What does Biden’s failed campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination tell us about his future?
So what will happen now as the White House has gone into denial mode about the president’s weak performance in last week’s debate with Trump? The debate produced no rational discourse on the major issues of our time, and it’s unlikely we will hear anything of substance through the remainder of the campaign if Biden chooses to stay in the race.
On that question, I turned the other day to Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes: The Way to the White House (1992), perhaps the best book on a presidential campaign in our time. Cramer spent six years researching and writing the book. He reported on six Democratic and Republican contenders, including Biden, who withdrew after allegations of plagiarism and lying. (Cramer, who died of lung cancer in 2013, was a friend of mine.)
Cramer was given broad access to Biden and his family, including his wife Jill. Biden was elected to the Senate from Delaware in 1972 by a few thousand votes at the age of twenty-nine, after a come-from-behind race against incumbent J. Caleb Boggs, a two-term moderate Republican who had served in the US Army in Normandy, Germany, and Central Europe. Cramer recounts a turning point in a final debate with Boggs—one now filled with irony, considering what happened the other night: “Some wise-ass,” Cramer writes, “asked a trick question about a treaty. . . . Joe happened to know what it was. “But Boggs was confused. He stumbled around. Poor old guy looked terrible! So it came to Biden—and he knew—he could’ve slammed the guy . . . but, no. That was the key. Joe knew exactly how he had to be. If the beloved sixty-three-year-old did not know what the . . . treaty was . . . well, there was only one thing for a twenty-nine-year-old to say:
“Aw, I don’t know that one either . . .”
“That was the moment,” Cramer writes, “Joe knew he had him. It was destiny.”
Things got much more serious during the race for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. In the fall of 1987, after months of campaigning, Biden was confronted with a series of lies he had made in earlier campaigns about his academic record and class standing while in law school at Syracuse University. Then came equally serious—and proven—allegations of plagiarism as his campaign speeches came under close scrutiny by the national press. There were things, Cramer writes, that Biden had said during a television interview “about his IQ, and his scholarships, how he graduated with three degrees, at the top of his class.”
“There must have been a hundred press calls,” Cramer writes. The reporters “didn’t want explanations. . . . What they wanted was a comment—to show they’d called; a no-comment was just as good. He’d explain one thing, they’d bring up another.” Biden was by then married to Jill, and, Cramer wrote, she couldn’t stand it. She said, “There’s no way to answer.”
Finally, there was a meeting at his home and one of Biden’s senior Senate aides told him: “The only way you’re going to shut the press up is . . . get out” of the race for the presidency.
“Jill wanted out,” Cramer writes. “The calls to the house . . . so nasty. There was no explaining. These people didn’t want to hear the answers. They just kept . . . well, it was awful.”
Jill was Biden’s second wife. His first wife, Neilia, died in a traffic accident along with their daughter six weeks after his election to the Senate. Their two sons were seriously injured but survived and Biden spent as much time as possible, including most weekends, with them as they recovered: he was sworn into the Senate by his elder son’s hospital bed. Cramer devotes a chapter, titled “Jill,” to the story of the couple’s relationship. They were set up on a blind date after Biden saw her modeling in a Parks Department ad at the airport, and they hit it off immediately. She brought a depressed widowed father back to life.
Once remarried, Biden told Cramer, “he’d take care of the politics and Jill . . . the way she was with the boys—with everybody. She could talk with anyone. Not that she believed everyone. . . . She had backbone. She was private. . . . She could sniff out bullshit. . . . especially when it was his bullshit. . . . She’d tell him straight. Very soft of manner was Jill, but smart; she knew who she liked. They’d have their home, their family . . . then he would reach outward again. It wasn’t just the schedule—he could travel, he could speak. It was more like the center was in place . . . so he could lift his eyes. ‘What Jill did,’” Biden told Cramer, “‘she was the one who let me dream again.’”
When Cramer interviewed him, Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and his withdrawal from the presidential campaign was made in the old judiciary hearing room. The place was packed with reporters. There were twenty-eight TV cameras present. “Feeding frenzy,” a sympathetic Cramer writes.
“Jill was on his left, close, her right arm almost touching him,” Cramer writes, as her husband surrendered to the media. “She stared straight ahead at the wall of cameras, the pack . . . but she met no one’s eyes. She hated them. First time in her life . . . but it was true: this was hate. They were destroying what Joe worked for, twenty years. It was just another story for them. They were excited: the crowd at a hanging. She couldn’t believe how Joe was—controlled.”
Biden kept his concession speech short and sweet, Cramer writes. “No ranting, no self pity . . . He thanked his supporters. . . . He thanked the press for being there. Then he turned on his heel, and walked out.”
Cramer, now part of the entourage, stayed with the senator as he walked through an anteroom into the committee caucus room, where there was privacy. Jill and Mark Gitenstein, a longtime Senate aide, were at his side. “I did the right thing,” Biden said. He was calm, quiet, and clear, Cramer writes. Biden went on: “I can concentrate now. . . . I can do a good job” as chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
“‘No!’” Jill said, as Cramer writes. “And it jolted them: her tone. Jill never cut in like that. Joe and Mark each thought she was talking just to him.” Cramer ends the chapter with her next words that were said “with steel in her voice.”
“‘You have got to win.’”
Jill Biden saw the reality back then, and angrily stood aside as her husband was compelled to pull out of the race for the 1988 Democratic nomination and lost his chance to win the presidency. Despite her importance, the decision to step aside as the president of the United States and let others in his party do battle with Trump is Joe Biden’s to make, and his alone. It’s unlikely he will let the national media make the decision for him again.
In the last pages of his voluminous book, which ran to 1,047 pages of small type, Cramer tells of a final visit in 1988 with Biden, who was recovering after surgery for an aneurysm: “Joe was finally recuperating. . . . lying on his hospital bed, staring up idly at the TV, and he saw Bush and Reagan on stage, in black tie, in front of a huge model White House . . . lights shining in the Gipper’s old eyes as he gave Bush his endorsement, or whatever . . . and thought, ‘I oughta be up there.’
“Then,” Cramer writes, Biden realized that “he didn’t want to be up there. . . . and that’s what he told people, after he was well, when they came to him in the Age of Bush and told him he had to run next time. He said he was exactly where he belonged, for this time in his life . . .
“There would be time, in his life, to establish in everyone’s mind, that he was of good character. If he lived long enough, that, too, would come. People would know, he never cheated in law school.”
It was one of the allegations of personal wrongdoing that had ended his run for his party’s nomination. The stakes are much higher now, thirty six years later, and the issues are not schoolboy stuff. Far from it.
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