3

The Hail Mary (1972)

“The smart guys covering Delaware politics didn’t give me a snowman’s chance in August.”

The Democrats had a problem. In 1972, the world had yet to learn about a building called Watergate, Nixon was still popular, and he was about to pancake George McGovern, running up the electoral scoreboard 520 to 17. Some of the Senate races were hopeless; why even put up a fight?

Take Delaware, for example. The Republicans had an incumbent, and their man looked unbeatable. Senator Caleb Boggs was a bona fide legend; a World War II hero, for the last thirty years he had been a member of Congress (three times), governor of Delaware (two terms), and now he was a U.S. senator.

He had never lost a race.

The Democratic Party bigwigs knew they couldn’t beat Caleb Boggs. So they needed someone expendable, a sacrificial lamb.

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. Joe Biden was only twenty-nine 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 thirty years.”)

Ted Kaufman was in that meeting where the Democratic bigwigs floated the idea of Biden running. He remembers hearing one of them ask, “Well, who’s going to be his campaign manager?”

“His sister, Valerie,” someone said.

“Great ticket. They ought to reverse it!”

They had a point. Whereas Joe had sort of goofed around at college, Val was a star. “Valerie had been a top student at the University of Delaware,” Kaufman said. “She’d been homecoming queen. She was an absolutely incredible person.”

Val was always in Joe’s corner, and had been ever since they’d practiced tackle football and ridden together on that bicycle. When Joe ran for county councilman, Val developed a hyperorganized system that gave them an edge: She tracked all the voters in the county, sliced and diced the neighborhoods by past voting records, and established a system of block captains. The operation, in a sense, served as a crude beta version of the vaunted ’08 Obama campaign apparatus. (Biden wasn’t the first to do this, of course. It can be traced as far back as Aaron Burr, who, in 1800, tallied up the blocks on a voter-by-voter basis, outmaneuvering Alexander Hamilton.)

Val called up Kaufman—Can you help us? He agreed to meet the Biden kid. “I’ll be happy to help you, but I’ve got to tell you that you have no chance of winning,” he told Joe. Kaufman liked what he saw, however, and joined Team Biden. He would be Biden’s right-hand man for thirty-six years.

Biden knew the odds were close to impossible. As he put it, the pundits said he had a “snowman’s chance in August.” But what the hell? Biden was not one to turn down a challenge—just ask the kid who dared him to run beneath that moving dump truck. And the former football player inside couldn’t resist trying the Hail Mary.

“I am announcing today my candidacy for the United States Senate,” he said on March 20, 1972, before launching into a forty-minute speech—short for him! After the speech, he hopped in an old-timey propeller plane and flew around the state, with Beau sitting on his lap. Delawareans must have wondered…Who the hell is this guy? In one early poll, 18 percent of Delawareans had heard of Biden. Caleb Boggs? 93 percent.

He had a plan to get people to know him. And it pivoted around something very simple: coffee.

Even before he officially announced, Biden knew he had to do something to get on the public’s radar. He couldn’t afford too much advertising, so he set out to do things the old-fashioned way, sitting down with voters over a cup of coffee to discuss the issues. The first coffee session would begin at 8 a.m., usually at a neighborhood woman’s house, and they would invite thirty to forty of her neighbors to join. Another session would begin just down the street at 9 a.m., also with thirty guests. Then another at 10 a.m., then 11 a.m., practically back-to-back for the entire day, sometimes until midnight. As always they did things as a family; Valerie, Neilia, and Joe’s mom all pitched in, showing up with coffee and doughnuts. (Joe’s mom was the “coffee chairman.”) He could meet with more than three hundred people per day. They sometimes brought along Beau and Hunter, and just “carried them from house to house like footballs in wicker baskets.”

It’s a lesson that stuck with Joe for life. Decades later, during the 2008 election, after an eighteen-hour day he turned to one of his staffers, Herbie Ziskend, and told him, “The key to winning these things is you have to ask the people for their vote.” So simple, but the advice sort of blew Ziskend’s mind. In all the machinations of a modern election, it’s easy to forget these basic lessons, but they’re the things that Joe excels at—Just ask for their vote.

WISDOM OF JOE

Remember the basics.

Yet back in 1972, Biden knew coffee and charm weren’t enough. He knew that at twenty-nine years old, if he wanted to be taken seriously, he needed to command the issues and study the policy. So every Sunday night, Joe and Neilia invited PhDs and Fulbright scholars to their home, fed them plates of spaghetti, and then they geeked out over the tax code, domestic policy, and foreign affairs. He knew that people would ask, Is he just an empty smile, or does he have substance?

He gave speeches on civil rights, health care, and the folly of the Vietnam War. (Whether you agree with Biden’s policies or not, you have to give him credit for saying—for the most part—basically the same thing for fifty years. For this we can thank Joe’s grandfather, Grandpop Finnegan, who told him, Tell them what you really think, Joey. Let the chips fall where they may.)

Immediately Kaufman saw something special. This guy, Biden, he gets it. He doesn’t just spout the Democratic talking points. He thinks. He does his own thing. “These were issues that not a lot of elected officials had been talking about: The Democrats didn’t say much about balancing the budget. No one was saying that we have to do something about the environment,” remembered Kaufman. “He was for a strong criminal justice system. That was a no-no among Democrats. The Republicans were the people who were concerned about crime. But Joe Biden talked about the fact that the people who were getting hurt by crime were our people.”

But these principles don’t go far without campaign donations, and Biden had squat. In the early days he met with potential donors; many passed. (Why squander money on a lost cause?) In one of these meetings, a potential donor told him that he had no chance, that the experts said he had no chance and even his dentist said he had no chance. He just ripped into Biden.

Joe stood up and turned to leave. “Look, I don’t have to take this malarkey. I don’t need you or this committee. And another thing…I’m gonna win.”

MALARKEY

“Malarkey” is the most Biden-y word in the English language. But where does it come from?

The word’s origin can be traced back to the early thirteenth century, when an old Irish shoemaker, Bartley Malarkey, was accused of cheating his customers.

Wait…that’s a bunch of malarkey. The origin is unknown. Merriam-Webster defines it as “insincere or foolish talk.” The earliest use is thought to be in the 1920s, possibly from an Irish-American cartoon. UrbanDictionary.com defines it as “an Irish-American slang word meaning ‘bullshit.’ Most notably used by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden during the 2012 Vice Presidential debate.” (Another win for Biden: his very own Urban Dictionary entry.) You get the feeling that this is a word that Joe heard while growing up in the Biden clan, a word that helped shape his thoughts on integrity, plainspokenness, and what it means to be a man.

One study analyzed a century’s worth of public records and found that Biden used the word “malarkey” more than twice as much as anyone in Congress. A few classics:

In 2012, Biden told a group of Pennsylvania firefighters that President Obama was going to invite them to the White House for a beer. “He’s going to call you, no bullshit. This is no malarkey. You come to the White House. I’ll buy you a beer.”

In 2015, Biden said, “Mark my words, the Republican Party is going to try to claim credit for this [economic] resurgence….It’s a bunch of malarkey.”

In 2016, Biden said that Donald Trump “is trying to tell us he cares about the middle class. Give me a break. That’s a bunch of malarkey.”

From Day 1 of the campaign, Biden made one thing clear: No gutter politics. No attacks on personality. This conviction would become a career-long habit, and it’s one reason he’s so beloved in the Senate, by Democrats and Republicans alike. He even took the “positive campaign” to hilarious extremes. At every turn he seemed to praise Caleb Boggs. “I don’t think [anybody] can find anything unethical about Senator Boggs,” he volunteered cheerfully. “He’s just a very ethical guy.”

Biden’s one flirtation with negativity? He said that Boggs was “a nice guy, but he’s just not an innovative senator.” Burn.

And let’s say you were a Cale Boggs supporter and you happened to awkwardly bump into Joe Biden on the street. If he talked to you—and of course he would talk to you—he just might open his blazer and show you a campaign button that read I LOVE CALE. This actually happened. Biden actually wore a Boggs campaign label inside his suit jacket.

Given that mind-set, there was no way he would allow his team to run a negative ad. “We produced some radio advertising in which we just really mildly criticized Caleb Boggs, and after it ran for two or three days, he made us take it off the air,” remembers John Marttila, a longtime advisor, who helped create the ’72 ads. He laughs when he tells the story. “I think one of them was on the environment, and the tagline was something like, ‘When Joe Biden sees a tree, he sees a tree,’ and it was so gentle by today’s standards. But Joe was always, always adamant about a lack of negative advertising.” So they pulled the incendiary ad.

WISDOM OF JOE

Never neg.

Instead of going after Boggs, he used the Vietnam War as a wedge issue, denouncing it as a “stupid and a horrendous waste of time, money, and lives based on a flawed premise,” and wondering why the United States was “spending so much energy in Southeast Asia that we had left truly vital interests unattended.” (Swap out “Southeast Asia” with “Middle East,” and it’s easy to spot a coherent through-line from 1972 to the present.)

Yet even if he was good on the issues, the age thing was a real problem. Who runs for the Senate at age twenty-nine? He looked so young that when he campaigned with his father (alongside Neilia and his mom), people sometimes mistook Joe Sr. for the Senate candidate. (“Hey, I’m going to vote for your dad!” people would tell Joe. He’d fire back, “I am, too!”)

Val found a solution when staring at a portrait of Henry Clay, the legendary senator. Clay was twenty-nine when appointed to the Senate in 1806. (Biden’s birthday, conveniently, would fall between the election and the start of the next Senate term, so he just barely made the cut.) Suddenly Joe had an easy answer. When people told him he was too young to be a senator, now he could say with a straight face, “You know, not since Henry Clay has anybody my age joined the Senate.”

At every turn he would hobnob with voters. Buying milk in the grocery store? He’d talk to voters. Traveling in a car? He’d talk to voters. When driving through town, he and Neilia had a system: She’d drive, he’d ride shotgun, and then, at red lights, he’d hop out to shake the hands of random drivers. By the time the light turned green, Joe was back in the car.

One night, the governor of Pennsylvania, who was Jewish, offered to campaign for Joe in a largely Jewish community. The campaign event was at a hotel reception hall, but the room was nearly empty. Huh. Where is everyone? They realized that much of the absent crowd must be at a nearby wedding. “Let’s go,” they said, and the boys embraced their inner Wedding Crashers and charmed the crowd. (Months later, Biden would win the Jewish vote.)

“He was the Energizer Bunny,” a volunteer later told Biden’s biographer, Jules Witcover. “He’d never stop. If you went to a high school football game on a Saturday morning, he was there. If you went to the Acme, he was there. If you went to the Delaware football game in the afternoon, he was there. He would go to those polka dances in the old Polish section of town. He’d shake hands. He had that smile, that grin.” It’s a national tragedy that we do not have video footage of twenty-nine-year-old Joe Biden at the Polish polka dances.

As Biden began to generate heat in Delaware, in DC, a man named F. Nordy Hoffman looked at the slate of 1972 Democratic hopefuls. It was Hoffman’s job to get Democratic senators elected. As the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, he helped the party figure out how to divvy up its resources—who to fund, who to snub. Before he gave anyone a nickel, he wanted to size them up.

One day he invited Joe and his brother Jimmy, who ran the campaign’s finances, to his office. Joe told Hoffman that he was going to run for the U.S. Senate.

“I knew a lot about this young man, but I wanted to find out if he had guts,” Hoffman remembered years later. “So I really taunted him for the first fifteen minutes: ‘What makes you think you can run?’ ‘Why should you be chosen?’ ‘We don’t have all the money in the world, and I’m sure you don’t have it.’”

Finally, Biden looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t have to take this crap from you.”

Bingo. “We are going to go for you. That’s what I wanted to know,” Hoffman told him.

“What?” Biden asked.

“I wanted to see if you had any guts,” Hoffman said.

“That was Joe Biden. He came through with flying colors,” Hoffman explained. “He was going to tell me he wouldn’t take my money and the hell with me.”

JOE THE LIFEGUARD

Ever since his first election, Biden has been a vocal champion of civil rights. His inspiration? The swimming pool.

In 1962, while still in college, Joe made some extra cash as a lifeguard. (With his swim trunks and summer tan, it must be said, this is peak Hot Young Biden.) A dozen lifeguards worked at the Prices Run swimming pool, but he was the only white guy. He was one of the only white people in the entire pool, which was filled with hundreds of African American swimmers.

Biden played hoops with the other lifeguards. Made friends. And for perhaps the first time, he began to see the world through a different, less privileged, set of eyes. He heard stories of segregation at movie theaters, of naked racism, of how black people endured “a dozen small cuts a day.”

He got along well with the community. Well, most of the community. There was one exception. The pool did have its share of what Biden called “gangs,” including a group known as the Romans. And the Romans had a kid named “Corn Pop.” One day Corn Pop kept bouncing on a diving board, which was against pool policy.

As Biden later told the story in Promises to Keep, he yelled at Corn Pop to stop the bouncing.

Corn Pop kept bouncing.

Biden whistled again.

“Hey, Esther! Esther Williams!” Biden yelled, referring to the ’50s swimmer and actress, and making one of his first Dad jokes. “Get off the board, man. You’re out of here.” Corn Pop left the pool.

Just one problem. The other guards, who knew better, warned him that later that day, when Biden left the pool and went to his car, Corn Pop might attack him with a straight razor. Shit. Biden thought about calling the police, but was then advised that if he did that, he’d never be accepted into the community. Double shit. So he did what any sensible nineteen-year-old would do: He wrapped his arm in a six-foot length of chain.

Biden left the pool and went to his car.

Corn Pop was waiting.

Biden held up his arm. He brandished the chain he had brought, and threatened to “wrap this chain around your head” before Corn Pop could use his razor. But then he kept talking, motormouth-Biden-style, and loud enough that the whole pool could hear him. Foreshadowing his days on the Senate floor, he launched into a mini speech about how he shouldn’t have called him Esther Williams, he meant no disrespect, and he apologized, although—he quickly added—it really is wrong to bounce on the diving board and Corn Pop shouldn’t do it again, and on and on and on…

It’s unclear if Corn Pop was amused, befuddled, or simply fell asleep during the surprising speech, but somehow the bomb was defused. No knives, no cuts, no chain-wrapping. Corn Pop and Joe even became unlikely buddies, and now the Romans had his back.

More than fifty years later, as an old man, Joe returned to that swimming pool. Wearing a navy suit instead of swim trunks, he sat in the lifeguard chair. “I owe you all,” he told the crowd. “I owe this neighborhood. I learned so, so much.” And by then the pool had a new name: The Joseph R. Biden Jr. Aquatic Center.

As the election approached, Biden still trailed in the polls by over 30 points. How could he break through? How could he mix it up? Biden had an idea for a radio ad that was, well, a tad unconventional.

In the ad, Biden approached random people at a grocery store and said, basically, “My name is Joe Biden. I’m the Democratic candidate for the United States Senate. Do you trust me?”

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

It seemed as if Biden was recording his very own attack ad. His team was skeptical. “You can’t put an ad on the air having people testify they don’t trust you!” Marttila pleaded. But Joe stuck to his guns. He sensed that a lack of trust in the system permeated the air, and he wanted to be an antidote. 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. “Our radio ad was a guy on our staff with a portable tape recorder, putting the microphone in the face of our mailman,” Val later told NPR.

Joe’s bizarro ad was joined by a series of brochures, and even though his campaign ran on fumes, the literature was slick. “Joe Biden is making an impact on the U.S. Senate and he hasn’t even been elected yet,” said the front page of one brochure, and then, inside, it showed photos of Biden next to veteran senators like Scoop Jackson and Hubert Humphrey, with a goal of boosting his gravitas. It worked. “The printed material became kind of a revolution for political print, and was duplicated afterwards,” says Marttila. (In 2015, lifelong pundit Chris Matthews remembered these brochures as something that he had “never seen before or since…He looked like he belonged there [in the Senate]; in fact, like he was already there.”)

Yet as wonderful as these brochures might be, they were useless if no one read them. And Biden couldn’t afford the postage. Mailing a single round of brochures cost $36,000, which would shatter their meager budget. The solution? Val created the “Biden post office,” a base of thousands of freckled teenagers who would hand-deliver these brochures across Delaware. The kids schlepped across the state on Saturdays and Sundays, when they were off from school.

Biden was big with the kids. Even though most of them weren’t old enough to vote, he visited high schools and spoke to the students. Biden had a hunch that even though the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds couldn’t cast a ballot, if they got excited enough, they could maybe convince their mom and dad to vote. You could argue that in 1972, Biden was to Delaware teenagers what Obama was to college kids in 2007—short on experience, long on hope.

Biden could feel the momentum. He was closing the gap. And best of all, Caleb Boggs hadn’t really done much campaigning, as he viewed his reelection as a fait accompli.

Finally it was time for debate night. The two men went back and forth congenially and respectfully, sticking to the issues. (Unlike 2016, no one threatened to throw the other in jail.) At the very end, Boggs was asked about his thoughts on the Genocide Treaty, something of a hot-button issue at the time. It was a simple question.

Yet Boggs couldn’t handle it, fumbled, and said he was “unfamiliar” with the treaty. (Today, within seconds of Boggs’s goof, we would pillory him on Twitter: #Unfamil­iarwit­htheTr­eaty.)

The moderator turned the question over to Joe.

Biden had thoughts on the treaty. How could he not? All of those spaghetti dinners with the PhDs and the Rhodes Scholars had paid off, and he was surprised to see Boggs wobbling. He could pounce. He could go for the kill.

Instead he said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is, either.”

Years later he explained that if he had pressed the point it would have been “graceless,” or like “clubbing the family’s favorite uncle.”

WISDOM OF JOE

Know when to pull a punch.

Young Biden kept it classy, he kept meeting voters, and the polls kept tightening.

Suddenly the impossible seemed very possible. The Boggs people began to sniff trouble. They started running attack ads, such as a brochure that showed a kitchen sink with the tagline “This is the only thing that Joe Biden hasn’t promised you.”

Yet as Team Biden neared the finish line, they were running out of money. Now the race seemed like a true toss-up. And they needed to keep their radio ads on the air. If they lost the ads, they’d lose the election. But, with ten days to go until election day, the coffers were empty.

So Val arranged a meeting with some fat-cat investment counselors. They were ready to give.

In a private meeting, they asked Biden what he thought about lowering the capital gains rate. “I knew the answer I thought they wanted to hear,” Biden remembered. “All I had to say was that I’d consider it…and I couldn’t say it….I just couldn’t lie to their faces.” He told them he wasn’t for changing capital gains.

The meeting ended. On the way home, Brother Jimmy told him, “Joe, I sure in hell hope you feel that strongly about capital gains because you just lost the election.”

Biden didn’t look back. Instead, he took out a second mortgage on his home. The ads stayed up.

Finally, election night.

112,844 people voted for the Republican icon Caleb Boggs.

116,006 voted for Joe Biden.

He won by just 3,162 votes, roughly 1 percent of the total—or about ten sessions of coffee. That night, Boggs called him to concede.

“You ran a good race, Joe.”

Biden was overwhelmed. He held the phone in his hand, choked up, and for once, he could barely speak. “I’m sorry, Senator. I’m sorry,” Biden finally let out.

The Biden team held a victory party at the Gold Ballroom of the Hotel DuPont. Kaufman still remembers the euphoria in that ballroom. “I can remember just as distinctly as if it just happened. I thought to myself, ‘I will never, ever believe anything is impossible again.’…I’ve seen a lot of campaigns, I’ve been in a lot of campaigns, and I have heard about a lot of campaigns, but to this day the greatest upset was that race.”

Once he collected himself, Biden moved to address his supporters. “I hope I don’t let you all down,” he told them. “I may go down and be the lousiest senator in the world. I may be the best.”

Two days after the election, both men, in a show of bipartisanship, were scheduled to take part in a Delaware tradition in which the winning candidate and the losing candidate race each other in go-karts, then literally bury a hatchet in the sand. (I had to fact-check this five times before believing it to be true. It’s called Return Day. The day after losing an election, could you imagine John McCain, Mitt Romney, or Hillary Clinton putting on a big smile and then hopping in a go-kart?) Out of respect for his decades of service, Biden offered to let Boggs skip the race. Boggs insisted.

And that was that. Joe Biden had just become the youngest senator-elect in a century, and the second youngest in the history of the United States, and along the way, he had toppled a Delaware legend. With his wife, Neilia, and three beautiful children, he had to think of himself as the luckiest guy on the planet.

A few weeks after election night, on November 20, 1972, Joe Biden turned thirty years old, making him eligible for the United States Senate, which would begin its session in January. In just over a month, he would take his Oath of Office. In that time he had work to do. He needed to find a new home in DC for Neilia and the kids, shop for Christmas presents and a Christmas tree, learn his way around the DC Senate offices, and hire a staff. Thanks to his popularity with the youth of Delaware, Biden had to weed through 2,500 staffer applications, and all of this by hand.

For his thirtieth birthday, he had a party at Panini Grill. The whole family gathered around a birthday cake. Wearing a crisp suit, Biden cut into the cake as three-year-old Beau and two-year-old Hunter looked on, transfixed, while Neilia, smiling, leaned over to poke the frosting.

In the coming weeks, Joe and Neilia would divide and conquer their bottomless to-do list. They both traveled to DC to hunt for a house. They found a school for the boys. It wasn’t lost on Biden that he was just thirty years old and lived a charmed life, and that this moment, this time with Neilia and their children, “exceeded all my romantic youthful imaginings.”

On Monday morning, December 18, 1972, Biden headed back to DC for more transition work, joined by Val, as always, who continued to serve as a confidante. Neilia stayed in Wilmington, wanting to knock out some Christmas shopping and buy a Christmas tree. She loaded up the station wagon for the errand, strapping in Hunter, Beau, and baby Naomi.

Joe was interviewing candidates for his staff. The phone rang. The call was for Val.

Biden watched his sister take the call. He saw her face go white, and somehow, through some sixth sense, he just knew.

“There’s been a slight accident,” Val said. “Nothing to be worried about. But we ought to go home.”

Biden knew better. He just knew. He felt it in his gut. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Silence. Joe and Val, brother and sister, raced to a plane and flew to Wilmington. They hurried to the hospital. He soon learned that, as promised, Neilia had gone shopping for the Christmas tree along with the kids. On the way home, she came to an intersection, stopped at the stop sign, and then eased the car forward. A tractor-trailer rolled down a hill. She was broadsided.

Neilia and the baby had died. It was not clear if the boys would live. Hunter’s skull was fractured, and the doctors feared brain damage. The crash had broken nearly every bone in Beau’s body, forcing the three-year-old to remain in a full body cast.

Biden could barely speak. He just stayed with his two young boys in their hospital room, waiting, watching, praying, hoping, grieving, loving. He went numb. The days bled into each other. Dark thoughts, suicidal thoughts, began to ooze into his head. “For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he later said. “Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, but because they had been to the top of the mountain and they just knew in their heart they’d never get there again.”

A few days after the accident, a grief-ravaged Biden somehow managed to speak at Neilia’s funeral. “The night before [Neilia] died, she was writing Christmas cards,” he told the crowd. “We were both in the living room in front of the fire and I was sitting in my lounge chair, a pompous young senator thinking about the big things I was going to do in Washington.” He spoke of a premonition. “We had decided not to have a fourth child because of a fear that something would happen to it….We had three beautiful children. Now I have two.”

Christmas came and went, and the boys stayed in the hospital. Biden felt loss, despair, and then anger. He was mad at the world. He was mad at God. “No words, no prayer, no sermon gave me ease. I felt God had played a horrible trick on me,” he later wrote. In some of the rare moments when he wasn’t with the boys, he would “bust out of the hospital and go walking the nearby streets. [My brother] would go with me, and I’d steer him wordlessly down into the darkest and seediest neighborhoods I could find. I liked to go at night when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight. I was always looking for a fight. I had not known I was capable of such rage.” Yet grief is a complicated thing, as is faith. In all this confusion, at one point he considered quitting politics and joining the priesthood, even reaching out to the local Catholic bishop to see if it was possible. (The bishop told him, “Look, Joe, why don’t you take a year to think about this?”)

He did take some time. And soon he returned from the rage and banished those thoughts of suicide. At least two things kept him alive: Beau and Hunter. He knew that his boys needed him. They had already lost a sister and their mother; no way in hell would he let them lose their father. He would keep going. He would get through this. He had to. For the boys.

That hospital room, with Beau in a body cast and Hunter nursing a crushed skull, became Joe’s entire universe. Early on, when Beau had to be transferred via ambulance to Delaware Division hospital, Joe reassured the boy, “I’m going to jump right in there with you, son.” The idea of “the Senate” became some abstract, distant concept that felt like another lifetime. The Senate felt suddenly small, irrelevant.

“One of my earliest memories was being in that hospital, Dad always at our side,” Beau remembered as an adult. “We, not the Senate, were all he cared about.”

Joe had many friends, and his neighbors rallied to show their support and condolences and love. Consumed by grief, he wasn’t much interested in talking on the phone. Jimmy, his brother, would screen the calls to give him privacy. But one call came through that Jimmy had to have him take.

Biden picked up the phone. “Hello, Mr. President, how are you?”

NIXON: “Senator, I know this is a very tragic day for you, but I wanted you to know that all of us here at the White House were thinking about you and praying for you, and also for your two children.”

BIDEN: “I appreciate that very much.”

NIXON: “I understand you were on the Hill at the time, and your wife was just driving by herself.”

BIDEN: “Yes, that’s right.”

NIXON: “But in any event, looking at it as you must in terms of the future, because you have the great fortune of being young. I remember I was two years older than you when I went into the House. [Laughs.] But the main point is you can remember that she was there when you won a great victory. You enjoyed it together, and now, I’m sure, she’ll be watching you from now on. Good luck to you.”

BIDEN: “Thank you very much, Mr. President.”

NIXON: “Okay.”

BIDEN: “Thank you for your call. I appreciate it.”

The call was recorded and later released to the public, along with a cache of Nixon’s tapes. Biden’s voice is raw, spent, and wrenching. His grief was unimaginable.

How did Biden come back from this? How did he find the will to not only survive but also eventually regain the glimmer in his eye, the spark of wonder, the joy of seeing Cub Scouts on an airport tarmac? To get a glimpse into how he recovered, we can look at a speech he gave, years later, as vice president, to the families of soldiers who had died in the line of duty. To empathize with the widows and widowers and parents of slain children, he shared his own pain.

“There will come a day, I promise you…when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.” He paused, looked at the crowd, and it was clear that he fully understood their grief. “It will happen. My prayer for you is that day will come sooner or later. But the only thing I have more experience than you in is this: I’m telling you it will come.”

WISDOM OF JOE

The smile will come.

The tragedy of the accident, in a sense, helps us understand one of Biden’s most fundamental qualities: empathy. He connects with people. And as he told the class of 2017 at Colby College, forming personal connections—through empathy—is the one successful trait that he sees in all the best 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, a person who has a different background or religion than yours. 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.

Back in that hospital room in the winter of 1972, as he watched and prayed for Hunter and Beau, reps from the Senate were relentless in asking him to serve. Biden said no. They kept coming back. Biden said no again. The Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, called the hospital every day. Ultimately, Mansfield knew just what card to play: Do it for Neilia. She wanted this. She helped you get elected. She helped you toss that crazy Hail Mary.

Biden finally agreed, but only on two conditions.

The first was this: six months.

Mansfield kept saying, “Just give me six months, and if you don’t feel that you’re up for it, you can quit.”

The second condition: Joe insisted that if he was going to join the Senate, he still needed to be a father to his boys. He needed to see them every day. So unlike virtually every other senator, every day, he would commute back home to see his sons. He would make the boys his number one priority.

And he would commute by Amtrak.

When a freshman senator takes the Oath of Office, typically, he or she does this in the chambers of the Senate. That wouldn’t work for Biden. A few weeks after the accident, he still spent most of his days and nights in the hospital, keeping a nervous eye on Beau and Hunter.

So on January 5, 1973, Joe Biden took the Oath of Office in the chapel of the Wilmington Medical Center. The tiny room was packed with Joe’s family, Neilia’s parents, and even a horde of cameras and press; the tragedy had put him on the national map. Just a few feet from his father’s side, little Beau Biden, three years old, wearing a sweater under a blazer, rested on a hospital bed with his leg still hoisted up in a cast.

Biden swore the oath and then said a few words. “I hope that I can be a good senator for you all. I make this one promise: If in six months or so there’s a conflict between my being a good father and being a good senator, which I hope will not occur…I promise you that I will contact [the governor] and tell him we can always get another senator, but they can’t get another father.”

Soon Beau and Hunter were discharged from the hospital. They would be okay, thank God. Val moved into the house to help look after the boys. In the morning, Joe ate breakfast with Beau and Hunter, hustled to the Wilmington Amtrak station to catch the express, and then he came back, every night, to tuck in the boys. And before he said good night, he led them in their nightly prayers, which were inspired by his Grandpop Finnegan: They would say three Hail Marys.