by Jeff Wilser
There would be no expert witnesses. There would be no in-person testimony from the other women who accused Thomas of sexual harassment, which clearly would have buttressed Hill’s allegations. (Written testimony was admitted, but did that have the same impact?)
The Senate confirmed Thomas 52 to 48, and that was that. Would he have squeaked through if the other women were allowed to testify? Or if the hearings had been given more time? Or if a panel of experts had testified? And how much should we blame Biden for the way Hill was treated?
Years later, Hill spoke about what she saw as Biden’s failure in the hearings. “I think he did two things that were a disservice to me, that were a disservice more importantly to the public,” Hill said in a 2014 interview. “There were three women who were ready and waiting and subpoenaed to be giving testimony about similar behavior that they had experienced or witnessed. He failed to call them.”
She continued. “There also were experts who could have given real information as opposed to the misinformation that the Senate was giving…and helped the public understand sexual harassment. He failed to call them.” At the time, a Biden spokesperson responded simply: “The Vice President continues to wish nothing but the best for Anita Hill.” (In Biden’s 365-page memoir, Promises to Keep, the name Anita Hill appears exactly 0 times.)
On the other hand, some argue that Biden has gotten a bad rap. “Then-Senator Biden felt that he had an obligation to try to sit in a neutral position as chair, and that was his priority—presenting a fair hearing,” his counsel on the Judiciary Committee, Cynthia Hogan, later argued. “I don’t think anyone was happy with the hearings. I think then-Senator Biden was surprised by the way the Republicans went on the attack….It wasn’t that he didn’t take sexual harassment seriously.” Joe Biden, like the nation, seemed to be grappling with the proper way to address sexual harassment, how to put it in the right context, and how to understand it. He was learning. And in the end, he did try to give Hill a full-throated defense. “There is absolutely not one shred of evidence to suggest that Professor Hill is fantasizing,” he said on the Senate floor, steel in his voice, scolding his colleagues. “There is no shred of evidence for the garbage I hear…that the only answer we can come up with is that she must be fantasizing….So I hope you will drop this stereotypical malarkey.”
At least one thing is crystal clear: Anita Hill’s life would never be the same. “I am no longer an anonymous, private individual—my name having become synonymous with sexual harassment,” she writes in Speaking Truth to Power. “To my supporters I represent the courage to come forward and disclose a painful truth—a courage which thousands of others have found since the hearing. To my detractors I represent the debasement of a public forum, at best, a pawn, at worst, a perjurer. Living with these conflicting perceptions is difficult, sometimes overwhelming.”
In 1991, Patricia Ireland was the acting president of the National Organization of Women (NOW). “This is not to say that there’s anything good about the Thomas hearings,” she says, “but there were a whole lot of women in this country who saw the hearings, and who had experienced sexual harassment, and started talking about it. And then there were men who loved these women, and they heard these stories, and they started talking about it. Husbands, brothers, fathers. There was an explosion of public consciousness.” Her NOW offices received so many calls that she had to install a new switchboard. She says it’s not a coincidence that 1992 would be labeled “The Year of the Woman,” with the election of four women U.S. senators: Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray, Carol Moseley Braun, and Dianne Feinstein.
Something else seemed to change, too: There was more willingness to talk about domestic violence against women. Biden’s staffer charged with spearheading the Violence Against Women Act, Victoria Nourse, says she noticed the shift. “The country changed, and the Senate changed, after Anita Hill,” says Nourse. “Women made themselves quite clear—that [hearing] was a mess.” She says that helped open the minds, and ears, of other male senators. The votes were more gettable. In the background, Biden’s team had continued work on what would become a three-year investigation into the deeper causes of violence against women. They hatched a report designed to evoke real emotions, and to focus on something specific: Violence Against Women: A Week in the Life of America, with involvement from both Democratic senators (including Ted Kennedy) and Republicans (including Orrin Hatch).
The report was unflinching. It found that in 1991, there were at least 21,000 domestic crimes against women…every week. “These figures reveal a total of at least 1.1 million assaults, aggravated assaults, murders, and rapes against women committed in the home and reported to the police,” Biden writes in the introduction. Yet he knew that statistics alone wouldn’t shake people to act. He wanted to look at “the human face” behind the numbers. From the report:
A twenty-six-year-old Connecticut woman is attacked by her boyfriend of five years; he breaks her right arm with a hammer.
A forty-six-year-old New Mexico woman is beaten and pushed out of a moving car by her husband. She spends three days in the hospital recovering from a broken tailbone and other injuries.
A Texas woman is stabbed in her apartment by a stranger who enters through sliding glass doors in the middle of the night.
This gruesome report ran twenty pages. Biden says that if his team included every event they knew about, the report would run seven thousand pages. Sometimes Joe Biden can goof around, and sometimes—likely more than we know—he’s deadly serious. “What do these stories tell us? At the most basic level, they tell us that no one is immune,” Biden writes. “Violence happens to young women and old women, to rich women and poor women, to homeless women and working women.”
The Violence Against Women Act included $300 million to train police, prosecutors, and victim advocates to help survivors, fund education programs, and toughen prosecutions of abusers. It also helped define sexual assault as a hate crime, letting women bring civil suits against their attackers.
Cynics might think of the VAWA as a PR move, a way to atone for his role in the Anita Hill testimony. Only one problem with this theory: Biden launched this crusade in 1990, and he had already tried, twice, to get the bill through Congress, even before the world had heard of Clarence Thomas.
He tried again to get the law passed in 1992.
Not enough votes.
1993.
Not enough votes.
Finally, in 1994, he cracked the logjam. All those years cultivating friendships with Republicans had paid off. People trusted him. “Everyone knew that it was personal for him,” says Nourse. He listened to the victim hotlines, talked to survivors, and heard more stories of abuse. “[Republicans] knew that he wasn’t going to let the crime bill forward if they took it [VAWA] out. And it wouldn’t have happened if he didn’t have that strong moral compass.” To secure Republican support, Biden bundled the VAWA with the $30.2 billion Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which put 100,000 cops on the street. If that sounds like a mouthful, you can remember it by what senators called it at the time—the “Biden Crime Bill.” Biden is proud of the win. (The nuance, like always, is complicated. According to some, the bill led to a stunning long-term drop in murders and other violent crimes. According to others, it accelerated the nation’s incarceration problem, and disproportionately hurt minority communities. The debate is not simple.)
When President Clinton inked the legislation into law, the Democratic majority leader said that Biden was “the one person most responsible for passage of this bill,” calling him “the most underrated legislator, the most effective legislator in the Senate, bar none.”
Most underrated legislator. Most effective legislator. Biden was no longer the golden boy. He was no longer the young vision of hope, the silver-tongued orator, or the guy with a spotless record. He now had bruises. Graying hair. The scars of politics, the scars of bad PR, and the physical scars from life-threatening surgery. Yet with the passage of the Violence Aga
inst Women Act and the crime bill—along with his globe-trotting work on the Foreign Relations Committee (more on that soon)—he seemed to relish his role as a senatorial doer, not just a talker.
It had taken more than four years for the bill to become a law. But Biden stuck with it.
WISDOM OF JOE
Play the long game.
“When I look at Biden and the Anita Hill hearings, this is the lesson, for me: People are complex. I see that people make mistakes, and they make huge mistakes,” says Patricia Ireland, the former president of NOW. “I don’t want to be held to who I was in 1991. I’ve grown and learned and changed since then.” She pauses, thinks. “But Joe Biden came back. He didn’t go hide in a corner. He didn’t go feel sorry for himself. He just doubled down on doing good work, pushing hard on issues that affect women’s lives. And that goes a long way for me. He gets credit for persistence and determination over a long number of years.”
The most important legacy of the VAWA, says Ireland, is that it helped change the culture about the way we think about these issues. “Whether it was sexual harassment, physical harassment, sexual assault, or violence in families—that was a shame that you didn’t talk about, a private matter, a family matter. You looked the other way,” says Ireland. “Biden was part of changing that perception to say, No, that’s not a problem that an individual woman has. It’s a structural problem. It’s a cultural problem.”
Biden’s work did not stop with the Violence Against Women Act. He would spend the next twenty-five years working to further change that culture, spreading awareness about sexual assault, and how it was not just a “women’s issue,” but one that needs to be owned by the men, too. It’s not just on women…it’s on us. Whether the crime is the Montreal Massacre, domestic violence, sexual harassment, or sexual assault on campus—it’s on men to look the evil in the eye, to do the right thing. (Is it a coincidence that Biden saw his colleagues tear into Anita Hill, while too many men stayed silent?) “You’re a coward for raising a hand to a woman or child—and you’re complicit if you fail to condemn it,” he said in 2014, on the twentieth anniversary of the VAWA. He then worked with President Obama to launch an initiative—to fight sexual assault, to educate, to get men on board—that he continues to champion to this day: It’s On Us.
7
Second Chances (1991–2008)
“And I absolutely can say, with certainty,
I would not be anybody’s vice president, period.”
Decades ago, when he was seventeen years old and in the backyard of his friend’s house, Joe Biden had said, “Mr. Walsh, I want to be president of the United States.”
True ambition might wax and wane, but it is never extinguished. In the years since passing the Violence Against Women Act, Biden would keep toiling, keep Amtraking, and keep fighting for the little guy. (By one estimate, he logged more than 2 million miles on Amtrak.) And he knew there was one important thing he could do that would buttress his grander ambitions: master foreign policy.
“I’ve met with virtually every leader in the world,” Biden is fond of pointing out. “I know these guys.” These foreign adventures began in 1979, when he was still a rookie with that full head of dark hair, tagging along on a trip to Yugoslavia.
His traveling companion? Averell Harriman, the legendary diplomat. Harriman had been at the Yalta Conference next to Stalin, Churchill, and FDR and later drove the Marshall Plan. Not a bad mentor.
They talked shop on the flight to Yugoslavia, where they were to meet with Josip Broz Tito, the eighty-seven-year-old dictator. Harriman—Biden’s Yoda—gave him two key lessons. One: Go and see for yourself. Don’t just read newspapers or accept conventional wisdom; use your own eyes and ears. Two: Don’t trust, but engage. Tito was nominally a Communist, but he fought like hell to keep Yugoslavia out of the Soviet tractor beam. “By keeping up relations with leaders like Tito,” Biden later wrote, “we could nudge them toward change.”
The lessons stuck—for years Biden would personally visit hot zones, gather intel, and visit both troops and generals, presidents and peasants. And something else stuck: Biden’s fascination with Yugoslavia. As a dictator, Tito had a clenched grip on the uneasy alliance of Serbs, Muslims, Croats, Bosnians, Kosovars, and Slovenes. Then Tito died. Order collapsed. In 1991, the power vacuum was filled by Slobodan Milošević, a Serb. Then, bloodshed.
Remembering Harriman’s advice—Go and see for yourself—Biden visited Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia and he saw the nightmare. He learned of mutilations, beatings, gang rapes, and the murder of little girls. The war is complex and awful and tragic and outside the scope of this book, but Biden was unafraid to call it what it was: genocide. An estimated 100,000 people would die.
He came back to the Senate, impassioned, to rally his colleagues to the cause. He prepared a thirty-six-page document with detailed recommendations of air strikes and policy proposals.
He couldn’t muster enough support, as it’s never easy to make the case for military action. He gave more speeches. Still nothing. “The West has dithered so pathetically, and Bosnia has suffered so terribly,” Biden wrote in a 1993 op-ed in the New York Times. Biden’s basic request: Arm the victims. He urged first George H. W. Bush, then Bill Clinton, to lift the UN embargo against Bosnia and send weapons to those who were getting slaughtered. (Quick perspective: Biden didn’t just oppose George Bush, he squared off against Clinton, again putting principles ahead of party.)
“Biden opposed Clinton on Bosnia for three years. It wasn’t easy,” remembers Mike Haltzel, his senior foreign policy advisor at the time. “And we did it because it was the right thing to do.” Biden hounded Clinton on the phone—four times a week—to try to change his mind. Once again Biden reached across the aisle, this time to Bob Dole, and together the two men championed the cause.
And in the heat of the conflict, Biden would eventually meet the man responsible for much of this bloodshed, Slobodan Milošević, in person. On a top-secret trip—secret, so Milošević couldn’t use Biden’s presence as his own propaganda—Biden wanted to take the measure of the man. Milošević showed Biden map after map, trying to convince him that there was no ethnic cleansing, no genocide. Biden saw through the bullshit. And he called him on it.
“What do you think of me?” Milošević asked him.
Biden looked him in the eyes. “I think you’re a damn war criminal.”
WISDOM OF JOE
Call a bully a bully.
It’s a gross oversimplication to suggest that Biden was the only reason that Clinton, finally, moved to intervene. That said, “When you look back, Senator Biden got Bosnia right earlier than anyone,” said James Rubin, one of Biden’s policy advisors. “He understood that a combination of force and diplomacy would revive American leadership and avoid a disaster in Europe.” As Biden ballparks it, the intervention saved 10,000 lives.
And Milošević? He was tried as a damn war criminal.
JOE THE NAME-BUTCHERER
Biden has an almost preternatural talent for making friends with strangers, schmoozing with world leaders, and charming the charmless.
Yet he does have one bit of diplomatic kryptonite.
“He’s just terrible with names, especially in a foreign language,” says Mike Haltzel. “I mean he just butchers things. If your name is not Johnson, you got a real problem.”
Haltzel tells a story about a time when he and Biden traveled once again to Bosnia, in the late ’90s, this time to meet with a woman named Biljana Plavšić, who was then president of the Republika Srpska. She was tough. And she would later serve for years as a war criminal. Haltzel knew it would be a difficult meeting. Looking back, he now says it was the most hostile meeting he ever attended with Biden on foreign soil. (“We had just bombed the crap out of them less than two years earlier.”)
They met in Plavšić’s office, which was more like a Serbian Orthodox church. Plavšić flanked herself with muscular Serbian generals (or as Haltzel puts it, “goons”), meant to in
timidate. Haltzel knew that Biden had to have something positive to say—anything—to establish a sliver of rapport. He found an angle: Republika Srpska had just moved their capital from an ultrafascist city, Pale, to a more cosmopolitan city, Banja Luka. That’s perfect. Biden could congratulate her on the move of the nation’s capital—a harmless courtesy, and one consistent with progressive values. So Haltzel suggested that as a conversational tactic.
“The problem is he’s just not good with foreign words,” says Haltzel, so in the briefing book, he had spelled it out “Pale” phonetically, using both italics and capitals. They got to the point of the meeting where Biden could tactfully bring up Pale. “So he starts to sink his teeth into it,” says Haltzel.
Biden then congratulated Plavšić on the move from Pele, pronouncing it like the soccer player.
“He keeps talking about Pele and I’m thinking, Oh Jesus Christ, what are we gonna do?” says Haltzel. “I write down a note and I put, ‘Pale is a Bosnian-Serb town. Pele was a Brazilian soccer player.’ ”
Haltzel later clarified that the gaffe did no damage and that the meeting was a success, but at that moment, he used some nonverbal cues to slip Biden the note. “I slid it over to him, and I can see him look at me. He came close to bursting out laughing.”
Kosovo. Iraq. Afghanistan. After forty-plus years of loafers-on-the-ground visits, few can top Biden’s foreign policy bona fides. And after the Soviet Union collapsed, Biden helped lead the charge to expand NATO to include Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. But it’s fair to wonder, How involved was Joe Biden, really, in this process?