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

the house of lost dreams. He actually looked forward to trips so that he could get some rest. Also, it lifted his spirits to be helping other Democrats, speaking to audiences. He still had his gift of connecting with a crowd.

At home, as the boys settled into their new routine, Joe eased up a bit, too. In Washington, he made friends with a group of senators and their wives. After a time, he even accepted invitations to their monthly dinners.

In New Castle County, Delaware, the county council announced plans to build a new park of ten and a half acres. It would include a football field, a Little League baseball field, basketball courts, and bicycle racks. There would be a playground with equipment for younger children. The council, on which Joe Biden had started his political career, was naming the recreation area Neilia Hunter Biden Park.

At the beginning of Joe Biden’s second year in Congress, the San Francisco Chronicle judged him to be one of the ten best-dressed men in the Senate. This honor was not huge, since the typical US senator was older, rumpled, and unfashionable. But it got Senator Biden some good publicity.

By this time, Biden had proven himself as a speaker who could raise funds for the Democrats. He still enjoyed making speeches, and his friendly personality came through to audiences. A rumor started that the Democratic Party might choose him as their candidate for president in the election of 1976.

That talk could easily have given the young, ambitious senator a swelled head, but he knew he wasn’t yet qualified to run for president. “I don’t have the experience or background,” he told a TV interviewer in September 1974. Joe wanted to reassure the people of Delaware that he intended to represent his state in the Senate for years to come.

“If you hang around Washington,” Biden explained, “it’s easy to start thinking you’re important, and so it is a blessing in disguise that I commute every day and get out of this city.” He added, “I prefer being home with my kids, and that way I’m home with my constituents too.”

Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield thought so well of Joe Biden that in 1975 he gave Biden a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee. Biden had been hoping for this assignment for two years, and he appreciated what a big favor it was for a junior senator like him. He was thrilled to attend his first meeting with the legendary secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

But Biden got off on the wrong foot that day. First he went to a room in the Dirksen Senate offices, only to discover that the Foreign Relations Committee meeting was in the Capitol instead. Late now, Biden rushed to the Capitol and the correct room—and was grabbed by an armed guard. “Where d’ya think you’re goin’, buddy?”

Waving his Senate ID at the guard, Biden plunged into the hearing room. In his hurry he slammed the door and bumped into the back of Kissinger’s chair. Most people would have kept a low profile for the rest of the meeting, after such a bumbling entrance. But Biden soon raised his hand to ask a question.

Kissinger had assumed that this annoying young man was someone’s assistant. “Mr. Chairman,” he addressed acting chair Mansfield in his distinctive German-accented croak, “I thought no staff was allowed.”

One of Kissinger’s staff passed him an urgent note, informing him that the annoying young man was actually the junior senator from Delaware. “Oh,” said Kissinger. “I apologize, Senator Bid-den.”

Joe couldn’t resist a teasing answer, pretending to mistake Kissinger for President Eisenhower’s secretary of state in the 1950s: “No problem, Secretary Dulles.”

Jill

Joe Biden was building a reputation as “Amtrak Joe.” Riding the train to Washington every day, he soon knew all the conductors, as well as the other regular passengers. Now and then he used the time, an hour and twenty minutes, to catch up on paperwork. But more often he spent the time talking.

Sometimes Beau and Hunter would ride with their father, and sometimes Joe Sr. would come along. He’d followed politics all his life, and he was deeply proud of his son the senator. He enjoyed sitting in on Joe’s hearings and meetings.

Besides chatting, discussing, and arguing with his fellow passengers, Joe also liked to sketch designs for the perfect Biden home. Beau later remembered sitting on the train, watching his father draw plans for houses, as well as the grounds around them. Joe dreamed of a family house that would welcome the people he loved, all of them. It would be like his childhood home with his Finnegan grandparents in Scranton, only bigger and better.

In 1975, Valerie Biden was still in the North Star house with Joe, Beau, and Hunter, taking care of the boys. Her marriage to Bruce Saunders had broken up, and this year she got remarried—to Joe’s good friend Jack Owens. The relationship that had started out ten years before, with that disastrous blind date in Syracuse, had completely turned around. Val had to admit that Neilia had been right to say, “If I could pick any guy in the world for you, it would be Jack Owens.”

As Joe slowly recovered from the tragic loss of Neilia and their baby Naomi, he felt more and more that he no longer wanted to live in the North Star house. He started looking for a new house, and he found one he loved at first sight in the suburb of Greenville. It was a former Du Pont mansion with two separate wings—“one for me and one for Val,” thought Biden. He knew that Valerie, even married to Jack, would still want to live in the same house with Beau and Hunter.

Joe Biden bought the Greenville house and began remodeling it. In later years, Beau had fond memories of weekend trips to the hardware store with his father. The family spent days planting trees, putting up a fence, painting