Biography Traces Political Mistakes And Personal Scars That Shaped Joe Biden

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When his wife and young daughter were killed in a car accident in 1972, Biden struggled to acknowledge his grief publicly. «He didn’t want to become a symbol of human vulnerability. But it was thrust upon him and he had to decide whether to embrace it, Evan Osnos says.





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Osnos points to a connection between Biden’s failed 1987 presidential bid and his prognosis following the aneurysms: «Had he been on the campaign trail, he might not have survived, because he would not have gone to see a doctor about the symptoms, Osnos says.

Thirty-three years later, Osnos sees a candidate who has come to terms with the tragedies and mistakes that have shaped his life.

«If you talk to the 77-year-old Joe Biden now, he’s a man who is at peace, Osnos says. «He’s at peace from a series of hard-won scars. And it’s a very different mindset than he had back then.


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In his very early years as a senator, he was kind of a moving target politically. I mean, to be blunt about it, he was more concerned about being re-elected than he was about specific policy items. The most acute example of that is that he had run for office as a progressive candidate on the side of civil rights, and he had played a bit part in some desegregation efforts in Wilmington, Del. And he got to the Senate and he was representing a district that had a large white suburban contingent who were very wary of court-ordered busing. And they told him so. And there was a famous meeting that he went to in which parents in the suburbs, most of them white, of course, attacked him for being in favor of integration and civil rights efforts. And he turned on that issue and became the Senate’s most forceful Democrat against court-ordered busing.

On Biden’s work on domestic issues

On the domestic front, one of the things that he defined himself by was being active on issues of law enforcement and crime and punishment. He was one of the authors of the Violence Against Women Act, and he was active very much in the crime bill of 1994. So these became some of the issues that he was best known for. He was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which is a very powerful position. And all of those began to give him more stature as a kind of technician in the ways of Congress. He was somebody who knew how to get things accomplished. He would work the cloakroom … and he took pride in that. Later, when he was tapped to become vice president, part of it was because he was somebody who believed in a functioning Senate. He thought you could get things done if you knew how to do it. And the Obama administration wanted some of that.

On Biden’s role in Justice Clarence Thomas’ 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and his decision not to allow other women to testify alongside Anita Hill



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Biden imagined himself in that period as being somebody who was a Democrat, but who treated Republicans seriously, tried to maintain the standards of the Senate, which was that you give the other side credence and allow them to have a serious hearing for their ideas. … In some ways, what he tried to do was to try to pay respect to the Republican side of the process by allowing Republican senators to question Anita Hill very intensively, harshly in some cases. And then he also did not allow these other accusers to testify in person. They were allowed to testify in written form, which ultimately meant it didn’t really have any impact on the proceedings. And Biden came to regret that. He said later that the mistake was that he gave Clarence Thomas more credence than he deserved. …

But to be precise, [Biden] doesn’t say that he made an error. What he says is that he wished Anita Hill had been treated better. And I think that’s a key distinction because if we’re trying to understand the ways in which Joe Biden is capable of self-reflection and what are the issues on which he has expressed his clear regret and no, he has not gone as far as Anita Hill wants him to in saying that … he was wrong about handling that case.

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The crime bill of 1994 was inspired most of all by the crack epidemic, which was at that point, it was raging through American cities and there was this surge of political activity and demands to try to do something about it by raising the consequences, by imposing steeper sentences and making policing tougher. And interestingly, it wasn’t just coming from Joe Biden and other white politicians, but it was coming from the Congressional Black Caucus. Many Black members of Congress were in favor of the crime bill, in particular. …

If you talk to Joe Biden about it today, Biden says the mistake we made, and it was a serious mistake, was that we believed this idea that crack was somehow different, that it was an order of risk that was unlike other things that we’d seen in the drug war or in the world of law enforcement. And it had to be treated with extraordinary force. And that was the reason why they undertook these, what turned out to be very punitive and damaging steps.

On deciding whether to write about allegations concerning Hunter Biden’s business activities in Ukraine



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I was not going to simply amplify the allegations for the sake of amplifying them. I’m going to stick to what we know to be true. … As a technical matter, by the time the book was done, the Giuliani conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden had not yet come out, or at least it was not as detailed as it is now. So it was not a particularly hard call. I mean, what I talked about in the book was Hunter Biden’s involvement in Ukraine as a board member of the gas company. I talked about the impact that that had on Joe Biden in the sense that Hunter Biden apologized to his father for creating an issue in the campaign and has promised not to have any business with foreign sources of income if his father is elected. As far as I was concerned, those are the known facts. It’s not a known fact that anything [Trump lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy] Giuliani is talking about is real, and therefore I was not going to give it the credence of reality.

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.