by Jeff Wilser
But that fifteen-year-old letter didn’t fit into a sound bite. Nor did his explanation for how the Kinnock speech was usually credited, but in Iowa—just that one time—it was not. Besides, once a candidate gets slapped with a label, it’s difficult to shake the image, no matter if it’s fair or if it’s bunk. And every time new evidence seems to fit that label, it’s particularly damaging. (See also: “Crooked Hillary.”)
Jill, for one, was incredulous. As long as she had known Joe, ever since that first date when he politely shook her hand when he said good night, she had known him as a man of honor. He had that saying of his—I give you my word as a Biden. Integrity was his bedrock. “Of all the things to attack you on,” she said to him, “your integrity?”
Biden couldn’t believe it either, and rebutting all of these charges must have felt something like Whac-A-Mole. Especially with the benefit of thirty years of hindsight, it really does look like each of these episodes has a solid explanation. At no point did he intend to cheat.
Yet he finally resigned himself to a more humbling truth: “It was my fault. When I stopped trying to explain to everybody and thought it through, the blame fell totally on me,” he later wrote, accepting responsibility for coasting in law school, flubbing the citations, and blowing his gasket to say “Wanna compare IQs?” He owned the mistakes.
And now he had to make a decision. Stay in the race and keep whacking moles, or quit the election to focus on Bork? He still had a shot. If he set up shop in Iowa and doubled down on the campaign, maybe he could still win this thing. What was more important: the personal ambition to become president, or the fate of the Supreme Court?
There would be no flashy news conference. Biden didn’t make a big stink about things, but instead, quietly, while on a lunch break from the Bork proceedings, he stepped outside to address the reporters and the cameras. Jill stood at his side.
“Hello, everybody. You know my wife, Jill,” he begins. “Although it’s awfully clear to me what choice I have to make, I have to tell you honestly I do it with incredible reluctance—it makes me angry,” he said, in something of a sorry-not-sorry! “I’m angry with myself for having been put in this position….I have made mistakes….Now the exaggerated shadow of those mistakes has begun to obscure the essence of my candidacy and the essence of Joe Biden.” That last sentence, in a sense, encapsulates the irony of Biden’s career: the “shadow of mistakes” has obscured the essence—a man committed to integrity, his family, and public service.
He quickly wrapped up the speech. “And lest I say something that might be somewhat sarcastic, I should go to the Bork hearings. Thanks, folks.”
WISDOM OF JOE
Know when to leave.
Seconds later, Joe turned to head back inside the Senate building. Jill grabbed his arm and looked him in the eyes. And then she said, as Biden remembered, “something that sounded like profanity. Jill didn’t often use profanity, but she wanted my full attention. She wanted me to understand that doing my best wasn’t good enough now: ‘You have to win this thing!’ ”
Cue the Rocky music. Biden felt galvanized. He might have lost the election, but he vowed to win the battle that, in a sense, could be more consequential to the nation: stopping Bork.
BIDEN’S PRIZE FIGHTS
When your career spans from the days of Muhammad Ali to the era of Ronda Rousey, you’re going to have some one-on-one dust-ups. Some quick highlights of other Biden sparring matches:
Biden v. Jimmy Carter
The two weren’t enemies, but Biden wasn’t a fan of what he called his excessive “moralizing.” He once told the then-president, “You thump that Bible one more time, and you’re going to lose me, too.”
Biden v. Fund-raising
Joe Biden doesn’t like fund-raising. Never has. He hates outside money and he likes to stay clear. As former staffer Jeff Connaughton tells the story in The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, one day Biden told his team that he was ready to hit the phones and make his fund-raising calls. “Later in the campaign, a twenty-three-year-old fund-raising staffer got into a car with Biden with a list of names and phone numbers. ‘Okay, Senator, time to do some fund-raising calls.’ Biden looked at him and said, ‘Get the fuck out of the car.’ ”
Biden v. Paul Ryan
In the 2012 election, just eight days after Obama got shellacked by Mitt Romney in the first presidential debate, Team Obama, suddenly wounded, needed a strong showing from Joe. He delivered. In the VP debate, Biden’s “high-energy performance—part angry bar-room debater, part condescending elder uncle, part comic mime artist—frequently seemed to leave Paul Ryan overwhelmed,” judged The Guardian. He kept things peppy and upbeat, calling Ryan “my friend” fourteen times, but at every turn he told Ryan, “That’s a bunch of malarkey.”
Biden v. Donald Trump
Ah, what might have been. (Or what still might be…) While Biden has generally kept personality out of politics, he is, first and foremost, a father. So after Trump’s “locker room talk” about grabbing women’s genitalia, Biden was asked if he wished he could debate Donald Trump. “No,” he replied. “I wish we were in high school and I could take him behind the gym.”
Usually, when a candidate drops out of an election, they are free to go home and lick their wounds. “I’m telling you, if this had been me, I would have been curled up in the fetal position, crying,” said Kaufman. “If I had undergone a barrage like that on myself and my personal integrity…I’m not a drinking person, but I would have seriously considered drinking.”
Biden did not go fetal. He did not hit the bottle. Instead he went back to work. Tuning out the embarrassing press and the cheap shots, he called a platoon of legal witnesses to the Senate floor. He wanted to show that while Bork might be brilliant, his judicial philosophy was “out of the mainstream.” The hearings dragged on for days and then weeks, like the most un-athletic Olympics the world has ever seen.
Then, a turning point: On September 23, Biden called former Chief Justice Warren Burger to testify. Burger was appointed by Nixon, and therefore was no bleeding-heart liberal. He supported Bork, saying that in the fifty years of his legal career, he had never seen a more qualified candidate. He seemed like an unlikely (and unwise) witness for Biden to call.
But Biden was more thoroughly prepared than anyone realized. He quoted Chief Justice Burger’s own words, from years before: “The right of privacy…appear[s] nowhere in the Constitution or Bill of Rights; yet these important and unenumerated and unarticulated rights have nonetheless been found to share Constitutional protection with explicit guarantees.”
It’s a bit of a weedy quote, and Biden (rightly) realized that he needed to hit the point harder. Sharper. He needed to press the case. Biden looked up at the former chief justice. “Mr. Justice, that is what this debate is all about, at least with Judge Bork and I. And I wonder if you could speak with us a little bit, educate us a little bit, about these unenumerated rights—the right of privacy?”
Burger politely said that while he wasn’t there to give a lecture on Constitutional law, “I see no problem with that statement, and I would be astonished if Judge Bork would not subscribe to it.”
Wait. What?
Nixon’s former chief justice—and a key Bork booster—had just contradicted Bork’s position in the linchpin of the entire proceedings.
It was happening. The kid from Syracuse Law School was winning. It took weeks of tedium, but Biden kept hammering home the point—literally, with his gavel—that Bork was out of the mainstream. The moderate senators (including Republicans) were now swayed: Bork’s America is not our America.
Finally, on October 23, 1987, the Senate was ready for its vote. A heated debate raged until the very last second. Outraged Republicans complained that the entire process had been a sham, that special interest groups were playing politics.
Biden, who felt he had done cartwheels to ensure fairness, gave a fiery rebuttal. Standing on the Senate floor, making eye contact with his c
olleagues, he came just short of yelling. “I asked Judge Bork, do you think you got a fair hearing? He said yes.”
“Anything else you want to say, Judge Bork?”
“No.”
“Anything at all you want to clarify?”
“No.”
Joe Biden had brought it home. The Senate soon voted…and it wasn’t close. 42 ayes, 58 nays. And thus a new verb was born into the political lexicon: “Borked.”
Afterward, in a moment of hard-fought triumph, Biden’s team had bottles of champagne and was ready to pop the corks. Biden killed the party before it started. “There’s nothing here to celebrate,” he told them. “There’s a guy sitting at home whose whole life has been devoted toward being on the Supreme Court. Imagine how he feels.”
WISDOM OF JOE
Classy in defeat, classy in victory.
The legal community golf-clapped in approval. “After [Biden] withdrew from the race, gracefully…he turned his attention to the constitutional debate in recent years, and acquitted himself superbly,” wrote the Legal Times. And the New York Times said that the hearings “instructed all of us on the Court and the Constitution. They have confounded the cynical view that everyone in Washington has base political motives.”
After dropping out of the race, Joe Biden would not be Ronald Reagan’s successor. Yet in one sense, at least, he proved to be something just as important: his counterpart. Reagan soon summoned Biden to the Oval Office to discuss the next Supreme Court justice. As Biden later described in his memoir, Reagan oozed charm and charisma.
“Hi, Joe,” Reagan said, shaking hands. “Congratulations on Bork.”
“No, Mr. President. There’s no cause for congratulations. I feel bad for Judge Bork. He was a good man.”
“Ah, he wasn’t all that much,” Reagan said with a smile, which Biden found befuddling. Wasn’t all that much? Reagan then asked him, “Who do you want, Joe?”
“Mr. President, that’s not my job.”
Then, in a spirit of bipartisan collaboration (how quaint), Reagan cracked open his short list of Supreme Court nominees and asked Biden for his thoughts. He gave one name, then another, then another. Then he got to the fifth name on his list: Anthony Kennedy. The president was curious: Whattya think, Joe?
Within weeks, Anthony Kennedy glided through the Senate, passing 97 to 0. By most accounts, Biden deserves credit for swapping Bork for Kennedy. “Joe Biden played a more consequential role in the history of the Supreme Court than almost any senator in American history,” suggests the New Yorker’s legal expert, Jeffrey Toobin. “If Biden never did another thing as a senator than protect the nation from Robert Bork as a Supreme Court Justice, he will have a more significant, and noble, legacy than many presidential candidates.”
In the last thirty years, think of how many Supreme Court decisions came down to the swing vote of Anthony Kennedy. To quickly channel It’s a Wonderful Life, what would the world look like if Bork was on the Court?
“I have no real doubt that, had Bork been confirmed, the Court would never have decided to reaffirm the core holding of Roe v. Wade in Planned Parenthood of [Southeastern] Pennsylvania v. Casey or to overrule Bowers v. Hardwick in Lawrence v. Texas,” says Larry Tribe, the constitutional scholar. He then spells out the jaw-dropping repercussions. “So abortion rights would have been jettisoned by the early 1990s if not sooner, and rights of sexual privacy would not have been constitutionalized. Same-sex marriage wouldn’t be a constitutional right today. And every use of race by state and federal institutions to increase diversity in education and other realms would be flatly forbidden. In nearly all the 5–4 decisions in which Justice Kennedy joined four more liberal justices to create a majority, the Court would have gone the other way. The difference for women and marginalized groups would have been enormous.” Without Joe Biden swinging his gavel in 1987, we might live in a very different America.
In the bittersweet aftermath of the Bork highs and election lows, an overworked Biden hit the gym to blow off some steam. While pumping iron he felt a shard of pain in his neck. Must be a muscle pull, he thought. Later that day, on Amtrak, he felt the pain again. Then he felt the pain in his legs. Then more pain in his neck. He saw a doctor who told him that he likely pulled a nerve while lifting weights, and gave Biden a neck brace.
Despite the awkward neck brace, Joe Biden had every reason to feel pretty good about himself. He had won a real victory with Bork. He still had Delaware—he would always have Delaware. His pollster called him to say, “The good news is that 74 percent of the people of Delaware think you ought to run for president again….The bad news is that 43 percent of the people in Delaware think you’re too arrogant.”
“Find those people!” Biden said, laughing. “Find those people! Who are those people? I’m not too arrogant!” Biden was just forty-five years old, he had Jill and Hunter and Beau and Ashley, and he still had his beloved Corvette Stingray. Sure, 1988 might belong to Michael Dukakis, but who’s to say Biden wasn’t the future of the Democratic Party? He had time. He had lots of time.
In February of 1988, he felt even better when he spoke to a crowd at the University of Rochester, who, giving him a hero’s welcome, kept him talking and talking and talking for a Q&A session of four hours. (This is the very same gabfest, in fact, where staffers had to cut off the microphones to get him to leave.) That night he flopped on his hotel bed, exhausted, hungry. He thought about ordering pizza.
Then he blacked out.
He woke up on the floor. He stared at the alarm clock. 4:10 a.m. Panic. It was hard to think. Hard to move. Did he just have a heart attack? He was dizzy, sick, nauseous. He could barely stand. He staggered to the bathroom and tried to force himself to vomit. Nothing came out. So he went back to bed and lay there, in agony, for hours.
The next morning, Biden tried to gut it out and make his scheduled flight. He told his staffers that he was fine, just a little sick, and that if he could get home, he’d be all right. “Can you carry my briefcase?” Biden asked a friend. (This was wildly out of character and it raised red flags; Biden always carried his own briefcase.)
Pretty soon his team figured out something was drastically wrong and hurried him to a local hospital. The doctors spotted blood in his spinal fluid. The likely diagnosis? A brain aneurysm.
Biden had zero margin for error. They needed to transfer him to Walter Reed hospital and wanted to use a helicopter, but a bumpy ride in a chopper could rupture the vessel and kill him. Instead they drove him in an ambulance, through the snow. A police escort led the way, with Beau in the front car, looking out for his pops.
Jill joined him in the ambulance and tried to lighten the mood. “You know, Joe, you always screw everything up,” she said to him. “We were supposed to be going to a spa for Valentine’s Day.”
At the hospital they scanned his brain. He had an intracranial aneurysm, and he needed surgery ASAP. Especially in 1988, the surgery was aggressive and risky.
“Doc, what are my chances?” Biden asked, just before the surgery.
There were two neurosurgeons in the room. One of them paused, then asked Biden to clarify: “Senator, for mortality or morbidity?”
Mortality or morbidity. There was the chance that he would die, and then the chance that even if he lived, he would be seriously disabled, or technically “morbid.”
“Let me put it to you this way,” said Biden. “What are my chances of getting off this table and being completely normal?”
“Well, your chances of living are a lot better.”
“Okay. What are they?”
“Thirty-five to fifty percent.”
Then there was the added risk of morbidity: Paralysis. Loss of speech.
Loss of speech? For Joe Biden? “I think I laughed out loud when [the doctor] said that,” Biden later remembered. “I kind of wish that had happened [before the election].”
It was almost time. Just before the surgery, Joe took a moment to look Beau and Hunter in the eyes, and say the
words that he needed to say. “I guarantee you,” he told them, “every single time you have a problem, when you have a tough decision to make, you look: I’ll be there with you. Every time.”
Jill and the family headed to a waiting room. Then Joe went under the knife. The doctors shaved his head, dressed the bald skull, flipped on the saw, and then cut into his brain.
In the waiting room, the family sat and prayed, hoped, worried. Beau and Hunter must have felt the way their father had, fifteen years earlier, when he waited to see if they would survive the car crash.
More waiting. The doctors had said that the operation should take around four hours, maybe four and a half.
Four hours—no word.
Five hours—no word.
Six.
Seven.
Eight.
Joe Biden’s brain was under that knife for nine hours. Finally, the doctor reappeared…and said that it had gone well. Quite well. “The timing, I think, was appropriate,” he told them.
The “timing,” in fact, was terrifying: The aneurysm had exploded literally seconds after they had pried open his skull. (It’s possible that the invasion of the knife itself had caused the burst, but still.)
Finally, Biden regained consciousness. Opened his eyes. At first he still had no idea if he was paralyzed, if he could speak, if he could still be Joe Biden. “He worked his fingers and toes under the sheet. Brought a hand up to touch his nose. Blinked his eyes. Saw the clock. Told himself the time, and figured the duration of his unconsciousness. He estimated the square footage of the ceiling by multiplying the tiles,” writes Cramer. “He could think. He could move. He could talk. Thank God.”