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

Joe only said, “I think that’s a pretty good idea.” But inside, he was happier than he’d been for years. The only question was, would Jill agree? The next chance he got, he asked Jill to marry him.

At that time, Jill wouldn’t say yes. She was all too aware that if she married Joe, she’d be “marrying” his sons, too. She loved the boys so much that she was afraid of letting them down. “I really had to make sure it was going to work,” she explained later, “because I could not break their hearts if it didn’t work.”

And Jill was also more aware than ever that if she married Joe, she’d be marrying into Senator Biden’s political life. She did not want to become a public person.

In 1976, President Ford was naturally the Republican candidate. Joe was eager to help the Democrats take back the White House in November. He believed that Jimmy Carter, former governor of Georgia, was the right candidate to unseat Gerald Ford. Biden was impressed by Carter’s victories in the early primary elections, and he heartily approved of Carter’s stand against racial segregation.

Joe Biden was the first senator to endorse Jimmy Carter, months before it was clear that Carter would win the Democratic nomination. Carter asked Biden to help him campaign, and Biden chaired his campaign steering committee. Biden traveled around the country to speak at rallies, urging audiences to turn out in November for Jimmy Carter. He sometimes joked that he’d been chosen to campaign because at age thirty-three, he was the only senator too young to run for president himself.

Publicly, Joe Biden didn’t admit that he intended to run for president in the future. On a visit to his old grade school, Holy Rosary in Claymont, Senator Biden told the class that he was happy in his work as a senator. He had no ambitions, he assured them, to become president.

“You know that’s not true, Joey Biden,” said one of the nuns, waving a piece of lined paper. It was the essay he’d written about wanting to grow up to be president. She’d actually saved young Joey’s paper for almost twenty years. So she had written proof that he’d thought about becoming president ever since age twelve.

Jimmy Carter won the election in November, and he was inaugurated as president on January 20, 1977. Meanwhile, Joe Biden was moving ahead in his Senate career. He’d already gained his longed-for seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1975.

And in February 1977 he was happy to be appointed to the Senate Judiciary Committee. On this committee, Biden hoped to work for civil rights and justice, and against crime. He’d also have the chance to approve or disapprove the president’s appointments to important government positions, such as secretary of defense or justice of the Supreme Court.

But next year, 1978, Senator Biden’s six-year term would be up. In order to accomplish all he envisioned, he’d have to run for reelection. The issue of school busing was hotter than ever in Delaware. On the Judiciary Committee, Biden found himself caught in the middle, between anti-busing segregationists like Senator Eastland, chair of the committee, and pro-busing liberals like Senator Ted Kennedy.

The School Busing Dispute

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 ruled that racially segregated schools were harmful to children and therefore unconstitutional. A few school districts responded by busing a number of white students to Black schools, and Black students to white schools. The city of Berkeley, California, voluntarily began a busing program that was successful. However, most school districts quietly did nothing to integrate. And where busing did begin, some white families protested or even sued the schools.

Charlotte, North Carolina, had a token busing program, but it did not actually achieve racial balance. In 1965 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the school district to court on behalf of ten Black families. Finally, in 1971, the Supreme Court required Charlotte to revise its busing program. The city was then fairly successful, at least for some years, in integrating its public schools. And a study showed that after integration, educational achievement for all students improved.

Boston, Massachusetts, was likewise ordered in 1974 to begin busing to correct racially segregated schools. But white Boston parents reacted with months of protests and sometimes violence. Thousands of white parents withdrew their children from the public schools and sent them to private or parochial schools, and thousands of white families moved to the suburbs, out of the Boston school district.

Even Black leaders had mixed opinions on whether school busing was a good way to integrate education. In any case, during the 1990s, the courts decided that busing for integration was no longer necessary. School districts that had been ordered to integrate schools by busing were released from such plans.

By now Joe and Jill had been going out for about two years. Joe still wanted to marry Jill, but he thought it was time for her to say yes or no. He told her that he was leaving on a Senate trip to South Africa. By the time he returned, ten days later, he and his sons would need an answer.

Joe wanted to marry Jill so much that he was willing to give up his promising political career. He’d decided that if Jill agreed to become his wife and Beau and Hunter’s mother, he would not run for reelection in 1978.

But when Joe came back from South Africa, Jill wouldn’t let him make that sacrifice. “If I denied you your dream,” she explained to him later, “I would not be marrying the man I fell in love with.” She’d decided she wanted to marry Joe so much, she was willing to become a politician’s wife.

Joe’s brothers, Jimmy and Frank, took Jill out privately and warned her that Joe had even bigger political ambitions than she knew. Joe, with the backing of his whole family, intended that one day he