And Then There Were Six

(2 of 3)

At any rate, the Kinnock tape opened the floodgates. Students of Robert Kennedy's rhetoric began pointing out that some of Kennedy's words -- and Hubert Humphrey's too -- had been coming out of Biden's mouth, without attribution. Mark Johnson, a Gephardt staffer, passed copies of a story containing Kennedy-Biden quotes to CBS News, which dug up tapes to confirm the point. Thus the Gephardt campaign did help marginally to keep the furor going but, despite many rumors, did not originate it.

Two legal publications began chasing reports that Biden, while a law student at Syracuse University in 1965, had plagiarized large portions of a law-review article for a course assignment. The story somehow got to CBS, which aired it, and it was true. Syracuse is investigating whether a faculty member violated confidentiality by talking about that incident. Craig Christensen, former dean of the law school, told Biden in a June 11 letter that his file had been locked in a safe. But a source who attended a Sept. 4 dinner with Christensen told TIME that the former dean discussed Biden's student problems with his guests and said nothing about confidentiality. ^ Christensen admits talking at the dinner about the problem of securing student records but denies discussing the details of Biden's transcript.

Biden was just about the last politician who could survive such an onslaught. Any number of Democratic pros were happy to see him stumble; Biden had surrounded himself with aides, notably Pollster Pat Caddell, who struck them as arrogant. Caddell particularly antagonized Democratic elders by talking about leading an "inside insurgency" that would capture the party for the baby-boom generation.

To a number of people in the press and party, Biden came across as a glib wise guy, a candidate of style rather than substance. Says a Democratic strategist of his fellow pros: "This is a fairly liberal bunch, and we saw Biden trying to appropriate the liberal mantle with rhetorical tricks." Accusations of plagiarism thus hurt as almost nothing else could. They turned Biden's strong point, the passionate oratory that could bring a crowd to its feet, into a subject for ridicule and fed deep suspicions about his ability to be President.

Nonetheless, as late as last Sunday afternoon the Biden camp still thought it might be able to rescue the campaign. Then a Biden aide got a phone call from a friend at Newsweek, who read him a story from the coming week's issue that contained more damaging details. The story described how C-SPAN, a cable- TV network, had filmed Biden lying about his academic credentials at a campaign stop in Claremont, N.H., earlier this year. What was truly devastating was the tape itself, aired on TV last week. There was Biden, finger jabbing the air, haranguing a man who had asked about his law-school record. After boasting that he had a "much higher I.Q. than you do," Biden passionately recited a highly exaggerated list of his academic accomplishments. He said, for example, he had graduated in the "top half" of his law-school class; in fact, he was 76th in a class of 85.