by Jeff Wilser
You can guess the reaction, and you’d be right. One newspaper ran the headline: I’M WORTH MORE MONEY, $42,000 NOT ENOUGH. Another front-page editorial said, “The voters of Delaware who elected this stupid, conceited jackass to the Senate should kick him in the rear to knock some sense into him, and then kick themselves [for] voting [for] such an idiot.” (Biden had the paper framed.)
To the chagrin of his more tenured colleagues, he spoke up in favor of public financing, arguing that it would help strip away the influence of lobbyists and outside cash—and help them win back the public’s trust. His proposal: Incumbents get x dollars of public money to use for campaigning, and then the challengers get x plus 10 percent. Why the extra cash for challengers? Biden wanted to level the playing field, given the “obvious advantages of incumbency.”
Only one little problem: Most of the senators relied on that outside money. And what senator wanted to give a challenger an “extra 10 percent”? Blasphemy! Biden’s proposal was dead on arrival. When he finished his speech, the Senate floor was filled with more awkward silence, and later, in private, a veteran senator warned him that he would be “the youngest one-term senator in the history of America.”
To avoid that fate, Biden would need to learn some lessons about how to treat his colleagues. Even the Republicans. One day he happened to walk past another rookie senator, Republican Jesse Helms, who, at the time, didn’t exactly boast the most progressive stance on civil rights. (Helms once wrote, “Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are facts of life which must be faced.”) Biden, who ran on civil rights, couldn’t stomach that nonsense. And he overheard Helms bad-mouthing what would become the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Biden was steamed. “That guy, Helms, he has no social redeeming value,” he vented to Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader. “He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about people in need. He has a disregard for the disabled.”
Mansfield then told Joe a little story. A few years earlier, Jesse Helms—the man who “doesn’t care”—had flipped through the newspaper with his wife, and noticed an ad of a disabled fourteen-year-old, who had braces on both legs. The ad said, “All I want is someone to love me and adopt me.” So Jesse Helms adopted the kid.
“I felt like a fool,” Biden said many years later. Mansfield gave him a piece of advice that would stick in his craw: Joe, question another man’s judgment, but never question his motives. Why? Because you simply don’t know his motives. Biden would think of this as the “Mansfield Method,” and he mastered it.
WISDOM OF JOE
Question their judgment, not their motives.
From that moment, he vowed to “look past the caricatures of my colleagues and try to see the whole person.” As he would later say when vice president, “Every time there’s a crisis in the Congress…I get sent to the Hill to deal with it. It’s because every one of those men and women up there—whether they like me or not—know that I don’t judge them for what I think they’re thinking.”
BIDEN AND THE CAPACITY FOR CHANGE
Biden would soon meet a man who, similar to Jesse Helms, on the surface, seemed to embody everything that he opposed: Senator Strom Thurmond, the segregationist.
“Segregation in the South is honest, open, and aboveboard,” Thurmond once said. To try to block the Civil Rights Act—the Civil Rights Act!—he gave a filibuster that lasted for a staggering twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, an impressive feat of windbaggery, even by Joe Biden’s standards. In 1965, ol’ Strom was so disgusted by this “civil rights” thing that he actually switched parties, flipping from Democratic to Republican.
And yet.
Despite those repugnant positions, Biden did his best not to vilify the man, and he watched as Thurmond’s positions on race gradually evolved. “Strom Thurmond was…a brave man, who in the end made his choice and moved to the good side,” Biden said, more than three decades later. “I disagreed deeply with Strom on the issue of civil rights and on many other issues, but I watched him change. We became good friends.”
What accounts for that shift? And how the hell could Biden, who had always championed civil rights, become buddies with such a…well, a bigot? “I went to the Senate emboldened, angered, and outraged, at age twenty-nine, about the treatment of African Americans in this country, what everything that for a period in his life Strom had represented. But then I met the man…I grew to know him. I looked into his heart and I saw a man, a whole man. I tried to understand him. I learned from him. And I watched him change oh so suddenly.”
Biden believes in our ability to change so much, in fact, that he unwittingly used the word five times in one paragraph. “Strom knew America was changing, and that there was a lot he didn’t understand about that change. Much of that change challenged many of his long-held views. But he also saw his beloved South Carolina and the people of South Carolina changing as well, and he knew the time had come to change himself.”
Before Strom Thurmond died, he made sure he included one last detail in his will: The eulogy would need to be delivered by Joe Biden.
As Beau and Hunter regained their health and their spirits, Biden became more active, joined committees, and started meeting new friends and being more social. He spoke out against Nixon, making him one of the very few politicians whose longevity has permitted denouncing both President Nixon and President Trump. (This makes Biden the modern-day equivalent of John Quincy Adams, who knew both George Washington and then, at the end of his long life, Abraham Lincoln.)
And as early as 1974, Biden tipped his hand that he might be interested in running for president. “I’d be a damn liar if I said that I wouldn’t be interested in five, ten, or twenty years if the opportunity were offered,” he told the press at the time. “You’re being a phony to say you’re not interested in being president if you really want to change things. But I’m certainly not qualified at this point. I don’t have the experience or background.”
Yet for all Biden’s emerging influence in DC, he kept himself anchored at home. “I want to make sure the people of Delaware realize that my first priority is Delaware,” he said. “I feel the important thing is for me not to change from the way I was before I was elected….If you hang around Washington, it’s easy to start thinking you’re important, so it is a blessing in disguise that I commute every day and get out of this city.”
The mind-set would serve Biden well for decades. He never took the state for granted, he met with voters again and again, and amazingly, in one survey, one out of four Delawareans said that they had personally met Joe Biden. (Many have political stickers that they slap on their cars, which simply say “Joe.”) Some tell stories that almost elevate Joe to folk-hero status. “Take Mary Hartnett, 72, of Wilmington,” reported USA Today’s Maureen Milford. “She was walking home from church in 1977 when a purse-snatcher struck. Biden, who was driving by, jumped out of his car and hot-footed it after the culprit, she says, running through backyards and scaling fences. The thief dropped the pocketbook.”
From purse-rescuing to schmoozing with local officials, Delaware would come first. As his foreign policy advisor Mike Haltzel remembers, Biden once told him, “If it’s ever a choice in scheduling a meeting between a foreign prime minister or the fire chief from Delaware, the fire chief gets the appointment.” He would never be seriously challenged for reelection.
WISDOM OF JOE
Dance with the one who brought you.
In the spring of 1975, while strolling through Wilmington Airport, Biden couldn’t help but notice some posters advertising the New Castle County park system. Now, normally, Joe Biden might or might not notice a random poster about trees. (Although as that ’72 ad reminds us, “When Joe Biden sees a tree, he sees a tree.”)
Yet this poster had something else going for it: a beautiful woman. “She was blonde and gorgeous,” Biden later remembered. “I couldn’t imagine who was looking at trees with her in the photograph.” He thought, That’s the kind of woman I’d like to meet.
/> Call it serendipity, call it chance, call it fate. According to at least one version of this story, that very night, his brother tried to set him up on a date and slipped Biden a woman’s number. “You’ll like her, Joe,” he assured him. “She doesn’t like politics.”
Her name was Jill. As he tells the story in Promises to Keep, Joe called her the next day. “Um, this is Joe Biden?” he said in a strong opening. They exchanged just a bit of small talk, and he blurted, “Do you think you could go out tonight?”
“No,” she said. “I have a date.”
But a trivial matter like that was not going to stop Joe Biden. (Don’t wait for the coin flip.)
“I’m only in town for one day, see,” he said. “Do you think you could break it?”
It turns out she was free after all. He later drove to her place and knocked on her door like a gentleman (as opposed to just meeting at a bar), and he wore a suit, which impressed her. When the door swung open, he was astonished to see the woman from the park ads.
They went out for dinner and a movie; Jill doesn’t remember the film, but their choices would have likely included The Stepford Wives, Funny Lady, and At Long Last Love. They stayed out till midnight.
And in something of a he said/she said, Jill remembers the story just a bit differently. Decades later, she said that Joe saw the poster and told his brother Frank, “Oh, that’s the kind of girl I’d like to date!” Frank happened to know Jill from college, so he asked for her number and slipped it to Joe. (Either way, it’s a solid meet-cute.)
“I was really charmed by him,” she said in 2012. “At the door, you know how guys are usually trying to ‘make their moves’? He didn’t. He was a gentleman.” After she said good-bye, at 1 a.m. she phoned her mom and said, “My God, I think I finally met a gentleman.”
WISDOM OF JOE
Don’t “make a move.” Be a gentleman.
He asked to see her again. She agreed. More phone calls, more dates, more lovable-Joe loquaciousness. Biden was so enchanted, he tried to have a DTR (Define the Relationship) talk after two dates(!), suggesting that they stop seeing other people. Jill wasn’t yet ready. When she was still in college, she had married very young, and, while separated from her husband, she was still in the process of getting a divorce. And she also really, really, really didn’t want to date a politician.
So how did Joe handle this? Whether he knew it or not, he executed the only move you can when the other person says, “I don’t want anything serious”: You basically agree—let’s just have fun!—and secretly hope that the other person will change their mind.
Joe fell hard. He fell for her character, her spunk, her streak of independence. “She had backbone. She was private—Joe liked that, her cool way of hiding the girl inside, and old hurts…he could see that,” suggests biographer Richard Ben Cramer. “She had that way of looking at you…and then that quick shy smile, half-doubting—she could sniff out bullshit. She’d tell him, too—especially when it was his bullshit—she’d tell him straight. Very soft of manner was Jill, but smart: she knew who she liked.”
As the days and weeks ticked by, the fun turned into something more. Jill met his sons. They liked her. Soon Biden met Jill’s extended family, won over her grandparents, and was delighted to learn that they cooked spaghetti on Christmas Eve, just like his family. When he thought about buying a new house, he took her with him to see it. (Hint, hint.) They spent Christmas together. In other words, this totally-nothing-serious couple behaved exactly like a couple that wanted to get serious.
Even Hunter and Beau knew what was up. And they approved. In a delightful anecdote shared by Biden in Promises to Keep, one morning, while Joe was in the bathroom shaving, the two boys approached him nervously.
“You tell him, Hunt,” said Beau, then seven years old.
“No. You tell him,” said Hunter, then six.
“Beau thinks we should get married,” said Hunter.
Joe looked at them. “What do you mean, guys? Beau?”
“Well, we think we should marry Jill,” Beau said. “What do you think, Dad?”
Joe liked the idea. Hunter liked the idea. Beau liked the idea. There was only one person who didn’t like the idea: Jill. Biden proposed to her, and she said no. (Thank God this wasn’t on the jumbotron.) She loved Joe but she wasn’t ready to be a full-time mom, and like any sensible person, she still didn’t want to date a politician.
So he asked her again; again she said no.
He asked her a third time.
Again she said no.
Maybe…fourth time’s the charm?
Nope. Again she said no—still needed more time.
Okay, how about the FIFTH MARRIAGE PROPOSAL?
Thanks, but no thanks.
Finally Biden could take no more. “I’m not going to wait any longer,” he told her, before leaving on a ten-day senatorial trip to South Africa. “Either you decide to marry me or that’s it. I’m out. I’m too much in love with you to just be friends. Think about it while I’m gone,” he told her, and then he boarded a flight to Africa. For the next ten days, he waited in agony.
WISDOM OF JOE
Keep your self-respect, even when lovesick.
Joe flew back from Africa…and found that his ultimatum had worked. She said that she couldn’t afford to lose him. This time she had a different answer: yes.
When Joe married Jill on June 17, 1977, they did it as a family: Hunter and Beau stood at the altar. After this simple ceremony in the United Nations chapel, they took a “honeymoon” as a family, with the four of them heading to Broadway to see Annie, chow down on burgers at Blimpie’s, and then crash at their hotel in Manhattan…where Joe and Jill took the smaller bedroom, giving the boys the honeymoon suite.
Many years later, a reporter asked Beau about Jill, his stepmom.
Beau immediately jumped in to cut her off. “My mom,” he clarified.
“You don’t call her your stepmom?” the reporter asked.
“I don’t. I’ve been a lucky man in many ways. I’ve had two moms,” Beau said, tearing up. “It was like that from the very moment we got married….Anyone who knows her knows how kind she is. Look, it’s easy to fall in love with my mom.”
In 1981, Jill gave birth to a daughter, Ashley. Biden began to feel whole. In the next few years he would climb the ladder of seniority, draft legislation, serve on committees. In little over a decade, he had transformed himself from a broken widower into one of the shining stars of the Democratic Party, who seemed ready to level up.
He spoke up about Watergate, the Nixon resignation, civil rights, school busing. As the boys and Ashley grew older he began to travel to more countries, he met more foreign leaders, and he joined the Foreign Relations Committee, which he would eventually chair. As for the Oval Office? In 1984, he didn’t run for president—he said he wasn’t yet ready—but he had turned enough heads to receive one symbolic electoral vote.
But in 1988? Joe Biden was ready.
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.”
Imagine a young politician giving a speech. The words are poetic, uplifting, packed with inspiration. “It’s time we hear the sound of the country singing and soaring in the dawn of a new day,” he says. “It’s time to restore America’s soul….Our time has come!”
This almost sounds like JFK, Ronald Reagan, or Barack Obama, right? Yet in the mid-’80s, it was Joe Biden who was preaching Hope and Change. Nowadays we tend to think of Biden as the cool dad or the elder statesman, but once upon a time, at age forty-four, Biden seemed like the fresh new face of the Democratic Party. Good-looking. Clean. Articulate.
Would he run for president? He made it crystal clear: “I’m not going to run in 1988.”
And then he ran for president. And why the hell not? The Republicans had just enjoyed two terms in the White House, and no
party had won three in a row since the days of FDR—a good sign for the Democrats, right? Biden looked around at the other presidential hopefuls: Gary Hart. Jesse Jackson. Michael Dukakis. Some rookie named Al Gore. None of them had dibs. (There were so many candidates, they were nicknamed “The Seven Dwarves.”) After sixteen years in the Senate, he now had tenure, sex appeal, and hair that was still more brown than gray. Gaffes? Not yet. This was Prime Biden.
He had just two problems. First, polls showed that only two out of five Americans knew who he was. Second, many commentators claimed that he was all razzle-dazzle, but there was no “there” there. As the Los Angeles Times framed it, “Although no one questions Biden’s ability to rouse an audience, this very gift has helped crystallize the most significant criticism…that there is less to him than meets the eye (and the ear); that he sells the sizzle but is short on the steak; that he is more of a show horse than a workhorse.” Was Biden sizzle or was he steak?
Happily, and just in time for the ’88 election, Biden would have a plum opportunity—in the national spotlight—to prove that he had the right stuff: the Bork nomination, which sounds like a lost Star Trek film.
To quickly brush up on our ’80s political history, in 1987, Ronald Reagan told the nation that his top domestic priority was to seat Robert Bork on the Supreme Court. “No man in America and few in our history have been as qualified to sit on the Supreme Court as Robert Bork,” Reagan assured us.
Bork was a legal badass. Even the Left acknowledged his intellectual firepower and Justice-y credentials. Yet he was also a constitutional “originalist” and, by some accounts, the most conservative nominee the nation had ever seen. His confirmation would tip the balance of the Court. (It didn’t help that Bork had been a key chess piece in President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre; as solicitor general, Bork had fired the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox.)