“We Rebuilt Our Family”
“Independent almost to a fault,” President Jimmy Carter called Joe Biden. Biden had helped Carter win the presidency, and now President Carter was expected to help Senator Biden win reelection in 1978. And Carter did fly into Wilmington by helicopter in November 1977, and appeared briefly at two fundraising events. But he was not that enthusiastic about Biden.
Joe Biden, for his part, was disappointed in President Carter. He’d worked hard for Carter’s election in 1976, but now he criticized the president openly. He didn’t think Carter knew how to work with Congress. And he disagreed with Carter about busing. President Carter, as well as the NAACP and other civil rights groups, believed that busing was necessary to break down racial segregation in the schools.
The Supreme Court had ruled in 1971 that school districts could use busing to achieve racial balance. More recently, federal courts had ordered New Castle County, Delaware, to bus students to achieve racial balance. Public-school busing was the big issue of the Senate campaign in Delaware. Joe Biden’s position was that he disagreed with the court order, but he thought it must be obeyed.
Biden bluntly called busing “an asinine concept.” At the same time, he didn’t want to be associated with most opponents of busing, who simply wanted to maintain racial segregation. “I don’t want to be mixed up with a George Wallace,” Biden had complained to an interviewer. George Wallace, governor of Alabama, was famous for declaring, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
But Joe Biden’s liberal colleagues in the Senate did accuse him of letting the “racists” get to him. The Judiciary Committee was divided between the liberals, including Mike Mansfield, and the die-hard segregationists, including Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, chair of the Judiciary Committee since 1957.
Biden was for racial integration, and he’d supported most of Senator Edward Brooke’s efforts to achieve equality, such as the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. But he believed that public-school busing would only cause white parents to pull their children out of the public educational system because they feared their children would be bused to inferior schools. Even parents who believed in equal education for all were not willing to take a chance on their own children’s future.
So Biden thought that busing was the wrong way to go about integration. He’d made this argument in his first campaign for the Senate. It would work much better, Biden thought, to fight racial discrimination with housing, job opportunities, and college education. However, in 1974, Biden did vote with the liberal senators to make sure federal courts retained their power to enforce school integration if necessary.
Back home in Wilmington, parents against school busing were even angrier with Joe Biden than his Senate colleagues were. They knew he’d cast the deciding vote in 1974, leaving the courts with the power over local school districts to require school busing. Joe feared that the citizens of Delaware would vote against him for not preventing school busing, and so did Biden’s chief aide, Ted Kaufman. Joe’s Republican opponent tried to use this point, calling Biden too liberal for Delaware. Joe was seriously afraid of losing this election.
Jill campaigned alongside him, beginning in the summer of 1977 with a huge picnic for Biden supporters. Thousands of them showed up, and they all wanted to meet Jill and tell her how wonderful Neilia had been. Jill could have felt threatened by the task of following in Neilia’s footsteps, but she greeted everyone graciously. After all, she and Joe both believed that Neilia’s spirit was blessing their marriage.
Valerie managed Joe’s campaign the same way she’d done in 1972. Four thousand volunteers swarmed over the state of Delaware, knocking on doors for Joe Biden. As it turned out, Biden didn’t need to have worried about losing. On the first Tuesday in November 1978, Senator Biden easily won reelection, 58 percent to 41.
Afterward, Biden thought that the voters had trusted him, even though he couldn’t solve the busing problem, because he listened to them. He let them vent their anger. As he wrote later, “I instinctively understood that my most important duty was to be a target.”
Biden did remarkably well in the elections of 1978 compared with some of his fellow Democratic senators. Partly because President Carter was unpopular, several of them were voted out. And in Mississippi, Senator James Eastland’s racism finally caught up with him.
The African Americans of Mississippi had gained voting rights and organized behind their Independent candidate, Charles Evers. The NAACP informed Eastland that they would not support him for reelection in 1978. Rather than lose, Eastland announced his retirement.
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Meanwhile, at home in Wilmington, the Biden family continued to evolve. In spite of the fact that Beau and Hunter had advised their father to marry Jill, they didn’t consider her their mother right away. After all, their aunt Valerie had mothered them for the last four-plus years, and so had their grandmother Jean. And before that, there had been their loving mother, Neilia, called “Mommy.”
Jill was patient with Beau and Hunter, rather than trying to force intimacy. “I marveled at the way she let the boys come to her,” Joe wrote later.
Jill volunteered at the boys’ school. She did their laundry and cooked dinner every night. She kept the many pictures of Neilia displayed around the house for Beau and Hunter. And she regularly called the Hunter grandparents in upstate New York to let them know how the boys were doing.
At first Beau and Hunter called their new mother “Jill,” as they had since Joe and Jill had started dating. And then, although no one asked them to, they began calling her “Mom.” One day, when the boys were in the car, Jill stopped to refill the tank. Beau heard the gas station attendant ask, “How much gas do you want, hon?”
To Beau, about ten years old, “hon” sounded disrespectful. “Mom,” he told Jill, “if he ever calls you ‘hon’ again, I’m going to go out there and say something to him.”
* * *
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter ran for reelection. Usually, a president in office has a big advantage over a challenger, but Carter was in trouble with American voters. The economy was in a slump. Gasoline shortages caused long lines of unhappy drivers at gas stations. And to the shame of the nation, fifty-two Americans were being held hostage in Iran.
In 1979, a popular revolution had swept the US-supported shah of Iran from power. That November, the revolutionaries had stormed the US embassy in the capital, Tehran, and captured the American staff. All during the 1980 campaign in the US, both Republicans and Democrats criticized President Carter for not freeing the hostages.
Senator Ted Kennedy ran for president in the Democratic primary elections against Carter. He was weighed down in the race by an old scandal from 1969, a car accident in which a young woman on his staff had drowned. However, Kennedy remained a candidate until the Democratic National Convention in August, and so the Democratic Party was weakened and divided.
In contrast, the Republican Party was united behind their candidate for president. Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor and previous governor of California, projected a smooth, sunny personality. He promised to stimulate the economy by lowering taxes, to shrink the federal government, and to strengthen the US military. This conservative stance appealed to many voters in an uncertain time.
Joe Biden campaigned for Carter, but not nearly as enthusiastically as he had in 1976. He, too, thought Carter was mismanaging the Iran hostage crisis. Representing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden and others traveled to the Persian Gulf in April 1980 to find out more about the hostages. The senators happened to be escorted by a naval officer named John McCain, who would become friends with Biden and later join him in the Senate.
Visiting an aircraft carrier in the Gulf, the senators accidentally discovered that the carrier held a fleet of large military helicopters. They immediately guessed that President Carter was about to launch a raid on the US embassy in Iran, to rescue the hostages. They were outraged t
hat the Carter administration would undertake such a complicated, risky military action without even informing the Senate.
Soon afterward, Operation Eagle Claw, as the raid was called, was launched. It failed badly. The US Special Forces never even reached Tehran, and eight soldiers were killed.
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In November 1980, Ronald Reagan won the presidency by a landslide. Reagan was almost seventy at his inauguration in 1981, the oldest man ever to become president. In his inaugural speech he expressed the way he intended to govern: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Reagan’s Economics
Conservative Republicans believed that under Democratic presidents, the federal government had grown too big, costing taxpayers too much money to run. They also believed that federal agencies had too much power to regulate and tax businesses, which harmed the national economy. The solution, according to President Reagan and his supporters, was to cut taxes on wealthy investors and businesses, and to remove the regulations that were holding them back. They believed these policies would allow private businesses to thrive and automatically produce more wealth for everyone, including middle- and lower-class Americans.
But Democrats scornfully labeled the conservative war against taxes, especially taxes on big business and the wealthy, “trickle-down economics.” They believed that government regulation was necessary, for instance, to prevent businesses from polluting the environment or taking unfair advantage of customers. And they believed the government did a better job than private businesses of providing certain services for all Americans. To do so, the government needed to collect taxes.
In the same election, Republicans won a majority of seats in the Senate. Biden’s friend Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts had been chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee since 1978, but now he had to give way to Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
Senator Thurmond, elected to the Senate in 1954 as a Democrat, was a Dixiecrat who switched parties in 1964 to become a Republican. He was determined to use his powerful position as chair of the Judiciary Committee to fight against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
Even before Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in early 1981, the Democratic Party began speculating about the 1984 campaign. Their candidate would have to begin organizing a team and raising money years ahead of the actual election. The party’s eventual choice would be Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s vice president.
There was talk about Mondale picking the young senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, as his vice president, but Biden said he wouldn’t accept that nomination. Some of Biden’s advisors, including pollster Patrick Caddell, encouraged him to think of running for president himself. Biden was tempted. He’d turn forty-two in 1984, so he’d be old enough to be president. But after a long, serious talk with Jill, he decided not to register for the Democratic primary elections.
Biden felt that even if he had a good chance of winning this time, he wasn’t ready. He wasn’t sure he knew why he would run, or what he could accomplish if he was elected. As his good friend and advisor John Marttila had said, “You shouldn’t run until you know the answers to those questions.”
Besides, Joe thought a presidential campaign would be too much of a strain for his family. The Bidens had a brand-new member: in the summer of 1981, they welcomed a baby girl.
Beau and Hunter had actually found out about the baby coming before their father did. When Jill first thought she might be pregnant, she stopped at a pharmacy for a pregnancy test kit. The boys were with her in the car, and Jill explained to them why she was going into the pharmacy with a scarf covering her hair and wearing dark glasses. She wanted to keep the result of the test private, either way.
Beau and Hunter were excited to be the first ones in on the secret. Jill told them they could choose their baby sister’s name, and they decided on “Ashley.” And so Ashley Blazer Biden was born on June 8, 1981.
Earlier that year, in March, an assassin had shot and critically wounded President Reagan. Reagan recovered, but the attempt was a reminder, for anyone seeking the presidency, of that danger.
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Joe Biden had plenty to keep him busy in the Senate. On the Judiciary Committee, he was eager to work on revising the US criminal code, which had not been updated since 1900. His double goal was to make the streets safe and to protect the civil rights of people accused of crimes. Black people, he knew, did not get treated fairly in the court system. On average, they got longer sentences for the same crime.
By the 1980s there was great concern about drug trafficking and the use of illegal drugs in the US. Several parts of the revisions of the US criminal code called the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 were written especially to try to correct this problem. The conservatives in Congress, backed by President Reagan, thought the solution was to “get tough on crime.” They wrote some harsh penalties, such as for possessing marijuana, that would turn out to do more harm than good.
Joe Biden was now the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, and so he led the whole Senate in considering the Comprehensive Crime Control Act. In October 1984, President Reagan signed the act into law. At the time, Biden was proud of his work on this project. But many years later, he would see it as a mistake.
Meanwhile, he was again running for reelection to the Senate. By now he was firmly established in Delaware as a popular senator, and his campaign manager, Valerie, had campaigning down to a science. In November 1984, Biden won his third term by twenty percentage points. As for President Ronald Reagan, he won reelection by a second landslide, bigger than in 1980.
“My Word as a Biden”
Why did Joe Biden want to be president? What would he do if elected? Those were the big questions.
By 1985, Biden felt more confident about his answers. The four years of President Reagan’s first term had made clear to Biden how a Democratic president, and Biden in particular, could make a difference. He felt that Ronald Reagan’s genial manner was only a front for the Republicans’ stingy policies.
Republicans were cutting spending for welfare programs that the Democrats had put in place, such as Medicaid, food stamps, and public housing. The Republicans froze the minimum wage at $3.35 per hour and cut funding for federal education programs. As a result, the gap between the richest and the poorest Americans widened. The homeless population grew as more Americans could not pay their rent or mortgages.
And Biden believed that he was ready to lead the country. He understood working-class and middle-class Americans. And he’d served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for ten years, traveling outside the US and meeting leaders of foreign countries. “I knew the world and America’s place in it in a way that few politicians did,” he wrote later.
Joe Biden began making public appearances around the country, getting a sense of whether he had a realistic chance of winning the presidency in 1988. At least he would not be running against the immensely popular President Reagan, since Reagan was in his second and final term. Jill often went with Joe on these testing-the-waters trips, and so did Beau, sixteen, and Hunter, fifteen.
The boys were now both at Archmere Academy, their father’s old high school. Beau would even be elected student body president with Hunter’s campaign help. Unlike Joe, Beau was coolheaded and disciplined—in fact, his friends called him “the Sheriff.” Hunter was the impulsive one. Both boys would do anything for each other, and anything for their father.
At the Iowa Democratic Party’s dinner in November 1985, Biden presented himself as a young, vigorous senator like John F. Kennedy in 1960. He even used a phrase from Kennedy’s presidential campaign, “Let’s get America moving again.” Biden sounded like a candidate, but he denied that he was planning to run for president in 1988. He didn’t want to declare too early. First he wanted to be sure he’d have enough backing for the expensive, grueling campaign.
Jill was seriously worried abo
ut how a campaign for the presidency might strain their family. She’d talked to Lee Hart, the wife of Gary Hart, candidate for president in 1984. “It’s harder than you can ever believe,” Lee had told her. Although Jill and the children were well adjusted to being a senator’s family, being a presidential candidate’s family would be a much higher level of stress.
But Joe reassured Jill that he wasn’t committing himself to actually running in 1988. He was only getting himself known around the country, demonstrating that he could appeal to audiences of voters. He was making connections with people who could donate money and help him campaign if he did run.
Besides, Joe Biden was still first and foremost a father. Ashley, only four years old in 1985, was getting the same devoted treatment that Joe had lavished on Beau and Hunter when they were little. Years later, Ashley remembered him as always being around, even though he worked in Washington.
“I talked to him two times a day by phone,” Ashley told Biden’s biographer Jules Witcover. “He was always home at night, most of the nights, to catch dinner and to tuck us into bed.” Biden still had the same rule about phone calls too: “If us kids called, that was it.” No matter how important a meeting was, Biden’s staff knew to get him out of it for a phone call from one of his children.
One thing in Washington that Biden wanted to change, if he did run, and if he was elected, was the Reagan administration’s policy toward the white government of South Africa. The Black majority were struggling against oppression by the white minority, under a harsh segregation system called “apartheid.” In the US, there was a strong movement to punish the government of South Africa with economic sanctions.
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