by Jeff Wilser
ALSO BY JEFF WILSER
Alexander Hamilton’s Guide to Life
The Good News About What’s Bad for You…and the Bad News About What’s Good for You
The Maxims of Manhood
Copyright © 2017 by Jeff Wilser
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780525572589
Ebook ISBN 9780525572596
Illustrations by Mark Stutzman
Cover design by Alane Gianetti
Photographs on this page and this page courtesy of Branden Brooks
Cover photograph by SERGEI SUPINSKY/Staff/AFP/Getty Images
v4.1
a
Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.
—JOE BIDEN
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I: THE UPSTART
1 The Boy Who Couldn’t Speak (1942–60)
“I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid.”
2 Hot Young Biden (1960–72)
“I probably started my first year of college a little too interested in football and meeting new girls. There were a lot of new girls to meet.”
3 The Hail Mary (1972)
“The smart guys covering Delaware politics didn’t give me a snowman’s chance in August.”
PART II: THE SENATOR
4 Biden Time (1972–88)
“I ain’t changing my brand. I know what I believe. I’m confident in what I know. And I’m gonna say it. And if folks like it, wonderful. If they don’t like it, I understand.”
5 Biden v. Bork (1987–88)
“Judge Bork, I guarantee you this little mallet is going to assure you every single right to make your views known…That is a guarantee.”
6 It’s On Us (1988–94)
“You’re a coward for raising a hand to a woman or child—and you’re complicit if you fail to condemn it.”
7 Second Chances (1991–2008)
“And I absolutely can say, with certainty, I would not be anybody’s vice president, period.”
PART III: THE VEEP
8 From Gaffes to Glory (2008–2016)
“The number one issue facing the middle class [is] a three-letter word: Jobs. J-O-B-S.”
9 Beau (1969–2015)
“A parent knows success when his child turns out better than he did. In the words of the Biden family: Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known.”
10 Get Back Up! (2016–Forever)
“Millions of Americans have been knocked down, and this is the time [when] we get back up, get back up together.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ENDNOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION
2008. Tallahassee. Joe Biden had been campaigning all day, most of it on his feet. Talking, laughing, joking, hugging, Biden-ing. He had to be exhausted. Finally, at dusk, his weary team slogged back to the airport. Time to rest, recharge.
As they pulled up to the tarmac, Biden noticed a group of kids, Cub Scouts, who were there to visit a fire truck.
Hey, he thought, Cub Scouts!
Revitalized, Biden ran over and shook their hands, hugged them, tousled hair. Then he had an idea. “You guys wanna come and see my plane?”
“Yeah!” the kids cried out.
“Is it okay?” Biden asked a staffer, like a teenager asking to borrow the family car. The staffer gave the thumbs-up.
YES! After getting permission from their (amazed) parents, Biden walked the kids to his plane, where his wife, Jill, cheerfully waved them on board. Joe showed them the cockpit, gave them a grand tour, and learned their names along the way, almost as if he were charming a prime minister.
One of the kids spotted a basket of candy. “Is that your snacks?”
“That’s our snacks,” Biden said, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “You can sneak one if you want.” He doled out some Tootsie Rolls. “Everybody got one?”
His assistant at the time, Herbie Ziskend, remembers the day well. “These little kids were adorable. And he met them all.” This wasn’t a campaign event. This wasn’t scripted or planned. Biden just loves this kind of stuff. The best part? “The kids didn’t know who he was!” Ziskend says, laughing.
It seems that everyone who has worked with Biden, knows Biden, or once bumped into him on the Amtrak has a favorite story to share. Like the Delaware woman who says he raced down a thief to save her purse, the neighbor who watched him zip around in his Corvette, or the teenager who met Biden once, just once, but received some advice that would help him conquer a speech impediment. Colleagues and staffers can vouch for that authenticity, that warmth, how he’s the same Joe whether the camera is on or off…for better or worse.
Just ask the cameraman. “He’s almost exactly the same,” says Arun Chaudhary, the nation’s first-ever White House videographer, whose team shadowed Biden and President Obama, capturing their every moment, whether they were talking policy or licking ice cream cones.
Or, as Obama put it, “Folks don’t just feel like they know Joe ‘the politician.’ They feel like they know the person. What makes him laugh, what he believes, what he cares about, where he came from. Pretty much every time he speaks, he treats us to some wisdom from the nuns who taught him in grade school.”
The goal of this book is to unpack that wisdom—not just the lessons from the sisters at Holy Rosary, but the hard-fought insights he has earned from a lifetime of service. Biden has freely, gleefully, shared much of this advice in countless speeches, interviews, and gabfests with students, but no one has really collected it all in one place. So throughout the book you’ll find callouts to the “Wisdom of Joe,” little dollops of insight that apply to us all.
Why Joe Biden? The premise is simple: Biden is a good man; Biden is the man. We can learn from the way he speaks plainly, stays upbeat, and treats others with respect, no matter who they are or how they vote. That basic decency is why liking Joe Biden is a nonpartisan issue. His pals have ranged from liberal lions (Ted Kennedy) to arch conservatives (Strom Thurmond). “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem,” suggests Republican Lindsey Graham in his slow, southern drawl. “He is as good a man as God ever created.”
“Joe Biden doesn’t have a mean bone in his body,” says John McCain. “He’s unique in that he’s had some role in every major national security crisis that his nation has faced in the last thirty-five years. I don’t know anyone like him in the U.S. Senate….I would say he’s been the most impactful vice president that I’ve known—certainly in modern times.”
McCain has a good point—Biden isn’t just a “nice guy”; he also gets things done. When we take stock of Joe’s legacy, we see a record of service that has few modern-day parallels. Who else pushed to end wars in both Vietnam and Iraq? Who else worked with eight presidents, from Nixon to Obama? (Or as he put it, “Folks, I can tell you I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately.”) As chairman of the Robert Bork proceedings, he might have done more to shape the Supreme Court than anyone since FDR. He championed the Violence Against Women Act. Pushed through a crime bill that put 100,000 cops on the street. Fought to end the genocide in Bosnia. And he did all that before he became, in Obama’s totally unbiased judgment, “the best vice president America’s ever had.”
Why this book? Let’s not kid ourselves. An entire gen
eration knows Biden mostly from the aviators, the Amtrak, the “bromance” memes, and the ice cream cones. And, okay, the gaffes. In an odd way, we only embraced Joe Biden after he left the White House, sort of like how we might not appreciate an ex until after the breakup.
So another mission of the book is to give Joe his due, to look back on his life and savor the best nuggets. As should be clear from the cover, this is not an academic tome or a year-by-year account of Biden’s life, from birth to Air Force Two. (For that, I recommend Jules Witcover’s exceptionally well-researched 2010 biography, Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, as well as Biden’s own 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep.) Instead, the goal here is to offer something that can be binged in a single weekend, focusing on the key stories and lessons from Biden’s remarkable life and career.
Why now? Or, to be as blunt as Biden, isn’t this old news? Shouldn’t we be looking forward, not backward?
First off, Joe’s wisdom is timeless. And it can be helpful to look at the past—the good and the bad, the wins and the misfires. Joe Biden isn’t perfect; that’s the price of being a public servant for nearly five decades. (Quick perspective: When Biden prepared to launch his first campaign, the Yankees were led by a player named Mickey Mantle.) So the book doesn’t pretend the flaws don’t exist; instead we’ll look at those missteps and suss out the teachable moments.
Most important, we can learn from the way that Biden, time after time, has bounced back from unthinkable tragedy and heartache. As his longtime right-hand man, former senator Ted Kaufman, once said, “If you ask me, who is the luckiest person I have ever known? I would say Joe Biden. If you ask me, who is the unluckiest I have known? I would say Joe Biden.” As a young man he lost his first wife and baby daughter. As an old man he lost his son. Along the way he nearly died from a brain aneurysm, with a priest giving him last rites. That’s why when Biden says something like, “I feel your pain,” it’s not phony. With Biden it’s real. He does feel the pain, and he has felt the sharp edges of that pain for more than forty years.
Yet this is what makes Joe, well, Joe: Through it all, he carries himself with grace and strength, and somehow, against all odds, he even finds a way to see the humor. The tears are followed by a smile, a chuckle, some finger-guns. In fact, he is so effective at exuding this breezy cool, this Ah, Shucks friendliness, that at times we forget that he is a man of substance and grit, a man who has a knack for bucking the odds, for coming back from the brink.
Joe’s comebacks began in the very beginning. When Biden was a boy, then just “Joey,” after any setback, his father would tell him, Get back up! Get up! Get up! He has followed that advice as a child, as a man, and as a father.
None of us have walked in Biden’s shoes or faced the same tragedies, but all of us will know loss, feel heartache, suffer bruising defeats. As just one example, on November 8, 2016, about 65.8 million Americans were knocked to the floor by a sucker punch.
Joe can help us get back up.
1
The Boy Who Couldn’t Speak (1942–60)
“I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid.”
Across the political spectrum, from the far left to the hardest right, America can agree on at least one thing: Joe Biden is a talker. In one legendary bout of talking, after a forty-minute speech at the University of Rochester, then-Senator Biden took questions for half an hour. Then an hour. A staffer held up a watch as a signal: Time to go. Biden ignored the signal. Two hours. Eventually his staff, exasperated, switched off the microphones so the students couldn’t ask any more questions, but even that couldn’t stop Joe. He just mingled into the crowd so he could keep the conversation rolling…then chatted for another hour.
Yet Biden wasn’t always a motormouth. Just as Bruce Wayne had a childhood fear of bats, young Joey Biden was scared of talking. He had a speech impediment. A stutter.
“I talked like Morse code. Dot-dot-dot-dot-dash-dash-dash-dash,” he later remembered. If you asked him his name, he might reply, “J-J-J-J-Joe Biden.” Kids poked fun at him, because kids are monsters. They called him “Dash.” “It was like having to stand in the corner with the dunce cap. Other kids looked at me like I was stupid. They laughed.”
Joey had three ways of coping with his stutter:
Family
Guts
Nuns
With the Bidens, everything starts with family. They are a tight-knit clan, something Joey would quickly learn after coming into the world on November 20, 1942, the same day that American troops marched up the coast of Africa to invade the Nazis. The Biden family was Irish, Catholic, and, therefore, large. Working class. Church every Sunday.
Joe’s dad, Joe Sr., made his bread by cleaning boilers, selling furniture, dusting crops, and then selling used cars. His mom, Jean, a “spunky Irish lass with a mind of her own,” would comfort him when the other kids mocked his stutter, teaching him self-respect. “Remember, Joey, you’re a Biden,” she would tell him. “Nobody is better than you. You’re not better than anybody else, but nobody is any better than you.” He would remember these words for decades, repeating them to his colleagues, to voters, to his kids. (His mom even had an explanation for the stutter: “Joey, it’s because you’re so bright you can’t get the thoughts out quickly enough.”)
His siblings also had his back. His sister, Val, a self-described “full-fledged tomboy,” would hop onto the handlebars of his bicycle, E.T.-style, and Joey would pedal her to the playgrounds of Scranton, Pennsylvania. There he’d teach her how to throw a baseball, how to tackle, and how to shoot hoops. (Val would later return the favor. She managed every one of his campaigns until 2008.) Brothers Jimmy and Frank rounded out the Biden kids, and the foursome stuck together. Joey had an uncle, Boo-Boo, who also stuttered, and offered him some much-needed empathy.
Yet empathy was scarce in grade school. When he read aloud his homework, one little jerk would taunt, “B-b-b-b-b-b-BIDEN!” So Joey turned to his second technique for coping with the stutter: proving that he had guts.
Joey Biden was a skinny kid. Short for his age. Yet to prove that he had mettle, he would do…well, basically, he would do stupid things. (In other words: boyhood.) Take the “Feat of the Dump Truck.” One day, a kid named Jimmy Kennedy dared him to run under a dump truck. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal. But Jimmy dared him—or maybe triple-dog-dared him—to run under the truck while the truck was moving.
Jimmy was an older kid, around twelve, and should have known better. “Thing was, Kennedy never, never—NO CHANCE—thought the kid would do it…but Joey did it,” writes Richard Ben Cramer in What It Takes. “The dump truck was loaded to the gills and backing up—not too fast—and Joey was small, only eight or nine, and he ran under the truck from the side, between the front and back wheels…then let the front axle pass over him. If it touched him, he was finished—marmalade—but Joey was quick. The front wheels missed him clean.”
Daredevil Joey would perform more stunts. He once climbed above a construction site, grabbed a rope, and then swung over the site like he was Tarzan. On a $5 dare, he scampered up a 200-foot pyramid of coal. (That very $5 bill could later be seen, framed, hanging in his Senate office.) “Joe was just a daring guy who wasn’t frightened by anything,” a childhood friend remembered. Always a prankster, he tossed water balloons at rich guys in convertibles, threw snowballs into the open windows of truck drivers, and ran away from adults who chased him with a broom. (Those 2016 prankster memes? Not without basis.)
He quickly learned that football was another way to prove he had guts. When still a young and skinny kid, he found a dirt alley where some older boys were tossing around a football. “You ca-ca-can’t catch me!” he said, and then ran. They tried to catch him; they couldn’t. So they invited him to play tackle football, where he would play until he bled…and then keep playing.
Then, in 1953, in a quiet move that would send shock waves to the U.S. Senate for decades to come, the Biden family moved from Scranton to the hardscrabble neighborhoods
of Delaware. (First to a town named Claymont, then to Wilmington.) Joey was ten at the time. Why the move? Money was tight, and Joe Sr. had found a better job as a car salesman. (Not coincidentally, Biden would have a lifelong infatuation with cars. He is likely the only vice president in American history whose iPhone received push-alert notifications from Car and Driver.)
Joe Sr.’s new job taught the kid some lessons. One year, the owner of his father’s dealership, seemingly drunk with power at the annual Christmas party, took a bucket of silver dollars and emptied it onto the floor, just to watch his underlings claw for the scraps. Joe Sr. would have none of that. “I quit, God damn it!” he said, before storming out of the party.
When his parents got home that night, Joey’s mom told him, “I’m so proud of your father. He just quit.” Joe Sr. didn’t have a backup plan, but Bidens don’t get bullied. Not by a boss, not by other kids. As Senator Biden would later say, “When I got knocked down by guys bigger than me—and this is the God’s truth—[my mom] sent me back out and said, ‘Bloody their nose so you can walk down the street the next day.’ And that’s what I did.”
Yet even if Joey didn’t exactly get “bullied,” per se, in seventh grade he was still mocked for that lingering speech impediment. In Latin class, the kids gave him the nickname of “Joe Impedimenta.” So he turned to his third technique for coping with the stutter: appealing to a higher power.
Or, more specifically, nuns.
At Catholic school, nuns were a big part of young Joey’s life. After hearing all of the dash-dash-dashes in his speech, a nun suggested that instead of trying to blast out a sentence in one gushing torrent, he carve it up into its natural pauses, its rhythm, its cadence. So instead of trying to say, “I love eating ice cream cones on Amtrak,” you would say, deliberately, “I love—eat-ing—ice cream-cones—on Am-trak.”
This strategy helped. But there was a catch: It required him to rehearse sentences, so he couldn’t really use it on the fly. What would he do when the teacher called on him in class? How would he handle conversations with strangers? What if—even scarier—he had to talk to a girl?