Joe Biden biography by Jules Witcover: on Principles & Values
Anthony Kennedy:
1987: No unitary theory of interpreting Constitution
In 2 days of hearings in mid-December, Kennedy "I do not have an overarching theory, a unitary theory of interpretation
[of the Constitution]," the nominee said. "Many of the things we are addressing here are, for me, in the nature of exploration and not in the enunciation of some fixed or immutable ideas."
And he cited as "central to the idea of the rule of law . . . that there is a zone of liberty, a zone of protection, a line that is drawn where the individual can tell the Government: Beyond this line you may not go."
On 2/1/1988, Kennedy won unanimous support of the Judiciary Committee and 3 days later of the full Senate by a vote of 97-0.
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.230
Oct 5, 2010
Barack Obama:
OpEd: Jackson & Sharpton were articulate black predecessors
Biden was quoted in N.Y. Observer saying about the appeal of Obama: "You got the first mainstream African American, who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man.""Articulate" and "clean"? A black man?
Was Biden being condescending? Or sarcastic? Or just plain insensitive? Biden tried to explain: "What I was attempting to be, and not very artfully, is complimentary. The word that got me in trouble is using 'clean.' I should have said 'fresh'; he's got
new ideas."
Later Biden again said he deeply regretted any offense about the "articulate" and "clean" comments and had so told Obama, who was less than gracious in response. "I didn't take Sen. Biden's comments personally," he said, "but obviously they
were historically inaccurate. African American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate."
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.375-378
Oct 5, 2010
Clarence Thomas:
1991: Accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill
Five days before the Thomas confirmation hearings were to begin, an aide, acting on a tip from a Thomas critic, telephoned a young black law professor at the University of Oklahoma named Anita Hill, to inquire about the judge. The call set off a chain
reaction that plunged the politics of the nation into a melodrama seldom seen since the Watergate scandal.A decade earlier, Anita Hill had worked for Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She made shocking allegations of sexual
harassment by Thomas at the EEOC. Biden, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, decided to send the FBI to talk directly to the woman. She wrote a four-page account of her accusations against the judge.
When confronted, Thomas said, "It just didn't
happen. I wouldn't do that. Black men are always accused of that." [When the news reached the public], Biden called a quick second round of hearings. [Anita Hill testified at length about sexual harassment by Thomas, and Thomas was confirmed anyway].
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.260-265
Oct 5, 2010
Colin Powell:
2004: Cabinet exit meant loss to Cheney-Rumsfeld war theory
Powell as secretary of state, the loser to Cheney and Rumsfeld in winning Bush's ear and his collaboration in pursuit of the war. In the confirmation hearings of Powell's successor, Condoleeza Rice, moving up from her first-term post as
With Bush's reelection came a modest remaking of his administration, and with it further watchdog responsibilities for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The most significant change was the jettisoning of Colin
The moderate voices are now gone. The president pointedly got rid of Colin Powell and other centrists. The only people left are the neocons."
Bush's national security adviser, Biden gave her a hard time as a defender of the war, but then voted to confirm her. Biden expressed his fears of what the second term would bring. "It may be worse.
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.362
Oct 5, 2010
Joe Biden:
1966: Required to retake law school course for plagiarism
Young Biden slid into a situation that much later would have damaging consequences to his career. As he described it in the memoir: "About six weeks into the first term I botched a paper in a technical writing course so badly that one of my classmates
accused me of lifting passages from a Fordham Law Review article; I had cited the article, but not properly. The truth was, I hadn't been to class enough to know how to do citations in a legal brief. The deans and professors were satisfied that I had not
intentionally cheated, but they told me I'd have to retake the course the next year." A classmate remembered Joe coming up to him one day and declaring: "You're not going to believe what just happened. They accused me of plagiarism!" the whole incident
was soon forgotten after Biden retook the course in question and passed it the second time around--forgotten, that is, until it resurfaced years later in a manner that shook Biden's political ambitions to the core.
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p. 41-42
Oct 5, 2010
Joe Biden:
1973: Base Nixon's resignation on violations, not politics
The controversy dragged on, until the tape bearing the famous "smoking gun" made clear that Nixon had been aware and privy to payoffs to the Watergate burglars for their silence. Biden joined the chorus of demands that the president resign or be
[In the 1973 Watergate hearings], Biden continued to caution his fellow Democrats, and the press, to proceed in a way that would assure Nixon a fair hearing that would not in any way jeopardize the ultimate administration of justice in the matter.
trust of that office to such a degree as to warrant his forcible or voluntary removal from that office. His resignation was not the consequence of political pressures, but solely as a consequence of a violation of that high public trust."
impeached, stating "For the sake of history, the issue must not be confused. The issue is not how well President Nixon conducted foreign policy over the past five and a half years, but whether the President of the United States violated high public
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.118-119
Oct 5, 2010
Joe Biden:
1987: Clarion call: rekindle fires of idealism
With all preparations for running in place, and about $2 million in his campaign treasury, Joe Biden on 6/9/87 kicked off his bid for the White House at the Wilmington railroad station that had been a regular venue in his political life during his
14 years in the US Senate. In JFK-like urgings to get America moving again after the Republican "self-aggrandizement" years of Nixon, Ford and Reagan, he told the hometown crowd: "We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society,
for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference." And he reiterated his argument that it was time for youth to be served. "I am absolutely convinced that this generation is poised to respond to this challenge,
and for my part this is the issue upon which I will stake my candidacy," he said. "The clarion call for my generation is not "It's our turn," But rather "It's our moment of obligation and opportunity.'"
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.169
Oct 5, 2010
Joe Biden:
1987: Anti-Bork most organized opposition to Court nominee
As Judiciary Chair in 1987, Biden found himself in the middle of pressures from all these intense anti-Bork foot soldiers, demanding to testify at the confirmation hearings. The political reality was that Biden could not pick & choose without incurring
the undying enmity of those who were denied. It had to be none, [or] (virtually) all. No one publically insisted upon testifying. And at the close of the hearings, Bork and his flawed constitutional vision--and not the coalition--remained at center stage
The massive compilation came to be known within the coalition as "The Book of Bork" and was widely circulated among members of the Senate, the news media, and every group with an interest in rejecting the nomination. Biden himself underwent intensive pre
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.177-179
Oct 5, 2010
Joe Biden:
1987: Accused of plagiarizing Neil Kinnock's speech
A British Labour Party candidate, Neil Kinnock, delivered a speech in his recent election campaign [in which he] talked of the political opportunities that had come to him as a result of the helping hand they had received along the way. It struck a chord
with Biden, reminding him of his own fortunes.Kinnock said of his predecessors, "Anybody really think they didn't get what we have because they didn't have the talent, or the endurance, or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no
platform upon which they could stand."
That last phrase particularly captured Biden's attention. At the Iowa debate, the campaign hadn't prepared closing remarks. An aide suggested, "Why don't you use the Kinnock stuff?"
Biden closed with, "Why is it
that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to university? Were they not smart? Were they weak? No, they didn't have a platform on which to stand." He hadn't made the attribution to Kinnock that he usually did. [Newspapers called it plagiarism].
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.186-189
Oct 5, 2010
Joe Biden:
1987: Heckled for exaggerating academic record
In his 1987 president bid, Biden was caught by a C-SPAN camera telling a tormenter, "I went to law school on a full scholarship, the only one in my class to have an academic scholarship. In the first year, I decided I didn't want to be in law school and
ended up in the bottom 2/3 of my class and then I decided I wanted to stay, went back to law school and ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition."Biden also claimed that at University of Delaware he had
finished with three undergraduate degrees. His law school records showed, however, that in his first year at Syracuse he was ranked 80th out of 100 students and in his final year 76th out of 85. Also, his full academic scholarship was half based on need,
and rather than three undergraduate degrees, he earned one with a dual major in history and political science. Also, he had shared the moot court award with other students. Biden recalled later of his presidential campaign, "The floodgate had opened."
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.194-195
Oct 5, 2010
Joe Biden:
2008: I would not be anyone's V.P. nor Secretary of State
In 2008, Biden was apparently everybody's choice to be secretary of state. Asked about it, he was emphatic: "Absolutely, positively, inequitably, Shermanesquely, no. I will not be anybody's secretary of state in any circumstance I can think of.
And I absolutely can say with certainty I would not be anybody's vice president, period. End of story. I guarantee I will not do it.""If we have a Democratic president," he said, "I can have much more influence, I promise you, as chairman of the
Foreign Relations Committee than I can as vice president." And he laughed, walking off to rejoin his family and get back to Wilmington. For most of the nation's history, the vice presidency had been avoided like a plague by most ambitious politicians.
More often than not, especially in the first hundred years of the Republic, the office was regarded as a dead end, a sort of gold watch in retirement.
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.389-394
Oct 5, 2010
Joe Biden:
1973: Reconsidered priesthood after losing wife in car crash
Biden recalled his thoughts in the depth of his despair and depression about the loss of [his wife and child in a car crash] was to reconsider the idea of becoming a priest. He went to the local Catholic bishop "about getting a dispensation. In the
Catholic Church you could get married and have lost your spouse and have children, and you can get a dispensation to go to the priesthood. I didn't ask him to get it, I asked if he could, would he, etc., and he said, 'Look,
Joe, why don't you take a year to think about this? I don't think this is the right thing for you, but if you still want to do that, I will initiate the procedure.' I never followed up on it. It was the only other thing I ever thought about, but it was
obvious I didn't have the vocation or I would have done it." So began what soon would be a familiar daily sight to train passengers on the run between New York and Washington, in both directions--the Amtrak life of Senator Joe Biden of Delaware.
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.98-99
Oct 5, 2010
Richard Nixon:
Eisenhower could not think of a major idea by V.P. Nixon
"If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don't remember." At Eisenhower's next news conference, nobody bothered to ask him whether he had. 8 years later, when Nixon himself reached the Oval Office, he kept his vice president, Spiro Agnew,
V.P. Nixon remained essentially an outsider in the Eisenhower administration. When a reporter asked Eisenhower at a news conference for an example of "a major idea of his you had adopted" during Nixon's years as his vice president, the president replied,
some quarters as a sort of insurance policy for Nixon's presidency, with Nixon himself facing impeachment in the Watergate scandal and cover-up. The thinking was that Congress would not impeach the president & put the tainted Agnew in the Oval Office.
similarly in the dark, never informing him in advance of Nixon's heralded "opening to China" secret trip to what was then called Peking. Eventually, with Agnew facing the loss of the vice presidency in an investigation of bribe-taking, he was seen in
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.400-401
Oct 5, 2010
Sarah Palin:
2008 V.P. debate sparked more curiosity than substance
The highlight of the campaign for the vice presidency was supposed to be the nationally televised debate between Biden and the surprise Republican vice presidential nominee, Governor Palin of Alaska. She turned out to be made for TV--perky, folksy,
good-looking, good-humored, and surprisingly quick on the draw, seemingly a match for the glib Irishman from Delaware.In advance, the Obama strategists took the confrontation with the crowd-pleasing, unpredictable Palin seriously. "We knew, and we
prepared for the fact that "debating Sarah Palin was an enormously difficult task with very little upside, because people thought Palin would be lucky to get off the stage without a monumental gaffe. But we knew having studied her that she was a damn
good debater."
The two nominees exchanged predictable policy positions. From the outset, Palin injected a tone of folksiness. The debate sparked more curiosity than substantive discussion, and Biden came out the clear winner in the post-debate polls.
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p. 423-427
Oct 5, 2010
Sonia Sotomayor:
Confirmed for Supreme Court by 58-31 vote
The sudden announcement by Justice David Souter that he was resigning from the Supreme Court gave Obama his first opportunity to make an appointment. He nominated Federal Appellate Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor of New York as the first
Hispanic American on the highest bench. Biden, who had chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee through every Supreme Court confirmation hearing since 1987, was called on to help prepare her.
A Wall Street Journal editorial issued a scathing diatribe against him entitled, "How Joe Biden Wrecked the Judicial Process," alleging his insistence that a nominee be subjected to questioning about his or her judicial philosophy broke new and
unwarranted ground. That approach had indeed brought Bork down, to the dismay of conservative stalwarts. Sotomayor, however, artfully dodged all challenges and was confirmed by a 58-31 vote, with nine Republican senators supporting her.
Source: A Life of Trial & Redemption, by Jules Witcover, p.454
Oct 5, 2010
Page last updated: Feb 14, 2019