In 1962, while still at college, Joe made some extra cash as a lifeguard. A dozen lifeguards worked at the Prices Run swimming pool, but he was the only white guy. He was one of the only white people in the entire pool, which was filled with hundreds of African American swimmers.
Biden played hoops with the other lifeguards. Made friends. And perhaps for the first time, he began to see the world through a different, less privileged set of eyes. He heard stories of segregation at movie theatres, of naked racism, of how black people endured "a dozen small cuts a day."
He got along well with the community. Fifty years later, Joe returned to that swimming pool. Wearing a navy suit instead of swim trunks, he sat in the lifeguard chair. "I owe this neighborhood," he told the crowd. " I learned so, so much." By then the pool had a new name: The Joseph R. Biden Jr. Aquatic Center.
Despite those repugnant positions, Biden did his best not to vilify the man, and he watched as Thurmond's positions on race gradually evolved.
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 the 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 to include one last detail in his will: The eulogy would need to be delivered by Joe Biden.
The interviewer wanted to clarify. "And you're comfortable with same-sex marriage now?"
"I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying one another, are entitled to the same exact rights," Biden said. "All the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction beyond that."
Whether he had intended to or not, Joe Biden had just made history, and we all know what happened next.
So, Val [Biden's sister campaign manager] arranged a meeting with some fat-cat investment counselors. They were ready to give. In a private meeting, they asked Biden what he thought about lowering the capital gains rate. "I knew the answer I thought they wanted to hear," Biden remembered. "All I had to say was that I'd consider it. And I couldn't say it--I just couldn't lie to their faces." He told them he wasn't for changing capital gains.
The meeting ended. On the way home, Brother Jimmy told him. "Joe, I sure in hell hope you feel that strongly about capital gains because you just lost the election." Biden didn't look back. Instead, he took out a second mortgage on his home. The ads stayed up.
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.
Biden had 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.
Biden launched this crusade in 1990. [Finally, in 1994], 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."
It had taken more than four years, but Biden stuck with it. The most important legacy of the VAWA, 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.
Biden's work did not stop with VAWA. He would spend the next 25 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.
"Iran," said Obama.
"Iran," said Clinton.
Then it was Biden's turn. "Pakistan." The room did a double-take. As [Biden's long-time aide Ted] Kaufman explains, "Well, if Iran is a real problem because they MAY have nuclear weapons, Pakistan is a problem because they ALREADY HAVE nuclear weapons."
Plenty of national security experts agreed with Biden. As recently as 2017, the former CIA station chief of Islamabad said, "With a failing economy, rampant terrorism, the fastest growing nuclear arsenal, the sixth largest population, and one of the highest birthrates in the world, Pakistan is of grave concern. It probably is the most dangerous country in the world."
Kaufman concluded, "I absolutely think that the reason why Obama picked him for vice president was because of watching him on the Foreign Relations Committee, and going through the debates with him."
In June 2016, Biden unveiled the federal Genomic Data Commons--a database for consolidating all the key clinical trials, stats, and treatments [among other actions on the "Cancer Moonshot"].
[Val, Biden's sister and campaign manager, created] the "Biden post office," a base of THOUSANDS of freckled teenagers who would hand-deliver these brochures across Delaware.
The shoppers would say, "No, why should I trust you?"
He flipped the message to say, "That's what's wrong with America right now. I promise you if you elect me, you'll know exactly where I stand. You'll be able to trust me." The ad was as shoestring as it gets.
So, he went to the University of Delaware, dated more girls, and basically turned himself into Hot Young Biden. It's possible that Hot Young Biden might have been a little too hot for his own good. He basically loafed about, and later confessed: "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."
He was still trying to meet girls in his junior year, when he drove to Fort Lauderdale with some buddies for Spring Break. Yet he was bummed to find a mob of silly drunken college kids, all of them acting stupid.
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." Biden was only 29 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 30 years."). Biden knew the odds were close to impossible. In one early poll, 18% of Delawareans had heard of Biden. Boggs? 93%. [Biden won].
"Caring about your colleague as they're dealing with a sick parent, or their child [who] graduated from college, or the child was in an accident. That's the stuff that fosters real relationships, breeds trust, allows you to get things done in a complex world. The person on the other side of the negotiating table, the other side of the political debate; a person who doesn't look like you, who lives in a community you've never visited. They're not some flattened version of humanity, reducible to a collection of parts and attributes. They're a whole person, flawed, struggling to make it in the world just like you."
So he began quoting Kinnock in his own stump speeches. Each time, he was careful to clearly reference Kinnock.
Then came the primary debates. On August 23, 1987, at the close of the debate, Biden just did his normal riff on Kinnock. But he rushed it, and forgot to credit Kinnock.
The New York Times unleashed a front-page headline: DEBATE FINALE: AN ECHO FROM ABROAD, which charged that Biden had "lifted Mr. Kinnock's closing speech, without crediting Mr. Kinnock."
Biden was soon accused of ANOTHER bout of plagiarism, suggesting a troubling pattern. Earlier in the year, he had given an inspiring address that clearly lifted language from a 1967 Robert Kennedy speech. It was devastating. William Safire called him "Plagiarizing Joe."
At the hospital they scanned his brain. He had an intracranial aneurysm, and he needed surgery ASAP.
"Doc, what are my chances?" Biden asked, just before the surgery.
"35% to 50%." Then there was the added risk of morbidity: Paralysis. Loss of speech.
Joe Biden's brain was under the knife for nine hours.˙The aneurysm 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.)
Biden would live. And then it hit him: "Dropping out of the '88 election saved my life." If he had been campaigning, then he likely would have been wooing votes in N.H., in the snow, and if he had collapsed there, he would have been too far away from the life-saving surgery at Walter Reed.˙
"I talked like Morse code. Dot-dot-dash-dash," he later remembered. If you asked him his name, he might reply, "J-J-Joe Biden." Kids poked fun at him. They called him "Dash." Biden said, "It was like having to stand in the corner with the dunce cap. Other kids looked at me like I was stupid. They laughed."
Yet empathy was scarce in grade school. When he read aloud his homework, one little jerk would taunt, "B-b-b-BIDEN!" So, Joey turned to his second technique for coping with the stutter: proving that he had guts. [And if his boyhood gutsy exploits didn't work, Joey] appealed to a higher power. Or, more specifically nuns.
At Catholic school, after hearing 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 Amtrak."
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 a teacher called on him in class?
So, he devised a few clever hacks. [Before each class, he would count the number of paragraphs and] memorize the one that he was likely to recite.
Biden visited Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia and he saw the nightmare. He learned of mutilations, beatings, gang rapes. Biden was unafraid to call it what it was: genocide. An estimated 100,000 people would die.
He came back to the Senate, impassioned. He prepared detailed recommendations of air strikes and policy proposals. "The West has dithered so pathetically, and Bosnia has suffered so terribly," Biden wrote in 1993. 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 getting slaughtered.
It's a gross oversimplification to suggest that Biden was the only reason that Clinton, finally, moved to intervene. When you look back, Senator Biden got Bosnia right earlier than anyone.
Beau did things the hard way, the right way. At first, Delaware's governor offered to appoint Beau to be the attorney general, filling a vacancy. He turned it down so that, Obama said, he could run in an election and "win it fair and square."
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The above quotations are from The Book of Joe The Life, Wit, and (Sometimes Accidental) Wisdom of Joe Biden by Jeff Wilser. Click here for other excerpts from The Book of Joe The Life, Wit, and (Sometimes Accidental) Wisdom of Joe Biden by Jeff Wilser. Click here for other excerpts by Joe Biden. Click here for a profile of Joe Biden.
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