With Surprise Reversal, Biden Rewrites His Legacy and Makes a Play for History

In his first memoir, President Biden reflected on what at the time was the most searing moment of his political career. He had withdrawn from his first presidential campaign in disgrace, driven out by charges of plagiarism. But he resolved not to let it be the end of his story. “A person’s epitaph,” he observed, “was written when his or her last battle was fought.”

He wrote that in 2007 with the benefit of hindsight about his campaign collapse in 1987, long before the first primaries. Now, some 37 years after that flameout, Mr. Biden’s epitaph weighed heavily as he made surely the hardest political decision of his long career in Washington to give up the presidency after just one term and end his bid for re-election.

As he sat in isolation with Covid at his Delaware beach house these past few days, hacking and hacked off, Mr. Biden certainly did not want to go out without a fight. His Irish was up, as he would put it, about all those allies pressuring him to step down out of concern that he was too old to win the race. But at the end of the day, he was persuaded that even at this late hour, his legacy would be enhanced by making the ultimate political sacrifice rather than be the president who allowed Donald J. Trump back into the White House.

“By doing something that is anathema to the DNA of any politician, which is surrender the possibility of continuing in power, President Biden is making a consequential presidency even more so,” said Jon Meacham, the historian who has been a friend and outside adviser to Mr. Biden over the past few years.

“The phrase he’s used a lot is, ‘I’m a respecter of fate,’” Mr. Meacham added. “And I believe that.”

Fate looms large in the Oval Office. Every first-term president thinks about one thing: winning a second term. And every second-term president thinks about another thing: securing a legacy. Conventional wisdom has long held that to be a great president, it is necessary to win re-election. One-term presidents are afterthoughts in the pantheon of history. They never make Mount Rushmore.