The authors wanted no gaps.

So CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson interviewed some 200 people before the presses began churning out their chronicling of former President Joe Biden’s “original sin,” pointedly subtitled: “President Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.”

Being true to the ethic of our craft, my journalistic colleagues were equally unsubtle in making sure you knew they had no hidden motives. “Our only agenda,” they wrote in their opening sentence, “is to present the disturbing reality of what happened in the White House and the Democratic campaign in 2023-2024, as it was told to us…”

Yet, there is one gap. It’s where Chapter 13 ends, on the morning of June 27, 2024, as Biden is leaving Camp David after days of arduous debate prep and flying to Atlanta for his 9 p.m. debate with Donald Trump – that same night.

Now check out page 185, the start of Chapter 14: “The Debate.” It starts by noting Biden arrived quite late at the Atlanta debate hall, just a half-hour before airtime.

But something happened in that time gap between leaving Camp David and arriving at the Atlanta debate hall – that provided crucial instant insight into what Biden’s best and brightest should have instinctively realized: over-scheduling their aging president may have contributed to the debate disaster he suffered.

It’s too bad Tapper and Thompson were so busy with their prime time debate night duties that they missed the chance to be in the journalistically best place to be on that debate day morning. Namely, sipping morning coffee with me, in our suburban Maryland home just outside Washington. (Alas, Tapper was in Atlanta, preparing to co-moderate the debate; and Thompson was focused on covering it.)

Here's what they missed. As I was sipping coffee and watching morning TV news on June 27, I heard the unmistakable air-beating roar of huge helicopters overhead. After decades of covering presidents, I knew the sound and the routine. Yup, outside I saw Marine One and its escorts were only now taking Biden from Camp David to Andrews Air Force Base, so Air Force One could fly him to his late night debate.

I was astounded. This was so wrong, in so many ways. Since Jake and Alex were not in my living room, only my wife heard me venting:

“That’s Joe Biden! He’s heading from Camp David to downtown Atlanta. He’ll be exhausted by the time he walks on stage for tonight’s debate… I bet he will walk onstage drained. His voice will sound like hell. I’m worried this will be a disaster.”

What was Biden’s chief-of-staff Jeff Zients thinking? I said I’d seen tough-minded chiefs-of-staff protect presidents who were younger than Biden – by flying them to major events a day early, so they could rest and prepare. James Baker did it for Ronald Reagan. H. R. Haldeman did it for Richard Nixon. Did Zients at least try, only to be overruled by his boss or the First Lady?

That night, I hated when we all saw I’d been too damn right. We all saw a president who was drained and cognitively impaired to the point of not being able to function. It should have been so damned obvious. The next morning, I wrote a column recounting my concerns just as I’d voiced them to my wife. Today, I’ve just requoted them for Jake, Alex and you.

This was never just about journalism and politics for me. Because I was also watching the aging decline of a longtime friend. Biden and I met when he was a freshman Delaware senator who had tragically lost his wife and daughter in a car crash and I was Newsday’s young Washington correspondent. He was commuting daily by Amtrak so he could be home in Wilmington each night with his two young sons. One day, I asked if he’d like company on his ride home; he said yes. We rode and talked. I spoke about my adventures covering Nixon’s White House. Joe talked about life as a young senator. We got off in Wilmington. Joe went home to his boys. I crossed the tracks and went home to my sons who were about the same age as his.

Seeing Biden age, first slowly, then rapidly has been hard to watch. But it happens. Seeing others taunt and scheme to make his plight worse has been painful.

“Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said back in 2020. And that’s the way it should have been. Surrounded by insiders with ambitions, Biden accomplished a lot, but stayed too long.

Today, it is sad to see an accomplished politician, patriot and leader who once saw himself as a bridge now being vilified as a roadblock. It is more than sad to see it all happening in a week in which he just made public a most hateful cancer diagnosis. Timing can be cruel.

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