Joe Biden

by Beatrice Gormley

  But President Reagan and his secretary of state, George Shultz, preferred a policy of “constructive engagement” with South Africa’s white government. During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 1986, Biden reproached Secretary Shultz for not coming down harder on South Africa. “I’m ashamed of the lack of moral backbone to this policy.”

  Some criticized Biden for this dramatic speech, in which he actually waved his fist at Secretary of State Shultz. They saw it as grandstanding, putting on a performance for the media audience rather than talking to Shultz. But Biden refused to be embarrassed. He told reporters, “There are certain things worth getting mad about.”

  * * *

  By January 1987, Joe Biden had a good feeling about his chances in the 1988 presidential race. He was on the point of publicly announcing that he was running for president. But one problem he’d ignored up until now was that he didn’t have a good relationship with the national media.

  In a way this was odd, for someone as friendly and social as Biden. But during his first years in the Senate, when he was suffering grief over Neilia’s death, he’d avoided talking to the press as much as possible. Even after that period, he still dashed for the train at the end of the day, anxious to get home to Beau and Hunter. Other politicians, staying around to have a cup of coffee or dinner with the reporters who covered the Capitol, made valuable personal connections.

  As a result, Biden’s image with the national media was almost a cartoon: a tall guy with a great smile and a flair for connecting with an audience, but not much else. Joe Biden looked like a senator, and he talked like a senator—in fact, he had a reputation for talking on and on. But was there anything behind the image?

  As one reporter put it, was Biden “more of a show horse than a work horse”? His fellow senators knew how hard he worked, but the national reporters might not dig up that information. However, Joe was confident that at least his character—his honesty, his “word as a Biden”—could not be attacked.

  These days he had another problem to ignore: headaches. He’d never had headaches before this year, but by early 1987 he often felt as if his head were in a vise. He gulped extra-strength Tylenol, sometimes ten a day, as he flew from California to Iowa to Alabama to give speeches and shake hands. During one appearance in New Hampshire in March, Biden’s pain was so severe that he had to duck backstage, retching. He barely managed to finish that speech.

  At another event, he lost his temper at a questioner in the audience. That day Biden was not only suffering from splitting headaches but was also coming down with the flu. He thought the questioner was doubting his intelligence, and he went into a rant about his IQ and his outstanding record in college and law school. He hardly knew what he was saying. Afterward, he realized he’d exaggerated quite a bit.

  This same year, Biden’s duties in the Senate were heavier than ever. In January he’d become chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He knew that the Reagan administration was hoping to appoint a conservative judge to the Supreme Court. There were several older justices on the court who might retire or die, giving the president the chance to replace them. The question was, could Joe Biden do his vital work as a senator and run for president of the United States at the same time?

  Even more important, as Jill pointed out, could Joe be the devoted husband and father he wanted to be? Could he still show up for family birthdays or school plays? She felt their life was perfect now the way it was. Beau would graduate from Archmere that spring, with Hunter only a year behind. Ashley was starting elementary school.

  And although Joe didn’t want to admit it, the headaches wouldn’t go away.

  Joe Biden carefully scheduled his announcement to avoid Beau’s graduation from Archmere and Jill’s and Ashley’s birthdays. On June 9, 1987, in a dramatic stunt, Biden told a cheering crowd at the Wilmington train station that he was indeed running for president. Then he and his whole family rode a chartered train to Washington.

  That same day in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the Scranton Tribune’s proud front-page story was all about Senator Joseph R. Biden and his bid for the presidency. And they’d dug up and reprinted the old photograph of young Joey Biden watching former president Truman in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade.

  Joe Biden was smart and talented, he had a great team behind him, and he had incredible reserves of energy. He’d always been confident that he could do anything, if he only kept working hard enough. However, running for president is a full-time job, and Biden couldn’t ignore his duties as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Shortly after his dramatic announcement, an opening came up on the Supreme Court. President Reagan’s choice for the new justice was the ultraconservative Republican Robert Bork.

  The Supreme Court

  The nine justices of the Supreme Court, plus the lower federal courts, make up the third branch of the US government, the judicial branch. These judges are appointed by the president (the executive branch) but must be confirmed by the Senate (the legislative branch, together with the House of Representatives). The Supreme Court has the power to review a law of the land, and to rule it either constitutional or unconstitutional—that is, to affirm a law, or to strike it down.

  Since the founding of the United States, the Supreme Court has made some momentous decisions for the country. The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in 1857 ruled that a slave could not become free even by escaping to one of the states where slavery had been abolished, and that even free African Americans were not entitled to the rights and privileges of citizens. The Gideon v. Wainwright decision in 1963 ruled that a person accused of a crime, if not able to pay for a lawyer to defend them, must be provided with one. In the United States v. Nixon case in 1974, the court ruled that the president is not above the law, and so President Nixon had to turn over recordings made in the Oval Office.

  Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, so their influence can last much longer than that of the president or other elected officials. And a justice doesn’t necessarily make decisions the way the president would like. The Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, who appointed Earl Warren as chief justice in 1953, later said that was one of his major mistakes. Eisenhower expected Warren to uphold conservative policies, but instead Warren led the court in making forceful decisions to outlaw racial segregation.

  Up until now, the court had been fairly evenly balanced between liberal and conservative. But Judge Bork, if confirmed by the Senate, would push the Supreme Court over the line from moderate to conservative and back up the tendency of the Reagan administration to restrict civil rights and civil liberties. Bork had opposed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. He had stated openly that he wanted to roll back Supreme Court decisions such as Griswold v. Connecticut, which gave married couples the right to buy and use contraceptives.

  Joe Biden had no doubt that Judge Bork would change the Supreme Court for the worse. But as chair of the Judiciary Committee, he was determined to give Bork a fair investigation. There was already an uproar of unfavorable publicity about Robert Bork’s nomination. He was opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that defends citizens’ rights. He was also attacked for carrying out President Nixon’s orders in 1973 during the Watergate scandal, which eventually led to Nixon’s resignation from the presidency.

  A fair investigation of Bork would take time and hard work, cutting into Biden’s plans for his presidential campaign. And all the while his headaches were still plaguing him, in spite of the extra-strength Tylenol pills he kept taking. As Biden tried to protect civil rights and at the same time give Judge Bork a fair hearing, many accused him of being a weak leader. One columnist, George Will, called Biden “the incredible shrinking candidate.”

  In August 1987, as Biden worked to get the Senate Judiciary Committee ready to hold hearings on Robert Bork, the campaign for president was heating up. Biden needed to pay more attention to Iowa, the first state to vote in the primary season. Jill had already traveled there several ti
mes to campaign for her husband.

  Now Biden needed to appear in Iowa himself. On August 23 there would be a debate among the Democratic candidates, the most important campaign event of the entire summer. Busy with preparing for the Bork hearings, Biden didn’t take time to work on his debate speech. He trusted his ability to speak impromptu, and his gift for creating a bond with his audience.

  During the plane trip to Iowa, Biden did ask one of his speechwriters how he should close the speech, since the closing makes the biggest impression. He decided to quote the words of a British politician, Neil Kinnock. Kinnock, campaigning for prime minister, had spoken eloquently about growing up in coal mining country, and being the first of his family to go to university.

  Biden identified with Kinnock’s passion for his background. Biden, like Kinnock, had grown up in coal mining country. He also came from people who were intelligent but never had a chance to go to college. As Kinnock put it, “There was no platform upon which they could stand.”

  These words, Joe Biden felt, expressed what the Democratic Party needed to do in the United States. The Republicans had knocked down the platform of government support built by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson for the working class. Democrats needed to be the party that rebuilt the platform better than ever. Biden had used this idea in speeches before, and it came naturally to him.

  When it was Biden’s turn to give his closing speech at the debate, he spoke Kinnock’s words so movingly that some people in the audience wiped away tears. Afterward, one of his staff remarked that this time Biden had forgotten to give Kinnock credit, although he always had before. But it didn’t seem like a big worry at the time.

  Then, on Saturday, September 12, a story broke in both the New York Times and the Des Moines Register. The Times story, on the front page, said that Biden had “lifted Mr. Kinnock’s closing speech.” And quickly NBC News ran a split-screen video matching Biden’s exact words with Kinnock’s exact words. It made Joe’s stomach hurt to watch it.

  It seemed that the campaign manager of one of Biden’s Democratic opponents, Michael Dukakis, had tipped off reporters about Biden’s slip. Soon there was a chorus accusing Biden of plagiarism—using someone else’s words as if they were his own. The media dug up another instance: at the California Democratic Convention in January, Biden had given a speech that included some words of Robert Kennedy’s from twenty years before. A speechwriter had put the phrase in without telling Biden where it came from.

  The media—“the sharks,” as Ted Kaufman, now Biden’s chief of staff, called them—had gone into a feeding frenzy. For more than a week the accusations of plagiarism grew louder, as Biden and his team tried to ignore them. A columnist in the New York Times called him “Plagiarizing Joe.”

  Jill was even more upset than Joe was. “Of all the things to attack you on. Your integrity?”

  Meanwhile, even before the Judiciary Committee hearings on Robert Bork began, Senator Ted Kennedy gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor against Bork. Biden loved and admired Kennedy, but this was just what he’d been afraid of. Kennedy, as well as other Democrats, was giving the public the impression that the Democrats on the committee had already made up their minds to block Judge Bork’s appointment.

  On Tuesday, September 15, Chairman Joe Biden opened the Bork hearings in the Russell Senate Caucus Room. The hearings got off to a good start, and Biden felt confident that the Democrats could make a good case for rejecting Bork.

  Then reporters dug up a mistake Biden had made twenty-two years before. It was his carelessness, back in his first year of law school, when he’d failed a technical writing course. He’d turned in a paper without giving proper credit to a source. Of course Biden’s law school professors hadn’t thought he was trying to cheat, but the media didn’t care about that. What they cared about was making a good story, the story of Joe the Plagiarizer, even better.

  And what Biden cared about, more than his campaign for president, was the damage the story might do to the so-important Bork hearings. At a private meeting, he asked the Judiciary Committee to choose another member as chair. “Absolutely not,” said Republican Strom Thurmond. “This is ridiculous,” said Ted Kennedy. Joe was deeply touched that his fellow senators had confidence in him, and he went on with the hearings.

  But in the following days, the story in the media grew and grew: Biden was a plagiarizer, a liar, a blowhard, an empty suit. A news helicopter hovered over the Biden home, the Station, and reporters camped out near the house. Ashley, only six years old, had to go off to school in the mornings being filmed by TV cameras.

  Finally, on the evening of September 22, Joe Biden called a council at the Station to decide what to do. The trusted inner circle in the living room included Jill, Beau, and Hunter; Joe’s mother and father; his sister, Valerie, and her husband, Jack; and Joe’s brothers, Jimmy and Frank. Biden’s chief of staff, Ted Kaufman, and a few other trusted advisors were also there to help.

  As Joe paced the living room, the discussion went back and forth. Beau, now a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, and Hunter, a senior at Archmere, knew how much “My word as a Biden” meant to their father. They urged him to defend his honor on the campaign trail. But Joe had also given his “word as a Biden” to do his sworn duty as senator and chair of the Judiciary Committee.

  Biden was torn. At one point during the evening, he stopped pacing and asked his mother, Jean, what she thought. She answered, “I think it’s time to get out.”

  The next day, during a break in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge Bork, Biden stepped outside for a press announcement. With Jill at his side, he told the gathered journalists that he was dropping out of the race for president. He was angry that he had to make the choice, but he believed it was more important for him “to keep the Supreme Court from moving in a direction that I believe to be truly harmful.”

  Joe’s sons were angry for him too. After he’d quit the race for the presidency, the three of them went to a football game at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the crowd recognized Senator Biden and started a chant about “Plagiarizing Joe.” Hunter went after the heckler with his fists, and Joe and Beau had to restrain him.

  At the end of the hearings in October, the full Senate voted not to confirm Bork, 58–42. A few months later President Reagan filled the empty seat on the Supreme Court with Anthony Kennedy, who would turn out to be a moderate influence. But bitter feelings toward the Democrats, on the part of Judge Bork and his Republican supporters, remained for many years.

  * * *

  Joe Biden was now free from the stress of campaigning for president. His family was out of the glaring spotlight, and the pressure from the Bork hearings was gone. Still, his headaches continued to plague him. One day near the beginning of 1988, while working out in the Senate gym, Biden felt a stab of pain in his neck. He left the gym and boarded the train to Wilmington as usual. But now, besides the pain in his neck, he felt numb on his right side, and his legs felt heavy.

  These were signs of something very wrong. But Biden shook them off. He was determined to show the world that Joe Biden was not a quitter. As his father had always said, “If you get knocked down, get up.” The next day, Biden saw a doctor, got a neck brace, and went on with his schedule of meetings, travel, and speeches.

  But on the night of February 9, in a motel room in Rochester, New York, Joe Biden was struck down. He felt “something like lightning flashing inside my head, a powerful electrical surge—and then a rip of pain like I’d never felt before.”

  The next morning he was found lying on the floor of his room. He was rushed back to Wilmington. At Saint Francis Hospital, a spinal tap determined that Joe had suffered an aneurysm—a leakage of blood—inside his skull. He was given the last rites—prayers and blessing for the dying—by a Catholic priest.

  The only hope for Joe was a dangerous and delicate operation, which had to be performed at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center near Washin
gton. There the brain surgeon explained that a possible side effect of the surgery could be loss of speech. Biden joked, “I kind of wish that had happened last summer,” meaning the fateful speech in which he’d forgotten to credit Kinnock’s words.

  The seven-hour surgery was successful. Joe’s shaved, stitched head looked, as he wrote later, “like a misshapen baseball that had just had its cover nearly knocked off.” But he was alive, and he could still speak.

  Recovery, however, was slow and frustrating. At home a few weeks later, Biden suffered a blood clot in his lung and was taken back to Walter Reed Hospital for more treatment and medication. Finally leaving the hospital again, he had a defiant joke ready for the reporters waiting in the parking garage: “I’ve decided to announce that I am reentering the race for president.”

  The reality was that for the first time in his life, Joe Biden was forced to slow down. No visitors. No work, even from home. No phone calls, even from the president. He slept a great deal, and gradually he healed. In May he returned to the hospital for surgery on another aneurysm, and stayed there for several more weeks. Then back home for a whole summer of just rest and recovery.

  The experience of nearly dying, and then having to live life in the slow lane for months on end, made Joe Biden look at life differently. He didn’t feel the same pressure to succeed at everything, every time. His campaign for president had come to a humiliating close, but that wasn’t the end of the story of Joe Biden.

  He was still a senator, still chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and the Judiciary Committee. After Labor Day he was finally able to board the Amtrak train to Washington again. In the Senate Chamber, Biden’s colleagues gave him a standing ovation.

  Stand Up to Bullies

  Beau and Hunter Biden were worried about their father. The night Joe Biden had decided to drop out of the presidential race of 1988, they’d pleaded with him to keep fighting. If Joe gave up this fight, they feared, he would also drop out of public life—his chosen life’s work. “But, Dad,” Beau said, “if you leave, you’ll never be the same.”