When former Vice President Kamala Harris’s memoir, 107 Days, hits the shelves on September 23, it promises to do more than recount her historic tenure as the first woman, Black person, and Asian American to serve as vice president of the United States. Instead, it pulls back the curtain on the fraught dynamics inside the Biden White House during the tumultuous 2024 election cycle, offering a candid, sometimes blistering, account of loyalty, ambition, and the burdens of breaking barriers.
According to excerpts published in The Atlantic and reported by OK! and The Boston Globe, Harris does not mince words about the White House’s decision-making in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential race. She reflects on President Joe Biden’s choice to seek a second term—a move she bluntly labels as “recklessness.” “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness,” Harris writes. “The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
Harris’s memoir, which takes its title from the 107 days she had between Biden’s aborted reelection campaign and Election Day to make her own case to the American people, is both a personal and political reckoning. She details her unsuccessful bid to become the nation’s first female president and doesn’t shy away from the what-ifs. Would a different decision from Biden have changed the course of American history? Harris, ever the pragmatist, admits to wrestling with this question.
“At 81, Joe got tired,” Harris observes, capturing a moment that many Americans saw play out on the national stage, especially after Biden’s difficult debate performance following grueling travel. “That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser. I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”
Yet, Harris insists her silence during the months of mounting concern over Biden’s cognitive health was not out of self-interest, but loyalty. “I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win. ‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized.” She adds, “I would have interfered if I truly felt Joe was not able to carry out the job.”
But Harris’s account is not limited to the presidential decision. She turns a critical eye to her own treatment within the administration. The memoir and its excerpts, as summarized by The Boston Globe, paint a portrait of a vice president often left isolated, undermined by a team whose loyalty to Biden sometimes translated into open hostility toward her. After a well-received speech in Selma, Alabama, commemorating the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday—a pivotal event in the civil rights movement—Harris recalls being “castigated” by White House officials. “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.”
Such moments, Harris suggests, were not isolated. She claims the White House rarely defended her against public attacks, whether from conservative media or political opponents. “When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a ‘DEI hire,’ the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, [and a] senator representing one in eight Americans.” She elaborates, “They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible. Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me.”
The memoir also highlights her policy achievements—most notably, her focus on abortion rights following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which helped Senate Democrats secure a slim majority in the 2022 midterms. Yet, Harris laments, Biden’s team failed to capitalize on this success to bolster her standing or set her up for a potential presidential run. “Team Biden valued the optics of having a Black woman as vice president but not the woman herself,” The Boston Globe notes, echoing Harris’s own frustration with the high price of admission into institutions long dominated by white men.
It’s not lost on Harris—or her critics—that her tenure was historic. She was the first woman, Black person, and Asian American to be vice president, and, after Biden’s withdrawal, the first woman of color to become a major party’s presumptive nominee for president. Biden himself often called choosing Harris “the best decision I made in my whole career,” a sentiment that, according to Harris, was not always shared by his inner circle.
The memoir’s release is sure to reignite debate about the role of vice presidents, the challenges of being a political “first,” and the inner workings of the Biden administration. Harris’s willingness to air the administration’s dirty laundry is already sparking controversy. Anonymous sources from the White House contest her claims of sabotage and undermining, but the weight of her experience—and the public record of her treatment by both media and political insiders—lends her account undeniable heft.
Harris’s story is not just about one woman’s ambition or disappointment. It is a window into the continuing struggles faced by women and people of color at the highest levels of American power, and a reminder that even the most visible “firsts” are often forced to navigate obstacles invisible to those who came before. As the country digests Harris’s revelations, one thing is certain: the conversation about who gets to lead—and how they are treated when they do—is far from over.
In the end, 107 Days stands as both a personal reckoning and a political warning, challenging the nation to reckon with the cost of ambition, loyalty, and the unfinished business of representation at the top.
