Joe Biden Read online

  Finally Senator Hubert Humphrey, the majority whip, assembled enough votes to cut off the filibuster. The Senate passed the bill, and President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Now the federal government had the power to prevent segregation in schools, on buses, and in restaurants. The act also included a voting rights section, but unfortunately, it was too weak to do much good.

  So one of the worst restrictions on African Americans in the South remained: they were not allowed to vote. Some states charged Black citizens (but not whites) a poll tax—a fee for voting—that they knew most Blacks could not afford. Some required Black citizens (but not whites) to pass a difficult “literacy test”—for instance, reading aloud a long passage filled with legal jargon from the state constitution. In other places, Black people were threatened with violence if they tried to register to vote.

  During the Freedom Summer of 1964, civil rights workers led a huge voter registration drive in Mississippi. It did not succeed in its goal—three of the civil rights volunteers were murdered, and most Black citizens did not even try to register. But the civil rights movement forged on. Early in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led several demonstrations in Selma, Alabama.

  On Bloody Sunday, March 7, marchers led by John Lewis were attacked near Selma, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, by state troopers on horseback with whips and tear gas. One man was killed, and Lewis and many other people were badly injured. Americans who watched the violent scenes on TV were horrified, and the civil rights demonstrators gained much sympathy for their cause. In August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prohibiting any state voting law that discriminated against a racial group.

  Joe and Neilia also talked about the kind of home they envisioned: a roomy Tudor-style house on a spacious lot with big trees. They both wanted lots of children. And of course they would welcome friends and family to their home.

  There was one exception to Joe’s record for sliding by that first year. In fact, he did something careless that would come back to haunt him in the future. Writing a paper for a technical writing course, he used some text from the Fordham Law Review without giving proper credit. As Joe told it later, he didn’t even know how to cite a source—because he’d cut the class in which citation was explained.

  His professors took this mistake very seriously, and Joe had to appear before a faculty meeting. The professors and deans decided that Mr. Biden hadn’t cheated on purpose, but the incident went on his record. He received an F in the course, and he would have to take it over again in order to get his law degree.

  * * *

  Toward the end of the first year, with final exams looming, Joe realized that he was in serious trouble again. He had exactly ten days to cram a year’s worth of coursework into his head. Neilia came to the rescue, using her teaching skills to draw up study sheets for him. Joe, for the first time in his life, began drinking coffee to stay awake all night. In the end, he managed to avoid flunking out.

  So he survived his first year of law school. That summer, he and Neilia were married. Joe was touched that her Protestant, Republican father had come to accept Neilia’s marrying a Catholic—and a Democrat, to boot. On August 27, 1966, Neilia and Joe were married in a Catholic church in Skaneateles. The Hunters hosted a big reception at the country club.

  The wedding was a joyous celebration with all of Joe’s family, as well as friends from Scranton, Wilmington, Archmere Academy, the University of Delaware, and law school. Two of Joe’s buddies from the Scranton days, Larry Orr and Charlie Roth, were his ushers.

  * * *

  The newlyweds moved into a small apartment in Syracuse, in a neighborhood of modest houses. Neilia could walk to nearby Bellevue, the school where she taught eighth grade. The Bidens opened their home to their old friends, including Neilia’s former roommate, Bobbie, and her husband, Dan Greene. And they started making new friends with the neighbors.

  Joe still had two years of law school to complete, but he took time from studying to organize the local young people for sports: stickball, football, or whatever they could play on the streets. Driving around the neighborhood in his light green sports car, a ’67 Corvette, Joe would round up kids for a game. He and Neilia, the beautiful, outgoing local teacher, were a glamorous couple in the neighborhood.

  Both Neilia and Joe loved having kids around. They often invited girls and boys over for dinner. They let them play with their new dog, a German shepherd named Senator. One boy, Kevin Coyne, formed a special attachment with the Bidens. Kevin had a speech impediment, and certain older boys teased him about it. Once, when Joe happened to overhear those boys tormenting Kevin, he jumped over the fence and scolded them fiercely.

  “He scared the daylights out of them,” Kevin remembered with satisfaction. Kevin became a helpful young friend to the Bidens, walking Senator for them and giving them tips on where to shop.

  Neilia likewise befriended a young girl, Pat Cowin, in her eighth-grade class at Bellevue. Pat’s own mother was often ill and unable to take care of her, but Neilia gave Pat some of the special attention she longed for.

  To supplement Neilia’s small teaching salary, Joe took several odd jobs during his summers. He worked at a marina on Skaneateles Lake, as a hotel night clerk, and for the Schaefer Beer company.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1968, Joe Biden received his law degree. He was only seventy-eighth in a class of eighty-five, but he’d made a deep impression on many of his teachers and fellow students. James Weeks, the technical writing professor who had given Biden an F the first time around, described his former student as “far from distinguished scholastically.” However, he added, “He knows what he is doing and appears to possess good judgment and a highly developed sense of responsibility.”

  The Importance of Politics

  Now that Joe had his law degree, would he and Neilia make their home in New York, or in Delaware? Joe’s family, of course, hoped the young couple would settle near them. Joseph Biden urged his son to apply to law firms in Wilmington.

  Using his business connections, Joe’s father got him a meeting with a friend of a friend, a superior court judge. The judge was impressed with Joe—“a sparkler,” he called him later. On the spot, he arranged a job interview for Joe with the highly respected law firm of Prickett, Ward, Burt & Sanders.

  At the lunch interview, Rod Ward kidded Joe about his so-so grades in law school. “Obviously, you’re hoping to get a job based on your good looks.” Joe assumed that meant he didn’t have a chance of being hired.

  But actually, Ward was impressed with this young man’s intelligence and likability. Also, Joe had excellent letters of recommendation from his law school professors. “Mr. Biden has shown himself to possess the confidence and capabilities which would enable him to become an outstanding trial attorney,” Dean Robert Miller had written. So the law firm offered Joe Biden a job, although at a low starting salary.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1968, the young Bidens threw a big farewell barbecue for their friends and neighbors in Syracuse. Then they moved to Wilmington, where they rented a small farmhouse in Mayfield, where Joe’s parents still lived. Joe and Neilia started looking for a house to buy. Neilia was pregnant with their first child, and it seemed that they were well launched on their plan for their life together.

  Joe took up his job at Prickett, Ward, Burt & Sanders, but he stayed with them for only six months. He worked hard for the law firm, but he felt more and more uncomfortable with their politics. He was a Democrat, sympathizing with labor unions and civil rights. The members of the firm, in contrast, were Republicans, and their main clients were wealthy corporations. Joe didn’t tell his bosses that he would never vote for Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for president in 1968.

  Joe finally decided to quit the day he watched William Prickett, one of the partners, argue a case at the courthouse in downtown Wilmington. Prickett was defending the Catalytic Construction Company against a welder who had been bad
ly burned on the job. The lawyer’s argument to the judge was that the injuries were partly the welder’s own fault. It was a perfectly legal defense, and Joe knew that Prickett was just doing his job. The judge would probably dismiss the suit.

  But Joe left the courthouse sickened from watching the welder’s family, especially the wife. She was about the same age as Neilia, and she’d looked so crushed by the unfairness of the law. Her husband was crippled and disfigured for life—but they would get nothing.

  William Prickett invited Joe out to lunch that day, but the young lawyer made up an excuse. Instead he walked across Rodney Square to the state of Delaware’s Office of the Public Defender. There he signed up to work as a lawyer for clients like the welder, who could not afford to pay legal fees.

  In his new job, most of Joe’s clients were African Americans from the inner city. Many of them were surprised that this young “honky,” their insulting name for a white man, sincerely wanted to offer them their legal right to defense in court.

  Working as a public defender part-time, Joe Biden also started his own law firm in 1969. He talked Dave Walsh, his best friend from Archmere Academy, into going into business as his partner. He also persuaded Jack Owens, his best friend from law school, to move to Wilmington and join his firm.

  Joe gave his best for his clients, but he was still determined to go into politics. He and Neilia had many passionate discussions about their future, and Neilia wished that Joe would keep practicing law. She imagined him becoming a judge—and someday, a Supreme Court justice. But Joe had a different vision for himself, and she accepted that.

  Joe had been brought up on the importance of politics, first at Grandpop Finnegan’s kitchen table and later at the Biden family’s dinner-table discussions. And he could see, in his daily life in Wilmington, what a difference one person in a position of power could make. Because of Charles Layman Terry Jr., the governor of Delaware, soldiers patrolled the streets of Wilmington with drawn bayonets.

  1968: Year of Turmoil

  President Lyndon Johnson was elected by a landslide in 1964, and he had high hopes of transforming the country into a “Great Society.” He did achieve some important goals, including the establishment of Medicare—health insurance for the elderly. However, Johnson’s accomplishments were overshadowed as he led the US deep into the quagmire of the Vietnam War. By 1968, thousands of young American men had fled to Canada to avoid the military draft, or just refused to serve. Thousands more people marched in front of the White House and across the country to protest what they saw as a senseless, brutal, costly war. So many Democrats turned against the president and the war that on March 31, Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection.

  But that was not the end of the turmoil. Only a few days later, on April 4, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots broke out in cities across the country, including Washington, DC, Chicago, and even Wilmington, Delaware.

  Meanwhile, presidential candidates were running for their parties’ nominations. One of the Democratic front-runners was Senator Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the assassinated president John F. Kennedy. On June 5, just after winning the California primary election, Robert Kennedy also was shot by an assassin.

  In August the Democratic National Convention met in Chicago and nominated Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, as their candidate. Outside the convention, angry protesters of the Vietnam War confronted police and National Guard troops, and an ugly brawl took place on national television. The Republicans had already nominated Richard M. Nixon, who promised to win the war in Vietnam and restore law and order in the US. That November, Nixon narrowly won the election from Humphrey as well as from a third-party candidate, former governor George C. Wallace of Alabama.

  After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the spring of 1968, riots had broken out in Wilmington’s inner city, where the majority of residents were African American. Governor Terry’s solution to the unrest was to send in the National Guard.

  The riots subsided, and the mayor of Wilmington asked the governor to call off the guard. But Governor Terry kept the military occupation in the Black district of Wilmington for the next nine months. Joe Biden’s sympathies were with the residents of the Black neighborhoods, whose streets were shadowed by white soldiers with rifles. The residents lived under curfews and with the fear that their children would be accidentally shot. They were people like the lifeguards Joe had worked with the summer after his freshman year in college.

  * * *

  While Joe’s law career was taking off, the young Biden family was growing, just as Joe and Neilia had planned. Their first baby, Joseph Robinette Biden III, called Beau, was born on February 3, 1969. Only a year and a day later, Beau’s brother, Robert Hunter Biden, was born on February 4, 1970. More than ever, Joe and Neilia were eager to find the right house.

  Joe had been fascinated with houses ever since he was a boy. As a student at Archmere, riding the school bus, he’d noticed the difference between his own neighborhood and the neighborhoods of many of his classmates. The roads in Mayfield were as straight as tic-tac-toe lines, and the small, cheaply built houses perched on flat, bare lots. In the more attractive neighborhoods, majestic oaks and elms lined the curving roads, shading solid, spacious homes.

  Now Biden felt close to realizing his dream home, and he and Neilia spent weekends driving around the outskirts of Wilmington, looking at real estate. With a loan from Neilia’s father, they bought a small house in nearby Newark, Delaware—not to live in, but to fix up, rent, and eventually sell for a profit. Joe and Neilia found a house they liked for themselves in the Brandywine Springs Manor section of Wilmington. But they decided Joe’s parents should buy it instead, while Joe and Neilia bought the Bidens’ house in Mayfield.

  Instead of living in the Mayfield house, Joe and Neilia rented it out also. Then they bought a farm that had possibilities of becoming their ideal home. There was a house they could enlarge for their growing family and visitors, and a big piece of land with room for other family members to build their homes. In the meantime, they rented the farm, as well, to college students. Now they were paying three mortgages.

  To save money, Joe, Neilia, and the babies moved into a cottage on the grounds of the Country Club Swimming Pool. They could live there for free if Joe managed the swimming pool. For a person with Joe’s energy and ambition, it was no problem to squeeze pool management into his crowded schedule. “I was probably the only working attorney in Delaware who lifeguarded on Saturdays,” he joked later.

  The Bidens were doing quite a real-estate juggling act. And it would get even more complicated with Joe’s first dive into politics.

  Joe’s opening came when John Daniello, a Democrat on the New Castle County Council, decided to run for Congress in 1970. The problem was, Daniello didn’t want to leave his seat on the county council unguarded, for a Republican to win. Daniello had heard that Joe Biden was smart, popular, and ambitious. So he and others in the Democratic Forum, a group working to get the Delaware Democratic Party concerned about civil rights, asked Joe to run for county council in 1970.

  For several reasons, Biden wasn’t eager to run. He wasn’t very interested in county affairs, like local construction regulations. Besides, New Castle County was heavily Republican, so his chances of getting elected weren’t good. And anyway, he yearned to jump straight into national politics, where he could have a say on big issues like the ongoing Vietnam War.

  But as Daniello pointed out, Biden had to start somewhere, just to get his name known to voters. So Joe checked the idea out with Neilia, who had a good instinctive understanding of politics. She said, “Let’s try it.”

  And Joe’s sister, Valerie, enthusiastically agreed to manage his campaign. If anything, she was a fiercer competitor than Joe. As Joe noted later in his first memoir, “Valerie Biden did not go into any race to lose.”

  Valerie was only twenty-six, but she was al
ready an experienced campaign manager. She’d run Joe’s campaigns since he’d been elected president of the junior class at Archmere, and he’d always won. Now Val set up a campaign center in their parents’ basement. From the public voting records, she gathered a database that included every registered voter in the district so that she knew which people were likely to vote Democratic. She organized a small army of volunteers, including her two younger brothers, to help voters get to the polls.

  Meanwhile, Joe went door to door in the Democratic neighborhoods, introducing himself to the voters. But he also knocked on doors in the Republican precincts, confident that he could win voters over one by one. With his savvy about real estate, Joe knew what middle-class Republican voters cared about. They wanted to keep developers from building on all the open spaces, to keep the county budget tight, and to support the police.

  On Election Day in November 1970, almost every single Democratic candidate in the state of Delaware, including John Daniello for Congress, lost their race. But Joe Biden won his county council seat by two thousand votes.

  * * *

  At the same time that Joe Biden was jump-starting his political career, he was also building the family life he wanted. Interviewed after the election by a reporter for the Wilmington Evening Journal, he said, “The most important thing to me without question is to be a good father.”