Joe Biden

by Beatrice Gormley

  Soon after Biden took his seat on the New Castle County Council, Neilia was pregnant for the third time. The Bidens definitely needed a bigger house than the pool cottage, where little Beau was sleeping in a closet. After long searching, Joe and Neilia found their ideal house in North Star, a village only a few miles from the border between Delaware and Pennsylvania. This house, built in 1723, stood on four acres of land. Through complicated financial arrangements, they managed to sell their three rental properties and buy their dream house in the spring of 1971.

  Unfortunately, this perfect Colonial house was not in the county council district that Joe Biden represented. He couldn’t move there and still keep his seat on the council. But Joe’s parents had just moved into a house that was in Joe’s district. So all he had to do was talk his dumbfounded mother and father into moving again—to North Star. “You’d really like it,” he urged. “It’d just be for a year or so.”

  Three days later, Joe’s brother Jimmy moved Joseph and Jean Biden’s belongings into the house in North Star. Joe, Neilia, Beau, and Hunter would live in the senior Bidens’ house for the next year, until after the 1972 election. On November 8, 1971, Joe and Neilia’s baby girl was born, and they named her Naomi Christina.

  * * *

  Joe Biden could have been satisfied with this good start to his political career. But he was already looking ahead, thinking of running for the Senate in 1972. Not the Delaware state senate, a reasonable goal for an ambitious young man, but the United States Senate.

  This would be a huge leap, from county councilman to US senator. To make the leap even harder, the senator up for reelection in 1972 was the popular Republican James Caleb Boggs. Boggs had had a long, successful political career, and every voter in Delaware knew who he was. Why would they vote for an unknown young Democrat instead? Biden wouldn’t even turn thirty, the minimum age for a US senator, until thirteen days after the election.

  But Joe Biden was thinking about his next step in politics as carefully as he used to figure out plays on the football field, or as he planned his rhythm and word choice to avoid stuttering. For one thing, he was unlikely to get reelected to the county council. The precincts were being redistricted by the Republicans so as to favor Republican candidates even more. Joe had actually heard them laughing about this legal but unfair trick.

  Joe understood that the gap between county councilman and US senator might be too wide to bridge. He would have preferred to run for the US House of Representatives, a smaller gap. But the current representative in his district was Pierre S. du Pont IV. DuPont Chemical was a major industry in Delaware, wealthy and influential. Joe didn’t think he’d stand a chance against Congressman du Pont, backed by the money and prestige of his family’s company.

  Although Joe was aiming for bigger things than the New Castle County Council, he did apply his talents and energy for the county during his two years in office. He fought, as he’d promised, against development that would break up the communities of Wilmington and build over open space. He prevented the corporate giant Shell Oil from polluting the environment with refineries on the Delaware seashore.

  All this work was for causes that Biden sincerely believed in. It also made him known as a politician who was out to serve the people. And at every public appearance, Joe, naturally outgoing and likable, generated good publicity for himself. So did his young, appealing family.

  The Democratic Party in Delaware had been weak and disorganized for years, but now there was a movement afoot to reform and strengthen it. Joe Biden, a young, talented, ambitious politician, had a lot to offer the Democrats. Henry Topel, the chair of the state Democratic Party, was impressed with Joe’s youth following. They couldn’t vote yet, but they’d already played an important part in Joe’s campaign for county councilman.

  In fact, Topel’s own son David was one of the teenagers in Valerie Biden’s political network. David contacted high schools all over Delaware, arranging for Joe to speak to the students in classrooms and assemblies. Joe spoke passionately about how the US should end the Vietnam War, and the students responded eagerly. They wanted to do something—they only needed to be asked. Senator Boggs supported President Nixon’s running of the war, so these young people were inspired to help the Democrats beat Boggs.

  Henry Topel could see that Joe Biden and his army of young activists could be a big help to the Democrats. He put Biden on the state party reform commission. This job gave Biden the chance to travel around Delaware and meet important Democrats outside the county of New Castle.

  As the commission searched for the right person to run for the Senate in 1972, Biden didn’t push the idea of himself as the candidate. But by the summer of 1971, the Delaware Democratic Party had run out of other likely candidates. They’d asked the former governor, the chief justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, and several others, but none of them wanted to run against Caleb Boggs.

  Finally, during a convention of the state party, Joe Biden heard a knock on the door of his motel room. He was in the middle of shaving, wearing shorts, but he let in Henry Topel and Bert Carvel, former governor of Delaware. They’d come to a decision: they wanted him to run against Boggs for the Senate. The Democrats needed to run a candidate, no matter how hopeless the chances looked. And nobody else wanted to be the “sacrificial lamb,” doomed to lose.

  Joe said that he needed time to think it over. But he’d already been planning for this.

  Triumph and Tragedy

  For the second time, Joe Biden’s whole family plunged into a political struggle. This time, the stakes were much higher. If Joe was elected to the US Senate, he’d have the chance to influence the big issues he cared about so much: The Vietnam War. Women’s rights. Civil rights. The environment. The problem of crime.

  Neilia was all in. She’d let go her dream of Joe becoming a Supreme Court justice. Now she advised him to give up his law practice, although it was their main source of income. Even with Joe’s unusual energy, she pointed out, he couldn’t run his law firm, do his work as county councilman, and run for a national office.

  As for Valerie Biden, of course she’d be Joe’s manager for this campaign too. Her husband, Bruce Saunders, oversaw the campaign budget. Joe’s brother Jimmy accepted the job of raising money—they estimated that running for the Senate would cost Joe $150,000. Frankie, still a teenager, could help gather the high school volunteers.

  The campaign gathered momentum. Joe Biden’s energy and joy were contagious, especially for the young volunteers. They felt like part of the family. And the Bidens treated them that way, encouraging the young people to drop by to play touch football and swim in the pool.

  Jean Biden worried that running for the Senate would ruin her son’s so-far brilliant career. But Joe assured her that even if he lost the race, he’d win. The campaign would get him known throughout the state of Delaware, and maybe even get him some national publicity. As his mother had to agree, people who got to know Joe Biden almost always liked him.

  Besides, Joe intended to win. He was confident that he could charm voters into giving him a chance.

  * * *

  Before Biden even announced that he was running for the US Senate, his campaign launched a series of “coffees”—meetings in private homes—around the state of Delaware. At that time, not many women worked outside the home, so they were able to attend daytime meetings. Each coffee was Joe’s chance to introduce himself to thirty people at a time, in person, and to explain why he was running for senator. And—very important—these meetings were a chance to listen to Delaware residents’ concerns.

  During the fall of 1971, Joe’s campaign organized hundreds of neighborhood coffees. They found a hostess in each neighborhood, invited likely guests, and provided coffee and doughnuts. Twice a week, Joe attended ten coffees a day, beginning at eight o’clock.

  As Joe arrived at the first meeting, Val would go on to set up the nine o’clock coffee, while Neilia would set up the ten o’clock. Jean Biden would wrap up a
t the end of the eight o’clock coffee and then leave to set up the eleven o’clock. And so on, the candidate and his team leapfrogging through the day.

  Beau, Hunter, and baby Naomi were on the campaign trail too, although they were too little to know it. “We just carried them from house to house like footballs in wicker baskets,” Biden wrote later.

  Delaware is such a small state that you can drive its length in only two hours. So thousands of voters had the chance to see Joe’s winning smile and hear his persuasive words, close and personal. They felt his warmth, and his concern for their concerns. Reporters began to take notice of Joe Biden, calling him a “joyous campaigner” and a “rising star” in the Democratic Party.

  It was easy for Joe Biden to be likable, but he also intended to know what he was talking to voters about. He wanted to be the best-informed candidate. So Neilia put on Sunday night spaghetti dinners at their house, inviting scholars from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware. These dinners were like seminars, where Joe and his team could learn from the experts about important issues: the ongoing Vietnam War, problems of drug abuse, the environment, and crime.

  Meanwhile, Jimmy Biden, only twenty-three at the time, traveled around asking for money. In Delaware, he didn’t stand a chance of getting funds from the state Democratic Party. They were sure that Biden was going to lose, and they were pouring their money into the governor’s race.

  But outside of Delaware, Jimmy got more interest. He flew around the country, as far as Alaska and California, to find donors. He saw his job as a salesman with the best possible product—his brother Joe. “In sales,” he explained later, “you have to believe in your product, and I was a believer. How were they going to say no?”

  And Joe, with his loyal, hardworking family and friends, had the best possible volunteer team. But at a certain point, the Bidens realized that they needed a professional campaign consultant. Joe thought he’d found the ideal consultant in Jack Owens, his best friend from law school. Jack had already worked on two successful political races in Pennsylvania.

  So Jack joined the “Biden for Senator” campaign—but only two months later, he had to quit. Campaign manager Valerie couldn’t stand Jack now any better than she had on that blind date several years before in Syracuse. The bad feeling was mutual. Jack dropped out, and Joe hired instead a young consultant from Boston, John Marttila.

  Another professional who joined the campaign was Patrick Caddell, a young pollster. His first poll for Biden, early in 1972, showed Joe losing to Boggs by a landslide. Joe exclaimed, “Oh my God, I’m going to get killed!” But Neilia got him to calm down and pay attention to the details of Caddell’s explanation. The pollster said there were hopeful signs—the numbers could change as the campaign went on.

  * * *

  On March 20, 1972, at the Hotel Du Pont in downtown Wilmington, Joseph R. Biden Jr. officially announced his candidacy for the US Senate. Although Biden spoke respectfully of his opponent, Senator Boggs, he suggested that the sixty-two-year-old politician was out of tune with the times. Americans were sick of the war in Vietnam, and people in Delaware in particular had lost many young soldiers to the war. Boggs, a Republican, would not criticize President Nixon for continuing the war. But Biden said bluntly that it was “a horrendous waste of time, money, and lives.”

  During the campaign Biden was frank with his audiences about where he stood on the issues, and he didn’t necessarily agree with every liberal position. He did not favor legalizing marijuana. Although he was for racial integration, he thought school busing to achieve integration was a mistake.

  If he was honest with voters, Joe believed, they would trust him. And trust was especially important to Americans disillusioned over the Vietnam War. Many felt that the government, whether Democratic or Republican, had been lying to them for years.

  Since Joe Biden was hardly known outside of Wilmington, he hoped to persuade some national Democratic politicians to endorse him—to announce publicly that they supported his campaign. That would get Delaware voters to take him more seriously. With this purpose, Biden traveled to Washington, DC, to visit Mike Mansfield, majority leader of the US Senate.

  Mansfield wasn’t willing to actually endorse Joe Biden, since Caleb Boggs was a longtime colleague of Mansfield’s in the Senate. But Mansfield agreed to have his picture taken with Biden in the grand reception room of the Senate, and to say something nice that Biden’s campaign could quote in their flyers. A few other Democratic bigwigs, including Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, also joined the photo op in the Senate reception room.

  As Joe Biden went from neighborhood coffees to polka dances in the Polish sections to high school football games, Senator Caleb Boggs hardly campaigned at all. Why should he? By September, the polls still showed him winning easily over the upstart Biden. Senator Boggs turned down a chance to debate with Biden on TV. Boggs had spent only $3,000 to this point, compared with Biden’s $50,000, although Boggs’s campaign had plenty of money.

  Overall, 1972 looked to be a good year for Republicans. It was also a presidential election year. The prediction was that President Richard Nixon would easily win reelection over his Democratic rival, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota.

  The Biden campaign desperately needed money, especially for radio advertisements during the final weeks. But there were lines Joe refused to cross. One time, he and Jimmy went to a meeting with a group of Delaware’s wealthiest businessmen. The brothers hoped that these men would donate $20,000 to pay for the radio ads.

  The multimillionaires were friendly, but Joe Biden’s hackles went up when they asked him what he thought about tax reform. President Nixon had proposed a tax reform that would increase their profits, and Biden had come out against it. Now he sensed that these men wanted him to take back what he’d said on the campaign trail. Instead Joe repeated what he’d said before about tax reform.

  Jimmy was disgusted. He thought Joe had lost the election with his stubbornness, and he didn’t speak to his brother on the drive home. But Joe took out a second mortgage on his house for $20,000 to pay for the radio spots.

  Whether a donor represented big business or labor unions, Biden felt exactly the same about anyone who wanted to tell him how to vote. One time, Jimmy managed to get a promise from the president of the machinists’ union to donate $5,000. But when Joe and Jimmy went to Washington, DC, to pick up the check, Joe almost blew it.

  The union president pressured Joe to say that if it came to a vote in the Senate, he’d vote in favor of the union. To Jimmy’s horror, Joe rudely told him what he could do with his check, and he walked out of the office. Jimmy himself quietly accepted the check.

  In the last five or six weeks of the campaign, Patrick Caddell’s polls showed Joe Biden’s numbers rising. Biden’s team worked feverishly to promote their candidate. Joe’s consultant Marttila wrote and produced tabloid “newspapers” describing Biden in glowing terms. Marttila had the papers run off in Boston, Massachusetts, and trucked down to Wilmington overnight each Friday.

  Early Saturday morning, bundles were dropped off at garages in neighborhoods all over Delaware. Valerie’s corps of young volunteers delivered the papers to 350,000 homes. They were rewarded with orange juice, doughnuts—and pride at being part of this exciting movement.

  Joe himself kept on walking around neighborhoods, knocking on doors, asking voters to choose him on Election Day. Neilia walked with him, whispering into his ear important details about the people approaching him on the sidewalk, so he could make that personal connection. Joe kept on speaking to any group that would listen.

  The polls still predicted Senator Boggs winning over Biden, but the gap was growing narrower. The Republicans began to worry. In the Wilmington News Journal, a headline read, ‘SACRIFICIAL LAMB’ MAY REWRITE SCRIPT. Ten days before the election, the polls showed the two candidates running neck and neck.

  Tuesday, November 7, was Election Day. That night Joe Biden, with his extended f
amily and campaign team, waited in the ballroom of the Hotel Du Pont for the results. At last the votes from a working-class Polish neighborhood put Joe over the top. Senator Boggs called to concede the election.

  Joe was stunned. The whole room was silent for a moment, as if no one could believe they’d really won. Then Neilia’s father, Robert Hunter, broke the silence with a joke. “Well, Joe, if my daughter has to be married to a Democrat, he might as well be a United States senator.”

  And Joe really was senator-elect Biden! That night, he and Neilia were too keyed up to sleep. They lay in bed talking about their future. Everything was still working out the way they’d planned before they were married: their children, their house, Joe’s career in politics. Soon they’d move on to the next step, their exciting new life together in Washington, DC.

  * * *

  On November 20, 1972, Joe Biden turned thirty—and finally he was old enough to become a US senator. The Bidens celebrated Joe’s birthday, along with his victory in the Senate race, with a big party at the Pianni Grill in Wilmington. It was a newsworthy event, with a TV crew to film Joe and Neilia cutting his birthday cake together.

  In the following weeks, Joe felt like he was sailing along, confident and clearheaded. Now that he’d won, even more people were donating to his campaign, so he could pay back the second mortgage on the North Star house. He and Neilia were swept up in plans and arrangements. In two short months, they needed to buy a house in Washington, the right house near the right future school for Beau, Hunter, and Naomi.

  Senator Biden would need people to run his office, so he had job seekers to interview. Fortunately, he already had an experienced chief of staff, Wes Barthelmes. He also wanted to get a head start on good relations with his fellow senators, so he began calling on other senators to introduce himself.