joined a picket of a segregated movie theater after working one summer at an all-black swimming pool, which had opened his eyes about racism for the first time. “I was never an activist,” Biden confessed. “The civil rights movement was an awakening for me, not as a consequence of my participation but as a consequence of my being made aware of what was happening,” he said.57
And it wasn’t just civil rights. That same month, Biden had painted himself as a Vietnam War opponent, recalling, “We all said, ‘That’s kind of stupid, but it’s going to end.’” But an old friend of Biden and Neilia’s told the press that Biden was “for a long time pretty much a supporter,” only changing his mind by the time he ran for Senate. Biden would admit that he had declined to take part in the movements he now extolled because “by the time the war movement was at its peak, I was married. I was in law school. I wore sports coats.” He added, “You’re looking at a middle-class guy…. I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dye shirts.”58
The wounded, limping campaign was finally given its mercy killing after Newsweek unearthed C-Span footage of an April 7 event in New Hampshire, where an audience member had asked Biden which law school he had attended and where he had placed. Perceiving it as a slight, Biden had reacted badly. He’d shot back that he had “ended up in the top half” of his class, graduated with three degrees, was “the outstanding student in the political science department,” and had gone to law school on a full academic scholarship. He then told the questioner he would “be delighted to sit back and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like.” All of this was proven to be untrue: Biden had placed toward the bottom of both his undergraduate and law school classes, had a single degree with a double major, had only been nominated for the political science award, and had received a partial scholarship based on financial need. “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he now explained.59
A different campaign might have weathered these scandals. But with little of substance undergirding it and tied up as it was in Biden as a personality and his straight-shooter, tell-’em-what-they-don’t-wanna-hear persona, the campaign hit a wall. On September 23, Biden entered the crowded hearing room to call it quits.
The humiliating exit from the race proved to be a blessing in disguise. Shortly after ending his campaign, Biden was finally examined for the painful headaches he’d been ignoring on the trail. After being hospitalized, doctors found one aneurysm at the base of Biden’s brain, then a second. He spent the next seven months recuperating from two high-risk cranial surgeries and an operation on a blood clot found in his lung, with a priest at one point reading him his last rites as he was wheeled into surgery. Had he stayed in the race, the doctors told him, he would have died on the campaign trail. Instead, he returned to the Senate in September 1988 to a hero’s welcome and with a seemingly wiser, more philosophical outlook.60
“I think I’m good at what I do,” he reflected. “I like very much what I do. I won’t voluntarily stop what I do.”
Black lives really do matter. But the problem is institutional racism in America. That’s the overarching problem that exists.
—Joe Biden, 20161
It was Labor Day weekend in 1980 when a young motorist found himself being tailed by an irate Joe Biden.
The young man had been speeding down an abandoned road when Biden, attending a nearby birthday party at his sister’s house, spotted him. Alarmed at the driver’s recklessness when his and the other parents’ kids were playing outside—and no doubt triggered by the trauma of the crash that had killed his first wife and baby daughter—Biden jumped into his car and chased him for more than half a mile, finally catching him across state lines in Pennsylvania. Making a citizen’s arrest, Biden charged the 26-year-old with reckless driving in magistrate court; he returned not once but three more times to make sure the charge was filed in a case that he, having made the arrest, would have to personally prosecute. Biden only dropped the charge after the motorist started desperately calling him every day, telling him he was a hard worker, this was his one and only such joy ride, and he could lose his license if convicted. Asked by the Wilmington News Journal after he dropped the case if he was just avoiding prosecuting a potential voter, Biden replied: “I wouldn’t have minded that. It would have been fun.”2
This wasn’t the first time Biden had dabbled in some minor vigilante justice. Three years earlier, he had chased down two purse snatchers and returned the stolen goods to the victim. But this incident was different in the lengths to which Biden went to make sure one young motorist’s irresponsible joy ride would be punished by the criminal justice system.
“Some guys they just give up living and start dying little by little, piece by piece,” Bruce Springsteen, the poet of blue-collar America, had sung in 1978. “Some guys come home from work and wash up, and go racing in the street.” And other guys, it seemed, do citizen’s arrests and prosecute those guys.
The incident was a powerful symbol for the direction Biden’s career would take from the 1980s onward as the twin issues of crime and drugs took a central role in his political persona. It captured the zeal with which Biden would prosecute the late twentieth-century “wars” against both, which quickly and seamlessly morphed into a war on the mostly nonwhite underclass of the United States.
It’s practically impossible to divorce political issues in the United States from race. As everyone from newspaper reporters to sociologists would discover from the 1970s on, almost every hot-button topic in US politics, including education, welfare, and the size of government, was, in an era barely a few decades out from Jim Crow, deeply tied up with voters’ racial attitudes. It was something Ronald Reagan had capitalized on in a presidential campaign that darkly signaled to conservative white voters that he understood their frustration over minorities supposedly gaming the system to get ahead.3
But perhaps no issues were more wrapped up in America’s fraught history with race than crime and drugs. By the time the 1960s were over, outright racism and support for Jim Crow had become out of bounds, and conservatives needed a way to keep capitalizing on white voters’ racist fears without coming across as defrocked Klansmen. The genuine rise in crime and drug use during the 1960s proved the most fertile ground. It is little wonder, then, that so many of Congress’s most-storied former segregationists so easily made the transition into tough-on-crime-and-drugs warriors after the 1960s.4
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