Neilia had been integral to Biden’s career; he had called her both the brains of his campaign and his closest adviser. He had planned on having her organize his Capitol Hill office. Managing to keep it together through the funeral, Biden paid tribute to his wife, who he recalled treating everyone the same, regardless of income, race, or social standing. “I was probably one of those phony liberals,” he said. “The kind that go out of their way to be nice to a minority and she made me realize I was making a distinction…. I’m going to try to follow her example.”
He didn’t seem to take the lesson to heart. Biden quickly ran afoul of the NAACP’s Wilmington chapter, which slammed recently elected Delaware officials for their failure to hire black employees. The group was most scathing toward the “utter disdain and gall” of Biden and two other “so-called liberal figures” who had “received the vast majority of the Delaware black vote on the basis of stated or strongly implied promises” to hire African Americans. They either believed “blacks are not qualified for professional positions in government services,” the NAACP charged, or they had “chosen to cowardly kowtow to the antiliberal, ultraconservative mentality which is emanating these days from President Nixon and the national scene.”48
Biden instead looked to the DuPont company, Delaware’s overriding political and economic power, which he had praised during the campaign as a more “conscientious corporation” for paying taxes at the full rate. During the campaign, one of DuPont’s top lawyers served as Biden’s adviser and one of its top chemists his research and policy consultant. After Biden’s victory, Ted Kaufman, a veteran DuPont employee, joined the senator’s staff and stayed with him for twenty-two years, nineteen of them as chief of staff. Biden and the company settled into what he later called a good relationship; twice a year, he would meet with DuPont’s executive committee and those of Delaware’s other chemical giants, Hercules (a DuPont subsidiary) and ICI (a future subsidiary). Biden didn’t make a point of fighting either the company or the family, he explained, opting instead to find common ground.49
The newly elected senator Biden was a fairly standard liberal politician for the early 1970s, albeit one whose lack of filter tended to either endear him to observers or annoy them. This may well have been part of his success: a gifted speaker, Biden’s knack for shooting off at the mouth with controversial, even inflammatory lines fed into his self-styled image as an unapologetic truth-teller. Just as he had promised, he was a reliable liberal vote on Vietnam, checking Nixon’s overreach on executive power and especially environmental protection.50
Biden’s first decade in office foreshadowed many of the hallmarks of his politics. He quickly took to the controversial congressional practice of giving paid speeches, mostly at fundraisers, colleges, and high schools, supplementing his senator’s salary by as much as tens of thousands of dollars a year. He would be a prolific, high-earning speaker for the rest of his career. After initially voting to limit such earnings, he soon declared this “one of my biggest mistakes” and reversed course.51
Biden established himself as an implacable friend of Israel from the get-go. During the campaign, a mini-scandal had flared up when a graduate student hired by Biden to write a Middle East policy paper told the press he had been instructed not to include the candidate’s personal views because that would mean “political suicide.” According to the student, Biden had argued in an August staff meeting for the internationalization of Jerusalem and a settlement that would involve Israel returning the land it was illegally occupying after the 1967 war—with Biden adding that any pro-Israel position he took now would be the one he stuck to for the rest of his career. Biden stopped just short of denying the student’s claims, saying he had merely been playing devil’s advocate. He would indeed spend his Senate career showering Israel with unquestioning support, even when its behavior elicited bipartisan outrage. He helped to secure an unparalleled amount of US aid for Israel early on and to scuttle a 1998 peace proposal with Palestine, and he told an assembly of lobbyists that Americans “cannot afford to publicly criticize Israel.”52
Meanwhile, the Watergate scandal that had been roiling Washington since 1972 revealed Biden’s credulous faith in consensus, unity, and bipartisanship for their own sake. He warned fellow Democrats not to celebrate damage to the GOP because “the demise of the Republican Party means your own demise … means the demise of the two-party system.” He chided Democrats for trying to blame Watergate on the Republican Party as a whole, warning that political institutions were the “fabric that keeps us together” and if the public came to blame the GOP for what happened, “the system goes under.” After dragging his feet on calling for impeachment, Biden eventually delivered an April 1974 speech he had planned for weeks, calling for fairness to Nixon, attacking the press and government leakers, demanding “restraint” from reporters, and telling their sources “to shut up.” “Impeachment is too important a matter to be left to the press,” he said.53
Biden’s future troubles keeping his day job and his family’s business dealings separate had their seeds in this period, too. Soon after his win, Biden’s younger brother James, with a net worth of only $10,000, was approved for a string of loans from the local Farmers Bank that were worth sixteen times that sum, money James used to open a club. According to three former bank officers, the hope had been that the Biden name would attract a hip, big-spending crowd. Instead, the club was a failure, and James left his debts unpaid, prompting Biden to personally call the bank and complain about his brother’s treatment by debt collectors. Impatient bank officers, meanwhile, threatened James with using the delinquent loan to embarrass his senator brother.
Farmers Bank’s near-collapse shortly after triggered a federal fraud investigation into Norman Rales, a financier linked to the bank, which dredged up far more embarrassing details, including senator Biden’s personal and business connections to Rales. The investigation also revealed that James inexplicably held $600,000 worth of loans from First Pennsylvania, a large Philadelphia bank, which he received through a recommendation by the office of Pennsylvania governor Milton J. Shapp, who Biden had publicly endorsed for president in 1975. John T. Owens, Biden’s brother-in-law and former law partner, had also supported Shapp and worked in the governor’s administration while holding a minor stake in the club. To top it off, Biden at the time held a seat on the Senate Banking Committee, then notorious for being a hotbed of graft.54
More than any of that, however, it was the twin issues of the economy and civil rights that defined Biden’s fundamental approach to politics for the rest of his career.
The Liberal Who Killed Busing
The recession of 1973–75 and the decade’s seemingly never-ending inflation crisis loomed over Biden’s early political career. After three decades of prosperity and rising incomes in the United States, the 1970s saw it all crash back down to earth. In the same decade, the United States would experience its worst peacetime inflation and its worst postwar recession. Skyrocketing food and energy prices hollowed out paychecks, and the days of carefree consumerism that marked Biden’s formative years ended. Millions of Americans lost their jobs in waves of unemployment, which hit 9 percent by mid-decade.55
Though the crisis had many roots, including the 1973 oil shock, it became the impetus for the building of a new political coalition aimed at a total rejection of the New Deal and its social-democratic counterparts abroad. With unemployment climbing and inflation spiraling out of control, free-market economic ideas found a friendlier reception. Combined with a bubbling panic among white suburbanites over issues like taxes, integration, and drugs and crime, the crisis would help usher in the era of neoliberalism that brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency.56
Even so, Sen. Biden started off as a solid, if somewhat ambivalent, New Deal Democrat. He voted for controls on rent and prices for everything from food to petroleum products. In his freshman year, he criticized Nixon’s budget cuts that would “mean the difference between life
