Yahoo Finance Joe Biden: by the people that know him
Joe Biden
(Getty Images)Of all the anecdotes about Joe Biden, there’s one that stands out for John Kosinski.
Growing up in Biden’s home state of Delaware, Kosinski was forever crossing paths with the future President of the United States Of America. His mother worked in Pala’s, a workaday café in the city of Wilmington, which had a sign outside self-deprecatingly offering the “World’s Worst Pizza”. That didn’t deter the affable then-Senator Biden from regularly dropping in.
Biden was the ever-present local politician. “I can’t count the number of times I shook his hand or got a letter from him,” says Kosinski, now an educational campaigner. “He was just omnipresent throughout my life.” But the moment that has truly stuck with him came seven years ago when the father of Kosinski’s high school friend, Tom, died.
Tom’s father, known as Reds, was a volunteer firefighter in Wilmington. It turns out that Reds had been one of the first responders at the 1972 car crash that killed Joe Biden’s wife Neilia and baby daughter Naomi. Reds had helped the two young Biden boys, Hunter and Beau, out of the wreck. He’d also been called to the Biden house when it was struck by lightning in 2004.
When Biden learned that Reds had died, he called his widow to express his condolences and apologised that, as Barack Obama’s vice president, his schedule meant he wouldn’t be able to attend the service.
That schedule, however, must have been more flexible than first thought. “Remarkably Joe Biden showed up to the funeral - with no pomp and circumstance,” recalls Kosinski. “He just sat in the back row to pay his respects.”
When asked by a fellow mourner if he’d like to speak, Biden shared his recollections of Reds, off the cuff. As his son Tom later noted: “Hearing these stories, coming from the sitting Vice President was incredible. But more importantly, there wasn’t a single newspaper reporter in sight.”
As I talk to keen Biden watchers and those whose lives have intersected with his over the decades, it’s the small acts, often away from the public glare, which are so telling about the new President.
For Evan Osnos, author of the newly published Joe Biden: American Dreamer, his particular “Joement”, if you will, came when President Obama invited his new wingman to play golf in the nascent days of their partnership.
“It’s kind of funny and wonderful,” says Osnos. “They played together and Biden won. And, according to Biden’s telling, he was never invited to play with the president again.
“What I love is that it captures Biden’s innate competitive streak. Although he might have felt a little bit unsure of himself around this dynamic intellectual superstar, he took some small pleasure in being able to best Obama on the golf course - even if he’d not been able to do it in the presidential race.”
Running alongside tales of slipping into the pews during a firefighter’s funeral and the resolve to beat the boss over 18 holes, there’s also the pep talks, whether to a 13-year-old boy with a stutter or a senator who’s just delivered one of her first speeches. There are the heartfelt calls to parents whose children were killed in school shootings. There’s the constantly late-running schedule - due to the near-impossibility of prising Biden away from a member of the public with whom he’s connecting.
Each moment - these fragmentary flashes of character – are a clue to the complex, surprisingly fluid psyche of Joe Biden, to the evolution of the man who became the 46th President.
Biden, it’s fair to say, enters the Oval Office having gone through more personal growth than many of his predecessors. A product not just of his years (all 78 of them) and formative personal experiences, but a self-reflection bolstered by the lessons learned along the way.
In understanding the evolution of Joe – like deciphering the growth rings of a sturdy Pennsylvanian red oak in its eighth decade – Bidenologists point to a series of key life phases.
Joe Biden turned the initial assortment of cards he’d been dealt into an unexpectedly winning hand. Life until 1972 was “a period of almost unimpeded good fortune and success giving him almost a kind of magical thinking about his own ability to shape the contours of his life,” observes Evan Osnos.
Born in Scranton, Pennysylvania, a blue-collar town on its economic downers, affected by a debilitating childhood stutter and academically underwhelming, the young Biden was nonetheless able to overcome it all to graduate, establish a law career and decide to run - at the precocious age of 29 – to be a senator in Delaware.
Against serious odds, Biden beat the popular incumbent to become the sixth-youngest US senator in history on 7 November 1972.
Fast forward less than six weeks to 18 December and his life was shattered by the tragic car crash. Suicidal, he considered giving up his Senate seat.
Psychologically, this was his “coming of age,” says Osnos. “That really was like a period of cosmic maturity, where he began to understand actually that the universe will deal you as much cruelty as it might deal you good fortune.”
Biden’s moral centre – that empathy and regard for others – seems to have been forged in his pain.
“He was so concerned about his family, so concerned about his kids, he became Amtrak Joe, as they called him,” says Steve Levingston, author of the deftly- observed Barack and Joe: The Making of an Extraordinary Partnership. “Almost every night he would leave Washington, take the train back to Delaware [a commute of around 1.5 hours] to be with the kids and tuck them into bed at night. “In the Senate, lots of guys don’t have that moral underpinning.”
Over the following years, the Senate became something of a surrogate family for Joe Biden; the institution and his faith that parties can work together became personal.
By the 1990s, he was a big beast in the chamber and its influential committees. Some of the decisions taken back then haven’t aged so well: such as driving the controversially punitive 1994 crime bill which ultimately led to a surge in the prison population. Ditto the treatment of Anita Hill, who was branded a liar and insane when she accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991. Her allegations emerged during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings chaired by Biden.
“You have to acknowledge that the 1990s was a period in which he made compromises and choices that were typical of a man of his time and place - which is to say he was a powerful white man in the upper ranks of the Democrat party. Those are policies he’d now look back on with regret,” says Evan Osnos.
This retrospective rumination over those missteps made the 1990s a pivotal period in the formation of Biden’s character. A generous dollop of pride, however, remained intact.
When Barack Obama initially offered Biden the VP job in 2008, he was apparently sniffy about the role – seeing it as something of a demotion.
It took his wife Jill – an educator he married nearly five years after the terrible car crash, who has been a deeply-grounding force in the family ever since – to have a word.
According to Osnos, Jill said: “’Seriously, you’re gonna say no? You say that you got into politics over civil rights. You say that you’re opposed to the war in Iraq. You’re being given an opportunity to help the first black presidency. And you’re saying no.’
“And he said, ‘How am I going to work for somebody, I’ve never had a boss?’” And her answer to that was ‘grow up’.”
Biden seemingly did just that – and in doing so became a more serious person. Less prone to free-wheeling improvisation, more liable to stick to the script; forming an unexpectedly close relationship with the boss.
“They were very different characters. Joe is a garrulous outgoing talker who just won’t shut up and is kind of loose with his words. And Obama is quite the opposite. He’s reserved, aloof and very measured in the things that he says,” says Steve Levingston. “They weren’t a natural match to begin with, but they became all that - that’s what really makes the relationship so extraordinary.”
Whilst it seems too soon to gauge whether Biden will forge a similar level of warmth with his Vice President Kamala Harris, it’s believed he wants her to reprise the same role he played with Obama: to be that last person in the room when he’s making a decision.
That said, one ex-White House staffer had a somewhat different take on the Obama/Biden dynamic. They told Osnos: “The reason why that partnership worked is that each one thought he was the mentor to the other.”
As Obama’s presidency headed towards the end of its second term, Joe Biden mulled over whether to try to fill his boss’s shoes - and make his third attempt at running for president.
But while he deliberated Beau Biden - the three-year-old son lifted with broken bones from that 1972 crash, who went on to distinguish himself in politics and the military - died of brain cancer. He was 46. Biden was once more shattered.
“It was a final humbling by the fates”, says Osnos. “Some of that old kind of slightly jokey, un-seriousness that was part of his image in Washington for a while, that made people not take him very seriously, that was gone.
“Somebody said to me, the death of Beau Biden killed off the arrogance of Joe Biden for the last time. He emerged as this more kind of reflective and settled person.
“There became something very grave about his view of the world and the risks posed to it by Donald Trump.”
Osnos continues: “Biden’s basic view is diametrically opposed to Donald Trump’s. Trump’s view of human affairs is that we are more or less engaged in an enterprise that’s nasty, brutish and short.
“Joe Biden, curiously, has every reason to believe that if he wanted to - based on his own experience. But his fundamental view is something quite different: which is that human beings might have fierce disagreements with one another, but they can usually find a way to break bread if they allow themselves that possibility.”
Just how much bread Biden will get to break will depend on how far he can leverage Trump’s departing gifts of Senate control and a Republican party reeling from the Capitol invasion. And whether he can summon every ounce of emotional intelligence, empathy and indefatigable positivity – shaped from both brutal and brilliant moments - to somehow narrow the chasms cleaving America apart.
He might just do it. Tom, the son of Reds the firefighter, notes: “Dad was a hard Republican his entire life. Politics were not really a big topic in our house, but whenever Joe Biden’s name came up, the only thing he would say was ‘He’s a very good man who takes great care of people.’”
Read More
The inside story of the Bidens’ takeover of the White House
Matt Frei: ‘All eyes on Joe Biden - it won’t be easy for him’
