The Book of Joe

by Jeff Wilser

  As Joe said years later, he fell “ass over tin cup in love.” He knew she was “The One.” For the rest of Joe’s time on Paradise Island he saw her every day, pretty much blowing off his buddies. Before he left the island he told her, with the certainty of young love, “You know we’re going to get married.”

  “I think so,” she whispered. “I think so.”

  BIDEN AND BOOZE

  What’s Joe Biden’s favorite beer?

  Budweiser

  Guinness

  PBR

  He couldn’t tell you. Joe Biden has never had a beer. He has never had a drop of alcohol, not even on Spring Break. You would never guess that from The Onion’s Joe Biden, with its headlines like, “Biden Clenches Plastic Beer Cup in Teeth to Free Hands for Clapping.” And sure, when he’s gleefully finger-gunning behind Obama at the State of the Union, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he might be on his third bourbon.

  The reason? As a kid, he had noticed that his uncle Boo-Boo drank too much, and he wanted to avoid the same fate. “There are enough alcoholics in my family,” he said in 2008. In college Biden was always the designated driver, making him the darling of the parents. (But don’t worry—he still had his fun. “Joe would do wild and crazy things,” as his sister, Val, later clarified, “but he was always sober.”)

  Biden has the same policy with cigarettes and pot. (In college, he once stopped dating a woman because she smoked—deal-breaker.) “I don’t use anything that could be a crutch,” he told a reporter in 1970. “I use football as a crutch and motorcycle jumping and skiing—I ski like a madman. But those are crutches over which I have some control. I’m against chemical crutches.”

  After Joe returned from the BAHAMAS, he raced home and told Val, “I met the girl I’m going to marry!”

  Val didn’t laugh this off. Impulsive? Maybe. But the whole family knew that when Joe got an idea in his head, he was serious. He mooched a turquoise convertible from his father—one of the perks when your dad is a car salesman—and on the very next weekend, he drove five hours to visit Neilia in Skaneateles, New York, staying at a nearby rooming house. He met her family in their fancy house on the lake, which he later recounted in Promises to Keep. (Much of what we know about Joe and Neilia’s early courtship, and what happens next, comes from Biden’s 2007 memoir.)

  “You water-ski, don’t you, Joe?” her father asked, in what sounds like a deleted scene from Meet the Parents.

  He did not. But Biden was a natural athlete—he still had dreams of playing on the college football team (and he once dreamed of going pro)—so he made it his new mission in life to become an expert water-skier. He took some free lessons from a friend of Val’s, one day spending six straight hours falling down, getting up, falling down. (For the sensible people who have never tried it, six hours is a lot of water-skiing.) On a more substantive note, this anecdote showcases a core Biden trait: the willingness to put in the time and practice. He makes it look easy with the toothy smile and the folksy charm, but whether it’s overcoming his stutter as a teenager, studying troop movements in Iraq, mastering the details of constitutional law before a Supreme Court battle, or literally busting his ass to become proficient in water-skiing, Joe Biden puts in the work.

  WISDOM OF JOE

  If you want it, hustle for it.

  Soon Neilia met the Biden family, and as they bonded over homemade barbecue, she easily won them over. How could they not be impressed with her one-two punch at Syracuse—dean’s list and the homecoming queen? Joe was so in love that he scrapped his summer plans and got a job at a gas station, so he could stay in Skaneateles and spend more time with her. He pumped gas during the day and saw Neilia at night. (It’s easy to imagine Hot Young Biden at the gas station, flashing a big smile and filling ’er up while he chats your ear off, and then, when the tank is full, keeping you another five minutes even though you’re late for work.)

  When the summer was over, Joe knew that in his fall semester, he would not be able to see her on the weekends—he had football practice. He had impressed the coaches the previous spring, and now he had a chance to be a starter. Biden had loved football since he was that scrawny little kid in Scranton. But playing football meant not seeing Neilia.

  So he ditched football.

  Not only did he quit the team, but he rejiggered his fall schedule so that he had no classes on Friday—a classic senior move—which freed Thursday night for the 320-mile trip to New York. Joe didn’t own a car, so, when possible, he would borrow a car from his pop’s dealership. If that wasn’t possible? He’d hitchhike. Then he got craftier. Joe’s father was plugged in to a network of dealerships that needed cars moved from one lot to another, so Joe, who had gobs of friends, paid them five bucks each to drive a car one way and hitchhike home; since the dealership paid Joe $10 per ride, he made a cool $5 profit on each trip. That could add up to $100 per weekend, which subsidized his visits to Neilia. (Joe Biden: the original Uber.)

  On those car rides, with the wind in his hair, he would let his mind wander. He thought about the future. He thought about the wedding, graduation, law school, the house he and Neilia would buy, and children. (“She wanted five, and that was okay by me.”) He daydreamed about running for public office. Campaigning. Giving speeches. And he wasn’t alone in his buoyant optimism; a friend of Neilia’s remembers a phone call where she gushed about her new boyfriend and said, “Do you know what he’s going to be? He’s going to be a senator by age thirty and president of the United States!”

  It’s entirely possible that without Neilia, Joe Biden would never have become a lawyer, a senator, or vice president. We can thank a handwritten note. When Joe drove to visit Neilia at Syracuse, he sometimes had to kill time while she was in class, so she would leave him little notes on his parked car’s windshield (’60s-era texting). One day she left him a note saying that she was running late, but since he was on campus, why not check out Syracuse Law School? He did just that: He applied, was accepted, and then enrolled.

  Everything was locking into place.

  Joe married Neilia in 1966, and his father gave them a surprise wedding gift. Since Joe Sr. managed a Chevy dealership, he said to Neilia, “Why don’t you give me [your] car, and I’ll fix [it] up for ya for the wedding.” But his dad had a sneaky plan. A few days later, Joe and Neilia swung by the dealership to pick up the refurbished car, and were shocked to find a gorgeous, shiny 1967 Corvette Stingray 4-speed. Joe’s dad pointed to the beauty. “This is my wedding gift.”

  (Biden still owns the car. In 2016, nearly fifty years later, he took Jay Leno for a spin, boasting that he had once pushed it to 110 mph. “What were you more excited about, the wedding night or the Corvette?” Leno asked him. “The wedding night,” Biden said with a chuckle.)

  With the Corvette as their only possession of real value, the young couple moved into a modest house in Syracuse, at 608 Stinard Avenue, just a few blocks from a small reservoir. They were broke and ate cereal for dinner, happily, in an era that Joe would later describe as magical. Joe was in law school at the time. Neilia taught at a nearby elementary school.

  They made their first addition to the family courtesy of some neighbors, whose German shepherd gave birth to some puppies. The puppies were adorable (because they were puppies), and Neilia would watch them play. So to surprise his wife, one day, Joe knocked on his neighbor’s door to ask if he could buy one. How ambitious was Joe Biden in his twenties? Exhibit A: They named the puppy Senator (or “Tor,” for short). They took walks with Tor around the reservoir and played football in the street with the local kids. They charmed their neighbors. In the summer, Joe and Neilia hopped into the Stingray, put down the roof, and drove the neighborhood kids to ice cream at Marble Farms.

  While Biden glided into his new neighborhood with ease, he had a tougher adjustment with law school. By his own admission he was “sloppy and arrogant.” He didn’t really find the work hard, “just boring,” and he liked to play hooky. (Kids, in this case, don’t foll
ow Joe’s example. Study hard. Stay in school.)

  He was so casual with his coursework, in fact, that when he wrote his legal papers, he didn’t understand how to cite articles. This got him in trouble. When a classmate accused Biden of plagiarizing passages from the Fordham Law Review, the faculty summoned him for an explanation. “The truth was, I hadn’t been to class enough to know how to do citations in a legal brief,” he later confessed. He did cite the Fordham Law Review in his paper, but technically, you’re supposed to cite the original source every time you use a quote. He didn’t. It seemed to be an honest (but careless) mistake, and the dean exonerated him, writing that “in spite of what happened, I am of the opinion that this is a perfectly sound young man.” (Soon the issue was forgotten, until it would later make a damning cameo in a presidential election….)

  Biden assumed that no matter what he did for the first chunk of the semester, all that really counted were the final exams. So he coasted until he had to cram. With only ten days before the finals, he still had basically done nothing. Uh-oh. With the clock ticking, he realized he was screwed. So he made two smart decisions:

  He started drinking coffee for the first time.

  He asked for Neilia’s help.

  And “help” is understating things; the way Biden describes it, she did practically as much work as he did. “Neilia devised the strategy,” he explains in his memoir. They would divide and conquer: Joe focused on two of his classes, Contracts and Property, and Neilia cracked the books on his other two classes, Torts and Criminal Law, and converted his notes into detailed, meticulous study guides that would help him master the material. The results? Neilia’s guides helped him ace Torts and Criminal Law. Joe failed one of the classes he tried to do on his own (Contracts). The good news is that he passed the other class he did solo, Property. The bad news is that this is likely because, as he put it, “The professor died and they passed everybody in the class.”

  WISDOM OF JOE

  Don’t be too proud to ask for help.

  Biden couldn’t spend all his time cramming; law school wasn’t cheap, so to make some extra cash, at various points he would work at a local brewery, spend nights as a hotel clerk, and even drive a school bus, which feels very on brand. And with Neilia’s help, he did enough to squeak by and graduate from Syracuse Law School in 1968, finishing #76 in a class of 85.

  Then something flipped. After the less-than-stellar showing at Syracuse, Biden seemed eager to begin “real life”—to do the things that matter. The next few years would be a blur. Biden joined a corporate law firm, quit the firm (after realizing he’d rather help people than big business), launched his own law firm, and served as a public defender, where he began a lifelong quest of “fighting for the little guy.”

  And then Biden forever left his youth on February 3, 1969, when Neilia gave birth to their first child, Joseph Robinette Biden III, better known as Beau. Exactly one year and one day later, she gave birth to Hunter. A daughter would soon follow: Naomi. The house filled up fast and they were cramped; at one point, little Beau had to sleep in a closet. During this time, they kept moving as Biden kept busy at work, met some local Delaware politicians, and then won a seat on the New Castle County City Council, thanks largely to Val’s political savvy.

  Now that Hot Young Biden had turned into Family Man Biden, the Bidens eventually settled into a larger house in Wilmington, Delaware, which he called “North Star.” And now, only four years out of Syracuse Law School, the owner of “Tor” cast his eyes on a new goal, an idea that seemed absurdly far-fetched: the United States Senate.

  3

  The Hail Mary (1972)

  “The smart guys covering Delaware politics didn’t give me a snowman’s chance in August.”

  The Democrats had a problem. In 1972, the world had yet to learn about a building called Watergate, Nixon was still popular, and he was about to pancake George McGovern, running up the electoral scoreboard 520 to 17. Some of the Senate races were hopeless; why even put up a fight?

  Take Delaware, for example. The Republicans had an incumbent, and their man looked unbeatable. Senator Caleb Boggs was a bona fide legend; a World War II hero, for the last thirty years he had been a member of Congress (three times), governor of Delaware (two terms), and now he was a U.S. senator.

  He had never lost a race.

  The Democratic Party bigwigs knew they couldn’t beat Caleb Boggs. So they needed someone expendable, a sacrificial lamb.

  A few names were tossed around. Then came one that most people had never even heard—How about this Joe Biden kid? (At the time, Biden was a fresh-faced New Castle County councilman, and had been networking with the Delaware political scene.)

  We can imagine the chuckles. Joe Biden! Good one. Joe Biden was only twenty-nine years old. That’s too young to be a senator. (It is, literally, too young to be a senator, as Article I of the Constitution says, “No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years.”)

  Ted Kaufman was in that meeting where the Democratic bigwigs floated the idea of Biden running. He remembers hearing one of them ask, “Well, who’s going to be his campaign manager?”

  “His sister, Valerie,” someone said.

  “Great ticket. They ought to reverse it!”

  They had a point. Whereas Joe had sort of goofed around at college, Val was a star. “Valerie had been a top student at the University of Delaware,” Kaufman said. “She’d been homecoming queen. She was an absolutely incredible person.”

  Val was always in Joe’s corner, and had been ever since they’d practiced tackle football and ridden together on that bicycle. When Joe ran for county councilman, Val developed a hyperorganized system that gave them an edge: She tracked all the voters in the county, sliced and diced the neighborhoods by past voting records, and established a system of block captains. The operation, in a sense, served as a crude beta version of the vaunted ’08 Obama campaign apparatus. (Biden wasn’t the first to do this, of course. It can be traced as far back as Aaron Burr, who, in 1800, tallied up the blocks on a voter-by-voter basis, outmaneuvering Alexander Hamilton.)

  Val called up Kaufman—Can you help us? He agreed to meet the Biden kid. “I’ll be happy to help you, but I’ve got to tell you that you have no chance of winning,” he told Joe. Kaufman liked what he saw, however, and joined Team Biden. He would be Biden’s right-hand man for thirty-six years.

  Biden knew the odds were close to impossible. As he put it, the pundits said he had a “snowman’s chance in August.” But what the hell? Biden was not one to turn down a challenge—just ask the kid who dared him to run beneath that moving dump truck. And the former football player inside couldn’t resist trying the Hail Mary.

  “I am announcing today my candidacy for the United States Senate,” he said on March 20, 1972, before launching into a forty-minute speech—short for him! After the speech, he hopped in an old-timey propeller plane and flew around the state, with Beau sitting on his lap. Delawareans must have wondered…Who the hell is this guy? In one early poll, 18 percent of Delawareans had heard of Biden. Caleb Boggs? 93 percent.

  He had a plan to get people to know him. And it pivoted around something very simple: coffee.

  Even before he officially announced, Biden knew he had to do something to get on the public’s radar. He couldn’t afford too much advertising, so he set out to do things the old-fashioned way, sitting down with voters over a cup of coffee to discuss the issues. The first coffee session would begin at 8 a.m., usually at a neighborhood woman’s house, and they would invite thirty to forty of her neighbors to join. Another session would begin just down the street at 9 a.m., also with thirty guests. Then another at 10 a.m., then 11 a.m., practically back-to-back for the entire day, sometimes until midnight. As always they did things as a family; Valerie, Neilia, and Joe’s mom all pitched in, showing up with coffee and doughnuts. (Joe’s mom was the “coffee chairman.”) He could meet with more than three hundred people per day. They sometimes
brought along Beau and Hunter, and just “carried them from house to house like footballs in wicker baskets.”

  It’s a lesson that stuck with Joe for life. Decades later, during the 2008 election, after an eighteen-hour day he turned to one of his staffers, Herbie Ziskend, and told him, “The key to winning these things is you have to ask the people for their vote.” So simple, but the advice sort of blew Ziskend’s mind. In all the machinations of a modern election, it’s easy to forget these basic lessons, but they’re the things that Joe excels at—Just ask for their vote.

  WISDOM OF JOE

  Remember the basics.

  Yet back in 1972, Biden knew coffee and charm weren’t enough. He knew that at twenty-nine years old, if he wanted to be taken seriously, he needed to command the issues and study the policy. So every Sunday night, Joe and Neilia invited PhDs and Fulbright scholars to their home, fed them plates of spaghetti, and then they geeked out over the tax code, domestic policy, and foreign affairs. He knew that people would ask, Is he just an empty smile, or does he have substance?

  He gave speeches on civil rights, health care, and the folly of the Vietnam War. (Whether you agree with Biden’s policies or not, you have to give him credit for saying—for the most part—basically the same thing for fifty years. For this we can thank Joe’s grandfather, Grandpop Finnegan, who told him, Tell them what you really think, Joey. Let the chips fall where they may.)

  Immediately Kaufman saw something special. This guy, Biden, he gets it. He doesn’t just spout the Democratic talking points. He thinks. He does his own thing. “These were issues that not a lot of elected officials had been talking about: The Democrats didn’t say much about balancing the budget. No one was saying that we have to do something about the environment,” remembered Kaufman. “He was for a strong criminal justice system. That was a no-no among Democrats. The Republicans were the people who were concerned about crime. But Joe Biden talked about the fact that the people who were getting hurt by crime were our people.”