The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Biden had already run twice for the presidency himself without success, in 1987 for the 1988 Democratic nomination and then in early 2008. Both times he had returned to the Senate, where he had comfortably and contentedly served for thirty-six years. So when speculation first started about his possible selection as vice president, he denied interest, as well as in being secretary of state in the next Democratic administration. “They are the only two things that would be of interest to anyone,” he said in April. “I’ve made it clear I don’t want either one of them.… I’m satisfied where I am right now.” When Obama asked him whether he would agree to be vetted for the vice presidency, he reported, “I said I’d have to think about it.”1

  By the time Obama had clinched the nomination after a long primary battle with Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, he met with Biden at a Minneapolis hotel and pointedly asked him, in light of his long and prominent experience in the Senate, “Will this job be too small for you?” Biden, setting his terms, replied, “No, not as long as I would really be a confidant.” Then he added, “The good news is, I’m sixty-five and you’re not going to have to worry about my positioning myself to be president. The bad news is I want to be part of the deal.”2 With Obama’s assurance that Biden would have the same basic arrangement as Carter and Walter Mondale had in terms of frequent and ready access to the president, including the weekly private meetings first initiated between them, Biden finally agreed. Also understood was that Biden would not be saddled with any administrative or departmental responsibilities that would impinge on his role as a general senior adviser across the board, in recognition of Biden’s broad experience.3

  Biden’s route to the vice presidency was a long one from humble beginnings in blue-collar Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was marked by unusually early political success but also deep personal tragedy, overcome by determination and resolute family support. Born on November 20, 1942, almost a year after America’s entry into World War II, he was the first child of Joe Biden Senior and the former Jean Finnegan. He was a lithe and athletic boy from English and French stock on his father’s side but clearly a dominant Irish Catholic influence on his mother’s. His paternal grandfather, Joseph H. Biden, emigrated from Liverpool to Baltimore in 1825. His maternal grandfather, Ambrose Finnegan, whose immigrant parents were apple pickers in upstate New York, was an acclaimed quarterback at Santa Clara in California before moving to Scranton, where he worked for coal and gas companies in the heart of the anthracite coal country of the Allegheny Mountains.4

  Joe Senior and a cousin prospered during the war working for an uncle who manufactured a watertight sealant for merchant marine ships, so much so that they both owned the fastest new cars and piloted a small plane on hunting trips to the Adirondacks and polo matches on Long Island. Joe Senior subsequently was transferred to a Boston suburb with his family, where a daughter, Valerie, was born, Joe Junior’s best friend and later his first campaign manager.

  After the war, however, the good times ended, and Joe Senior entered into a couple of unsuccessful enterprises with his cousin, including a crop-dusting business over Long Island. He moved the family back to Scranton and the small home of Grandfather Ambrose in the Green Ridge neighborhood of Irish, Italian, and Polish families, where two more boys, Jimmy and Frank, were born. Joe Junior got his first taste of politics at Ambrose Finnegan’s, where on Sundays, after mass and afternoon dinner, neighborhood men would gather around the kitchen table talking sports and politics.

  In Green Ridge, he enjoyed a scrappy Tom Sawyer childhood of playing baseball and cops and robbers, committing various pranks, and absorbing a Catholic school education. He was a good student despite suffering a severe case of stuttering, for which he was roundly ridiculed by others in his classes. But sympathetic nuns helped him through patient coaching, and eventually he conquered it to the point that he later came to be known for his oratory—and the length of it.5

  When Joe Senior took a job selling automobiles in Wilmington, Delaware, and moved the family there, Joe Junior was enrolled in Archmere Academy, a Catholic prep school, where he was a class leader and in football a speedy receiver. He moved on to the University of Delaware, where a promising football career was cut short by a spring-break trip to Nassau. There he met Neilia Hunter, a beautiful college student from upstate New York. Soon on weekends he was borrowing a convertible from Joe Senior’s car lot and commuting 320 miles round trip to see her, leaving no time for football. On graduating from Delaware, he was admitted to the Syracuse University Law School, near Neilia’s family home.6

  Writing later in his memoir, he explained an incident during his first year there: “I botched a paper in a technical writing course so badly that one of my classmates accused me of lifting passages from a Fordham Law Review article.” He was called before a faculty board to explain, and the board concluded that he hadn’t intentionally cheated but required him to repeat the course. He did so, but more than twenty years later the incident would still add fuel to growing impressions that he was a serial plagiarist. After his second year he and Neilia were married, and with diligent tutoring from his new wife he graduated in 1968, and they moved to Wilmington, with the intention of Joe starting a small law practice.7

  After briefly working for a large and prestigious firm that defended major corporations, Biden decided it wasn’t for a young lawyer from a working-class background. He signed on as a public defender and then found a firm more to his political liking. While he was in Syracuse, during and after the April 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Wilmington had been the victim of severe riots in the heavily black-populated Valley section of the city, which spread downtown. Delaware’s Democratic governor Charles L. Terry Jr. called out all thirty-eight hundred National Guard troops to patrol the most troubled neighborhoods nightly and kept the troops there until the following January—the longest such military presence in any American city since the Civil War.8 Disappointed with the occupation and with the state Democratic Party, Biden registered in Delaware as an independent and in 1968 voted for the Republican Russell Peterson, who ousted Terry. “But I couldn’t bring myself to register as a Republican because of Richard Nixon,” he explained later.9

  In Wilmington he got involved in a citizens’ fight against intrusive highway plans and was approached to run for the state General Assembly. He declined but joined a local Democratic forum of young progressives concerned that the state party was dragging its feet on school integration, open housing, and other civil rights issues.

  At age twenty-seven Biden was encouraged by a retiring member of the New Castle County Council to seek his seat. He ran, on essentially family energies and manpower, and won by two thousand votes in a nominally Republican district. Even before he had served a day on the council, he decided to run for the United States Senate in 1972 and won that too, weeks before he would reach the required age of thirty, upsetting the veteran Republican senator Caleb Boggs.

  On the occasion of his thirtieth birthday, shortly before Inauguration Day, the Biden family held a twin celebration. Then Joe, Neilia, and their young family of two boys, Beau and Hunter, and an infant girl, Naomi, moved into a new home in suburban Wilmington and prepared both for Christmas and Joe’s impending swearing-in. While hunting for a home away from home in Washington, Biden got a phone call informing him that his wife and baby daughter had been killed and the boys injured in a car accident.

  Biden’s sons eventually recovered, but in his own shattered state he at first thought of giving up the Senate before being sworn in. His closest family members and some notable would-be Senate colleagues, however, urged him to take the oath, if only as some personal catharsis to see him through the tragedy. He finally did so, at the hospital where son Beau was still recovering. On that occasion he declared, “If, after six months or so, there’s a conflict between being a good father and being a good senator,” he would resign. He explained to Delawareans, “We can always get another senator, but they [his sons] can’t
get another father.”10

  To that end, Biden began a routine that continued with few exceptions during his sons’ convalescence and on throughout his Senate career: commuting to care for the boys. His family life subsequently stabilized with a long courtship and marriage in 1977 to his second wife, Jill Tracy Jacobs Biden, a community college teacher who continued in her own profession while embraced by the boys as their second mother. Biden’s youth, tragic personal story, and open manner soon drew many speaking engagements around the country. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was in the middle of all major civil rights debates. After easily winning a second term in 1978, his name was floated at the 1980 Democratic National Convention as a possible 1984 presidential candidate. But he demurred, saying, “It’s difficult to be the kind of father I want to be and go flat out [campaigning] for two years.”11

  Reelected to the Senate in 1984, Biden became chairman of the Judiciary Committee and ran for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination and simultaneously led a fight against the confirmation of the ultraconservative federal judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Suddenly accused of plagiarism in borrowing from a speech about blue-collar roots by a British Labor politician without attributing the remarks to him, followed by resurrection of the charges at Syracuse Law School of improperly citing a reference source in that Fordham Law Review article, Biden ended his bid for the 1988 nomination, observing, “There will be other presidential campaigns but there may not be other opportunities for me to influence President Reagan’s choice for the Supreme Court.”12 In the end, Biden prevailed as the full Senate declined to confirm Bork by the largest rejection of a Supreme Court nominee ever delivered.

  Back in the Senate, Biden threw himself into his work on the Foreign Relations Committee as well as the Judiciary Committee. On a speaking tour, he suffered an intercranial aneurysm at the base of his brain that required emergency surgery and later a second aneurysm and surgery that kept him out of the Senate for seven months. On his return he plunged into work again, winning the approval of a major anti-drug bill and the creation of a national drug czar after six years of crafting. He was easily reelected that fall.

  In June 1991, Biden found himself in the center of another contentious political fight to fill another Supreme Court vacancy, upon the retirement of the eighty-two-year-old Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American on the highest bench. Not surprisingly, President George H. W. Bush nominated another African American, but his choice of the ultraconservative federal judge Clarence Thomas was a bombshell, particularly because Bush declared him to be the person “best qualified at this time” to replace the legendary Marshall, legal hero of the civil rights movement.13

  The nomination of Thomas, a federal judge for only a year and widely regarded to be the most rigidly conservative black jurist in the land and no intellectual heavyweight, guaranteed another bitter battle with Democrats, including Biden. Once again Biden was faced with an appointment that, if confirmed, could radically change the ideological composition of the court.

  In the course of the hearings, a former subordinate of Thomas named Anita Hill alleged that as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission he had made improper sexual advances to her. Thomas made a full and categorical denial of all allegations, then turned indignant, claiming the charges had “done a grave and irreparable injustice” to him and his family.14 He labeled the hearings “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves” and who would be “lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”15 In spite of Hill’s personal testimony and that of other black women who said they had heard of various sorts of sexual harassment from Thomas, he was confirmed by a vote of 52 to 48, the most votes ever cast against a successful nominee.

  In 1996, Biden won his fifth six-year Senate term and in 2001 became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Upon the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September 11, he pledged his support to President George W. Bush’s determination to locate and kill or capture the perpetrators finding haven in Afghanistan. But in 2002, when the administration pivoted its attention to Iraq under the flawed belief that strongman Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction poised to hit Western democracies, Biden held committee hearings exploring Bush’s intentions and where they might lead. Pointedly, he asked, “When Saddam Hussein is gone, what would be our responsibilities [thereafter]?” He also questioned “whether resources can be shifted to a major military enterprise in Iraq without compromising the war on terror in other parts of the world.”16

  As Vice President Cheney continued to beat the drums for war, Biden joined the Republican senators Richard Lugar of Indiana and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska in a Senate resolution that would give Bush authority to use force to disarm Saddam Hussein only if other means failed. But according to the Senate majority leader at the time, Trent Lott of Mississippi, President Bush ordered him: “Derail the Biden resolution, and make sure its language never sees the light of day again.”17 Lacking sufficient Democratic support, Biden dropped the resolution and finally, in October, voted for Bush’s use-of-force resolution with the caveat that it be acted on only as a last resort.18 It was an action that would haunt Biden long afterward. In the end, because Bush had told him personally he had not made up his mind to invade Iraq, Biden said later, “I thought it would give him a stronger hand to get Saddam Hussein to act responsibly, and it was a very bad bet I made.”19

  And so on March 18, 2003, the invasion began with Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” assault on Iraq, which dispersed the dictator’s army and drove him into hiding and eventual capture in mid-December. But an insurgency continued, causing Democrats at home to conclude that a regime change in their own country was imperative to end the war and causing Biden to weigh what his own role in achieving it should be. In mid-August, however, he declared that his seeking the presidency again in 2004 was “too much of a long shot.”20

  Instead, he threw his support behind Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, like-minded on the quagmire the Iraq War had become. But Kerry fell victim to unwarranted smears against his combat service in Vietnam and renewed jingoism stirred up by Bush supporters, and he lost narrowly. Biden began to consider running for president again in 2008, especially when Kerry decided not to try a second time.

  In January 2007, Biden declared his intention to seek the Democratic nomination again, vowing not to make the mistakes that had forced him from the presidential arena two decades earlier. He seemed well aware of and adjusted to the odds against him, running against the popular former first lady Hillary Clinton and an engaging newcomer, Senator Barack Obama, seeking to become the first African American president.

  In the campaign, it was clear from the start that the Democratic candidates’ positions on the war in Iraq would be critical. Biden joined in sponsoring a nonbinding resolution in the Senate against Bush’s surge of twenty thousand troops into the country, but it fell four votes short and was dropped. A bigger political problem for Biden was the lack of campaign money and the appeal of Senator Clinton to women and of Senator Obama to the black community. Though Biden continued to be a leading voice against the war in Iraq, calling for repeal of the 2002 authorization to Bush for use of force, he could get no traction, particularly with a proposal to partition the country.

  Biden continued his penchant for delivering long and detailed speeches on the stump, but he demonstrated his awareness of the problem with good humor at a nationally televised debate in Orangeburg, South Carolina, when asked by the moderator if he could manage this time around to curb his verbosity. He replied, “Yes,” and flashed a broad smile. More seriously, his thoughtful responses in the string of debates during 2007 and early 2008 drew praise and statements of agreement from the other contenders, including Obama. The Biden campaign capitalized on the phenomenon by running a television ad that said simply what his challengers were saying: “Joe’s right.”
But Biden found himself lost in the pack, seldom called on early or often to comment in the debates. In one of them, when finally invited by the moderator, he feigned surprise and said, “Oh, no, no, no, no! Don’t do it, no! Don’t make me speak!”21

  In the first 2008 voting in the Iowa precinct caucuses, he finished fifth with an abysmally embarrassing 1 percent and dropped out, recognizing that too much time had passed and he was no match for Obama and Clinton. He returned to the Senate again, telling a Wilmington reporter that he was not interested in being secretary of state or vice president if the next administration was a Democratic one. “I can have much more influence, I promise you, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee than I can as vice president,” he said.22

  Once Biden was out of the race, Obama approached him in late January for help in the remaining primaries, but Biden told him he intended to remain neutral until the voters had picked the party nominee. He promised both Obama and Clinton that he would work tirelessly for whichever of them won. “If you win,” he told Obama, “I’ll do anything you ask me to do,” to which Obama replied, according to Biden later, “Be careful, because I may ask you a lot.” Biden said Obama told him, “The only question I have is not whether I want you in this administration. It’s which job you’d like best.”23

  Once Obama decided that if he were to choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate, husband Bill might be “too big a complication,” he chose Biden, according to Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe. “We knew Biden could be somewhat long-winded and had a history of coloring outside the lines a bit,” Plouffe said later, “but honestly, that was very appealing to Obama, because he wanted someone to give him the unvarnished truth. What do you need in a vice president? He knows and understands Congress, has great foreign policy and domestic experience. He had the whole package from a VP standpoint.”24 What finally persuaded Biden to accept the nomination was Obama’s promise, if elected, to involve him as a governing partner in the new administration.