During his wide-ranging interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes on Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden contradicted an account by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd of Biden’s discussions with his dying son Beau, who passed away of brain cancer earlier this year.

In her Aug. 1 column “Joe Biden in 2016: What Would Beau Do?,” Dowd described a scene between the vice president and his son that apparently amounts to nothing more than Beltway fan fiction:



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When Beau realized he was not going to make it, he asked his father if he had a minute to sit down and talk. “Of course, honey,” the vice president replied. At the table, Beau told his dad he was worried about him. My kid’s dying, an anguished Joe Biden thought to himself, and he’s making sure I’m O.K. “Dad, I know you don’t give a damn about money,” Beau told him, dismissing the idea that his father would take some sort of cushy job after the vice presidency to cash in. Beau was losing his nouns and the right side of his face was partially paralyzed. But he had a mission: He tried to make his father promise to run, arguing that the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values. Hunter also pushed his father, telling him, “Dad, it’s who you are.”

The vice president told 60 Minutes‘ Norah O’Donnell that no such scene ever took place.

“Beau all along thought that I should run and I could win,” said Biden. “But there was not what was sort of made out as kind of this Hollywood-esque thing that at the last minute Beau grabbed my hand and said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to run, like, win one for the Gipper.’ It wasn’t anything like that.”

Watch the interview, embedded below: