“I believe he really thinks reducing the oil depletion allowance from 27 percent to 23 percent is something,” Biden said of Boggs. “He doesn’t question whether it should be eliminated altogether.” Such lines fed into Biden’s other major pitch: environmental protection. Building on his reputation in the county council as the defender of Delaware’s natural resources from heedless development and corporate rapaciousness, Biden released a plan for saving the nation’s wetlands and marshes as the election neared. Such moves bagged him the endorsement of the Washington-based Campaign Fund for the Environment, whose chairman, former Kennedy interior secretary Stewart Udall, made the pilgrimage to Dover and gave Biden his personal endorsement. Biden, Udall said, was “perhaps the most outstanding environmentalist in the whole country.”35
When simply ignoring Biden failed to stop the upstart from closing Boggs’s once-insurmountable lead, a parade of prominent national Republicans dropped by, including Vice President Spiro Agnew and “Mr. Republican” himself, Robert Taft, who set aside his archconservative image for the moment and touted Boggs’s liberal record.36
Crucially, Biden still had the energy and enthusiasm of a legion of grassroots volunteers from his county council campaign, and he dominated Boggs in fundraising. By the end of the campaign, Biden was both raising and spending twice as much as Boggs, thanks chiefly to small donations, where he had a five-to-one advantage. The campaign poured the proceeds into media, spending $268,000 in all to win, a huge amount for the time, and more than any other candidate in the state.37
Come November 8, Biden had completed what everyone in Delaware had assumed was a suicide mission, beating Boggs by 3,000 votes even as the state as a whole went for Nixon by twenty points. Just as he’d hypothesized, Biden’s path to victory had run through the GOP stronghold of Brandywine Hundred, which Biden lost by only 9,000 votes, compared to the usual trouncing that left Democrats an average of 17,000 down.38
The postelection numbers revealed other factors, too. Despite endorsements for Boggs from the state NAACP and Edward Brooke, the first black US senator since Reconstruction, Biden had run away with the black vote. In an election that saw relatively low black voter turnout statewide and even lower in down-ballot races, Biden finished second only to McGovern in the state’s African American districts, getting the support of 65 percent of those who had voted for president. And Biden dominated in union support. Nationwide, only seven other candidates, three of them running for president, outpaced Biden in money from organized labor.39
In front of a thousand-person-strong audience, Biden showered his fallen opponent with effusive praise, seeming almost apologetic that he’d won. Just as he’d campaigned, he told them, the Joe Biden of the Senate would be his own man, refusing to toe any party line, his highest loyalty to his voters and volunteers. “I may go down and be the lousiest senator in the world; I may be the best,” he warned them.40
Most election victories are the products of a murky alchemy, and Biden’s was no exception. Was it his appeal to middle-class and Republican voters on the issues of crime and drugs that put him over the top? Or the enthusiasm he inspired among volunteers, small donors, and particularly black voters? Did his nonpartisan, middle-of-the-road image make the difference? His forthright opposition to Vietnam? Or did his economic populist campaign unite voters across racial and class lines? Maybe it was just his youth, charisma, and bombast, compared to the soft-spoken, elderly Boggs.41
“The liberals thought I was holding back,” Biden privately mused in a Hotel du Pont corridor after the result. “Little did they know I’m not that liberal. The conservatives thought I was too liberal.”42
This would be a common refrain for the rest of Biden’s career: running away from the label of “liberal” even as he strategically championed liberal values to select audiences. In a Wilmington Morning News profile released early in the new year, Biden insisted he was “really moderate to liberal and a social conservative.” He compared liberals to lemmings (“every two years they jump off a cliff”) and recounted telling one applicant who hoped to work for a senator who would fight for consumers, “I’m not going to be an activist for two years.”43 If Biden’s victory had suggested many possible roads for his future political success, his words suggested he was already decided on one. The election had another effect, too: his unlikely triumph forever lodged in Biden the fear that a similar dark horse could one day unseat him.
First Casualties
Biden and his wife Neilia sat in front of a fire in their living room, she writing Christmas cards, he pondering his future in Washington. He would later say they sensed something wasn’t right. “What’s going to happen, Joey?” he recalled her asking. “Things are too good.”44
What should have been the biggest year of Biden’s life instead started with tragedy. The next day, exactly one week before Christmas, Neilia, who had decided to stay in Wilmington for one more day before joining Biden in DC, pulled away from a stop sign and was struck by a tractor trailer. She and 13-month-old daughter Amy were killed, and the couple’s two sons were injured. The mangled station wagon spun away and continued for another 150 feet before coming to rest against a tree. Campaign literature lay strewn across the road.45
“I was mad,” Biden said later. “I was mad at you guys in the press, mad at the people, mad at God, mad at everybody…. I just wanted to take my boys and go.”46
A devastated Biden ultimately decided against giving up his Senate seat and was sworn in at his sons’ bedside while they were still in the hospital. Though the truck driver was quickly absolved of all wrongdoing, Biden would repeatedly claim decades later that he had been drunk, to the distress and confusion of the driver’s family.47
Neilia had been integral to Biden’s career; he had called her both the brains of his campaign and his closest adviser. He had planned on having her organize his Capitol Hill office. Managing to keep it together through the funeral, Biden paid tribute to his wife, who he recalled treating everyone the same, regardless of income, race, or social standing. “I was probably one of those phony liberals,” he said. “The kind that go out of their way to be nice to a minority and she made me realize I was making a distinction…. I’m going to try to follow her example.”
He didn’t seem to take the lesson to heart. Biden quickly ran afoul of the NAACP’s Wilmington chapter, which slammed recently elected Delaware officials for their failure to hire black employees. The group was most scathing toward the “utter disdain and gall” of Biden and two other “so-called liberal figures” who had “received the vast majority of the Delaware black vote on the basis of stated or strongly implied promises” to hire African Americans. They either believed “blacks are not qualified for professional positions in government services,” the NAACP charged, or they had “chosen to cowardly kowtow to the antiliberal, ultraconservative mentality which is emanating these days from President Nixon and the national scene.”48
Biden instead looked to the DuPont company, Delaware’s overriding political and economic power, which he had praised during the campaign as a more “conscientious corporation” for paying taxes at the full rate. During the campaign, one of DuPont’s top lawyers served as Biden’s adviser and one of its top chemists his research and policy consultant. After Biden’s victory, Ted Kaufman, a veteran DuPont employee, joined the senator’s staff and stayed with him for twenty-two years, nineteen of them as chief of staff. Biden and the company settled into what he later called a good relationship; twice a year, he would meet with DuPont’s executive committee and those of Delaware’s other chemical giants, Hercules (a DuPont subsidiary) and ICI (a future subsidiary). Biden didn’t make a point of fighting either the company or the family, he explained, opting instead to find common ground.49