In fact, Joe Biden did not give up his plan of running for president. He only decided to be patient, rebuild his political reputation, and wait for the right time. For now, as he settled back into his work in the Senate, he could enjoy his family.
In September 1988, Hunter Biden entered Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He worked at the school to help pay for his room and board, as Beau did at the University of Pennsylvania, and took out a student loan. As Joe Biden liked to remind voters, he was a middle-class citizen, like most of them. The Senate was full of millionaires, but Joe Biden wasn’t one of them.
That fall, the race for president was in the final stages. Mike Dukakis of Massachusetts had won the Democratic nomination, but President Reagan’s vice president, Republican George H. W. Bush, won the general election on November 8. Now the Republicans would have four more years to nominate conservatives to the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s top concern in Congress was working on a bill called the Violence Against Women Act. Biden had been working on crime issues in the Senate since his first term, but he was shocked and disgusted to learn how widespread violence against women was in the US. Too many married men beat and sometimes killed their wives. Too many young men abused the women they dated.
Biden had been raised to believe that for someone in a position of power, the worst sin was to abuse that power. He often brought this up with his children during dinner-table discussions, and it made a deep impression on Ashley. In elementary school, she wrote an essay on what she wanted to be when she grew up: she wanted to help abused women. And she would, in fact, become a social worker.
* * *
Abuses of power came up in foreign relations too. In the Middle East, trouble arose between Iraq, ruled by the dictator Saddam Hussein, and its neighboring countries. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and quickly defeated Kuwait. The Bush administration was concerned that Saudi Arabia, a US ally and an important source of oil, would be attacked next, and President Bush began to build up US forces.
Biden agreed with President Bush that Iraq’s aggression had to be stopped. But as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he questioned whether US interests in the Middle East justified going to war. Joe Biden had begun his political career campaigning against the “quagmire” of the Vietnam War. He feared that an attack on Iraq could turn into another such costly and useless mission.
Biden also insisted, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that the president needed to consult with Congress before he sent American troops into battle. According to the Constitution of the United States, the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces. But only Congress has the power to declare war on another country.
However, without much consulting, President Bush pushed a resolution through the United Nations Security Council. Biden voted against it, but the majority of the Senate voted to approve it. On January 17, 1991, the US, the United Kingdom (UK), and other allies attacked Iraq. In a matter of weeks, Kuwait was liberated and Iraq was defeated. The American public overwhelmingly approved of such a swift and successful military action.
* * *
That summer, on June 27, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement at the age of eighty-two. He was the first and the only African American on the court. President Bush was determined to replace him with a reliably conservative judge.
To the surprise of Joe Biden, the rest of the Judiciary Committee, and many others, Bush’s choice was Clarence Thomas. Thomas, a judge in the federal court system, did not have nearly the experience and prestige of Judge Robert Bork, or even of most candidates for the Supreme Court. But he was very conservative, and he was Black.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Joe Biden, was in a bind. If Judge Thomas had been white, it would have been easy to reject him because of his lackluster record. However, if the committee rejected an African American nominee, they could be accused of racial bias. Even more than with Robert Bork, Biden was anxious to run the committee’s hearings in a way that was absolutely fair.
Leading the questioning of Thomas, Biden’s plan was to expose him as so stubbornly conservative that he would not be able to judge a case fairly. Biden was sure Thomas had already made up his mind about issues likely to come before the Supreme Court, especially about a woman’s right to choose whether or not to bear a child. But Thomas refused to state his position on that issue.
As senators continued to question him, Thomas even insisted that he had no opinion on the issue one way or the other. This was hard to believe. But Thomas would not be pinned down and give the committee a chance to reject him.
Then the Judiciary Committee learned of an entirely different reason why they should consider rejecting Clarence Thomas. Anita Hill, a law professor who used to work for Judge Thomas, accused him of a pattern of sexual harassment. If Hill was telling the truth, Thomas had abused his power as her employer, and he was not worthy to be seated on the highest court in the land.
Biden wasn’t sure what to do. Clarence Thomas’s nomination was already a high-profile news story. Anita Hill’s accusations could make it “a giant incendiary bomb,” as he said later.
Anita Hill did not want to be publicly involved in the hearings, but in the end, she came and testified before the committee. Clarence Thomas denied all her accusations. Furthermore, he angrily accused the Senate Judiciary Committee of racial bias for even allowing Hill’s testimony. He called the hearings “a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks.”
The committee decided to make no recommendation to approve or disapprove. On October 15, 1991, the full Senate narrowly confirmed Thomas as the new justice on the Supreme Court.
As for Judiciary chair Joe Biden, he had lingering bad feelings about these hearings. Against his will, they had turned from hearings into a trial of Clarence Thomas, and then into a trial of Anita Hill. He was afraid that Anita Hill’s supporters thought he had allowed her to be unfairly humiliated and dismissed.
Biden was also afraid that Thomas’s supporters would accuse him of racial bias. He talked and talked, during and after the hearings, trying to assure all sides that he was doing his best to be fair. Many simply thought he was talking too much.
* * *
While the Clarence Thomas hearings had dragged on, Joe Biden had been hearing alarming reports from Yugoslavia in eastern Europe. Biden had made many trips to the region for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he knew more than most senators about Yugoslavia. The country was an ethnic mix, and the Serbian majority was abusing the Muslim and Roman Catholic minorities. But in 1991 the Bush administration was mainly concerned that the country was breaking apart. To help keep Yugoslavia together, they supported the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic as the president.
By August 1992, civil war was raging in the former Yugoslavia. Bosnia, a section populated mainly by Muslims and Croats, had tried to declare independence. Milosevic’s artillery was pounding every city in Bosnia. Worse, the Serbs were carrying out a policy of what they called “ethnic cleansing”—actually, murdering or driving out all the non-Serbs in Bosnia.
In fact, Milosevic was committing genocide, trying to destroy a whole ethnic group. The next year, traveling to Yugoslavia to meet Milosevic, Biden would not shake his hand or sit down to a meal with him. He told the Serb leader to his face, “I think you’re a damned war criminal.”
While Joe Biden was more and more worried about the horrifying crimes being committed in Bosnia, most of the US was focused on the presidential election of 1992. Reporters had asked Biden if he was thinking of running this time, but he wasn’t. In the previous four years, he’d almost died from the aneurysms, and he’d led the Judiciary Committee through two of the most difficult Supreme Court nominations in the history of the US. And he’d tried hard—and failed—to push his Violence Against Women Act through Congress.
As it happened, Democrat Bill Clinton defeated Republican president George H. W. Bush in November 1992. At the
time, the Democratic Party had a reputation of being “soft on crime,” and Clinton promised that his administration would act to control crime. Joe Biden worked hard with others in Congress to write the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. His Violence Against Women Act was part of this sweeping crime control bill. So was a ban on assault weapons, the military-grade guns used in mass shootings.
In 1994, President Clinton signed the bill. Biden was proud of his accomplishment, and he was widely praised at the time, by the police as well as women’s groups. Unfortunately, the Violence Against Women Act would be weakened later by the Supreme Court. And the assault weapons ban was allowed to expire in ten years.
But worse, the bill would turn out to have unintended consequences. It included harsher sentences, including the death penalty, for many crimes. More people were imprisoned for longer times, and the populations in state and federal prisons grew.
* * *
In the Biden family, Beau and Hunter were pursuing their adult lives. Beau, like his father, attended the Syracuse University law school, with the intention of going into politics. Hunter spent a year as a volunteer in Oregon, where he met and married Kathleen Buhle in 1993. Later that year, Joe’s first grandchild was born. Hunter named her Naomi, after his lost sister.
In 1996, Senator Joe Biden was up for reelection again. Hunter was now living in Wilmington with his wife and little daughter, and Joe appointed him as his deputy campaign manager. Deputy, of course, to Aunt Valerie, who was still running Joe’s campaigns. Hunter also had a job with Maryland Bank, N.A. (MBNA).
Joe Biden hadn’t given up the idea of running for president, but 1996 was not the right time either. President Bill Clinton was naturally the Democratic nominee, and he was reelected.
The next year, 1997, Hunter bought his own house in Wilmington and opened it, as Joe always had, to friends and family. Beau moved into the third floor. He was now working as a prosecutor for the US Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia. He met his future wife, Hallie Olivere, at one of the gatherings at Hunter’s house.
Toward the end of 1998, Hunter left his job at MBNA in Wilmington and took a position in President Clinton’s administration. He and Kathleen moved to Washington, DC, where their daughter Naomi would attend the Sidwell Friends School. Their second daughter, Finnegan, was born in 1998, and a third daughter, Maisy, in 2000. As for Joe and Jill, they had become “Pop” and “Nana.”
In the presidential campaign of 2000, Al Gore, Clinton’s vice president, ran against the Republican candidate, Governor George W. Bush of Texas. That November, the election results were too close to call. Weeks later, the election was decided by another close vote, 5–4, by the Supreme Court. There was a conservative majority on the court, and they ruled in favor of Bush. This was yet another example of how important appointments to the Supreme Court had become.
Hunter was still in Washington with his family, but now he had a new job. He was a professional lobbyist, hired by businesses or other groups to try to influence public officials. He and his father had an unspoken agreement not to discuss Hunter’s business. Since Senator Biden was a powerful political figure, they didn’t want to give the impression that Joe was using his influence to help his son’s business dealings.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Senator Biden boarded the Amtrak train, as usual, at the Wilmington station. His train was halfway to Washington when Jill called him with stunning news: two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City. The country was under attack.
In Washington, Biden heard that a third plane had hit the Pentagon, the military headquarters of the United States. Joe Biden’s instinct was to run toward the Capitol. If we were under attack, he thought, the citizens of the United States would be terrified. He felt that Congress ought to reassure the country by staying in session as usual.
But security officers were herding people away from the government buildings, and Biden was not allowed to enter the Capitol. Ashley called as he was standing in the park across the street. “Daddy!” She’d heard on the news that a fourth plane was headed for Washington. “Get out of there!”
Several hours later, Joe Biden did get out of Washington, after trying in vain to persuade Congress to stay in session. But first he gave an interview to an ABC reporter, reassuring Americans that the government would stand strong and the country would pull through the crisis. During the drive home, Biden answered a call from President Bush, who had been spirited away from Washington on Air Force One by the Secret Service. He praised Biden’s reassuring speech.
* * *
Beau Biden, like his father, had the instinct to run toward danger, to come to the defense of his country. In 2003 he joined the National Guard. The year before, he and Hallie had married. Their daughter, Natalie, was born in 2004, and their son, Robert Hunter Biden II (named after Hunter), in 2006.
Joe Biden liked and respected President George W. Bush, but Biden mistrusted the president’s advisors, led by Vice President Dick Cheney. They seemed bent on invading Iraq, although it was a terrorist group called Al Qaeda, not Iraq that had attacked the US on September 11, 2001. To convince Congress to invade Iraq, the Bush administration claimed to have proven that Iraq had harbored Al Qaeda terrorists, and that Iraq now had weapons of mass destruction. At that, Senator Biden and most of his colleagues voted to give the president the power to invade Iraq. In 2003, the Bush administration launched what they promised would be a quick and easy military mission.
In the campaign for president in 2004, Biden’s friend Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts was the Democratic candidate. Biden honestly thought that American voters would choose Kerry, a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War. Americans were unhappy about the Iraq War. The conflict had dragged on, costing nine hundred American lives and many billions of dollars so far.
But in November, Senator Kerry lost to President Bush. However, in Illinois a young politician named Barack Obama won his election for senator. Joe Biden was impressed with Obama’s intelligence, his work ethic, and his understanding of how the US fit in among the nations of the world. Biden promised to get Obama a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Now Joe Biden was determined to run for president in 2008. He was deeply disturbed by George W. Bush’s choices in foreign policy, but even more disturbed by the division that was widening in American politics. There was less and less cooperation between Democrats and Republicans. Biden thought the Republican attacks on John Kerry had been especially nasty.
Biden believed that if he were president, he could bring together the hostile factions in Iraq and finally end that war. Jill, who had hung back from politics in the past, now wholeheartedly believed that he should run. In June 2005, Joe appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation and stated frankly that he intended to run in 2008. He began to gather his campaign team.
As President George W. Bush’s second term went on, the Iraq War looked more and more like a bad mistake. And in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, causing the worst national disaster in US history. President Bush was widely criticized for mishandling the national response.
In 2006, the prices of housing collapsed, the first sign that the US economy was sliding toward the Great Recession of 2007–2008. With the congressional elections of 2006, the Democratic Party regained control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. More than ever, Joe Biden was convinced that he should make a new run for the presidency.
* * *
Before launching a campaign for president, candidates often write a book to present themselves to the public. Joe Biden told his life story in Promises to Keep, published in 2007. The dedication page read, “For Mom and Dad, who kept their promises.” While most political memoirs are bland and boring, Biden’s book was highly readable. He told an inspiring personal story of challenges overcome, of love and tragedy and finding love again.
In January 2007, Joe Biden told Meet the Press that he was definitely running for pres
ident. This time, he declared, he was “going to try to be the best Biden I can be.” He didn’t mention a serious Biden family worry.
While the Bidens were proud that Beau had just been elected attorney general of Delaware, his younger brother, Hunter, was struggling with addiction. Unlike his father, Hunter had started drinking in high school. In recent years he had been in and out of recovery programs.
Just days before Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, Hunter and his uncle Jimmy were in the headlines. They had gotten entangled in a risky high-finance deal and lost a large sum of money. Furthermore, a third business partner was suing them. This publicity was not good for Biden’s campaign.
However, it was Joe himself, not his reckless son, who would undermine his chances for the Democratic nomination.
In the campaign of 2008 there were several Democratic candidates, but the two getting the most attention were Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, wife of former president Bill Clinton, and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. Hillary Clinton was the first woman who seemed to have a good chance of being nominated. And Obama, an African American, was a rising young star in the Democratic Party.
Biden didn’t think Obama was a strong candidate, because he’d been elected to the Senate only four years before. But he thought it spoke well of the Democratic Party that Obama was in the race. As he said to a reporter for the New York Observer, Obama was “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Oops. Joe Biden had spoken without thinking. His careless words exploded into the media. In the Wilmington News Journal, the headline on February 1, 2007, was SEN. BIDEN STUMBLES OUT OF GATE IN ’08 RACE.
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