Biden’s first decade in office foreshadowed many of the hallmarks of his politics. He quickly took to the controversial congressional practice of giving paid speeches, mostly at fundraisers, colleges, and high schools, supplementing his senator’s salary by as much as tens of thousands of dollars a year. He would be a prolific, high-earning speaker for the rest of his career. After initially voting to limit such earnings, he soon declared this “one of my biggest mistakes” and reversed course.51
Biden established himself as an implacable friend of Israel from the get-go. During the campaign, a mini-scandal had flared up when a graduate student hired by Biden to write a Middle East policy paper told the press he had been instructed not to include the candidate’s personal views because that would mean “political suicide.” According to the student, Biden had argued in an August staff meeting for the internationalization of Jerusalem and a settlement that would involve Israel returning the land it was illegally occupying after the 1967 war—with Biden adding that any pro-Israel position he took now would be the one he stuck to for the rest of his career. Biden stopped just short of denying the student’s claims, saying he had merely been playing devil’s advocate. He would indeed spend his Senate career showering Israel with unquestioning support, even when its behavior elicited bipartisan outrage. He helped to secure an unparalleled amount of US aid for Israel early on and to scuttle a 1998 peace proposal with Palestine, and he told an assembly of lobbyists that Americans “cannot afford to publicly criticize Israel.”52
Meanwhile, the Watergate scandal that had been roiling Washington since 1972 revealed Biden’s credulous faith in consensus, unity, and bipartisanship for their own sake. He warned fellow Democrats not to celebrate damage to the GOP because “the demise of the Republican Party means your own demise … means the demise of the two-party system.” He chided Democrats for trying to blame Watergate on the Republican Party as a whole, warning that political institutions were the “fabric that keeps us together” and if the public came to blame the GOP for what happened, “the system goes under.” After dragging his feet on calling for impeachment, Biden eventually delivered an April 1974 speech he had planned for weeks, calling for fairness to Nixon, attacking the press and government leakers, demanding “restraint” from reporters, and telling their sources “to shut up.” “Impeachment is too important a matter to be left to the press,” he said.53
Biden’s future troubles keeping his day job and his family’s business dealings separate had their seeds in this period, too. Soon after his win, Biden’s younger brother James, with a net worth of only $10,000, was approved for a string of loans from the local Farmers Bank that were worth sixteen times that sum, money James used to open a club. According to three former bank officers, the hope had been that the Biden name would attract a hip, big-spending crowd. Instead, the club was a failure, and James left his debts unpaid, prompting Biden to personally call the bank and complain about his brother’s treatment by debt collectors. Impatient bank officers, meanwhile, threatened James with using the delinquent loan to embarrass his senator brother.
Farmers Bank’s near-collapse shortly after triggered a federal fraud investigation into Norman Rales, a financier linked to the bank, which dredged up far more embarrassing details, including senator Biden’s personal and business connections to Rales. The investigation also revealed that James inexplicably held $600,000 worth of loans from First Pennsylvania, a large Philadelphia bank, which he received through a recommendation by the office of Pennsylvania governor Milton J. Shapp, who Biden had publicly endorsed for president in 1975. John T. Owens, Biden’s brother-in-law and former law partner, had also supported Shapp and worked in the governor’s administration while holding a minor stake in the club. To top it off, Biden at the time held a seat on the Senate Banking Committee, then notorious for being a hotbed of graft.54
More than any of that, however, it was the twin issues of the economy and civil rights that defined Biden’s fundamental approach to politics for the rest of his career.
The Liberal Who Killed Busing
The recession of 1973–75 and the decade’s seemingly never-ending inflation crisis loomed over Biden’s early political career. After three decades of prosperity and rising incomes in the United States, the 1970s saw it all crash back down to earth. In the same decade, the United States would experience its worst peacetime inflation and its worst postwar recession. Skyrocketing food and energy prices hollowed out paychecks, and the days of carefree consumerism that marked Biden’s formative years ended. Millions of Americans lost their jobs in waves of unemployment, which hit 9 percent by mid-decade.55
Though the crisis had many roots, including the 1973 oil shock, it became the impetus for the building of a new political coalition aimed at a total rejection of the New Deal and its social-democratic counterparts abroad. With unemployment climbing and inflation spiraling out of control, free-market economic ideas found a friendlier reception. Combined with a bubbling panic among white suburbanites over issues like taxes, integration, and drugs and crime, the crisis would help usher in the era of neoliberalism that brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency.56
Even so, Sen. Biden started off as a solid, if somewhat ambivalent, New Deal Democrat. He voted for controls on rent and prices for everything from food to petroleum products. In his freshman year, he criticized Nixon’s budget cuts that would “mean the difference between life and death to some people,” and he voted against the president’s nominee for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) for designing them. He frequently voted to improve and expand federal entitlement programs, the kind of “social legislation” he said upon Lyndon Johnson’s death would be the late president’s lasting legacy. This included a 1973 law that approved cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security benefits.57
When stagflation hit, Biden initially opted for the vigorous approach liberals had once taken to fight the Depression. His 1974 anti-inflation plan involved bailing out the construction sector, taxing excess profits of industry, and a huge standby public jobs program—it would not be the last time that decade he’d call on the government to put jobless Americans directly to work. That same year, he introduced a tax package aimed squarely at taxing the rich and the fossil fuel industry. Balancing the budget, he said, would have a minimal effect on inflation while potentially worsening the economy. “Biden is simply not very popular with free marketers and the oil interests quietly hate him,” wrote one newspaper.58
Yet a fiscal scold always lurked somewhere within Biden, coming closer to the fore as the recession worsened. By 1975, he was warning that deficit spending would run the economy further into the ground, and he reluctantly backed the first-ever resolution to impose a ceiling on federal spending.59 Within a few years, this reluctance would evaporate.
The country’s governing institutions were still wrestling with this recession when the furor over busing exploded in Delaware. In truth, the state’s busing “crisis” was really one part of a larger white, suburban rebellion against racial integration taking place around the country. And this itself was one piece in a larger story: the more-than-century-long struggle by the descendants of slaves to claim the full rights of American citizenship they were owed. That struggle had culminated in a nationwide mass protest movement in the middle of the twentieth century that extracted major concessions from the country’s corridors of power, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ordered the desegregation of public schools.
The Brown decision had, in theory, smashed the racist status quo, striking down the “separate but equal” doctrine that had made American apartheid legal and declaring it not only a sham in practice but a contradiction in terms. Ordered to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” governments came up with a variety of tools to end racial separatism. Busing—the