What It Takes (85 page)

Governor Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

Joe Biden ... for Delaware.

People’ll say he’s too young
... but he’d use that ... a fresh wind—he’d get the kids, hundreds of kids.
A young people’s campaign
... they’d work
every street, every house
...

They’d hand out brochures. He saw the brochures. Him and Neilia. And the children ...

They’d start a family—
a big family, big house
—he’d have to make some money before he ran ... maybe real estate.
Have to get known, too
—in the city, everywhere upstate—his home county, New Castle: that’s where the votes were.

There were only three counties in Delaware—a hundred thousand votes would win any race. And two-thirds of the votes were in the northernmost county, around Wilmington ... Joe knew,
he could win it there
.

Not attacking, no ... time for a change ... a
new generation
... people said Kennedy was too young. But he’d show them.
A new generation, a new voice, time for a change
.

Joe Biden, For the Future ...

Initially, political professionals dismissed the chances of the young challenger
...

Joe could see the story in the papers, day after the vote. He could see the whole thing like it’d already happened. They’d wake up, and he’d be there, roaring by like a rocket!

They’d try to stop him ...

Folks. I guess my opponent kind of took me for granted
—
took all of us for granted, but
...

He could hear himself say it ... six hours on the road ... his victory speech ...

When he got to Syracuse, he’d tell Neilia the new plan, exactly what he was going to say—when he was rolling, see, and they’d try to stop him, he’d say ...

She’d always listen. But she’d also tell him the thing they had to take care of ... today. She was organized in a way he wasn’t, in the present. People used to tease her about being late.
Always
late—her friends used to lie to her, tell her to come an hour ahead of time ... that way, she’d only be a bit late. But it was only because she was focused on this minute, this room, this person ... now. Most people didn’t see the organization. Her family knew: her mother, who could never find anything, would always call Neilia. “Mom,” she’d say, “it’s in the bottom drawer, in the back, under the red sweater ...”

And Joe knew. That was his new confidence. It wasn’t cocksureness—he’d always had that. This was quieter. He could do anything, everything he wanted, with Neilia. She’d take care of him. She’d take care of everyone else, too. He had the big piece of the puzzle locked in; now he could see the outlines of the others. He could live even more in the future, eyes to the horizon ... because he knew Neilia saw the path at their feet.

When he graduated, he moved straight to Syracuse. He could have moved into the big house on the lake—plenty of room, no problem, he was welcome ... but you had to understand how Joe was about this. They weren’t married yet. It might not have looked right. He took a room in a boardinghouse—he’d live there for more than a year—while he ran back and forth to Neilia’s.

That’s what he did his first year of law school: back and forth to the Hunters’ house ... a little waterskiing in the afternoons ... dinner dates at spaghetti joints with Neilia. Then, too, there was football or basketball with his new pals at school ... and riding around in the Chevy that Joe, Sr., gave him for a present. Joe told his pals he always had a new car in high school—brand-new Chrysler 300—whenever he had a date or something ... you know, his dad ran the dealership. He preened, too, about his driving—without question, Joe was the best driver
ever. “
You know I broke my record: four hours and seventeen minutes to Wilmington—six-hour trip.”

That’s the same way he was about sports: Biden was just ... too good. Some guys thought he
must
have lettered at Delaware—they started hearing stories that Biden
broke every record
at Delaware ... for God’s sake, he was
Little All-American
... the only reason he’d fool with Syracuse intramurals was to get in shape for his
tryout with the Baltimore Colts
. ... That’s the way he carried himself: “If there was an Olympic event in football,” Joe said, “I’d
be
in the Olympics.”

In short, if Biden could have sucked as hard as he blew, Syracuse would have been a seaport.

But not with the guys who knew him best ... and not about academics. Most of his friends figured if they didn’t copy their notes for Biden (and make sure the notes got to Neilia so she’d read them) ... there was no way in hell Joe was going to make it to the second year!

Joe himself blew hot and cold about his prospects. Most of the time, he was aw-shucks ... Syracuse was going to cut a third of the class—it’d be a damn miracle if he didn’t flunk. ... But if anyone
else
suggested that Biden might not make the cut—well, Joe was ready to step outside and
settle
who was smarter. “I’ll tell you something you guys may not know: I can learn more of this shit in
one day
... than you’re gonna get if you study three weeks!”

Joe sure as hell wasn’t going to be a grind. He didn’t need to be one of the four or five top guys in the class—the ones who’d get the call from the big Wall Street firms. He didn’t want to be a professor or a Supreme Court clerk. He was going back to Delaware; he just had to get through, pass the bar. And Syracuse
couldn’t
be that tough ... that’s how Joe had it figured: They took him, didn’t they?

They’d take a hundred twenty guys (it was almost always guys, in those days) and let about eighty-five come back for the final two years. It wasn’t that the competition was so hot—some of those guys you wouldn’t let fix a flat. But the cut was enough to put the wind up a lot of them. They worked like rats in a box! They’d get the assignments and skip lunch, run to the library.

Joe would never do that! ... Problem was, he’d
never
run to the library—he’d stay in the students’ lounge. The other problem was, the rats in the box saw that. Hell, you’d have to be blind
not
to see it: Biden didn’t think he had to scramble, like them.

That’s how he got into trouble, in fact—with that shithead Artie Cooper. It was in Legal Methods class, which was no big deal, just a course on how to cite a case, type up a brief ... sort of trade-school stuff. Joe didn’t pay it much mind. It was form, not content. He knew he could write. He’d hire someone to type the stuff up.

But in this course, they’d divide the students into groups, and then they’d grade one another’s papers. The point was, the teachers wanted to see not only how you wrote a brief, but how you could rip one apart, too.

So Joe handed in his crappy brief—he didn’t spend much time on it. He found a
Fordham Law Review
piece on the subject—“diversity jurisdiction”—and he took several cases from that. Thing was, when he took the facts of those cases from the law review, he took the journal’s description of the facts. And then he copied the footnotes, too.

Anyway, Artie Cooper got Joe’s paper for correction, and of course he saw where the whole thing came from—hell, Joe didn’t try to hide it: he footnoted the law review piece at the end ... but only once. So Cooper started acting like Joe was trying to pull a fast one—those weren’t
his
citations,
his
research. ... Well, Joe
was
trying to pull a fast one, but no faster than normal, no faster than the rest of the shit he had to pull to get through law school. But Cooper went mental! Artie didn’t just rip up the research—he took Joe’s paper to the teacher!

Well, the teaching assistant was a first-year guy, a local lawyer helping out, and he didn’t know what to do with this, so he took it to the professor ... and then the dean! All of a sudden, it was a federal case.
The dean
wanted Biden to write a letter—his version of what happened.

Of course, Biden was sick to death. Not to mention pissed off. What he would have liked to do was hammer Cooper into the ground like a tent stake. But that wouldn’t help. Plus, then everybody would know. It would look awful. Nobody was gonna say that Joe Biden cheated. That just wasn’t
him
... so what he had to do was write his letter, and show up at a faculty meeting to defend himself: he didn’t mean to dissemble. He didn’t know—
word as a Biden
. ... He hadn’t realized it
mattered
, where those citations came from, if he was only using the facts of the cases—he wasn’t taking their conclusions! It was just a mistake!

Well, Joe was good on his feet. And he
had
them, in that room that day—he could feel it. They liked him ... they believed him. But they couldn’t just drop it—not after shithead Artie turned it into Murder One ... so what they did was, they flunked him in that course, and let him take it again. Big deal.

He took it again, and did fine—got a B, which was a pretty good grade on Joe’s transcript.

By the end of that first year, it was
Joe
who was just about mental. He must have read a million pages in the last three weeks. One test—for the whole damn year!—he had to get hot. Game day!

But he did it. By a hair’s width. He ranked eightieth in the class, and they cut from eighty-eight down. ... Well, what of it? He made the cut, like he said he would. ... Hell, he had it figured from the start.

And that summer, he married Neilia. It was just like he’d imagined. No—it was better. It was a Saturday, August 27, 1966, and the day was glorious, with sunlight pouring down on three hundred guests at the country club, and sparkling on the water at the foot of the Hunters’ lawn. They did the service at St. Mary’s, Our Lady of the Lake—though Neilia was not Catholic, and didn’t plan to convert.

It was just like her, how she thought about that: she did consider converting—her religious beliefs and Joe’s were so alike—but then she thought she might somehow, someday, come to resent her conversion. And she didn’t want anything like that to come between them. She didn’t want to have anything to hold over Joe’s head. She knew herself so well, see ... just how she was.

And she knew what she wanted—to the smallest detail. Her bridesmaids’ gowns were long and completely straight from the neck to the floor—chiffon—in a shade between deep pink and deep red. She could have had their shoes dyed the same shade, but no—she wanted them green, to pick up the ivy in their bouquets of three white roses. Her own dress was stunningly simple: white brocaded lace that took her shape to the waist, with a long straight skirt, no train. She wore a chapel veil, with a headpiece intertwined with ivy, to match the greenery and shoes of her bridesmaids, and the matching ivy to set off her own white roses in profusion. ...

She was, as Joe would often tell her, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

But he looked every bit her match that day, in his striped pants, gray tailcoat, and pearly silver waistcoat. In fact, all the Bidens looked splendid: Joe’s sister, Val (every bit the princess of her own world), was Neilia’s maid of honor. And handsome brother Jimmy stood next to Joe, as best man. And the father! Such a distinguished man!

There were some guests at the country club who thought the Bidens must be quite a family in Delaware ... to have such style—must be rich! Everything about them looked so
perfect
. ... Wasn’t that part of their crowd landing in a
seaplane
? Right there on the lake!

Neilia, of course, knew it was one of Joe’s classmates who’d rented the seaplane. She had no illusions of Biden wealth, Biden power. (On their second date, she had to slip Joe a twenty under the table, so he could pay the tab at the restaurant.) But she was very proud to become a Biden, and she understood, with her unerring instinct, exactly what it meant, how important it was for everything to look
perfect
. ... That’s how she explained it to friends, later: you just had to understand how Joe was.

I
T WAS A MEASURE
of his own mentality of siege that Hart didn’t call the cops when he spotted the stakeout. Still, he couldn’t quite believe it. It was so obvious, it was ... comedic. There must have been five or six of these guys on the street and sidewalk across from his townhouse, and he saw they meant to look like neighbors—dressed in jogging suits, windbreakers, and such—but they kept checking with each other, at their car. Who the hell would be so
amateurish
?

He’d spotted the guy in the parka first—
a parka
—in May! He pointed him out to Donna Rice—it was Saturday night, they were walking to Hart’s car, on their way to Bill Broadhurst’s for dinner—and Hart told her, they were being watched. They turned right away and went back to the house. Gary meant to be calm. He was calm. It was just, suddenly ... he was walking too fast for her.

Hart’s front window, the kitchen window, gave a view of the street. He peeked out. Were they cops? Capitol Hill was a rough neighborhood, a lot of drugs ... but they were watching
his house
. Were these guys from another campaign? What campaign desperadoes would
dare
! ... No, they had to be press—were there cameras? Was there a van, or something, with a hidden camera?

Who were these guys?

What could he do?

Whom should he call?

He thought about the cops, but that would be a mess, and humiliating. What would he say?
There’re these GUYS, watching me, they’re always WATCHING ... you have to make them STOP!

Yeah, sure, okay, Senator, just calm down now.

Was he supposed to have his own muscle—guys in bulging suits, who’d take care of snoopers?
Uh, nice car you got there, fellas. Shame if it should get smashed up, parked out here on the street like this
.

What had his world come to? He was being stalked, at his own house. Whoever these guys were, whomever they represented. Hart was sure of one thing: he was their prey. The awful part was, he wasn’t even shocked. He’d felt hounded for weeks, ever since announcement—those
stories
...