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

But worse, the bill would turn out to have unintended consequences. It included harsher sentences, including the death penalty, for many crimes. More people were imprisoned for longer times, and the populations in state and federal prisons grew.

In the Biden family, Beau and Hunter were pursuing their adult lives. Beau, like his father, attended the Syracuse University law school, with the intention of going into politics. Hunter spent a year as a volunteer in Oregon, where he met and married Kathleen Buhle in 1993. Later that year, Joe’s first grandchild was born. Hunter named her Naomi, after his lost sister.

In 1996, Senator Joe Biden was up for reelection again. Hunter was now living in Wilmington with his wife and little daughter, and Joe appointed him as his deputy campaign manager. Deputy, of course, to Aunt Valerie, who was still running Joe’s campaigns. Hunter also had a job with Maryland Bank, N.A. (MBNA).

Joe Biden hadn’t given up the idea of running for president, but 1996 was not the right time either. President Bill Clinton was naturally the Democratic nominee, and he was reelected.

The next year, 1997, Hunter bought his own house in Wilmington and opened it, as Joe always had, to friends and family. Beau moved into the third floor. He was now working as a prosecutor for the US Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia. He met his future wife, Hallie Olivere, at one of the gatherings at Hunter’s house.

Toward the end of 1998, Hunter left his job at MBNA in Wilmington and took a position in President Clinton’s administration. He and Kathleen moved to Washington, DC, where their daughter Naomi would attend the Sidwell Friends School. Their second daughter, Finnegan, was born in 1998, and a third daughter, Maisy, in 2000. As for Joe and Jill, they had become “Pop” and “Nana.”

In the presidential campaign of 2000, Al Gore, Clinton’s vice president, ran against the Republican candidate, Governor George W. Bush of Texas. That November, the election results were too close to call. Weeks later, the election was decided by another close vote, 5–4, by the Supreme Court. There was a conservative majority on the court, and they ruled in favor of Bush. This was yet another example of how important appointments to the Supreme Court had become.

Hunter was still in Washington with his family, but now he had a new job. He was a professional lobbyist, hired by businesses or other groups to try to influence public officials. He and his father had an unspoken agreement not to discuss Hunter’s business. Since Senator Biden was a powerful political figure, they didn’t want to give the impression that Joe was using his influence to help his son’s business dealings.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Senator Biden boarded the Amtrak train, as usual, at the Wilmington station. His train was halfway to Washington when Jill called him with stunning news: two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City. The country was under attack.

In Washington, Biden heard that a third plane had hit the Pentagon, the military headquarters of the United States. Joe Biden’s instinct was to run toward the Capitol. If we were under attack, he thought, the citizens of the United States would be terrified. He felt that Congress ought to reassure the country by staying in session as usual.

But security officers were herding people away from the government buildings, and Biden was not allowed to enter the Capitol. Ashley called as he was standing in the park across the street. “Daddy!” She’d heard on the news that a fourth plane was headed for Washington. “Get out of there!”

Several hours later, Joe Biden did get out of Washington, after trying in vain to persuade Congress to stay in session. But first he gave an interview to an ABC reporter, reassuring Americans that the government would stand strong and the country would pull through the crisis. During the drive home, Biden answered a call from President Bush, who had been spirited away from Washington on Air Force One by the Secret Service. He praised Biden’s reassuring speech.

Beau Biden, like his father, had the instinct to run toward danger, to come to the defense of his country. In 2003 he joined the National Guard. The year before, he and Hallie had married. Their daughter, Natalie, was born in 2004, and their son, Robert Hunter Biden II (named after Hunter), in 2006.

Joe Biden liked and respected President George W. Bush, but Biden mistrusted the president’s advisors, led by Vice President Dick Cheney. They seemed bent on invading Iraq, although it was a terrorist group called Al Qaeda, not Iraq that had attacked the US on September 11, 2001. To convince Congress to invade Iraq, the Bush administration claimed to have proven that Iraq had harbored Al Qaeda terrorists, and that Iraq now had weapons of mass destruction. At that, Senator Biden and most of his colleagues voted to give the president the power to invade Iraq. In 2003, the Bush administration launched what they promised would be a quick and easy military mission.

In the campaign for president in 2004, Biden’s friend Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts was the Democratic candidate. Biden honestly thought that American voters would choose Kerry, a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War. Americans were unhappy about the Iraq War. The conflict had dragged on, costing nine hundred American lives and many billions of dollars so far.

But in November, Senator Kerry lost to President Bush. However, in Illinois a young politician named Barack Obama won his election for senator. Joe Biden was impressed with Obama’s intelligence, his work ethic, and his understanding of how the US fit in among the nations of the world. Biden promised to get Obama a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Now Joe Biden was determined to run for president in 2008. He was deeply disturbed by George W. Bush’s choices in foreign policy, but even