Biden Is Also Reborn

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His next few years in the Senate were not memorable, but when he remarried in 1977, the cloud lifted and he began enjoying his work. By the start of the current presidential campaign, he was one of the most promising Democratic contenders. But he withdrew before the first primary when allegations of resume bloating and plagiarism surfaced, saying "I have only myself to be angry with."

He looks back not in anger but in wonder at how fate has its way with a man. "There is no doubt -- the doctors have no doubt -- that had I remained in ! the race, I'd be dead," he says. A headache, which he thought was a pinched nerve, came during what would have been his peak campaigning time in Iowa. Had he still been running, he says, he would have toughed it out.

On Feb. 11 he went to a doctor in Wilmington, who discovered an aneurysm, a weakening in an artery supplying blood to the brain; the artery was already leaking. Biden was rushed to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for eight hours of cranial surgery, which many patients do not survive. Lying completely still in intensive care afterward led to the development of a blood clot on his lung, which required an operation to implant a filter in a vein. In May he was back on the operating table, for surgery on a second aneurysm. It was a hellish time, but he is completely recovered. "The good news is that I can do anything I did before. The bad news is that I can't do anything better."

The event is winding down, and Biden, the quick-smiling Irish-Catholic pol, kisses and jokes his way back to the Jeep. He seems to know who among the women in pantsuits sent the fruit baskets, who the flowers. He calls out to George Collins, who brought a truckload of watermelons from his farm, to save one for him.

He planned to refuse all interviews because he wanted to keep the day "personal, just between me and the folks who have been with me for 16 years." But in the pitch-black darkness he talks about how the past seven months have changed him. A man who always thought he spent a lot of time with his kids found out "I really hadn't. I knew I had reached a new level with them when after a month with me at home they cried, 'Oh, no, Dad, not Ragu again!' " About his run for the presidency, he says, "It just wasn't my time. Thank God, because it saved my life." He wakes up each morning to "my second chance in life," looking back at how far he has come instead of grasping for the next rung on the ladder, satisfied, grateful, to be a U.S. Senator. "I'm alive. I'm well. My family is happy. I do something I love." More than enough for anyone.