Joe Biden

by Beatrice Gormley

  At home, as the boys settled into their new routine, Joe eased up a bit, too. In Washington, he made friends with a group of senators and their wives. After a time, he even accepted invitations to their monthly dinners.

  In New Castle County, Delaware, the county council announced plans to build a new park of ten and a half acres. It would include a football field, a Little League baseball field, basketball courts, and bicycle racks. There would be a playground with equipment for younger children. The council, on which Joe Biden had started his political career, was naming the recreation area Neilia Hunter Biden Park.

  * * *

  At the beginning of Joe Biden’s second year in Congress, the San Francisco Chronicle judged him to be one of the ten best-dressed men in the Senate. This honor was not huge, since the typical US senator was older, rumpled, and unfashionable. But it got Senator Biden some good publicity.

  By this time, Biden had proven himself as a speaker who could raise funds for the Democrats. He still enjoyed making speeches, and his friendly personality came through to audiences. A rumor started that the Democratic Party might choose him as their candidate for president in the election of 1976.

  That talk could easily have given the young, ambitious senator a swelled head, but he knew he wasn’t yet qualified to run for president. “I don’t have the experience or background,” he told a TV interviewer in September 1974. Joe wanted to reassure the people of Delaware that he intended to represent his state in the Senate for years to come.

  “If you hang around Washington,” Biden explained, “it’s easy to start thinking you’re important, and so it is a blessing in disguise that I commute every day and get out of this city.” He added, “I prefer being home with my kids, and that way I’m home with my constituents too.”

  Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield thought so well of Joe Biden that in 1975 he gave Biden a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee. Biden had been hoping for this assignment for two years, and he appreciated what a big favor it was for a junior senator like him. He was thrilled to attend his first meeting with the legendary secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

  But Biden got off on the wrong foot that day. First he went to a room in the Dirksen Senate offices, only to discover that the Foreign Relations Committee meeting was in the Capitol instead. Late now, Biden rushed to the Capitol and the correct room—and was grabbed by an armed guard. “Where d’ya think you’re goin’, buddy?”

  Waving his Senate ID at the guard, Biden plunged into the hearing room. In his hurry he slammed the door and bumped into the back of Kissinger’s chair. Most people would have kept a low profile for the rest of the meeting, after such a bumbling entrance. But Biden soon raised his hand to ask a question.

  Kissinger had assumed that this annoying young man was someone’s assistant. “Mr. Chairman,” he addressed acting chair Mansfield in his distinctive German-accented croak, “I thought no staff was allowed.”

  One of Kissinger’s staff passed him an urgent note, informing him that the annoying young man was actually the junior senator from Delaware. “Oh,” said Kissinger. “I apologize, Senator Bid-den.”

  Joe couldn’t resist a teasing answer, pretending to mistake Kissinger for President Eisenhower’s secretary of state in the 1950s: “No problem, Secretary Dulles.”

  Jill

  Joe Biden was building a reputation as “Amtrak Joe.” Riding the train to Washington every day, he soon knew all the conductors, as well as the other regular passengers. Now and then he used the time, an hour and twenty minutes, to catch up on paperwork. But more often he spent the time talking.

  Sometimes Beau and Hunter would ride with their father, and sometimes Joe Sr. would come along. He’d followed politics all his life, and he was deeply proud of his son the senator. He enjoyed sitting in on Joe’s hearings and meetings.

  Besides chatting, discussing, and arguing with his fellow passengers, Joe also liked to sketch designs for the perfect Biden home. Beau later remembered sitting on the train, watching his father draw plans for houses, as well as the grounds around them. Joe dreamed of a family house that would welcome the people he loved, all of them. It would be like his childhood home with his Finnegan grandparents in Scranton, only bigger and better.

  In 1975, Valerie Biden was still in the North Star house with Joe, Beau, and Hunter, taking care of the boys. Her marriage to Bruce Saunders had broken up, and this year she got remarried—to Joe’s good friend Jack Owens. The relationship that had started out ten years before, with that disastrous blind date in Syracuse, had completely turned around. Val had to admit that Neilia had been right to say, “If I could pick any guy in the world for you, it would be Jack Owens.”

  As Joe slowly recovered from the tragic loss of Neilia and their baby Naomi, he felt more and more that he no longer wanted to live in the North Star house. He started looking for a new house, and he found one he loved at first sight in the suburb of Greenville. It was a former Du Pont mansion with two separate wings—“one for me and one for Val,” thought Biden. He knew that Valerie, even married to Jack, would still want to live in the same house with Beau and Hunter.

  Joe Biden bought the Greenville house and began remodeling it. In later years, Beau had fond memories of weekend trips to the hardware store with his father. The family spent days planting trees, putting up a fence, painting rooms. Hunter remembered how his father would hold him out a high window so he could reach the eaves with a paintbrush.

  Just as Joe had hoped, his new house welcomed a stream of family and friends. In fact, so many people were always coming and going that a friend named this Biden house “the Station.”

  Around Wilmington, Biden’s neighbors and acquaintances thought of him as friendly, generous, helpful Joe. They knew that he was a senator, of course, but they also felt that he was one of them. His mother had brought him up to believe that he was the equal of anyone, but also that anyone was equal to him.

  One day Biden happened to be driving through a neighborhood when he saw a boy snatch a woman’s purse. As the boy started to run away, Joe jumped out of his car. He chased the boy through backyards and over fences, until the thief threw the purse down.

  Joe returned the purse to the woman, who was overwhelmed by his gallantry. Thirty years later, she would still have that same purse. She expected Biden to become president someday, and she’d kept the rescued purse for him to sign when he was elected.

  * * *

  One Friday evening in March 1975, Joe happened to return from Washington to Wilmington by plane, instead of his usual train ride. As he walked through the airport, he noticed posters for the New Castle County parks. The posters showed different scenes around the park system, and the same beautiful, blond young woman appeared in several posters.

  At home, Joe found his brothers waiting, with their dates, to go out with him. Frank suggested that Joe bring a date along too. He knew a young woman whom Joe was sure to like, he said, and he gave Joe her phone number.

  Joe didn’t feel like going on a date with someone new—he just wanted to spend time with his family that night. But the next day, after a good rest, he was curious about this young woman. Her name was Jill Jacobs. Frank had said, “She doesn’t like politics,” and for some reason that appealed to Joe. He gave her a call.

  As it happened, Jill already had a date for Saturday night. But this roused Joe’s competitive side, and he asked her to break her date. He was a US senator, he explained, and he only had this night in town. Joe’s charm must have come through the phone, because Jill agreed to try to rearrange her schedule.

  When Joe picked her up that night, he was startled to recognize the person who answered the door. It was the same beautiful woman he’d seen on the New Castle County Parks posters.

  They drove to Philadelphia for dinner. Joe realized, as they talked, that Frank was right—Jill wasn’t interested in politics. And she didn’t seem impressed to be going out with a US senator.

  She’d voted for him in 1972,
though. That was the first time she’d ever voted, and she remembered going to senator-elect Biden’s victory party at the Hotel Du Pont and shaking hands with him and his wife, Neilia. That fall, Jill had been a junior at the University of Delaware, Joe’s old school. She was nine years younger than Joe.

  Over dinner, Joe and Jill had much to talk about. She didn’t ask him about his work in the Senate, or about famous people he’d met. They talked instead about their families, and people they both knew, and “about books and real life,” as Biden wrote later.

  Joe was immediately taken with Jill Jacobs. This evening was the first time since Neilia’s death that he’d been so happy in a woman’s company. He asked her out the next night, and the one after that. Jill didn’t point out that obviously he’d been fibbing about having only one night in town, but Joe could tell that she was amused.

  Jill found a lot to like about Joe, too, but she didn’t want to jump into a serious relationship. She’d married young, and she was in the process of divorcing her first husband. Now she was happy to be single and starting a teaching job in September. And finally, she really didn’t want to get involved with a politician.

  If Jill had paid more attention to Delaware politics, she might have realized how persistent Joe Biden could be. She might have guessed that he had great faith in his own judgment, and that he wouldn’t let her go just because she had other plans for her life.

  But for now, they compromised. Jill agreed that she wouldn’t date anyone except him, and Joe seemed to accept that this wasn’t a long-term commitment. After all, he did have two young children. And he wasn’t about to give up politics.

  However, Jill and Joe kept on spending time with each other. Jill met Beau and Hunter, and sometimes the four of them went out together. Eventually, as she said later, “It felt like I dated three guys.”

  Joe met Jill’s family and quickly felt at home with them. Even more so, Jill felt at home with Joe’s family. After a few months, she was eating dinner most nights at the Station with Valerie and Jack and the boys, whether Joe was in town or not.

  For Thanksgiving 1975, Jill suggested that she and Joe and the boys should go away for the weekend. They decided on Nantucket, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, for their getaway. During the long drive north, Jill helped Beau and Hunter make out their Christmas lists.

  By the next year Joe, and especially Jill, still weren’t sure they wanted to make a commitment. But Joe’s sons had decided. They came to see their dad early one morning in 1976, while he was shaving. Joe could tell they were nervous, but determined, about something serious. Beau, seven years old, said to his brother, “You tell him, Hunt.”

  “No, you tell him,” said six-year-old Hunter. There was a pause. Then he blurted out, “Beau thinks we should get married.”

  “We think we should marry Jill,” added Beau.

  Joe only said, “I think that’s a pretty good idea.” But inside, he was happier than he’d been for years. The only question was, would Jill agree? The next chance he got, he asked Jill to marry him.

  At that time, Jill wouldn’t say yes. She was all too aware that if she married Joe, she’d be “marrying” his sons, too. She loved the boys so much that she was afraid of letting them down. “I really had to make sure it was going to work,” she explained later, “because I could not break their hearts if it didn’t work.”

  And Jill was also more aware than ever that if she married Joe, she’d be marrying into Senator Biden’s political life. She did not want to become a public person.

  In 1976, President Ford was naturally the Republican candidate. Joe was eager to help the Democrats take back the White House in November. He believed that Jimmy Carter, former governor of Georgia, was the right candidate to unseat Gerald Ford. Biden was impressed by Carter’s victories in the early primary elections, and he heartily approved of Carter’s stand against racial segregation.

  Joe Biden was the first senator to endorse Jimmy Carter, months before it was clear that Carter would win the Democratic nomination. Carter asked Biden to help him campaign, and Biden chaired his campaign steering committee. Biden traveled around the country to speak at rallies, urging audiences to turn out in November for Jimmy Carter. He sometimes joked that he’d been chosen to campaign because at age thirty-three, he was the only senator too young to run for president himself.

  Publicly, Joe Biden didn’t admit that he intended to run for president in the future. On a visit to his old grade school, Holy Rosary in Claymont, Senator Biden told the class that he was happy in his work as a senator. He had no ambitions, he assured them, to become president.

  “You know that’s not true, Joey Biden,” said one of the nuns, waving a piece of lined paper. It was the essay he’d written about wanting to grow up to be president. She’d actually saved young Joey’s paper for almost twenty years. So she had written proof that he’d thought about becoming president ever since age twelve.

  * * *

  Jimmy Carter won the election in November, and he was inaugurated as president on January 20, 1977. Meanwhile, Joe Biden was moving ahead in his Senate career. He’d already gained his longed-for seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1975.

  And in February 1977 he was happy to be appointed to the Senate Judiciary Committee. On this committee, Biden hoped to work for civil rights and justice, and against crime. He’d also have the chance to approve or disapprove the president’s appointments to important government positions, such as secretary of defense or justice of the Supreme Court.

  But next year, 1978, Senator Biden’s six-year term would be up. In order to accomplish all he envisioned, he’d have to run for reelection. The issue of school busing was hotter than ever in Delaware. On the Judiciary Committee, Biden found himself caught in the middle, between anti-busing segregationists like Senator Eastland, chair of the committee, and pro-busing liberals like Senator Ted Kennedy.

  The School Busing Dispute

  The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 ruled that racially segregated schools were harmful to children and therefore unconstitutional. A few school districts responded by busing a number of white students to Black schools, and Black students to white schools. The city of Berkeley, California, voluntarily began a busing program that was successful. However, most school districts quietly did nothing to integrate. And where busing did begin, some white families protested or even sued the schools.

  Charlotte, North Carolina, had a token busing program, but it did not actually achieve racial balance. In 1965 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the school district to court on behalf of ten Black families. Finally, in 1971, the Supreme Court required Charlotte to revise its busing program. The city was then fairly successful, at least for some years, in integrating its public schools. And a study showed that after integration, educational achievement for all students improved.

  Boston, Massachusetts, was likewise ordered in 1974 to begin busing to correct racially segregated schools. But white Boston parents reacted with months of protests and sometimes violence. Thousands of white parents withdrew their children from the public schools and sent them to private or parochial schools, and thousands of white families moved to the suburbs, out of the Boston school district.

  Even Black leaders had mixed opinions on whether school busing was a good way to integrate education. In any case, during the 1990s, the courts decided that busing for integration was no longer necessary. School districts that had been ordered to integrate schools by busing were released from such plans.

  By now Joe and Jill had been going out for about two years. Joe still wanted to marry Jill, but he thought it was time for her to say yes or no. He told her that he was leaving on a Senate trip to South Africa. By the time he returned, ten days later, he and his sons would need an answer.

  Joe wanted to marry Jill so much that he was willing to give up his promising political career. He’d decided that if Jill ag
reed to become his wife and Beau and Hunter’s mother, he would not run for reelection in 1978.

  But when Joe came back from South Africa, Jill wouldn’t let him make that sacrifice. “If I denied you your dream,” she explained to him later, “I would not be marrying the man I fell in love with.” She’d decided she wanted to marry Joe so much, she was willing to become a politician’s wife.

  Joe’s brothers, Jimmy and Frank, took Jill out privately and warned her that Joe had even bigger political ambitions than she knew. Joe, with the backing of his whole family, intended that one day he would become the president of the United States. Jill listened, but she didn’t take this information too seriously at the time.

  On June 17, 1977, Jill Jacobs married Joe Biden at the United Nations Chapel in New York City. It was a Catholic ceremony. Beau and Hunter, ages eight and seven, stood beside the bride and groom at the altar. Compared with most Biden gatherings, the wedding was small, just family and close friends.

  After the luncheon reception, Joe and Jill Biden—and their two sons—went off on their honeymoon. The four Bidens saw the Broadway musical Annie and ate hamburgers at Blimpie’s restaurant. Back at their hotel, Joe and Jill let the boys choose between the two hotel rooms they’d reserved. As Beau told it years later, the boys picked the honeymoon suite for themselves.

  More seriously, Beau said how lucky he felt that Jill had come into their life. “Led by my mom as much as my dad, we rebuilt our family.”

  As for the boys’ aunt Valerie, her commitment to mothering the boys for more than four years was now complete. She and her husband, Jack Owens, moved out of the Station to a house of their own.