Biden was silenced by criticism from families of troops killed in Kabul, book says. ‘Sir, are you still there?’

Joe Biden was stunned into silence when he was told families of US service members killed in Kabul in August 2021 said that when the bodies were returned and the president met grieving relatives, he spent too much time talking about the death of his own son, Beau.

“I paused for the president to respond,” Jen Psaki, then White House press secretary, writes in a new book.

“The silence that followed was a bit too long. I worried for a moment that our connection had been lost.

“‘Sir, are you still there?’ I asked.”

Psaki left the White House in 2022, joining MSNBC. Her book, Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House and the World, will be published in the US next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Biden ordered the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, after nearly 20 years of war, in April 2021. On 26 August, amid chaos in Kabul, 13 US service members and 170 Afghans were killed when a suicide bomber attacked an airport gate.

On 29 August, the bodies of the Americans arrived at Dover air force base in Delaware, Biden’s home state. The president and the first lady, Jill Biden, attended.

“Of all the president’s duties,” Psaki writes, “this is high on the list of most heartbreaking. For President Biden in particular, it stirred feelings of his own despair about the death of his son Joseph Biden III, aka Beau.”

Beau Biden, a former attorney general of Delaware, went to Iraq with the national guard. He died of brain cancer in 2015, aged just 46.

Biden has questioned whether “burn pits” at US bases in Iraq might have caused his son’s cancer, championing legislation to help affected veterans. In her book, Psaki cites World Health Organization research which says burn pit emissions contain substances “known to be carcinogenic to humans”.

Psaki