54 Time December 21/December 28, 2020
used cars. Although popular and outgoing, Biden was
afflicted with a persistent stutter, which instilled in
him a lifelong hatred of bullies and a belief that even
the most stubborn obstacles could be overcome. “My
mother’d say, ‘Joey, remember, the greatest virtue of
all is courage,’ ” Biden recalls. “Without it you couldn’t
love with abandon. And all other virtues depend on it.”
While other teenagers marched against the Viet-
nam War, Biden glad-handed around the University
of Delaware in a sport coat. He was never the best
student or hardest worker, but his charm and tal-
ent carried him through law school, a brief stint as a
public defender and a seat on the New Castle County
council. In 1972, as Harris was being bused to third
grade, Biden mounted a long-shot bid for Senate. He
courted comparisons to John F. Kennedy: a young,
ambitious candidate with a big Irish- Catholic family,
a photogenic wife and adorable kids, and a message
about bringing a new generation to power. Congress
had recently lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, and
Biden’s sister Valerie, then as now his closest politi-
cal adviser, organized a brigade of high schoolers to
knock on thousands of doors, lifting the 29-year-old
to victory over a two-term incumbent.
Just weeks later, the car carrying Biden’s wife
and children on a Christmas shopping excur-
sion was broadsided by a truck. Neilia and their
13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed. Biden’s
two sons were badly injured. He came close to quit-
ting the Senate before he was sworn in. “His grief
makes him human,” says Moe Vela, a former senior
adviser. “And he understands that shared human-
ity, that shared vulnerability, allows him to connect.”
As a Senator, Biden was rarely behind the times,
but rarely ahead of them either. As Judiciary Com-
mittee chair, he oversaw the hearings into Anita Hill’s
sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court
nominee Clarence Thomas, enraging many for not
including public testimony by additional witnesses
who could testify to Thomas’ pattern of behavior
and for allowing the all-white, all-male committee
to bully Hill. He championed the 1994 crime bill,
which included both tough new sentencing laws and
the Violence Against Women Act. He voted for the
Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as
between a man and a woman, then, nearly two de-
cades later, upstaged Obama by embracing same-sex
marriage before the President did. He was a politi-
cian who followed public opinion but did not guide
it, an institutionalist who believed in the moderat-
ing influence of the Senate almost as much as he be-
lieved in his own policy preferences.
He carried that disposition into the vice presi-
dency. Once, when Vela was flying to Chile with Biden
on Air Force Two, the aide complained in personal
terms about a Republican Senator who was blocking
an Obama proposal. Biden grabbed Vela’s left forearm
with his right hand, as Vela recalls it, and said, “Moe,
you’re wrong. That’s my friend. We might not agree
every time on how to make America better, but we
both agree that we want to make America better.”
Biden advised younger politicians to criticize their
rivals’ policies without impugning them personally.
“Once you start attacking people’s character and their
motivations, you prevent them from ever being able to
get over the policy disagreement you had, and you lose
them as someone you can potentially work with,” ex-
plains Delaware Senator Chris Coons, a Biden protégé.
Biden went out of his way to help Republicans
where he could, once flying to Moscow and back in
a single day to join a GOP colleague for a presenta-
tion on nuclear weapons. “Joe has a good heart,” says
former Republican Senator John Danforth. “He’s got
the temperament and the background to reach out
and to work with all kinds of people to make govern-
ment work again.”
Most of all, Biden became famous for his empa-
thy. The stories are legion: how he hugged a grieving
child; called a grandmother on the day her grand-
son was sworn into the Senate; reached out after a
car accident, a cancer diagnosis, a death in the fam-
ily. One former adviser recalled how Biden held up
his entourage on the way out of the Executive Of-
fice Building to offer heartfelt thanks to a janitor for
mopping a spill; another recalls he and Jill always2020 Person of the Year
COURTESY JILL BIDEN
Biden and
Jill, his future
wife, met in
1975