Biden’s efforts were key to cracking the Democrats’ post-1960s commitment to civil rights. His 1975 amendment barring HEW from forcing school districts to assign pupils or teachers by race may not have become law, but civil rights advocates watched in horror as it drew votes for the first time from prominent Northern liberals. It signaled the end of the narrow but reliable Senate majority that had defended desegregation efforts from assault. Biden “will be remembered for his amendment that first illustrated the Senate’s tilt,” wrote the Wilmington Morning News. The Congressional Quarterly noted that its adoption by the Senate was a major watershed for this same reason, as well as the fact that the upper chamber, usually an obstacle to anti-busing efforts, had led the way this time. Biden himself boasted he’d “made it—if not respectable—I’ve made it reasonable for long-standing liberals to begin to raise the questions I’ve been the first to raise.”76
When even a former Klan recruiter like Byrd thought Biden was taking things too far, it’s not surprising that liberals and the civil rights community were apoplectic. Calling the 1977 Roth-Biden bill “so shabby an attack on the desegregation of school systems,” civil rights attorney Joseph L. Rauh Jr. charged Biden with embracing “the Nixon antibusing spirit.” The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of 140 civil rights, church, and liberal organizations, opposed it unanimously, a rare development. Six civil rights officials personally testified against the bill, with Charles Morgan Jr. of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) comparing Biden’s motives to George Wallace’s “segregation forever” campaign (“I don’t think I like you very much Mr. Morgan,” Biden interrupted). When one NAACP leader commented that the bill was the product of the “sad history” of racism in Delaware, Biden became upset. “My heart is heavy,” he said, his voice cracking. “For the first time, I have heard an indirect insinuation that I’m a racist.” The official clarified that Biden, too, was a victim of racism—namely, the “harassment and abuse” that had led him to oppose busing.77
It didn’t end there. Biden eventually convinced the Justice Department to intervene in Wilmington, though it returned a decision not to his liking. He later grilled two historic nominees about their views on the intervention and busing generally: US Appeals Court Judge Wade McCree, who stood to become the first black solicitor general since Thurgood Marshall, and Drew S. Days III, a black New York attorney tipped to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. On a Judiciary Committee stacked with former Southern segregationists, Biden, the young liberal from a Northern state, became the lone vote against both.78
By November 1980, Biden had backed every anti-busing measure in the Senate over the previous five years. That included repeated votes for anti-busing measures put forward by archconservative Jesse Helms—votes that all came after his reelection. He and Roth even came within a hair’s breadth of passing their 1977 bill to restrict the federal courts from ordering busing, which black Republican Edward Brooke called “the most pernicious amendment that has been introduced in this whole field.” Meanwhile, to Biden’s delight, Congress extended his Biden-Eagleton amendment year after year with ever-bigger majorities, even as HEW officials complained it had taken away one of their key tools—withholding federal funds—to pressure school districts refusing to desegregate. “The erosion [of busing] is on,” Biden said after one such vote. “It gets easier every year.”79
Biden insisted that none of this had hurt his relationship with the local black community. “I still walk down the street in the black side of town,” he said in 1975, “and you get—maybe they’re my clients—Mousey and Chops and all the boys at 13th and—I can walk in those pool halls, and quite frankly don’t know another white man involved in Delaware politics who can do that kind of thing.” Newspapers covering the controversial subject noted his history as a civil rights activist, joining sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters, a staple of Biden lore he would repeat for years. Only a decade later was he forced to admit that his activism consisted entirely of his summer job as a lifeguard.80
Whatever one’s thoughts on busing—and polling suggested even African Americans were split on its merits—there was no doubt that it had worked as a tool for dismantling segregation, nor that it was peacefully accepted in many communities. Its end contributed to a situation today in which school segregation is worse than it’s been for nearly five decades. In working to defeat it, Biden didn’t just help stop busing in Delaware—he showed he was willing to go much further, jeopardizing the wider mission of desegregation and sacrificing the continued march of civil rights in order to stay in power.81
Biden’s zealous turnabout on busing presaged the anti-crime and anti-drug crusades he embarked on in subsequent decades for similar reasons of political survival. These, too, were issues abstracted from, but deeply tied up with, America’s long struggle over racial equality, ones that greatly worried the suburban, middle-class, white voters whose opinion preoccupied Biden. This was a pattern for the rest of his career: whenever a right-wing hysteria would grip the public, Biden would be swept up in the frenzy, going further than even some of his conservative colleagues, typically to the detriment of the most vulnerable. For now, however, it was just one part of Biden’s transformation.
Year of the Conservative
Looking back in 1981, Biden said he had been persuaded to evolve by his fellow lawmakers.
“I have been made a believer over the last nine years in the Senate,” he said. The teachings of economists, he continued, had made him reluctant to listen to his Republican colleagues about the dangers of deficit spending, particularly when he was just an impressionable 29-year-old “not too long out of college.” But eventually he was worn down. “As I listened over the years in this body, I became more and more a believer in balanced budgets,” he said.
In truth, there was more to it than this. Biden had always chafed against being labeled a liberal. Perhaps it was something in the distinct character of Delaware, a slave state that stayed with the Union in the Civil War, literally and figuratively straddling the Mason-Dixon line. “Given a choice of Philadelphia or Virginia, I suspect a majority of Delaware would go South,” Biden once joked at a meeting of regional movers and shakers, earning a stern rebuke from a local columnist, which wouldn’t keep Biden from recycling the comment in later years.82
He spoke with pride about political hacks’ inability to put him in a box. In a 1977 interview, Biden explained that his “lack of orthodoxy” bamboozled older generations who still thought “you’re either a New Deal Democrat or you’re a traditional conservative Republican.” A memo from Pat Caddell—Biden’s friend and pollster who had moved on from helping him enter the Senate to helping Jimmy Carter enter the White House—had just been unearthed, warning Carter that “young Turks” like Biden could be his undoing. Caddell saw Biden as “part of a new generation of leadership that has some significantly different views than the basic Republican and Democratic philosophies that are prevalent today,” Biden reported after a conversation between the two.83
The irony was that Biden had been the very first senator to endorse Carter’s insurgent run. Long before Carter had announced, Biden had been advising party apparatchiks to give the cold shoulder to old-guard liberals like Hubert Humphrey and look instead to “Southern governors,” a preview of the conservative strategy the party would