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

York, Joe Biden was struck down. He felt “something like lightning flashing inside my head, a powerful electrical surge—and then a rip of pain like I’d never felt before.”

The next morning he was found lying on the floor of his room. He was rushed back to Wilmington. At Saint Francis Hospital, a spinal tap determined that Joe had suffered an aneurysm—a leakage of blood—inside his skull. He was given the last rites—prayers and blessing for the dying—by a Catholic priest.

The only hope for Joe was a dangerous and delicate operation, which had to be performed at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center near Washington. There the brain surgeon explained that a possible side effect of the surgery could be loss of speech. Biden joked, “I kind of wish that had happened last summer,” meaning the fateful speech in which he’d forgotten to credit Kinnock’s words.

The seven-hour surgery was successful. Joe’s shaved, stitched head looked, as he wrote later, “like a misshapen baseball that had just had its cover nearly knocked off.” But he was alive, and he could still speak.

Recovery, however, was slow and frustrating. At home a few weeks later, Biden suffered a blood clot in his lung and was taken back to Walter Reed Hospital for more treatment and medication. Finally leaving the hospital again, he had a defiant joke ready for the reporters waiting in the parking garage: “I’ve decided to announce that I am reentering the race for president.”

The reality was that for the first time in his life, Joe Biden was forced to slow down. No visitors. No work, even from home. No phone calls, even from the president. He slept a great deal, and gradually he healed. In May he returned to the hospital for surgery on another aneurysm, and stayed there for several more weeks. Then back home for a whole summer of just rest and recovery.

The experience of nearly dying, and then having to live life in the slow lane for months on end, made Joe Biden look at life differently. He didn’t feel the same pressure to succeed at everything, every time. His campaign for president had come to a humiliating close, but that wasn’t the end of the story of Joe Biden.

He was still a senator, still chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and the Judiciary Committee. After Labor Day he was finally able to board the Amtrak train to Washington again. In the Senate Chamber, Biden’s colleagues gave him a standing ovation.

Stand Up to Bullies

Beau and Hunter Biden were worried about their father. The night Joe Biden had decided to drop out of the presidential race of 1988, they’d pleaded with him to keep fighting. If Joe gave up this fight, they feared, he would also drop out of public life—his chosen life’s work. “But, Dad,” Beau said, “if you leave, you’ll never be the same.”

In fact, Joe Biden did not give up his plan of running for president. He only decided to be patient, rebuild his political reputation, and wait for the right time. For now, as he settled back into his work in the Senate, he could enjoy his family.

In September 1988, Hunter Biden entered Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He worked at the school to help pay for his room and board, as Beau did at the University of Pennsylvania, and took out a student loan. As Joe Biden liked to remind voters, he was a middle-class citizen, like most of them. The Senate was full of millionaires, but Joe Biden wasn’t one of them.

That fall, the race for president was in the final stages. Mike Dukakis of Massachusetts had won the Democratic nomination, but President Reagan’s vice president, Republican George H. W. Bush, won the general election on November 8. Now the Republicans would have four more years to nominate conservatives to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s top concern in Congress was working on a bill called the Violence Against Women Act. Biden had been working on crime issues in the Senate since his first term, but he was shocked and disgusted to learn how widespread violence against women was in the US. Too many married men beat and sometimes killed their wives. Too many young men abused the women they dated.

Biden had been raised to believe that for someone in a position of power, the worst sin was to abuse that power. He often brought this up with his children during dinner-table discussions, and it made a deep impression on Ashley. In elementary school, she wrote an essay on what she wanted to be when she grew up: she wanted to help abused women. And she would, in fact, become a social worker.

Abuses of power came up in foreign relations too. In the Middle East, trouble arose between Iraq, ruled by the dictator Saddam Hussein, and its neighboring countries. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and quickly defeated Kuwait. The Bush administration was concerned that Saudi Arabia, a US ally and an important source of oil, would be attacked next, and President Bush began to build up US forces.

Biden agreed with President Bush that Iraq’s aggression had to be stopped. But as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he questioned whether US interests in the Middle East justified going to war. Joe Biden had begun his political career campaigning against the “quagmire” of the Vietnam War. He feared that an attack on Iraq could turn into another such costly and useless mission.

Biden also insisted, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that the president needed to consult with Congress before he sent American troops into battle. According to the Constitution of the United States, the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces. But only Congress has the power to declare war on another country.

However, without much consulting, President Bush pushed a resolution through the United Nations Security Council. Biden voted against it, but the majority of the Senate voted to