AS TED AND I WORKED to deliver financial reform and a broader anti-fraud effort, I often recalled episodes from my more than two decades in Washington. I tried to draw on my experience to help me understand what was happening around me. I remembered what Valerie Biden Owens, Joe’s sister, told me the first time I met Ted: “Ted doesn’t have to worry, because he’s so close to Joe.”
It took me years to grasp all the ramifications of that sentence. But it didn’t take me long to realize that attaching oneself like a limpet to a powerful, influential figure was the name of the game in DC—or, rather, the beginning of the game. It’s certainly where I started. It also took me years to understand that, if you weren’t so close to Joe, you ought to be worried, because that meant something as well.
In February 1987, I moved to Washington to join the Biden for President campaign. I rented a room in Alexandria from a man who told me he’d worked for almost twenty years for the Potato Chip Trade Association. (Or maybe it was the trade association for all snack foods.) I remember thinking, “There’s a trade association for potato chips?” His living room was adorned with framed photographs of him with famous senators and members of Congress. It was my first encounter with a power wall.
I didn’t know when I looked at the potato chip wall that I’d one day join the ranks of what I call Professional Democrats. Or that this should be a personal goal. Despite the photographic evidence, back then I didn’t understand what possible connection could exist between snack foods and senators. And I didn’t foresee how the political culture of profit and ambition would, twenty-three years later, affect Ted’s and my crusade to bring Wall Street to something approximating justice. I see it all now because a decade after I went to Washington I, too, had become a highly ambitious Washington insider seeking personal gain while facilitating the status quo. In other words, I’d become a Professional Democrat, one of thousands who earn a lot of money in the private sector while positioning themselves for better jobs in future Democratic administrations.
Washington is a place where the door between the public sector and the private sector revolves every day. A lawyer at the SEC or Justice Department leaves to take a position at a Washington law firm; a Wall Street executive takes a position at the Treasury Department. The former will soon be defending the Wall Street executives his old colleagues are investigating; the latter will soon be preventing (or delaying or diluting) any government policy that Wall Street doesn’t like.
Senior officials, by leveraging the relationships they’ve developed while in Washington, can make millions after they leave government. To name just one prominent example from each party, Rahm Emanuel, a senior advisor to President Clinton, made $16.2 million as a self-described “relationship banker” at the investment firm Wasserstein Perella in less than three years after leaving the Clinton White House. Former Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas has made untold millions at the investment banking firm UBS (his wife, Wendy, a former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, exempted Enron from derivative-trading regulations and a short time later took a seat on Enron’s board of directors). Even mid-level staffers, people you’ve never heard of, can cash in. I know because I did. I barely registered on the DC power scale, but I still managed to earn millions as a lobbyist.
Don’t get me wrong. There are thousands of competent, dedicated, hard-working staffers and civil servants in Washington who never cash in. Many of them simply can’t: Their rank—and thus their value—is too low. But if you work your way up and become a key government official—in Congress or the executive branch (whether in the Justice, State, Treasury, or even Agriculture Department)—you can start test-driving Porsches in your final weeks in office.
These are the characters who while in the private sector play intermediary roles in fundraising between special interests and Democratic elected officials, who facilitate communication between the governing and power elites, and who generally find ways to help the Blue Team beat the Red Team. If the Blue Team wins, those who wear blue jerseys can better attain power and wealth over the short and long term and take higher positions during their next round in government service. The Red Team of Republicans—across Washington’s line of scrimmage—is playing the same game.
If the Marine Corps’s hierarchy of allegiance is unit, corps, country, God, then the hierarchy for a Professional Democrat is current firm, former-elected-official boss, the congressional Democratic leadership, and the president (if he or she is a Democrat). At least that was my experience, and my experience began with Joe Biden.
Ed Gillespie wrote in Winning Right, his memoir, that in Washington everyone is someone’s guy. Ed was a self-professed Karl Rove guy, Haley Barbour guy, and Dick Armey guy. Ed believed it meant loyalty: the willingness to go to the mat for someone. More than that, however, branding oneself this way makes political, social, and business sense. It signals to others that you belong to an inner circle within the Washington power culture. Under this taxonomy, I was a Biden guy.
I met Joe Biden when I was in college, followed him from afar, joined his staff, used him as a platform for my career, and generally climbed as high in government and as profitably in the private sector as I could. I did all of this using the experience, knowledge, and contacts I’d gained since the day I set my sights on attaining power with Biden in Washington. I played out the Biden string—and I might say the Biden camp played out the Jeff string—to the very end. Eventually, I made my way up to Mount Everest (briefing a president—Clinton, not Biden) and to the top of K-2 (becoming a millionaire lobbyist). One way or another, it’s the career trajectory for thousands of young people who move each year to DC. It starts with heady idealism and ends neck-deep in the Washington swamp.
I met Biden in 1979 when he came to speak at the University of Alabama. I was the leader of the student organization that had invited him, so I introduced him. Biden started by saying, “I know you’re all here tonight because you’ve heard what a great man I am.” There were only a few titters in the crowd. “Yep,” Biden continued, “I’m widely known as what they call ‘presidential timber.’” Now people began to realize he was being self-deprecating. “Why, just earlier tonight, I spoke to a group of students who had put up a great big sign, ‘Welcome Senator Biden.’ And then when I walked under the sign I heard someone say ‘That must be Senator Bidden.’” He had the crowd going.
Biden said he was aware this event was part of a class for credit and was glad that there were so many young people in the audience. There were also some older people, whom he addressed directly: “You think the younger generation doesn’t have the guts you showed in World War II, the moral backbone of your generation?” Nearly shouting, he said: “Well, don’t tell me that until first you acknowledge that this country stood back for years when Hitler rolled over Poland, rolled over France, and when America knew Hitler had begun killing Jews by the thousands. Even when we fought World War II, we left the Jews stranded to die. We knew about the concentration camps, and President Roosevelt chose not to bomb the railway lines leading to them.”
His remarks were apropos of nothing but certainly got the crowd’s attention. Later, in the car back to the airport, Biden told me: “If you hit ’em early in the speech with something they don’t like, something they don’t agree with, you’ll gain credibility. After that you can agree with ’em 98 percent on everything else, but they’ll remember you had the guts to confront them.”
Turning to the real topic of his speech, the SALT II arms control treaty then pending before the Senate, Biden, who spoke without any notes, explained the contents of the treaty, why he felt it was important to our national security, and the views of the various factions in the Senate.
Then he turned to that day’s news about the discovery of three thousand Soviet troops in Cuba. Biden, almost whispering, said: “Folks, I’m going to let you in on a little secret.” He walked with the microphone in his hand into the crowd, motioning everyone to lean forward to hear his secret. Then he yelled, “Those troops have been in Cuba all along, and everyone knows it!” The crisis was a sham, Biden argued, manufactured by the hawks to kill SALT II. Ever since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the Soviets had had as many as forty thousand troops in Cuba and had been drawing them down all along. Yes, there were still three thousand infantry troops in Cuba. No matter whether they were instructors or combat troops, they had no assault capability, no helicopters or ships that could deliver them to our shores. Besides, how afraid are we of three thousand Soviets invading Florida or Puerto Rico?
Biden whispered, thundered, argued, and explained for ninety minutes. He walked among the crowd. Finally, while still talking, he sat on the edge of the stage, in front of the lectern. He closed, after a long pause, by saying: “And that, students, is the end of tonight’s class.” After two seconds of complete silence—which I can still remember, even feel, today—two hundred Alabamans broke into sustained applause. Since I was sitting in the front row, I stood up (still applauding) to prepare to walk toward Biden to thank him. Once I stood up clapping, others behind me began to stand up. Within twenty seconds or so, by rising to my feet I had inadvertently started a standing ovation. (It was my first lesson in the importance of having a shill in the crowd.)
Biden’s performance had been masterful, and admirers surrounded him afterwards. I felt vindicated for having chosen Biden to launch the Alabama Political Union lecture series, which I had founded and which was clearly off to a strong start.
That night, a campus security guard drove Biden back to the Birmingham airport. I hopped into the backseat and went along. I could tell Biden was exhausted, but the security guard started asking him questions. Basic questions about politics, like what was the difference between a Democrat and Republican. I rolled my eyes, fearing Biden wanted to relax. Biden actually couldn’t have been more gracious. He answered the questions thoughtfully and respectfully. Biden’s responsiveness only elicited more questions, each of which Biden took as seriously as if he was on Meet the Press. I started to ask him questions, too. He was just as engaging with me, treating us more like delegates to a national convention than a security guard and a nineteen-year-old kid he’d probably never see again.
Not familiar with Biden’s biography, I asked him why he commuted to Delaware every day. With great self-possession and calm, Biden told me the story of how in December 1972, just a month after he’d been elected to the Senate, the car in which his wife, two sons, and baby girl were driving to pick up a Christmas tree was hit by a truck. The security guard driver and I were speechless.
“My wife and baby girl were killed,” Biden continued, “and my sons were badly injured. So I stayed with my sons at the hospital. I really didn’t want to be a senator. Eventually I was sworn in at my son’s bedside. I served, but I went home every night to be with my sons. And, over the years, Delaware just got used to having me home every day, so I really can’t ever move to Washington.”
I was deeply moved. I knew at that moment that I was hooked on Joe Biden. The combination of the best ninety-minute extemporaneous, substantive speech on arms control I’d ever hear in my life, his thoughtful answers to a curious security guard’s questions about politics, and finally his personal tragedy, told as if he was talking to one of his close friends, set the hook deep inside me.
When we arrived at the airport, the driver got Biden’s bags from the trunk. I wanted Biden to sign something, but all I had with me was a spiral notebook with me. He wrote on the back of it:
To Jeff and the APU,
Please stay involved in politics. We need you all.
Joe Biden, USS 1979
I did for the next 31 years, with that piece of cardboard framed and hanging on the wall of wherever I lived. Sometimes I eyed it with disdain, sometimes with admiration. Ultimately, I saw it as my meal ticket and, in a very real way, it had led to my position on Ted’s staff.
In my senior year at Alabama I applied to four top law schools and four top business schools. I asked Dennis Toner, the Biden staffer I’d met, for a letter of recommendation from Biden, who knew that I’d launched the APU and later brought to Tuscaloosa the National Collegiate Assembly, where Biden also spoke. Dennis warned me that Biden “doesn’t do this for just any student,” but in my case, thankfully, he did. This was my first step toward becoming a Professional Democrat. I wanted payback for what I did for Biden—and I got it. It was a transaction that set the stage for everything that was to come before I went to war with Ted Kaufman against Wall Street. After I got the letter, I also asked Dennis for a job on Biden’s staff. I hadn’t accumulated enough chips for that. Dennis encouraged me to first see which graduate programs accepted me.
I ended up going to business school at the University of Chicago. Time magazine had recently run a cover story about the increasing popularity and value of an MBA. The cover image was of a student wearing a mortar board, the tassel of which dangled a wad of cash. When I arrived in Chicago, I didn’t have a clear idea what investment banking was. Within six months, I’d decided that, if Wall Street didn’t hire me, I was a failure. Everyone wanted to be a banker or a management consultant; the dream employers were Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers, and McKinsey. The consensus among students was that only losers took jobs at companies that actually made things, like IBM or Proctor & Gamble.
I studied hard, often staying at Regenstein library until it closed at midnight. To take a break, I’d go to the stacks where old periodicals were kept. I’d pull out Time magazines from the 1960s and read about JFK, his administration, his assassination, Bobby’s rise to prominence, and MLK’s and Bobby’s assassinations. The way I divided my time in Regenstein was symptomatic of a division in me. Part of me was engaged in intense competition with my fellow students to land a job on Wall Street, but another part of me wanted to go to Washington, where JFK had been, and where I was sure Biden would one day be president.
In my second year at Chicago, I sent applications to top investment banks, but also wrote several letters to Biden asking for a job on his staff. I made the mistake of addressing them to Biden himself and not to Dennis. To the people who opened Biden’s mail, I was just another supplicant, and they never bothered to reply. With no word from Biden, I took a job at Smith Barney. I worked for them for a year in New York—yes, I’d made it to Wall Street—and for a year in Chicago. Then I moved to Atlanta to take a job at E. F. Hutton.
After two years at E. F. Hutton, I’d been promoted to assistant vice president. I was twenty-seven, had four years’ experience as an investment banker, and was making good money. I hadn’t forgotten Biden. I knew that he’d eventually run for president, and I still wanted to be part of it—and to be on his team in the White House when he won. Biden seemed to have forgotten me. He, or rather his office, hadn’t answered one of my letters in six years, and Dennis and I had fallen out of touch.
In late 1986, I finally got an entrée. I met John McEvoy, a Washington lobbyist for E. F. Hutton (I was already entering the belly of the beast), and told him about my dream of helping Biden become president. He put me in touch with his former wife, Liz Tankersley, who was Biden’s legislative director. Liz introduced me to Tim Ridley, a Biden staffer who would soon become the campaign manager of his presidential campaign. Tim offered me a job on the campaign for $24,000 a year, about one-fifth of what I was making at Hutton. I took it.
A week later, Tim asked me, before I officially started on the campaign, to do him a favor and “qualify” Biden in Georgia. To qualify for federal matching funds, presidential candidates have to raise at least $250 apiece from at least twenty people per state in at least twenty states. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, but I didn’t want to fail my first Biden assignment. I begged everyone I knew in Georgia to do me this favor and managed to raise the money. One of the people I asked was my college girlfriend, who was by then married and living in Georgia. She’d heard (third-hand, as it happens) that “Biden would sell his own grandmother to be president.” I told her it sounded like a rumor started by a disgruntled former staffer. She stood her ground and refused to write a check.
Then, mysteriously, Tim stopped returning my calls. And no one on the campaign could tell me my start date. For several weeks, I wasn’t sure whether I really had a job. Finally, after I’d moved from Atlanta to my parents’ home in Huntsville, Tim called. “Can you be here on Monday?”
That Sunday, I met Tim for brunch at the Hawk & Dove, a Capitol Hill restaurant. Tim, while terrible at returning phone calls, proved to be a shrewd yet warm-hearted political operative who had already won two Senate challenger races. To my surprise, Tim said my job wouldn’t be at Biden’s DC campaign headquarters. He wanted me to work for Ted Kaufman at the campaign’s Wilmington office. I’d done such a great job qualifying Biden in Georgia that they wanted to make me a fundraiser. I was a little annoyed. My imagination had been captured by Biden the bold, substantive, and charismatic speaker. In contrast, calling people and begging them for money sounded awful. But I wanted to be a good soldier. So I said to Tim: “Just tell me where to go.”
The next morning I met another new campaign staffer, Don Schimanski, at the train station. Together we went to Biden’s Senate office in Wilmington, where we met Biden’s sister, Valerie Owens, who had chaired all of Biden’s campaigns. She introduced us to our new boss, Ted, who drove us to the campaign headquarters, located in a vast, blue-carpeted empty retail space in a less-than-thriving strip mall outside of town. Don and I walked around and introduced ourselves. Dennis Toner, who was working at one of the island desks in the sea of blue, remembered me and greeted me warmly. At one long table sat six elderly women volunteers doing what I later called the stick-donut-squiggle. They were forging a sticklike J, a donut-shaped O, and squiggly E at the bottom of hundreds of campaign letters.
Ted wanted me to help build organizational systems that would ensure that the fundraising operation had a plan and procedures for executing the plan. So, under his direction, I wrote a fundraising manual that I soon called The Bible. It described an Amway-like incentive system of captains and sub-captains in which the captains would build a pyramid of fundraisers and would get credit for all the money raised by their sub-captains.
The Bible’s First Commandment was that no one gets to see the candidate without contributing $1,000. No exceptions. The Second Commandment was that people give money because of the person who’s asking, not the candidate. I’d learned this while qualifying Biden in Georgia. Do it for me, I’d say. The last thing that would work would be actually to convince someone that Biden had a chance. The Third Commandment was that the more a captain raised, the more people he or she brought in as sub-captains (and the more they raised), the more access a captain would get to Biden. I was in charge of keeping track of the captains and sub-captains, what they each raised, what levels they reached in the access-to-Biden hierarchy, and what rewards—from a lapel pin to dinner with Biden—they received.
The Bible worked. After Gary Hart dropped out of the race, Biden, from tiny Delaware, was second in fundraising only to Michael Dukakis, who could harness the powerful fundraising machinery of a sitting governor in a populous state. Biden was second in some polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, as well. It seemed like my White House dream had a fair chance of coming true.
One day that spring, Biden came to Wilmington. Wearing a light turtleneck and aviator shades, he walked through the door of the campaign office looking like the $3.5 million we’d so far raised for him. He knew all the old Delaware hands, people who’d been volunteering for him since his first miraculous win in 1972. He took the time to talk to most of them one-on-one. Ted told us to gather round for Biden, who didn’t seem to remember me. He didn’t say much. He told us that he was getting a positive response from the crowds in Iowa and New Hampshire and thanked us for our hard work. Then he turned and left. I could’ve trotted after Biden and said, “Remember me? I promised you six years ago that, if you ever ran for president, I’d be there. Well, here I am.” But by then I’d gotten to know many of the other young staffers, all of whom had their own Biden story that had brought them there. I had no reason to feel special. So, like the others, I went right back to work.
Eventually, I earned the spurs to take on my own fundraising territory for Biden: Texas and a couple of other southern states. My first stop was Houston. Whom do you call when you parachute into a city and try to put together a $50,000 event for Biden (or any Democratic candidate)? Jews and trial lawyers. (A few years later, Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama would say this out loud, naming “Jews, labor unions, and trial lawyers” as the financial pillars of the Democratic Party. Soon I learned to add Hollywood and Wall Street to that list.) Texas wasn’t renowned for its labor unions, but we knew of a couple of trial lawyers who were Biden fans, along with a doyenne of the Jewish community. I went to see them first, and they gave me the names of others.
In my pitches to these wealthy people, I tried to sound like a smooth Washington operator. I had already begun to fake sincerity. “Roger, for $50,000 I can get you dinner with the senator at his house. For $25,000 I can get you dinner with the senator, but not at his house.” It was all about the access to the candidate and the appearance of a relationship with him. Access, relationship: Already I was learning the key words I would need to help me understand Washington and what I would find there. Already, I was beginning to see the realities that explain why Ted Kaufman and I would later have such a difficult time fighting the Wall Street-Washington nexus.
The trial lawyers came through. We’d soon have enough to make it worthwhile for Biden to fly to Houston for a thank-you event. My offer to let the Jewish doyenne host the dinner at her house backfired. She told me if we reduced the donation to $500 a plate she could fill her house with people. I said no. It would take a thousand to buy access. She was irritated. Nevertheless, we got the $50,000, and it was time for Biden, his wife Jill, two other staffers who traveled with him, and me to fly to Houston. Ted told me to find Biden on the airplane and give him a briefing book about the event, tell him who’d done the most and whom to thank. I still hadn’t talked to Biden in six years. I’d been with the campaign for two months now, worked long days, and put together a $50,000 fundraiser. I felt I’d earned a moment of the candidate’s time. So I walked up the aisle to the first-class section where Biden and his wife were sitting. “Senator Biden, may I speak with you for a minute?” Barely glancing up he said: “Just gimme what you got.” So I handed him the briefing materials and returned to the back of the plane. Access denied.
Then things got worse. The plane couldn’t leave, first because the flight catering was late and then because of a mechanical issue. An hour elapsed, and we were still at the gate. I was frantic. Fifty people who had written $1,000 checks would be sitting waiting. I called the hosts in Houston to tell them about the delay, and we agreed to go forward with the event. Finally, the plane took off. When we arrived in Houston, the police were waiting on the tarmac to drive us straight to the event. We were still going to be nearly three hours late. I’d already grown increasingly anxious on the plane and now I could sense a disaster looming. When we got there, Biden and Jill waded into the crowd, and those who couldn’t get to him came up to me. My head was pounding, and I was a nervous wreck. It felt like film vérité: faces passing in front of me, speaking a language I temporarily couldn’t understand. All I could manage to mumble in response was to “ask Senator Biden, he’s your guy.”
And then Biden started speaking: “I know you’ve been here a long time so I’ll be brief.” I could see irate expressions on faces around the room. Their message was easy to guess: We waited this long for you, pal; you’d better not head for the door until we’ve had our fill.
Days later, back in Wilmington, a letter arrived from one of the Houston contributors, complaining about the event and particularly about me. “Biden’s staff guy was awful. He was rude and clueless.” Ted laid the letter on my desk and never said a word about it then or later. In two months I’d gone from swearing I’d treat each Biden supporter like a precious jewel to pissing people off.
The payoff line of every Biden speech in 1987 was, “Just because they murdered our heroes doesn’t mean the dream doesn’t live still buried deep in our broken hearts.” Allegedly, it had brought more than one Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner crowd to its feet, cheering wildly. It didn’t speak to me. First, the imprecise use of the word “they” bothered me. Who was this “they” who had murdered our heroes? We’re trying to beat the Republicans, not the assassins.
Biden’s campaign felt derivative; he wasn’t as bad as Gary Hart (who would stand with his hand in his suit pocket in imitation of JFK), but he was consciously trying to be a generational leader. As the pundits said, the Kennedys quoted the Greeks; Biden quoted the Kennedys. To be fair, the Kennedy legacy was tough to compete with.
That same summer, Lewis Powell retired from the Supreme Court, and President Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to take his place. It was a polarizing choice, since many believed that, if confirmed, Bork would create a majority that might overturn a number of previous Court decisions on matters relating to personal liberty, particularly Roe v. Wade. Senator Ted Kennedy made his infamous In-Robert-Bork’s-America speech, which galvanized both Bork’s opponents and supporters.
Biden, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, would chair the confirmation hearings, and his performance was widely expected to be like a first primary election for him. If he performed well, his name recognition and status among Democratic primary voters might skyrocket. Biden threw himself into preparation, creating a council of legal advisors and constitutional scholars to brief him on the issues.
My own confidence was high because my life plan was on track. Biden would end up in the White House, and I’d have some kind of interesting role. The campaign was still a fairly small operation, and I realized that if Biden started winning primaries it would balloon overnight. Big Democratic operatives would join the team, pushing me further down the hierarchy. I didn’t really care. The first thing we needed to do was win. My lust for power was beginning to take hold.
While dwelling on these happy thoughts, I took a weekend off in early September to go to Happy Valley for an Alabama-Penn State football game. As we drove up a winding two-lane road in Pennsylvania, I had the radio tuned to a local station. I heard a news report that presidential candidate Joe Biden had plagiarized a British labor politician. What?
That weekend in September 1987, Alabama beat Penn State, the defending national champion. My college buddies and I were elated as we left the stadium in Happy Valley. And though I was anxious to find out what was behind the news report we’d heard over the radio on the way there, I never imagined that within two weeks the Biden for President campaign would be over. It happened with dizzying speed.
Biden’s peroration at campaign debates included a long quotation from a speech by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labor Party and the son of a Welsh coal miner. It asked the question why he was the first member of his family in a thousand generations to attend university. Had his ancestors—who worked twelve-hour shifts in the mines but read poetry at night—been too stupid? No, it was because he had a platform on which to stand.
Biden used the quotation in its entirety, including the strange reference to “a thousand generations” (was he suggesting there had been a Biden college graduate in Biblical times?), the British locution “go to university” (instead of the more American “attend university” or “go to college”), and the claim that his ancestors were coal miners (which of course they weren’t). The quotation may have been ill-suited to Biden’s biography, but he’d always unmistakably attributed it to Kinnock. Except once—at a debate a few days earlier in Iowa. And someone, later revealed to be a Dukakis campaign advisor named John Sasso, created a video tape that placed Biden and Kinnock side-by-side saying the same words—and Biden not attributing them to Kinnock. Sasso knew perfectly well that it was a onetime lapse on Biden’s part. Regardless, he wanted to cripple a rival campaign on the eve of Biden’s big moment: the Bork hearings. So Sasso sent the tape to NBC News (which dismissed it as not newsworthy), the Des Moines Register (which printed a short story about it on page four), and the New York Times (which ran a devastating front-page story written by Maureen Dowd).
It got worse. That Sunday night, the national news led with snippets from Biden speeches side-by-side with speeches by Hubert Humphrey and RFK. Biden (or his speechwriters; many believe it was Pat Caddell) had lifted lines without attribution from his Democratic forebears. That night, at a cocktail party at Syracuse University, one of Biden’s law professors mentioned that Biden had “failed to footnote properly” a long quotation from a source and had agreed to take an F in the class. This story somehow got passed along to the media. Biden now looked like a serial plagiarist. It seemed to undermine what he saw as his biggest strength: that he could move people, thanks to his skills as a public speaker.
The result of all this coverage was that every word Biden said publicly, or had said in the past, was being scrutinized for plagiarism or exaggeration. A particularly damaging example—indeed, the campaign’s coup de grâce—was found in a four-month-old C-SPAN video that showed Biden speaking in a kitchen in a New Hampshire home. During the Q&A session, someone asked what Biden’s grades had been like in law school. The correct answer was: not very good. It was a sore subject with Biden, and he snapped at the questioner: “I’ll put my IQ up against yours any day.” He then went on to claim that he’d graduated in the “top half” of his law class (he hadn’t); attended law school on a full scholarship (he’d received a half scholarship based on financial need with some additional assistance based in part on academics); had three degrees (he has only two; he was counting his B.A. with a double major in history and political science as two degrees); and won an international moot-court competition (the competition had been in Toronto, so that claim, at least, was true). Eleanor Clift, at the time a reporter for Newsweek, found the video (she hadn’t seen it when it originally ran) and wrote a story about it.
Of all Biden’s screw-ups, this one concerned me most. Biden graduated seventy-sixth out of eighty-five—in other words, just outside the bottom tenth—at Syracuse University Law School. It seems fair to conclude that he found the curriculum harder—or that he worked less hard at mastering it—than all but a handful of his fellow students. There’s no shame in that. Biden had passed the Delaware bar exam and had been a good trial lawyer. And I knew he could master complicated material. His highly detailed and extemporaneous talk about SALT II in Tuscaloosa proved that, and since then I’d seen him speak substantively and convincingly about a whole range of issues.
Biden had interpreted a dig about his law-school grades as an attack on his IQ. This suggested that he had an intellectual inferiority complex, and I can only conjecture that it’s because he didn’t have the accepted credentials of a brainiac: Biden wasn’t a Harvard straight-A student, and Washington is filled with them. The telling part is that his sense of inadequacy compelled him to fabricate credentials that better suited the self-image of his intellectual abilities. The man I’d worshipped from afar was turning out to be all too human. Not fully happy with himself as he was, he tried—in little ways that had big consequences for his campaign—to be someone else.
The campaign flailed frantically, trying to stay afloat. Biden himself briefly stepped out of the Bork hearings to call an elderly African-American man who had been a cook at the diner that Biden had claimed he’d helped desegregate at a sit-in in the 1960s: “Do you remember? I was there. Can you tell people you remember me?” By then even Biden must have known it was over.
On the morning of September 23, 1987, Ted told me to call the fundraising captains across the country to let them know that Biden would withdraw that day at a 1:00 p.m. press conference. I dutifully called them all, trying to be as professional as possible, explaining that Biden felt he had no choice, and that by doing a great job chairing the Bork hearings he’d begin his rehabilitation. I thanked them each profusely and said we’d be in touch. About two minutes before the press conference, I called my parents. My mother answered. I couldn’t say a word, but she knew who was calling. I finally managed to say, “Turn on the TV,” and then broke down. While others listened to Biden’s statement, I walked into the bathroom and wept.
Later that week, Biden came to the Wilmington headquarters. “I’ve never quit anything in my life,” he said, “when people were looking.” That was mildly amusing, but it didn’t temper my feeling that my hero had been exposed as a phony. Biden—like Spiro Agnew, Earl Butz, and Alexander Haig before him—had entered the popular imagination not for his political achievements but for his gaffes.
Ted asked me whether I could stay in Delaware for a couple of months to help shut down the campaign. I said yes, remaining a loyal Biden soldier even after the general himself had retreated, hopefully to fight another day. To be honest, I didn’t really have a better option. I’d walked away from investment banking, gone all in with Biden, and now, after Biden’s ignominious exit, I had no idea what I was going to do next.
So I did what Ted asked. It was misery. And it was only exacerbated by my other unenviable task, which was to relive Biden’s downfall in excruciating detail by cataloging all of the news articles and opinion pieces written about his controversies and decision to withdraw. The next election for Biden’s Senate seat was in 1990, and that campaign team would need a database of the material from which potential opponents (and the media) would draw their barbs. There were hundreds of articles, at least one from almost every newspaper in the country. Many of them were brutal. Biden had sunk so low in the final days of his campaign that nothing, no aspect of his personality or his person, was out of bounds. Even Biden’s hair plugs became the object of opinion pieces. They were seen as symbols of his cut-and-paste persona and as evidence that he was unfit for office: Could any man who felt the need to mask his bald spot by surgically moving tufts of hair be entrusted with the presidency?
During the time I was dismantling the campaign and archiving Biden’s downfall, Ted offered me a job on Biden’s Senate staff in Washington at a salary of $48,000 a year. I wasn’t impressed. That’s what an administrative assistant made at E. F. Hutton. Ted assured me that “by Senate staff standards, this is huge, it’s positively munificent.” And Biden was still my hero, albeit a tarnished one, and if he wasn’t in the White House (yet), I’d serve him where he was: in the Senate. Moreover, Ted and I had developed a strong bond. He knew the value of an able lieutenant, and I liked working for him and knew he was Biden’s closest advisor. I’d figured out that the best way for me to help Biden was to help Ted. That’s what I did for the next twenty years.
Within days of my arrival, lobbyists started calling me and taking me to lunch. These meetings were helpful: I needed a quick primer on the issues before the committee, and the lobbyists knew them backwards and forwards. I had misgivings about their picking up the check all the time (this was well before Congress finally enacted a ban on all gifts). One lobbyist told me, “Jeff, Jesse Unruh said it best: If you can’t eat their food, drink their liquor, and get up and vote against them in the morning, you don’t belong in this business.” I compromised by agreeing to go to lunch only at the Monocle, a restaurant that had been cited a few years before for health violations. The lobbyists always begged me to go somewhere nicer. I held my ground. It was the Monocle or nothing. I’d accept free food but only from a bad restaurant. How’s that for ethics?
As my time in his office continued, one fact became clear: I just didn’t hit it off with Biden. Only a handful ever made it into his inner circle (which is true for many successful politicians, whether for self-absorbed or simply cautious reasons). I simply wasn’t one of the chosen.
As time passed, I tried to understand why Biden had appealed to me so much in the beginning and then how I saw him after the fact—after his campaign downfall and after working on his staff for a time. In Alabama, I’d watched him train his charisma beam on people of all ages and, as far as I could tell, win them all over. In Washington, he would do the same thing with complete strangers, especially if there was any hint that they might be from Delaware. Yet, behind the scenes, Biden acted like an egomaniacal autocrat and apparently was determined to manage his staff through fear. Like Napoleon, Biden had captured his personal Toulon at a very young age. In comparison, his tentative young staff must have seemed like an army of underachievers. I decided I’d stay until I could help him regain his professional balance and then move on to something else.
Ted invited me to sit in on meetings and get more involved in Biden’s inner circle of advisors, most of whom had been with him for nearly two decades. My background was in banking and my campaign experience had been brief, so political strategy was new to me. I spent most of these strategy meetings soaking in what I heard and waiting for a brilliant idea to hit me. To be honest, I didn’t contribute much. Indeed, I often had the impression we were quibbling about minor differences between nine equally fine different ways to skin a cat.
At a meeting in 1989, we were thinking up themes for drug-policy hearings that Biden could chair. Biden was trying to focus national attention on cocaine addiction, particularly on the devastating effects of crack cocaine in urban neighborhoods. Ron Klain, who had succeeded Mark Gitenstein as Biden’s chief counsel, wanted to have Hollywood executives testify about the movies’ impact on drug use. Ted proposed several ideas and then turned to me and asked, “Jeff what do you think?” I didn’t have a single idea. Moreover, I found the whole exercise silly. We were thinking up ways for Biden to get press attention so that when people think drug policy and law enforcement they think Biden. He’d already been holding a weekly drug-policy hearing for years now. In my mind, the focus was too much on designing hearings that would enhance Biden’s brand image as tough on crime and too little on hearings that would help the Senate get the information it needed to write effective legislation. It was at this meeting that I decided to apply to law school.
I left the Biden staff in May 1991 to travel for a couple of months before starting at Stanford in late August. At my going-away party, I gave a little speech to Biden and the rest of the staff. It included an anecdote about how I’d provided briefing material and talking points to Biden for a Senate floor speech just days ago. I said what a powerful, effective speech it had been and that it left me just as impressed with Biden as the first time I’d heard him speak almost fifteen years ago in Tuscaloosa. The only difference, I said, was that those were my talking points on the lectern he was ignoring. The staff laughed knowingly. We’d all had the experience of slaving over speech texts and talking points that Biden chose not to use, preferring instead to extemporize. My punch line didn’t even elicit a smile from Biden. In all my conversations with him, I don’t think he ever laughed at one of my jokes.