The Book of Joe Read online

  So he devised a few clever hacks. Let’s say, for example, that he had to talk to customers on his paper route. (Of course Joe Biden had a paper route.) He knew that one of his neighbors was a Yankees fan. To survive a conversation with the old man, he would read up on what had happened to the Yankees the night before and then memorize a sentence in the right cadence. “Mick-ey—Mant-le—hit a—home run.” Over and over. “Mick-ey—Mant-le—hit a—home run.” Joey would even wear a Yankees cap when he saw the old man, hoping to nudge the conversation to his comfort zone.

  He did the same thing at school, where he noticed two things. First, students were seated in alphabetical order, As in the front and Zs in the back. Second, when a nun asked the class to read passages aloud from a book, she always did it in the same order. Lightbulb. So before each class, he could count the number of paragraphs and memorize the one that he was likely to recite.

  WISDOM OF JOE

  Map out your attack.

  One day, for example, he knew the class would read aloud a passage on Sir Walter Raleigh. Joey counted the paragraphs and figured out the section that he would need to recite: “Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentleman…Then the gentleman put the cloak across the puddle, so the lady could step…”

  The night before, he followed his usual routine and blocked out the cadence, getting it down cold:

  Then the gen-tle

  Man put the Cloak

  A-cross the Puddle.

  Done. He felt good about it. The next day the nun, as expected, asked him to deliver that very passage. He nailed it.

  Except he was thrown a curveball.

  “Mr. Biden, what was that word?” the nun asked.

  Joey panicked.

  “Mr. Biden! Look at the page, and read it!” the nun demanded.

  But he couldn’t. The word she wanted him to repeat was “Gentleman,” but now, off the script of his carefully prepared cadences, the only thing he could verbalize was “Ju-ju-ju-ju-ju-gentleman.” The jig was up.

  Snickers.

  And not only were his classmates chuckling, but this time the nun cut him off and said to him, mockingly, “Mr. Bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden…”

  You’ve hit rock bottom when you’re getting picked on by a nun. Young Joey, ashamed and furious, walked out of the classroom without saying a word. He beelined for home.

  Joey told his mom what had happened, she told him to get in the car, and they drove straight to the Catholic school and marched to the principal’s office, where his mother asked to see Joey’s teacher. “Did you say Bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden?” his mom asked the nun. The sister confessed that she had. So Mrs. Biden, as pious and Irish Catholic as they come, stared down the nun and said that if she ever mocked Joey’s stutter again, she would “rip that bonnet off” her head.

  JOE BIDEN AND ICE CREAM

  “My name is Joe Biden, and I love ice cream,” he once said as vice president, while visiting the headquarters of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams in Columbus, Ohio. “You all think I’m kidding—I’m not. I eat more ice cream than three other people you’d like to be with, all at once.”

  These creamy cravings started at a young age. After Sunday dinners, Joey would ride his bike to the pharmacy, buy a half gallon of Breyers ice cream, and then cycle home to watch what then counted as prestige TV, Lassie.

  His favorite flavor? Classic chocolate chip. He can polish off two cones at a time. While wearing aviators. (As a Twitter meme suggests, “Find someone who looks at you like Joe Biden looks at his second cone of ice cream.”) Milk shakes are fair game, too: He once tipped $20 on a $3 chocolate milk shake in a South Carolina diner.

  “He gets excited about ice cream,” remembers Arun Chaudhary, the ever-present videographer. “It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy to an extent, like when someone knows you like cats and they keep buying you porcelain cats to put all over your home. So the [advance team] would bring him ice cream because it’s a thing. But he’s also genuinely excited.” On one trip, President Obama asked for a soft serve, and Biden ordered two scoops of the harder ice cream. He looked directly into Chaudhary’s camera and said, “I ordered hard ice cream, because I’m the hard guy.” (“It was funny,” says Chaudhary, “but I’m glad he said it to me and not CNN.”)

  And in 2017, as something of a Lifetime Achievement in Ice Cream Award, Biden had a flavor named after him at Cornell University, where the students nominated flavors and voted. The four runners-up:

  Biden’s Chocolate Bites

  Bits n’ Biden

  Not Your Average Joe’s Chocolate Chip

  Uncle Joe’s Chocolate Chip

  AND THE WINNER: Big Red, White & Biden

  As a young teenager, Biden cast a hopeful eye at a private school called Archmere, a tiny, prestigious, challenging Catholic high school. He thought of it as “my deepest desire, my Oz.” Yet Oz never comes cheap. At $300 a year, the private tuition was too high for his working class parents. So Joe Biden put himself to work, applying for a summer work-study program. Instead of goofing off with his buddies, he spent his days pulling weeds, painting fences, and using vinegar to wash the school’s two hundred windows.

  The school accepted him, and thanks to his gardening and window scrubbing, his parents could afford it. Only one problem: The stutter continued to haunt him. It was so serious that even though the school had a mandatory public speaking class, out of Catholic mercy, they gave him an exception and let him skip the course.

  So Biden kept practicing. He memorized poems and recited them in the mirror. In a bit of foreshadowing that sounds simply too rich to be true, he even memorized the Declaration of Independence, saying it again and again, hoping to master the cadence.

  We hold—these truths.

  To be—self—ev-i-dent…

  If there was a theory on how to lick the stutter, Joey would try it. “Someone said a stutter was caused by facial muscles seizing up in nervous convulsion,” explains Cramer. “So Joey stood for hours in front of a mirror, reading aloud or simply talking to his own image, while he tried to relax the muscles in his face, to attain that droopy, logy, sloooow eeeease that he thought would solve his problem.” He also took some inspiration from the ancient Greek orator Demosthenes, who, as legend has it, honed his craft by filling his mouth with pebbles and then shouting his words to the ocean. So Joey did the same thing, reading aloud his homework while gargling pebbles and stones.

  WISDOM OF JOE

  Steal from the greats.

  To indulge in some quick armchair psychology, it’s easy here to spot the seeds of the “Biden Doctrine,” which might be something like, Stick up for the little guy. The little guy might be a kid getting bullied, an out-of-work autoworker, or a victim of domestic violence. This theory has at least one believer: Barack Obama. “When Joe sticks up for the little guy,” Obama said, “we hear the young man standing in front of the mirror reciting Yeats or Emerson, studying the muscles in his face, determined to vanquish a debilitating stutter.”

  Eventually Joey would become Joe, and Joe made the high school football team. He was the second-shortest guy in his freshman class, and still all skin and bones, yet he was quick, shifty, and had good receiving instincts—he could snare whatever pass the quarterback lobbed his way. This earned him a new-and-improved nickname, “Hands.”

  Then he grew. He shot up a foot between his freshman and junior years, emerging as one of the team’s best players. Playing as a pass-catching halfback, “Hands” led the team with ten touchdowns, delighting his fantasy football owners. In one of Biden’s first press clippings, a 1960 sports section of the Chester Delaware County Daily Times reports, “The home team scored first in the opening period when…halfback Joe Biden…lugged the pigskin an additional 10 yards into pay dirt.” Another game recap notes that “Biden stood out for the Archers.”

  The team went undefeated. In what sounds like a scene from a Disney movie, in the championship game, Biden scored the winning touchdown and they won the title. The team has stayed close. In 1985
they held a twenty-five-year reunion, and in 2010 they held a fifty-year reunion, hosted by the vice president of the United States.

  As Joe’s time at Archmere drew to a close, he finally began to conquer his stutter. This led to a shocking revelation. He liked speaking in public. Hell, he was even good at it. All those nights spent memorizing blocks of text, practicing the cadence, and speaking to the mirror had given him a sneaky advantage: Now he didn’t need to look at the text when he gave a speech, and he could make strong eye contact, ad lib, and interact with the audience.

  So he began giving little mini speeches. About the world, about politics, about life. According to biographer Jules Witcover, one of his friends, David Walsh, later said that Joe “never saw a soapbox he didn’t want to get up on. He was very knowledgeable about history and politics.” Joe liked to talk (and talk and talk) in the backyard of the Walshes’ house, sometimes with David’s parents. (As a joke, his buddies would later give him an actual soapbox.)

  “Joe, what do you want to do?” David’s dad asked the seventeen-year-old.

  “Mr. Walsh,” he said, without hesitation, “I want to be president of the United States.”

  Biden would never fully shake the memories of that stutter. Sometimes it came back. And sometimes he spotted it in others. Take a random afternoon in 1994, when he gave a presentation to an eighth-grade class that visited him from Delaware. One of the kids raised his hand to ask a question. The kid was impossible to miss: He wore a bright orange, yellow, and blue sweater from Cross Colours, that ubiquitous brand from the mid-’90s.

  The Sweater Kid was Branden Brooks, or “Skip,” who’d struggled with a stutter all his life. Like Biden, he was afraid to raise his hand in class. When you have a stutter, it seems that nothing is easy. Not even ordering food at McDonald’s. In Branden’s experience, “You don’t order exactly what you want, because you’re afraid of how it comes out.” Talking on the phone with girls is hard. Everything is hard.

  Yet when Branden heard Senator Biden’s speech, he had the guts to ask a question. Nailed it, he thought, pleased that he didn’t stumble over his words. But Biden knew. He gently pulled Branden aside and said, “I notice that you have a stutter. I used to have one, too, but I never let it hold me back. You have something important to say, and people will wait to hear it.”

  On that day in Washington, frankly, those words from Biden didn’t really sink in. (“I didn’t think of it as a big deal at the time,” he said years later. “I was thirteen. And I was like, Okay, then we went off and had more fun in DC.”)

  Then he got the letter.

  A few weeks later, Branden received a handwritten note from Senator Joseph R. Biden, who must have made some inquiries about how to get in touch.

  Dear Branden,

  It was a pleasure meeting you yesterday. You are a fine—bright—young man with a great future ahead of you if you continue to work hard.

  Remember what I told you about stuttering. You can beat it just like I did. When you do, you will be a stronger man for having won. Also remember, every time you are tempted to make fun of someone with a problem, how it feels when you are made fun of.

  Treat everyone with respect and you will be respected yourself.

  Your friend,

  Joe Biden

  There were no cameras. This was no PR move. Senator Biden stopped whatever else he was doing and took the time to ink a letter to an audience of one: thirteen-year-old Branden Brooks.

  Branden took Biden’s advice. He began speaking up more. “I was like, he’s right, I need to put myself out there, I need to not be afraid. I need to speak my mind,” he says now. In ninth grade he ran for class president…and won. The next year he ran for class president…and won. Every year in college, he ran for class president. Every year he won. Every year he gave a speech in front of the school.

  Emboldened by his public speaking mojo, Branden eventually went to law school. Like Biden, he wanted to go into public service. He wanted to be a prosecutor. In 2008, he was sworn in as a prosecutor by the attorney general of Delaware, a man named Beau Biden.

  And because life comes full circle, in 2015, he tweeted a photo of his swearing-in ceremony, along with a picture of that letter. He thanked the vice president: “Took your advice to heart and years later Beau swore me in as a prosecutor.”

  Beau Biden swearing in Branden Brooks.

  And the vice president responded: “And it’s still true today, my friend. Treat everyone with respect and you will be respected yourself.”

  Biden, of course, was just channeling the words of his mother. Nobody is better than you. You’re not better than anybody else, but nobody is any better than you.

  2

  Hot Young Biden (1960–72)

  “I probably started my first year of college a little too interested in football and meeting new girls. There were a lot of new girls to meet.”

  As he mulled over where to go to college, Joe thought about becoming a priest. (Can you imagine a Father Biden? The “Holy Finger-Guns”! The Aviators Priest!) Even though he had “dated a lot of girls” by that point, he still felt the calling of the frock. The headmaster of Archmere gently suggested that before he swore any lifelong vows of celibacy, maybe he should go to college, then decide.

  So he went to the University of Delaware, dated more girls, and basically turned himself into Hot Young Biden. How hot? A ’60s-era photo of college Joe, where he looks a bit like a young Channing Tatum, would later break Twitter and make Leslie Knope faint. Just a few of the breathless reactions:

  “Young Joe Biden could leave me on read at 4:30 and text at 8:47 and I would reply at 8:46.”

  “I want to go back in time and make young Joe Biden a Valentine’s Day card and put it in his locker waiting in the corner for the surprise on his face as he sees the Valentine’s Day card fall from out of his locker.”

  “If they don’t remind you of Joe Biden,

  don’t have sex with them.”

  It’s possible that Hot Young Biden might have been a little too hot for his own good. In the fairy-tale version of this story, Biden worked his tail off in college, hit the books, and served as a role model for the youth of America. Nope. He basically loafed about, and later confessed: “I probably started my first year of college a little too interested in football and meeting new girls. There were a lot of new girls to meet.”

  He was still trying to meet girls in his junior year, when he drove to Fort Lauderdale with some buddies for Spring Break. Yet he was bummed to find a mob of silly drunken college kids, all of them acting stupid. (Spring Break: unchanged since the ’60s.) So a couple of friends suggested that they take a quick trip to the Bahamas; it would cost only $25 for a round-trip plane ticket.

  Biden wasn’t really a jet-setting Bahamas guy—he had never even been on a plane—but what the hell, why not? He blew most of his spending money on the ticket, and the friends hopped on a plane to Paradise Island, Nassau, without a hotel or a plan.

  They soon met some random guys who were sharing cheap accommodations, and they agreed to let Biden and his buddies crash for around $5, which meant sleeping on the floor.

  Like many tropical getaways, Nassau’s most beautiful beaches are private, safely keeping the rabble at bay. Joe was part of that rabble. He goofed around with his friends on a public beach, but then he saw, in what sounds like a vision, a “luscious pink pile” called the British Colonial Hotel, separated by a chain-link fence. Through this fence he saw, well, “dozens of beautiful young college girls sunning themselves.”

  Please keep in mind that Joe Biden was twenty-one at the time and acted like any red-blooded twenty-one-year-old: He wanted in. Yet he wasn’t a hotel guest, and he sure as hell couldn’t afford a room, so how could he get past that fence? Simple. Biden and his buddies found some hotel towels that were hanging on the fence, “liberated” these towels, masqueraded as hotel guests, and walked straight in through the gate.

  As Biden later described the scen
e in Promises to Keep, they had opened the gates of paradise. Instant luxury, women everywhere, like a commercial for Axe body spray. Joe and his wingman soon noticed two beautiful women chilling by the pool, a blonde and a brunette. Joe and his friend quickly huddled up to debate a key procedural point:

  “I’ve got the blonde,” said Joe.

  “No, I’ve got the blonde,” said his buddy.

  They flipped a coin.

  Biden didn’t wait to see who won the toss; he beelined straight for the stunning blonde.

  WISDOM OF JOE

  Don’t wait for the coin flip.

  “Hi, I’m Joe Biden.”

  “Hi, Joe. I’m Neilia Hunter.”

  She had green eyes. An easy smile. Instantly they hit it off, and the banter came quickly as Joe learned where she was from (the Finger Lakes), where she went to college (Syracuse), and what she wanted to do (teach). They kept flirting. As Joe talked to Neilia, he could see, over her shoulder, in the water, some guy emerge from a yacht. This Yacht Man—wearing “a little white yachter’s cap”—walked right toward them, and it became clear he knew Neilia.

  Awkward introductions all around.

  The Yacht Man asked Neilia if they were still on for that night. “I’m really sorry about tonight,” Neilia said, “but Joe and I are going to dinner tonight.”

  Game on.

  And this was Neilia. Joe did indeed take her to dinner that night, despite having only $17 to his name, and winced when the check came for $20. She slipped him two twenties—it’s okay. Later they took in some live music. On the walk home Joe tried to jump over a chain, caught his foot, and wiped out and fell to the ground. He wasn’t hurt and Neilia laughed and reassured him: “It was so dark you couldn’t possibly see.”