WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden says he decided against running for president because he “couldn’t win,” not because he would have had too little time to get a campaign up and running.

“I’ll be very blunt. If I thought we could’ve put together the campaign ... that our supporters deserve and our contributors deserved, ... I would have done it,” he said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

In the wide-ranging interview, in which Biden took questions for a time joined by his wife, Jill, the vice president also said he would not have gotten into the race just to stop Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I’ve said from the beginning, ‘Look, I like Hillary. Hillary and I get along together,” he said. “The only reason to run is because ... I still think I could do a better job than anybody else could do.”

The 72-year-old Biden sought to dispel recurrent rumors that his late son Beau, who died earlier this year at age 46 of brain cancer, had made a last-minute plea to his father to run for president.

Biden said there was no such “Hollywood moment ... Nothing like that ever, ever happened,” he said. “Beau all along thought that I should run and I could win.” The vice president did say he wants to continue to have a voice in party affairs.