The Art of Getting a Real Answer Out of a President

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At a moment of maximum peril for Joe Biden’s campaign, all anyone wanted to know was whether the president was still fit for the challenges of the Oval Office — and whether he would be for the next four years.

The problem as we approached Mr. Biden’s news conference on July 11, the first since his miserable performance at the debate last month, was how to get a new perspective on the president’s condition. Time and time again, in interviews with George Stephanopoulos and encounters with donors and members of Congress, Mr. Biden insisted that he simply had a “bad night.”

His list of explanations was long. A cold. Jet lag. Overscheduling. There was no underlying condition like Parkinson’s, the White House insists, dismissing the idea that his slow, shuffling steps and quiet voice revealed anything more than the usual toll of being 81.

There is an art to asking questions at a presidential news conference, especially if you have hope of getting anything beyond the standard talking points. But we wanted something more.

So as I prepared that day to take The New York Times’s seat — which I have occupied, in rotation with my colleagues, since Bill Clinton’s second term in the late 1990s — I knew that simply asking again whether he had lost his fastball was futile.

Instead, I thought, we wanted to watch him pitch.

My instinct was to ask him a policy question — a complex one, but within his sweet spot: National security. It is the subject he warms to fastest, and knows best. How he processed the query on live TV would give me and others a chance to compare the Joe Biden of the past to the Joe Biden of today.

We have some history. Mr. Biden and I have talked about the world’s hardest problems since I got to Washington about 30 years ago, when he was ranking member, and later chairman, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and I was just back from six years of reporting in Tokyo.

We talked about nuclear proliferation while riding the Acela train. We talked about Iran and debated his plan for reducing American forces in Afghanistan while sitting by the pool of One Observatory Circle, his official residence as vice president. He would occasionally host a small tribe of national security reporters for evening conversations, mixing a bit of barbecue with his stories about sparring with foreign leaders or sitting presidents. He would wax on until his wife Jill would show up just before midnight to ask whether it was “time to let everyone go home.”

All that ended when he became president. The garrulous storyteller was walled off, perhaps because his staff didn’t want a president thinking out loud to the press, and later, perhaps, because of his obvious physical decline.

Sometimes we got flashes of the old Joe Biden. There was the time in Geneva in June 2021, when he emerged from his only face-to-face encounter with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and described to us their arguments over Russian ransomware attacks on the United States. Or after his meeting in California last November with President Xi Jinping of China, when he talked in detail about Taiwan, Chinese espionage and the embargo on shipping semiconductors to China.

I knew Mr. Biden was at his most interesting when asked a question that required him to talk through a knotty foreign policy problem with no easy answer. And I knew, from work on a book on the revival of superpower conflict, that there was one issue he has spent hours debating behind closed doors but rarely discusses in public: Whether the United States should try to disrupt — overtly or covertly — the budding partnership between Russia and China, arguably the most important geopolitical shift of the past few years.

At NATO’s summit in Washington last week, the 32 leaders of the alliance issued a declaration condemning Beijing for the first time as a “decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine.” Because Mr. Biden had said so little about the partnership, it would be difficult for him to answer on political autopilot. But if he had a strategy for driving a wedge between Beijing and Moscow — as did Nixon and Kissinger — that would be news.

But in this fraught moment, the question was designed to be more than that — a window into how he analyzes problems.

A few hours before we had to get to the Washington Convention Center, I ran the idea by two editors in The Times’s Washington Bureau: Elisabeth Bumiller, who runs the bureau and who questioned George W. Bush during some of the hardest moments in his presidency; and Elizabeth Kennedy, who edits our White House team and cuts through the fog to the heart of a story.

We decided to add another element. When asked about his future stamina, Mr. Biden often talks about his record. So what if we asked him whether, three or so years from now, he thought he would be able to negotiate face-to-face with Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi, both of whom are a decade his junior?

When the news conference began, the first questions, as we expected, were about whether he would withdraw. The coast seemed clear to broach policy.

“David Sanger,” he said, reading from a notecard and then looking around for me. As someone handed me a microphone, he added, somewhat playfully, “Be nice.”

I laughed and plunged in, asking if he had “a strategy now of trying to interrupt the partnership between China and Russia,’’ and whether he could imagine taking on Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi one-on-one, “a few years from now.”

What followed was an eight-minute answer that showed considerable fluency in the topic. He talked about all the time he had spent as vice president and president with Mr. Xi — “over 90 hours.”

“The issue is that we have to make sure that Xi understands there is a price to pay” for creating instability in the Pacific and helping Russia in its military operations. He talked about North Korea and Iran’s involvement, too. But still I hadn’t gotten a direct answer to the question of whether it was U.S. policy to disrupt the relationship. I interjected to ask it again.

“Yes, I do, but I’m not prepared to talk about the detail of it in public.” And on the possibility of meeting Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin, he said, “I’m ready to deal with them now and three years from now.”

When the news conference was over, the president’s team said he had aced the test. Even Democrats who are skeptical about whether he should continue his candidacy said he had done well enough to tamp down some of their fears. And I was surprised that I got a real answer. It was confirmation that the White House was engaged in an effort to keep the China-Russia relationship from getting too close.

That was news.