This 365-page autobiography, published in 2007, follows the Delaware Senator from his roots in Scranton, Penn., to his current post as chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Biden ends his book by criticizing George W. Bush's handling of post-Saddam Iraq while emphasizing his early and unheeded misgivings about the war.
—M.J. Stephey
Promises to Keep
by Joe Biden
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| Childhood | Joe Biden was born in 1942 in Scranton, Penn., to a working-class Irish family. At 10, he moved with his parents and three younger brothers to Delaware. His father sometimes worked side jobs to support the family, which was very religious and extremely close. An embarrassing stutter plagued his childhood and adolescence, but he eventually overcame it by quoting long poems in front of a mirror. In high school, Biden says he was an athlete, not an academic: "Sports was as natural to me as speaking was unnatural." (p. 4) |
| Catholicism and Core Beliefs | Biden credits his Catholic upbringing for the personal — as well as political — beliefs he holds to this day: "My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion." As a young boy, Biden recalls being especially moved by newly elected John F. Kennedy, the country's first Catholic president: "The thing that struck me most ... was not the newness of his ideas but how much those ideas rhymed with the lessons I'd learned at Saint Paul's and Holy Rosary and Saint Helena's and Archmere — and especially at my home." For Biden, "Wherever there were nuns, there was home." (p. 7, 25) |
| Starting a Family | During a 1964 spring break trip to the Bahamas, he met his future wife, Neilia Hunter. He recalls sneaking into a hotel pool and spotting the New York native: "She was lit by the unforgiving glory of a full afternoon sun, and I couldn't see a single flaw. Basically, I fell ass over tin cup in love — at first sight." They married two years later despite Neilia's parents’ initial objections to Biden's Catholic background. They had three children — two sons and one daughter. (p. 7, 25, 28, 31) |
| Political Aspirations | As a teenager, Biden dreamed of becoming a public figure "who would do great things and earn a place in history books." Though his family lacked the political connections often needed to succeed, he knew there were a few exceptions: "The ones who got there on their own hook were almost all lawyers." That, he says, set his course.
But his academic laziness, which plagued him at the University of Delaware and nearly cost him admission into law school, troubled him at the Syracuse University College of Law: "The work didn't seem so hard, just boring; and I was a dangerous combination of arrogant and sloppy." With Neilia's help — along with cramming and caffeine — Biden made up for his many absences from class and graduated in 1968, ranked 76 out of 85 students. Later, reporters would dig up a stain on his academic record involving inadequate citations that bordered on plagiarism. In 1969, after briefly practicing law, Biden decided to run for New Castle County Council. He won by nearly 2,000 votes and became one of Delaware's up-and-coming Democrats. (p. 26, 39, 50) |
| Becoming a Senator | When several of Delaware's top Democrats approached Biden about running for U.S. Senate, he was skeptical about his prospect at winning and he was certainly not alone. Few believed that Biden could beat his opponent, longtime senator and Republican incumbent J. Caleb Boggs. "The big thing I had going for me in the Senate race was the big thing I had going for me my whole life: the Bidens ... especially my brothers and sister." His youth and underdog status actually worked toward his advantage. After smartly campaigning for the nation's new 18-year-old voters, he enjoyed a surprising victory and became the fifth-youngest senator in U.S. history. Ironically, Biden's early stutter and his unorthodox way of overcoming it helped him become quite an effective public speaker. "What had terrified me in grade school and high school was turning out to be my strength ... With all that practice quoting Emerson, I could memorize long passages; I never had to look down and read a text. So when I talked, I could watch an audience for their reaction." Later, Biden's oratory deftness would become a burden, with some journalists going so far as to question whether his actions backed his words: "He sells the sizzle but is short on the steak," they said, calling him "more of a show horse than a workhorse." (p. 38, 59, 77, 151) |
| Losing a Wife and Child | A week before Christmas in 1972, Biden was in D.C. when his wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident in Delaware. His two young sons were also in the car but had survived, though both were seriously injured — one needed a full-body cast, and the other suffered serious head injuries. Biden recalls feeling weirdly numb, distraught and outraged at the same time: "I began to understand how despair led people to just cash it in; how suicide wasn't just an option but a rational option ... I felt God had played a horrible trick on me, and I was angry." |
| Rebuilding His Family and Career |
The accident occurred just weeks after Biden won the Senate election, so he was sworn into office from a hospital bedside. Politics became meaningless. He writes, "My future was telescoped into putting one foot in front of the other ... Washington, politics, the Senate had no hold on me." He credits his parents and siblings, especially his sister Valerie, for helping him cope with Neilia and daughter Naomi's deaths: “They [his family] never left my side," he writes, "I have no memory of ever being physically alone." Though he considered leaving office completely, Biden returned to Congress, but admits that, at first, he did the least amount of work required. He later found out that some Congressional staffers were actually placing bets on how long he would last. His return to public life was also afflicted, he recalls, by an insatiable media. He openly resented the press for its morbid fascination with "what they liked to call my 'personal tragedy.'"
In 1975, Biden met Jill Jacobs, a teacher from Delaware. His relationship with her renewed his interest in life and politics: "It had given me the permission to be me again." Two years later, they married with Biden's two young sons standing next to them at the altar. A few years later, their daugher Ashley was born. (p. 80, 81, 85, 86, 100, 117, 118) |
| Eyeing the White House |
Biden laments the Democratic Party's crumbling base during the late 1970s and 1980s, especially during Jimmy Carter's administration. As Biden recalls, "Everything Carter touched seemed to turn to dust in his hands: the energy crisis, the recession, inflation, the Iran hostage crisis." In 1980, with Carter's approval rating on the decline, the Democrats started looking at Biden as a good compromise candidate. Ultimately, he decided against running — then and again in 1984 — citing youth and inexperience: "By my own standards, I wasn't ready to be president."
Reagan's administration proved even more troubling. By the mid-1980s, Biden writes, "People were so tired of the old Reagan cant that government was the enemy" that he became even more eager to return his party to the glory days of his youth. After announcing his candidacy in 1987, he noticed an ad by British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock and decided to use Kinnock's words about government programs as a hand up and not a hand-out as the foundation of his presidential platform. During a videotaped debate, he recited Kinnock's words but failed to cite their source. The New York Times accused him of plagiarism, and reporters dug up the citation mistake in his Syracuse University records. Biden knew he was in trouble: "When I stopped trying to explain to everybody and thought it through, the blame totally fell on me." Shortly before withdrawing his presidential bid, Biden was called off the campaign trail following huge political news: the resignation of Justice Lewis Powell from the Supreme Court. (p. 135, 136, 142, 148, 184, 185, 190, 199, 202, 203) |
| Supreme Court Frenzy |
Biden returned to Washington amid a media circus — with Justice Powell resigning, President Reagan now had a chance to "fulfill the Reagan Revolution." As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Justice nomination process, Biden's role was a significant one. The senator recalls a Washington Post editorial at the time, which stated: "Biden is really under the gun, facing a test he cannot afford to lose." After Reagan nominated Robert Bork, a distinguished and famously conservative judge, Biden remembers his anxiety building.
Perhaps owing to his own recent plagiarism scandal, Biden refused to engage in the type of personal attacks that had marred previous nomination hearings: "The way to stop Bork, as I saw it, was on the question of his outside-the-mainstream judicial philosophy — or ideology." Bork's nomination failed, and newspapers across the country praised Biden's handling of the hearings, calling them "an extraordinary lesson" and a "celebration of Republican democracy at its best." And, Biden writes, "a funny thing happened on the way to finding that argument; it opened me up to new ways of thinking about my own long-held political beliefs." (p. 168, 172, 173, 183, 204, 210). |
| Violence Against Women Act | Biden chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary from 1987 until 1995, and during that time he took particular interest in women's rights and gender-based crimes, authoring the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). After three years drumming up support, Biden helped push the bill through Congress in 1994. Biden counts the passage of the VAWA bill as one of his "proudest moments in public life." (p. xix) |
| Bosnian Genocide |
Were it not for a Croatian monk, Biden writes that he would never have taken interest in the former Yugoslavia. But after hearing the Monk’s tales of Croatian Catholics and Bosnian Muslims being raped and killed by Slobodan Milosevic's army of Orthodox Serbs, Biden became an early supporter of U.S. intervention. He remembers this stance as a “lonely crusade,” recalling the famous 1992 declaration of James Baker, then secretary of state, who said "we don't have a dog in this fight."
The election of Bill Clinton to the White House renewed Biden's hope that NATO air strikes could end the genocide, but Biden writes that the President's lack of foreign-policy experience made him timid in the world arena. With support from Vice President Al Gore and Senator Bob Dole, the Senate lifted its arms embargo on Bosnia, and NATO began an air campaign the following week. That moment, Biden says, was one of his most gratifying as a public figure. (p. 246, 247, 254, 260, 265, 254, 280, 284) |
| George W. Bush and the Rise of the Neocons |
Biden recalls his first impression of Bush as a favorable one, noting the President's initial willingness to consult both Republicans and Democrats about foreign policy, even if such questions belied his lack of experience.
What Biden didn't like, however, were the neo-conservative advisers with which Bush chose to surround himself. Their arm-the-heavens, to-hell-with-the-rest-of-the-world approach to foreign policy was a dangerous one, he writes. Worse still, Biden noticed a “San Andreas-like fault” that split Bush's foreign policy team, with Secretary Colin Powell and the State Department on one side and Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the civilians at the Defense Department on the other. Ultimately, he said, the hawkish Defense Department had the final say.
Biden acknowledges the neocons' good intentions, but blames their lack of firsthand, military experience for the bad advice they gave Bush: "They seemed so absolutely in thrall to the ideological concepts they'd dreamed up in their think tanks over the past twenty years that they were completely untethered to the facts on the ground." Biden describes the "Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz view of the world" as one that encouraged unilateral, military action as a diplomacy tool and believed in scaring rogue states into subjection. "'Shock and awe' was more than just a slogan," Biden writes. "It wasn't hard to see why an optimistic, ambitious, but woefully unprepared and uninformed president could get swept away by the vision." (p. 292, 296, 298, 311, 316, 309, 329, 330, 344) |
| 9/11 | In the months preceding the 9/11 attacks, Biden chaired hearings in the Foreign Relations Committee to "investigate the very real threats I thought the administration was ignoring" by pumping billions of dollars into missile and nuclear defense weapons. On Sept. 10, 2001, Biden delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., saying, "We have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat, while the real threat comes to this country in the hold of a ship, the belly of a plane, or smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack." The Senator goes on to criticize President Bush for fleeing Capitol Hill that morning of the attacks, and doing a "hopscotch around the country in Air Force One, unseen by the American public." He also blames Bush's unilateralism for America's fall from the world's graces: "The aftermath of 9/11 had revealed a deep vein of sympathy for the United States in surprising places," which, Biden contends, did not last long. (p. 298, 300, 304, 330) |
| The Taliban and Afghanistan | Biden fully supported a military campaign in Afghanistan, having noted that most terrorist breeding grounds were found in countries with weak governments like Kabul's. "Two weeks into the fight in Afghanistan, it was clear that the military campaign was going to be a success," Biden writes. But the war's easy success gave Bush's neocon advisers even more sway over the President; they opposed Biden's call for nation-building within Afghanistan to further weaken the Taliban. While Biden continued to seek more and better resources for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Biden recalls a disturbing encounter with Bush adviser Richard Pearle, who hinted at the administration's new focus on the "Axis of Evil": North Korea, Iran and Iraq. Most notable, Biden writes, was Bush's desire to topple Saddam. (p. 309, 304) |
| War in Iraq | The Senator says he was hesitant to invade Iraq, and called for Senate hearings to explore the consequences of military action. At the time, the rationale for the war rested on suspicions of weapons of mass destruction, but Biden writes that he was more worried about how Iraq would function after Saddam was deposed. Testifying before the Senate in July 2002, Biden said: "It would be a tragedy if we removed a tyrant in Iraq only to leave chaos in its wake." Biden ended up approving Bush's resolution for war, though he and Senator Richard Lugar tried and failed to limit its expansive language, which stated that the Administration could go after Saddam even if he agreed to disarm.
Biden blames Bush for the war's lack of progress, adding that he regretted seeing people like Colin Powell "shifting blame to Bush's handpicked minions" — Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Bush's biggest mistake, according to Biden, was "his unwillingness to level with the American people about what would be required to prevail in Iraq." (p. 330, 331, 335, 337) |
| 2004 Presidential Election | The Senator argues that Bush and his political team used the Iraq war "as another chance to drive a wedge between Americans" during the 2004 presidential election. "The disconnect between the administration's rhetoric back in Washington and the reality on the ground was greater than it had ever been." Biden was shocked and disappointed when John Kerry lost, saying, "I felt terrible for John, but I also felt really worried for the country." In Biden's mind, Kerry's defeat had only one upside — it renewed his interest in a 2008 bid for the White House. (p. 354, 356) |
| 2008 Bid for the White House | With the support of his family, Biden announced his candidacy in January 2007. He ends his book with his wife's straightforward prediction for the campaign: "You're going to give it your best shot. And you're going to go out there and run for the right reasons, and tell people why you should be president ... and we'll be okay." (p. 365) |