From NYpost.com…
It’s what she doesn’t say that makes Kathleen Buhle’s divorce memoir, “If We Break” — out Tuesday — so compelling.
For 24 years she was, of course, Kathleen Biden, wife of the notorious Hunter, and daughter-in-law of the president.
In the final chapter, she goes to DC Superior Court to renounce her married name and reclaim her identity as Kathleen Buhle, of Chicago’s working-class South Side.
She never explains explicitly why she abandoned the Biden name, although taunts from Hunter after their ugly divorce played a role. “Are you enjoying your last name,” he would say.
Still, her book makes clear that despite the immense privileges, “being a Biden” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Kathleen makes no mention in the lengthy acknowledgements of any Biden, other than her three daughters, Maisy, 21, Finnegan, 23, and Naomi, 28 — whose November wedding will be held at the White House.
In fact, she says she was always made to feel lower-class and that she wasn’t “a true member of the Biden family.”
Early in her marriage, she recalls: “We were taking family photos and Hunter’s aunt [Val] was running the show . . . At one point she announced, ‘Now let’s do Biden blood only’ . . . My daughter and my husband were in the picture but somehow I wasn’t included.”
When the Secret Service told her before Inauguration Day in 2009 that only Hunter and their daughters would be protected, she felt “embarrassed . . . Did this mean I was less important than my husband and my kids?”
AP/Jim Bourg
Kathleen fell pregnant within months of meeting Hunter fresh out of college, when they were serving in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Portland, Ore.
She was shocked at the opulence of his lifestyle when he took her home to his father’s former du Pont mansion in Greenville, Del.
Joe liked to describe himself as the “poorest man in Congress” and Hunter told Kathleen he came from a middle-class family. But she told him: “Hunt . . . a kid from a middle-class family does not have a ballroom.”
“The front door opened into a foyer with a marble floor and double staircase . . . He had a tuxedo hanging in his closet — a tuxedo he used fairly regularly . . .
“Hunter had instant entry into the world of power because he had something better than money: an actual US senator as a father. [He] had grown up in a world of affluence beyond my understanding. He’d talk of those with ‘new money’ [with] disdain . . . I felt a strong sense of not belonging.”
WireImage
Hunter’s easy job hunt
When they were visiting Joe in Greenville after they were married, someone came to the house to give Hunter “career advice” and offered him a job with the bank MBNA, for “a dollar amount greater than anything I’d ever imagined someone our age earning.”
The inflated salary from his father’s single biggest donor was one of the many benefits of the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation that was turbocharged when Joe became veep, when millions of dollars would flow from shady Chinese and Ukrainian business interests.
But Kathleen, now 53, never knew much about their finances, although she worried that they “lived above our means.”
Paul Morigi
