The Book of Joe, by Jeff Wilser: on Principles & Values

Joe Biden: 1972 campaign brochures included photos with incumbents

[Val, Biden's sister and campaign manager, created] the "Biden post office," a base of THOUSANDS of freckled teenagers who would hand-deliver these brochures across Delaware.

Joe Biden: 1972 campaign ad: "Do you trust me?"

The shoppers would say, "No, why should I trust you?"

He flipped the message to say, "That's what's wrong with America right now. I promise you if you elect me, you'll know exactly where I stand. You'll be able to trust me." The ad was as shoestring as it gets.

Joe Biden: Thought about priesthood, but dated a lot of girls

So, he went to the University of Delaware, dated more girls, and basically turned himself into Hot Young Biden. It's possible that Hot Young Biden might have been a little too hot for his own good. He basically loafed about, and later confessed: "I probably started my first year of college a little too interested in football and meeting new girls. There were a lot of new girls to meet."

He was still trying to meet girls in his junior year, when he drove to Fort Lauderdale with some buddies for Spring Break. Yet he was bummed to find a mob of silly drunken college kids, all of them acting stupid.

Joe Biden: Biden Doctrine: Stick up for the little guy

Joe Biden: 1972: unseated Republican incumbent Senator Caleb Boggs

A few names were tossed around. Then came one that most people had never even heard--"How about this Joe Biden kid?" (At the time Biden was a fresh-faced New Castle County councilman and had been networking with the Delaware political scene.)

We can imagine the chuckles. "Joe Biden! Good one." Biden was only 29 years old. "That's too young to be a senator." (It is, literally, too young to be a senator, as Article I of the Constitution says, "No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the age of 30 years."). Biden knew the odds were close to impossible. In one early poll, 18% of Delawareans had heard of Biden. Boggs? 93%. [Biden won].

Joe Biden: Personal connection is key trait of all world leaders

"Caring about your colleague as they're dealing with a sick parent, or their child [who] graduated from college, or the child was in an accident. That's the stuff that fosters real relationships, breeds trust, allows you to get things done in a complex world. The person on the other side of the negotiating table, the other side of the political debate; a person who doesn't look like you, who lives in a community you've never visited. They're not some flattened version of humanity, reducible to a collection of parts and attributes. They're a whole person, flawed, struggling to make it in the world just like you."

Joe Biden: Accused of plagiarism in 1987 presidential primary debate

So he began quoting Kinnock in his own stump speeches. Each time, he was careful to clearly reference Kinnock.

Then came the primary debates. On August 23, 1987, at the close of the debate, Biden just did his normal riff on Kinnock. But he rushed it, and forgot to credit Kinnock.

The New York Times unleashed a front-page headline: DEBATE FINALE: AN ECHO FROM ABROAD, which charged that Biden had "lifted Mr. Kinnock's closing speech, without crediting Mr. Kinnock."

Biden was soon accused of ANOTHER bout of plagiarism, suggesting a troubling pattern. Earlier in the year, he had given an inspiring address that clearly lifted language from a 1967 Robert Kennedy speech. It was devastating. William Safire called him "Plagiarizing Joe."

Joe Biden: 1988: suffered brain aneurysm and 9-hour emergency surgery

At the hospital they scanned his brain. He had an intracranial aneurysm, and he needed surgery ASAP.

"Doc, what are my chances?" Biden asked, just before the surgery.

"35% to 50%." Then there was the added risk of morbidity: Paralysis. Loss of speech.

Joe Biden's brain was under the knife for nine hours.˙The aneurysm exploded literally seconds after they had pried open his skull. (It's possible that the invasion of the knife itself had caused the burst, but still.)

Biden would live. And then it hit him: "Dropping out of the '88 election saved my life." If he had been campaigning, then he likely would have been wooing votes in N.H., in the snow, and if he had collapsed there, he would have been too far away from the life-saving surgery at Walter Reed.˙

Joe Biden: Boyhood speech impediment dominated his schooling

"I talked like Morse code. Dot-dot-dash-dash," he later remembered. If you asked him his name, he might reply, "J-J-Joe Biden." Kids poked fun at him. They called him "Dash." Biden said, "It was like having to stand in the corner with the dunce cap. Other kids looked at me like I was stupid. They laughed."

Joey had three ways of coping with his stutter:
1. Family
2. Guts
3. Nuns

Yet empathy was scarce in grade school. When he read aloud his homework, one little jerk would taunt, "B-b-b-BIDEN!" So, Joey turned to his second technique for coping with the stutter: proving that he had guts. [And if his boyhood gutsy exploits didn't work, Joey] appealed to a higher power. Or, more specifically nuns.

Joe Biden: School nuns helped Joey overcome boyhood stuttering

At Catholic school, after hearing his speech, a nun suggested that instead of trying to blast out a sentence in one gushing torrent, he carve it up into its natural pauses, its rhythm, its cadence. So instead of trying to say, "I love eating ice cream cones on Amtrak," you would say, deliberately, "I love--eat-ing--ice cream-cones--on Amtrak."

This strategy helped. But there was a catch: It required him to rehearse sentences, so he couldn't really use it on the fly. What would he do when a teacher called on him in class?

So, he devised a few clever hacks. [Before each class, he would count the number of paragraphs and] memorize the one that he was likely to recite.