Joe Biden

by Beatrice Gormley

  * * *

  Back in November 1960, during the first semester of Joe Biden’s senior year at Archmere Academy, Senator John F. Kennedy had been elected president of the United States. Since president-elect Kennedy was from a Catholic family, many Catholic Americans—including the Bidens and the Finnegans—were overjoyed. The United States at that time was mainly a Protestant country, with a long-standing bias against Catholics.

  President Kennedy was also younger than any other candidate ever elected president of the US. He was forty-three, quite a contrast with outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower, age seventy. In January 1961, young people across the country were inspired by President Kennedy’s inaugural address, especially these words: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

  This appeal spoke to Joe, drawing him toward a career in public service. His friend Dave Walsh later remembered his father asking Joe what he wanted to do in life. “Mr. Walsh,” Joe answered, “I want to be president of the United States.” To both Dave and his father, it seemed perfectly possible. Such a determined, talented, hardworking boy as Joe Biden might indeed grow up to become the leader of the free world.

  Typical of Joe, he wasn’t content with having a dream. To reach his goal, he needed a plan. How did somebody like him, without any money or big connections, go about becoming a politician? Joe went to the Archmere library and looked up senators and congressmen in the Congressional Directory. Many of them, he discovered, had started out as lawyers.

  That made sense, because trial lawyers got up in court and spoke to judges and juries. They persuaded their listeners by means of their knowledge and public speaking skills. Politicians would need those same skills to connect with voters, as well as with other policy makers. Joe, having mastered his disability, could aim to become a lawyer.

  That fall Joe began college life at the University of Delaware, where he majored in political science and history. Those studies would prepare him to go to law school after college, and the law degree would prepare him for politics. These were the steps in his master plan for his life.

  Of course, the catch was that Joe would have to actually study. There were so many social events at Delaware, and Joe loved getting together with other people. He went to dozens of dances and fraternity parties, in spite of the fact that he didn’t drink alcohol or smoke. He didn’t even belong to a fraternity.

  Joe had seen alcohol abuse in his own family, especially with Uncle Boo-Boo. He didn’t admire the way his uncle would drink and then talk big about what he could have accomplished in life. Joe didn’t want to take a chance on becoming an alcoholic himself.

  Besides, Joe could have a great time at parties without drinking. As his sister, Valerie, explained later, “Joe would do wild and crazy things but he was always sober. You couldn’t blame it [on] because he had too much to drink.” Joe was always the designated driver in his group of friends.

  He always had a car to drive too, which wasn’t true of many students. By this time Joseph Biden owned his own car dealership, and he would let Joe borrow a car from the lot on weekends. Joe dated a lot of girls, often on double dates with Valerie and a friend of his. Outgoing, good-looking, and nicely dressed, Joe was elected president of his freshman class at the University of Delaware.

  * * *

  During the summer after his freshman year, 1962, Joe worked as a lifeguard at a public swimming pool. The pool was next to a public housing project, Prices Run, in a mostly Black neighborhood, and Joe was the only white lifeguard. One day a gang member started fooling around in the pool, bouncing on the high board. Blowing his whistle, Joe sarcastically called him “Esther Williams” (a famous movie swim star). Joe ordered the youth out of the pool and escorted him to the parking lot.

  Fortunately, Joe realized that the incident could turn nasty, and he quickly got his temper under control. He apologized for insulting the macho gang member by calling him a woman’s name. At the same time, Joe pointed out, everyone had to follow the pool rules.

  Getting to know the other lifeguards at the pool was an education for Joe. He’d been aware that movie theaters in Wilmington were segregated by race, and he’d taken part in a couple of marches to desegregate them. In high school, Joe had walked out of the Charcoal Pit when they’d treated his Black teammate, Frank, unfairly. But now, for the first time, he was the only white guy in a group of Black men his own age.

  As Joe worked with his fellow lifeguards, chatted with them, and played basketball with them, he felt almost like an exchange student in a foreign country. His new friends were college students, like him, but they attended Black colleges. He was the only white guy they knew, and they curiously asked him questions about his way of life.

  In turn, Joe heard about how their lives were blighted by a constant stream of insults and injuries. They could be beaten up, for instance, for using the public drinking fountain in a white neighborhood. When they went to the movies, they had to sit in the “colored” section. Even though Joe had known about the movie theaters being segregated, it wasn’t until now that he truly saw how much it hurt his Black friends to be treated like second-class citizens.

  Joe’s lifeguarding experience helped him understand how much was at stake in the ongoing civil rights struggle. The next year, in May 1963, Joe and other Americans around the country watched shocking scenes on the TV news. During a civil rights march in Birmingham, Alabama, police chief Bull Connor turned fire hoses and attack dogs on the young marchers. And Joe read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a powerful explanation of why the civil rights marches were necessary.

  That same year, 1963, Joe took a trip to Washington, DC. He was especially eager to revisit the Capitol Building, where the US Congress—the House of Representatives and the Senate—met. This was where he planned to be someday, to do his part in national politics. Joe’s hero President Kennedy had first run for the office of senator from Massachusetts, and then, as senator, he had run for the highest office in the land.

  At the massive white-domed building on Capitol Hill, Joe stepped into the Senate Chamber in the north wing. The Senate was not in session at the moment, and Joe had a chance to stare around the empty room. Along one wall, decorated with dark red marble pilasters, was the marble rostrum, and the chair where the presiding officer sat. Semicircular rows of desks, one desk for each of the hundred senators, faced the rostrum. All around the room on the second floor, a visitor’s gallery overlooked the scene.

  This was the center of power. As Joe sank into the presiding officer’s chair, the thought gave him goose bumps. Here, senators hammered out laws that changed Americans’ lives for the better—or for the worse.

  Joe’s ambitious musings were interrupted by the hand of a uniformed security guard on his back. Unescorted visitors, the man informed him, were not allowed in the Senate Chamber. The guard marched Joe down to a room in the basement of the Capitol. He questioned him severely before letting the starstruck young man go.

  * * *

  As a freshman at the University of Delaware, Joe had gone out for football again. He loved playing the game so much that he’d toyed with the idea of a pro football career. But after Joe’s first-semester grades came out, his parents told him he had to drop football.

  Joseph Biden was especially worried that Joe was letting his grades slide. Joe Sr. was set on his oldest son becoming the first Biden to graduate from college. “Remember, Joey, you gotta be a college man,” he urged him. “They can never take your degree from you.”

  So Joe gave up football after freshman year, but still he was only skating along on C grades. He was having too much fun. He was put on probation for one of his wilder stunts, spraying an RA (resident assistant) with a fire extinguisher.

  And Joe spent many hours hanging around the dormitory lounge when he should have been studying instead. He argued with his friends about civil rights, about President Kennedy’s policy toward Cuba, about their own futures. J
oe’s friend Fred Sears, who had also gone from Archmere Academy to the University of Delaware, assumed that Joe didn’t have a chance of getting into law school.

  But at the beginning of his junior year, Joe woke up to an inconvenient fact. There was a direct connection between his grades and the next step in his master plan: becoming a lawyer. He had to improve his grade average. Fast.

  Lovestruck and Law School

  Finally getting serious about his college grades, Joe Biden went to a political science professor at the University of Delaware for advice. The professor told him bluntly that he had no chance of getting into law school unless he could achieve an excellent academic record for his last year and a half. So Joe moved off campus, away from the lively social life. After signing up for challenging courses, he studied all the time.

  Not surprisingly, his grades shot up. By spring break in 1964, Joe felt confident enough about his progress to think about going out for football again. He even allowed himself to take a vacation in Florida.

  Like throngs of other college students, Joe and his friend Fred Sears piled into a classmate’s car and headed for Fort Lauderdale, over a thousand miles away. But when they reached Fort Lauderdale, the beach scene wasn’t as much fun as Joe and Fred had hoped. Too many male students, they thought, and not nearly enough females.

  The two friends learned that a round-trip plane ride to Nassau, a resort town in the Bahamas, was only twenty-eight dollars. Without thinking it over much, they bought tickets and hopped on the plane. Joe and Fred had no money for a hotel. But they quickly found other college guys with a Nassau apartment and paid them a few dollars to sleep on their floor.

  Then Joe and Fred headed for the public beach. A chain-link fence divided it from a private beach belonging to an expensive hotel. And the private beach was full of attractive young women.

  On the fence separating Joe and Fred from the young women, they noticed some beach towels with the hotel’s logo. They grabbed the towels, wrapped them around their waists, and strolled in the front door of the hotel as if they belonged there. No one stopped them, so they walked on through the hotel to the private beach.

  There Joe spotted a girl so gorgeous that he knew he had to meet her. Fred saw her too, but Joe, quicker and more determined, got to her lounge chair first. “Hi, I’m Joe Biden.”

  She looked up at the guy with the dazzling smile and said, “Hi, Joe. I’m Neilia Hunter.”

  Joe and Neilia fell madly in love. They spent the next four days together, talking and talking. She found out that he intended to become a politician and do great things for the country. He found out that she understood a lot about politics.

  Neilia lived in Skaneateles, a town in the Finger Lakes district of upstate New York. She was a senior at Syracuse University, just north of Skaneateles. She loved working with kids, and she was going to start teaching next fall.

  By the time Joe joined Fred on the plane back to Fort Lauderdale, Joe was sure that he would marry Neilia. He’d planned exactly how he would do it: He would study hard during his senior year, in order to get into Syracuse University’s law school after graduation. Meanwhile, starting the following weekend, he’d drive from Wilmington to Syracuse and spend every spare moment each weekend with Neilia.

  The next person Joe told about Neilia was his sister, Valerie, then a freshman at the University of Delaware. Back in Wilmington, he burst into the Bidens’ house and ran up the stairs yelling, “Val!”

  Valerie was talking to a friend on the phone, but she hung up. Joe blurted out, “I met the girl I’m going to marry!” Valerie had double-dated with her brother since high school days, and she knew immediately that this new girlfriend was something different.

  Neilia, back in her hometown of Skaneateles, was a little more cautious when she called her college roommate, Bobbie. But she couldn’t hide her excitement about this amazing guy, Joe Biden. “Do you know what he’s going to be? He’s going to be a senator by age thirty and president of the United States!” As Bobbie could tell, Neilia was “completely over the moon” about Joe.

  The first weekend, Joe showed up at Neilia’s house driving a flashy turquoise convertible from his father’s used-car lot. Bobbie and the rest of their friends were impressed, with Joe as well as the car. Over the coming months, Neilia’s parents got to know Joe. They were impressed too, although Neilia’s father was uneasy about the fact that Joe was Catholic.

  When Joe took Neilia to Wilmington to meet his family, the Bidens threw a big barbecue, inviting all their friends. Neilia fit in as if she belonged, and everyone, especially Val, loved her. Valerie was planning to be a teacher, like Neilia, and they had a lot in common.

  Meanwhile, with Joe’s life goals clearer than ever, football didn’t seem so important. He informed his football coach that he was not going to try out for the varsity team his senior year. Instead Joe studied even harder.

  In spite of spending every weekend with Neilia, driving back and forth from Wilmington to Syracuse, 270 miles each way, he did pull his grades up. At the end of the spring semester in 1965, Joe graduated from the University of Delaware with a BA degree in history and political science. And the Syracuse University law school, noting his improved grade average, his decent score on the Law School Admission Test, and the letters of recommendation from his professors, admitted Joseph R. Biden Jr. He would begin in September.

  His next problem was how to pay for law school, which was going to cost $3,000 more than he had saved. Joe’s parents couldn’t pay the whole cost; they were still supporting Valerie, Jimmy, and Frank. But Joe received scholarships to make up the rest of the tuition fees. To pay for room and board, he got a job at Syracuse University as a resident advisor, living in a dormitory with undergraduate students.

  At law school, Joe quickly took to the social life. He spent most of his free time with Neilia, as he’d planned, and they gathered a group of friends around them. One of the first classmates Joe met, who became a close friend, was Jack Owens.

  Jack wasn’t dating anyone in particular, and Joe and Neilia agreed that Jack would be the perfect match for Valerie Biden. They wanted everyone, especially these two special people, to be as happy as they were. However, when they managed to lure Valerie up from the University of Delaware to meet Jack, the two could hardly stand each other, even for one evening. The Valerie-Jack match would have to wait almost ten more years.

  * * *

  Joe now felt wistful about missing out on varsity football during his senior year of college. So at Syracuse, he used his leadership skills to organize an intramural team of law school students. He quarterbacked them, his teammates kidded him, as if they were in the Olympics.

  By now Joe Biden had his stuttering problem well under control, although it would be there in the background for the rest of his life. He was always mindful of his ambition to become a trial lawyer and then a politician. He practiced public speaking every chance he got, including to high school classes.

  During this time he learned something very important about public speaking. When he knew what he wanted to say, he could look out at the audience rather than down at his notes. And seeing the audience’s reactions, he could adjust his remarks to them. Connecting with his listeners made him a better speaker, and he loved it. He could imagine how well he’d use these skills to convince a trial jury.

  Joe Biden’s friends teased him about enjoying the sound of his own voice, calling him “Mr. Soapbox.” On one occasion, they presented him with an actual wooden soapbox, the traditional platform for a street-corner orator. An old pair of his sneakers was fastened on top of it.

  Joe was pleased with himself, but he also wanted to share his hard-won skill in speaking fluently. In the dormitory where he lived as a resident advisor, he noticed a freshman who had a severe stutter. Taking the young man under his wing, Joe showed him how to practice speaking in front of a mirror. And to build up his confidence, Joe brought him along to Neilia’s house, including him in gatherings of their frien
ds.

  With all these activities, the one thing Joe didn’t do was study. The coursework bored him. He viewed law school as just something to get through, a necessary step in his life plan. “I was a dangerous combination of arrogant and sloppy,” he admitted later in his memoir, Promises to Keep. He skipped classes; if he went to the law school library, he spent more time chatting with other students than poring over law books.

  Everyone Joe Biden met was impressed with his confidence. Two of his classmates later remembered a time when a professor called on Joe to discuss a case. Joe hadn’t read the case, but he started talking anyway.

  As he went on and on in convincing detail, the other students began to catch on and laugh. Joe was making the whole case up, on the spot, and discussing this imaginary case. When he sat down, the class burst out applauding.

  Amazingly, Joe managed to get decent grades at the end of the first semester. Other students were envious of Joe’s ability to slide by. “You knew Joe was different,” said one classmate, Bill Kissell. If he’d studied only as much as Joe, Bill was sure he’d have flunked out. “He had other projects,” Bill added wryly, “and Neilia was clearly one of them.”

  And Joe was Neilia’s project. Joe had never met anyone, outside of his own family, who believed in him so absolutely. They planned their life together, agreeing on almost everything.

  First they would get married. While Neilia continued teaching, Joe would finish law school. Then he would practice law as a trial lawyer and start his own law firm. He would run for public office, win his elections, and work to make people’s lives better.

  Civil Rights, Voting Rights

  President John F. Kennedy proposed a civil rights bill, prohibiting racial discrimination, in 1963, but a Southern minority in the Senate filibustered that bill to death. After Kennedy was assassinated in November, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, was determined to steer the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. The bill quickly passed the House of Representatives, but again the “Southern bloc” in the Senate launched a filibuster that lasted from April to June.