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

on the job. The lawyer’s argument to the judge was that the injuries were partly the welder’s own fault. It was a perfectly legal defense, and Joe knew that Prickett was just doing his job. The judge would probably dismiss the suit.

But Joe left the courthouse sickened from watching the welder’s family, especially the wife. She was about the same age as Neilia, and she’d looked so crushed by the unfairness of the law. Her husband was crippled and disfigured for life—but they would get nothing.

William Prickett invited Joe out to lunch that day, but the young lawyer made up an excuse. Instead he walked across Rodney Square to the state of Delaware’s Office of the Public Defender. There he signed up to work as a lawyer for clients like the welder, who could not afford to pay legal fees.

In his new job, most of Joe’s clients were African Americans from the inner city. Many of them were surprised that this young “honky,” their insulting name for a white man, sincerely wanted to offer them their legal right to defense in court.

Working as a public defender part-time, Joe Biden also started his own law firm in 1969. He talked Dave Walsh, his best friend from Archmere Academy, into going into business as his partner. He also persuaded Jack Owens, his best friend from law school, to move to Wilmington and join his firm.

Joe gave his best for his clients, but he was still determined to go into politics. He and Neilia had many passionate discussions about their future, and Neilia wished that Joe would keep practicing law. She imagined him becoming a judge—and someday, a Supreme Court justice. But Joe had a different vision for himself, and she accepted that.

Joe had been brought up on the importance of politics, first at Grandpop Finnegan’s kitchen table and later at the Biden family’s dinner-table discussions. And he could see, in his daily life in Wilmington, what a difference one person in a position of power could make. Because of Charles Layman Terry Jr., the governor of Delaware, soldiers patrolled the streets of Wilmington with drawn bayonets.

1968: Year of Turmoil

President Lyndon Johnson was elected by a landslide in 1964, and he had high hopes of transforming the country into a “Great Society.” He did achieve some important goals, including the establishment of Medicare—health insurance for the elderly. However, Johnson’s accomplishments were overshadowed as he led the US deep into the quagmire of the Vietnam War. By 1968, thousands of young American men had fled to Canada to avoid the military draft, or just refused to serve. Thousands more people marched in front of the White House and across the country to protest what they saw as a senseless, brutal, costly war. So many Democrats turned against the president and the war that on March 31, Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection.

But that was not the end of the turmoil. Only a few days later, on April 4, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots broke out in cities across the country, including Washington, DC, Chicago, and even Wilmington, Delaware.

Meanwhile, presidential candidates were running for their parties’ nominations. One of the Democratic front-runners was Senator Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the assassinated president John F. Kennedy. On June 5, just after winning the California primary election, Robert Kennedy also was shot by an assassin.

In August the Democratic National Convention met in Chicago and nominated Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, as their candidate. Outside the convention, angry protesters of the Vietnam War confronted police and National Guard troops, and an ugly brawl took place on national television. The Republicans had already nominated Richard M. Nixon, who promised to win the war in Vietnam and restore law and order in the US. That November, Nixon narrowly won the election from Humphrey as well as from a third-party candidate, former governor George C. Wallace of Alabama.

After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the spring of 1968, riots had broken out in Wilmington’s inner city, where the majority of residents were African American. Governor Terry’s solution to the unrest was to send in the National Guard.

The riots subsided, and the mayor of Wilmington asked the governor to call off the guard. But Governor Terry kept the military occupation in the Black district of Wilmington for the next nine months. Joe Biden’s sympathies were with the residents of the Black neighborhoods, whose streets were shadowed by white soldiers with rifles. The residents lived under curfews and with the fear that their children would be accidentally shot. They were people like the lifeguards Joe had worked with the summer after his freshman year in college.

While Joe’s law career was taking off, the young Biden family was growing, just as Joe and Neilia had planned. Their first baby, Joseph Robinette Biden III, called Beau, was born on February 3, 1969. Only a year and a day later, Beau’s brother, Robert Hunter Biden, was born on February 4, 1970. More than ever, Joe and Neilia were eager to find the right house.

Joe had been fascinated with houses ever since he was a boy. As a student at Archmere, riding the school bus, he’d noticed the difference between his own neighborhood and the neighborhoods of many of his classmates. The roads in Mayfield were as straight as tic-tac-toe lines, and the small, cheaply built houses perched on flat, bare lots. In the more attractive neighborhoods, majestic oaks and elms lined the curving roads, shading solid, spacious homes.

Now Biden felt close to realizing his dream home, and he and Neilia spent weekends driving around the outskirts of Wilmington, looking at real estate. With a loan from Neilia’s father, they bought a small house in nearby Newark, Delaware—not to live in, but to fix up, rent, and eventually sell for a profit. Joe and Neilia found a house they liked for themselves in the Brandywine Springs Manor section of