Joe Biden by Beatrice Gormley (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📕

He was always mindful of his ambition to become a trial lawyer and then a politician. He practiced public speaking every chance he got, including to high school classes.

During this time he learned something very important about public speaking. When he knew what he wanted to say, he could look out at the audience rather than down at his notes. And seeing the audience’s reactions, he could adjust his remarks to them. Connecting with his listeners made him a better speaker, and he loved it. He could imagine how well he’d use these skills to convince a trial jury.

Joe Biden’s friends teased him about enjoying the sound of his own voice, calling him “Mr. Soapbox.” On one occasion, they presented him with an actual wooden soapbox, the traditional platform for a street-corner orator. An old pair of his sneakers was fastened on top of it.

Joe was pleased with himself, but he also wanted to share his hard-won skill in speaking fluently. In the dormitory where he lived as a resident advisor, he noticed a freshman who had a severe stutter. Taking the young man under his wing, Joe showed him how to practice speaking in front of a mirror. And to build up his confidence, Joe brought him along to Neilia’s house, including him in gatherings of their friends.

With all these activities, the one thing Joe didn’t do was study. The coursework bored him. He viewed law school as just something to get through, a necessary step in his life plan. “I was a dangerous combination of arrogant and sloppy,” he admitted later in his memoir, Promises to Keep. He skipped classes; if he went to the law school library, he spent more time chatting with other students than poring over law books.

Everyone Joe Biden met was impressed with his confidence. Two of his classmates later remembered a time when a professor called on Joe to discuss a case. Joe hadn’t read the case, but he started talking anyway.

As he went on and on in convincing detail, the other students began to catch on and laugh. Joe was making the whole case up, on the spot, and discussing this imaginary case. When he sat down, the class burst out applauding.

Amazingly, Joe managed to get decent grades at the end of the first semester. Other students were envious of Joe’s ability to slide by. “You knew Joe was different,” said one classmate, Bill Kissell. If he’d studied only as much as Joe, Bill was sure he’d have flunked out. “He had other projects,” Bill added wryly, “and Neilia was clearly one of them.”

And Joe was Neilia’s project. Joe had never met anyone, outside of his own family, who believed in him so absolutely. They planned their life together, agreeing on almost everything.

First they would get married. While Neilia continued teaching, Joe would finish law school. Then he would practice law as a trial lawyer and start his own law firm. He would run for public office, win his elections, and work to make people’s lives better.

Civil Rights, Voting Rights

President John F. Kennedy proposed a civil rights bill, prohibiting racial discrimination, in 1963, but a Southern minority in the Senate filibustered that bill to death. After Kennedy was assassinated in November, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, was determined to steer the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. The bill quickly passed the House of Representatives, but again the “Southern bloc” in the Senate launched a filibuster that lasted from April to June.

Finally Senator Hubert Humphrey, the majority whip, assembled enough votes to cut off the filibuster. The Senate passed the bill, and President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Now the federal government had the power to prevent segregation in schools, on buses, and in restaurants. The act also included a voting rights section, but unfortunately, it was too weak to do much good.

So one of the worst restrictions on African Americans in the South remained: they were not allowed to vote. Some states charged Black citizens (but not whites) a poll tax—a fee for voting—that they knew most Blacks could not afford. Some required Black citizens (but not whites) to pass a difficult “literacy test”—for instance, reading aloud a long passage filled with legal jargon from the state constitution. In other places, Black people were threatened with violence if they tried to register to vote.

During the Freedom Summer of 1964, civil rights workers led a huge voter registration drive in Mississippi. It did not succeed in its goal—three of the civil rights volunteers were murdered, and most Black citizens did not even try to register. But the civil rights movement forged on. Early in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led several demonstrations in Selma, Alabama.

On Bloody Sunday, March 7, marchers led by John Lewis were attacked near Selma, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, by state troopers on horseback with whips and tear gas. One man was killed, and Lewis and many other people were badly injured. Americans who watched the violent scenes on TV were horrified, and the civil rights demonstrators gained much sympathy for their cause. In August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prohibiting any state voting law that discriminated against a racial group.

Joe and Neilia also talked about the kind of home they envisioned: a roomy Tudor-style house on a spacious lot with big trees. They both wanted lots of children. And of course they would welcome friends and family to their home.

There was one exception to Joe’s record for sliding by that first year. In fact, he did something careless that would come back to haunt him in the future. Writing a paper for a technical writing course, he used some text from the Fordham Law Review without giving proper credit. As Joe told it later, he didn’t even know how to cite a source—because he’d cut the class in which citation was explained.

His professors took this mistake very seriously, and Joe had to appear before a faculty