Kathleen and I drove back to Washington the morning after Beau’s funeral. It was just the two of us. We listened to the radio station out of the University of Pennsylvania. Beau and I had loved it growing up. Now it was airing a three-shift tribute to Beau, a 1991 alum.
At one point, I pulled the car over and told Kathleen that maybe politics was now an option for me.
“You know, as horrible as I feel, I have a feeling of real purpose,” I said. It seemed so many people were more willing to forgive my past mistakes—relapses with drinking, administrative discharge from the Navy Reserve—than I was willing to forgive myself.
But I underestimated how much the wreckage of my past and all that I put my family through still weighed on Kathleen.
I suppose her response—Are you serious?—was entirely warranted.
We didn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the ride.
Or, really, ever again.
CHAPTER THREE
GROWING UP BIDEN
My father believed Beau could one day be president and that he’d get there with my help.
It seemed wholly natural. The two of us were raised on politics like farm kids raised on sweet corn. The rule Beau and I had as kids was that we could go with our dad to Washington whenever we wanted, though there was an unspoken limit to missing school too many days in a row. So two or three times a month we took the train with him to the Capitol and spent the day there. It was more like visiting the house of out-of-town relatives than being on one of those school field trips we saw all the other fidgety kids on. The people who worked for and with my father were like surrogate aunts and uncles. It wasn’t unusual for someone like Bill Cohen, say, then a Republican representative from Maine and later secretary of defense under Clinton, to ride the train back to Wilmington with Dad, have dinner with us, hang out, and stay overnight.
I’d sit on Dad’s lap during staff meetings, or take off with Beau to roam the Senate gym in the Russell Senate Office Building, which for us was just this big, rambling neo-Greek playground with a pool. Beau and I sometimes wandered into the steam room, where we’d find big-eared, bearlike Howell Heflin, Democratic senator from Alabama, chewing on his ever-present cigar as he shot the breeze with the youngish, still athletic-looking Ted Kennedy and an aging, angular Strom Thurmond.
They’d spot us and call out, “Hey, boys!”—we were always the only kids around—and we’d settle into some nearby corner to eavesdrop. Amid the swirling steam, the room filled with a chorus of mellifluous accents and clashing ideologies—conservative Democrat, liberal standard-bearer, rock-ribbed Republican. To our young ears, their chatter was as much music-making as politicking.
We were fixtures in the Senate cafeteria, knew all the waitstaff. Dad sat with us when he could, ordering a tuna fish on wheat and calling over whoever caught his eye. If Dad got pulled away, a senator would essentially babysit us. While I slurped navy bean soup and dug into a BLT (Beau always ordered a grilled cheese and fries), someone like Dan Inouye, from Hawaii, would share stories between bites about his Army buddies during World War II. I didn’t connect those tales to the shirt and jacket sleeve he pinned to his shoulder until years later, when I wrote a thesis paper in college about the senator’s heroism in leading an assault in Italy with the 442nd Infantry Regiment, the all Japanese American fighting unit, and losing his right arm to a grenade.
John Glenn, the astronaut-turned-senator from Ohio, would spot us waiting for Dad and call out, “Okay, boys, up to my office.” He’d lead us up there to show off models of his Project Mercury rocket, point to where he sat inside the Friendship 7 spacecraft, then regale us with tales about what it was like to be the first American to spin around in space and look down on entire oceans and continents. We’d just stare, our eyes wide and mouths open.
We absorbed some lasting lessons along the way, especially from when our father was new enough to have mentors and teachable moments, Washington style. I recall him telling us about a tutorial he’d gotten not long after arriving in office from Mike Mansfield, the longtime Senate majority leader from Montana.
Jesse Helms had been elected to the Senate the same year as Dad. When the Rehabilitation Act, a precursor of the Americans with Disabilities Act, was introduced in 1973, the hard-shell conservative from North Carolina—and bearer of another one of those mellifluous accents—went on the Senate floor to excoriate it as a massive federal overreach. Dad was so disgusted afterward that he responded with his own not-so-measured rant and asked, in effect, how anyone could be so callous, uncaring, and mean-spirited as to oppose such a magnanimous and much-needed bill.
Later, Mansfield summoned Dad to his office. “Iron Mike”—quiet, courteous, unfailingly persuasive—laid down his unwritten but inviolable law: you can question a colleague’s judgment, whether it be a Democrat or a Republican, but you should never question his or her motives. Everybody comes to the Senate for a reason, he went on, but nobody comes for the sole purpose of being mean-spirited or un-American. Someone’s judgment might be off, but his or her motives weren’t open to questioning, particularly on sensitive issues like this.
To illuminate his point, Mansfield told Dad a story about Helms. Several years earlier, Jesse and his wife, Dot, who’d been married for twenty years and were the parents of two teenage daughters, woke one morning around Christmas and read a newspaper article about a nine-year-old orphan with cerebral palsy. In the story, the boy, who used a wheelchair, said that
