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

they didn’t consider her their mother right away. After all, their aunt Valerie had mothered them for the last four-plus years, and so had their grandmother Jean. And before that, there had been their loving mother, Neilia, called “Mommy.”

Jill was patient with Beau and Hunter, rather than trying to force intimacy. “I marveled at the way she let the boys come to her,” Joe wrote later.

Jill volunteered at the boys’ school. She did their laundry and cooked dinner every night. She kept the many pictures of Neilia displayed around the house for Beau and Hunter. And she regularly called the Hunter grandparents in upstate New York to let them know how the boys were doing.

At first Beau and Hunter called their new mother “Jill,” as they had since Joe and Jill had started dating. And then, although no one asked them to, they began calling her “Mom.” One day, when the boys were in the car, Jill stopped to refill the tank. Beau heard the gas station attendant ask, “How much gas do you want, hon?”

To Beau, about ten years old, “hon” sounded disrespectful. “Mom,” he told Jill, “if he ever calls you ‘hon’ again, I’m going to go out there and say something to him.”

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter ran for reelection. Usually, a president in office has a big advantage over a challenger, but Carter was in trouble with American voters. The economy was in a slump. Gasoline shortages caused long lines of unhappy drivers at gas stations. And to the shame of the nation, fifty-two Americans were being held hostage in Iran.

In 1979, a popular revolution had swept the US-supported shah of Iran from power. That November, the revolutionaries had stormed the US embassy in the capital, Tehran, and captured the American staff. All during the 1980 campaign in the US, both Republicans and Democrats criticized President Carter for not freeing the hostages.

Senator Ted Kennedy ran for president in the Democratic primary elections against Carter. He was weighed down in the race by an old scandal from 1969, a car accident in which a young woman on his staff had drowned. However, Kennedy remained a candidate until the Democratic National Convention in August, and so the Democratic Party was weakened and divided.

In contrast, the Republican Party was united behind their candidate for president. Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor and previous governor of California, projected a smooth, sunny personality. He promised to stimulate the economy by lowering taxes, to shrink the federal government, and to strengthen the US military. This conservative stance appealed to many voters in an uncertain time.

Joe Biden campaigned for Carter, but not nearly as enthusiastically as he had in 1976. He, too, thought Carter was mismanaging the Iran hostage crisis. Representing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden and others traveled to the Persian Gulf in April 1980 to find out more about the hostages. The senators happened to be escorted by a naval officer named John McCain, who would become friends with Biden and later join him in the Senate.

Visiting an aircraft carrier in the Gulf, the senators accidentally discovered that the carrier held a fleet of large military helicopters. They immediately guessed that President Carter was about to launch a raid on the US embassy in Iran, to rescue the hostages. They were outraged that the Carter administration would undertake such a complicated, risky military action without even informing the Senate.

Soon afterward, Operation Eagle Claw, as the raid was called, was launched. It failed badly. The US Special Forces never even reached Tehran, and eight soldiers were killed.

In November 1980, Ronald Reagan won the presidency by a landslide. Reagan was almost seventy at his inauguration in 1981, the oldest man ever to become president. In his inaugural speech he expressed the way he intended to govern: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Reagan’s Economics

Conservative Republicans believed that under Democratic presidents, the federal government had grown too big, costing taxpayers too much money to run. They also believed that federal agencies had too much power to regulate and tax businesses, which harmed the national economy. The solution, according to President Reagan and his supporters, was to cut taxes on wealthy investors and businesses, and to remove the regulations that were holding them back. They believed these policies would allow private businesses to thrive and automatically produce more wealth for everyone, including middle- and lower-class Americans.

But Democrats scornfully labeled the conservative war against taxes, especially taxes on big business and the wealthy, “trickle-down economics.” They believed that government regulation was necessary, for instance, to prevent businesses from polluting the environment or taking unfair advantage of customers. And they believed the government did a better job than private businesses of providing certain services for all Americans. To do so, the government needed to collect taxes.

In the same election, Republicans won a majority of seats in the Senate. Biden’s friend Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts had been chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee since 1978, but now he had to give way to Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

Senator Thurmond, elected to the Senate in 1954 as a Democrat, was a Dixiecrat who switched parties in 1964 to become a Republican. He was determined to use his powerful position as chair of the Judiciary Committee to fight against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

Even before Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in early 1981, the Democratic Party began speculating about the 1984 campaign. Their candidate would have to begin organizing a team and raising money years ahead of the actual election. The party’s eventual choice would be Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s vice president.

There was talk about Mondale picking the young senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, as his vice president, but Biden said he wouldn’t accept that nomination. Some of Biden’s advisors, including pollster Patrick Caddell, encouraged him to think of running for president himself. Biden was tempted. He’d turn