Joe Biden

I learned later that the surgeon who put Dole back together after he was so badly injured in World War II was an Armenian whose family had deep memories of the genocidal campaign the Turks had waged against them.

I had no place to go. It was up or out.

I wasn't built to look the other way because the law demanded it. The law might be wrong.

I mark the last days of Hubert Humphrey as the high point of bipartisan decency in my career. Hubert Humphrey died a senator, and in his last months in the Capitol, cancer was wasting him. We all watched it happen. His hair was gone; he was emaciated. He was too diminished to take part in real debate, but he’d show up to vote. He loved the Senate. "The Senate is a place filled with goodwill and good intentions," Humphrey once said, "and if the road to hell is paved with them, then it’s a pretty good detour." In his last days it was like he didn’t want to leave the chamber. He’d stay on the floor late into the night, and he and his friend Senator Barry Goldwater would talk about things they’d accomplished together and separately in the Senate. Politically, the two men could not have been further apart. Humphrey had been the vice presidential candidate in 1964 when Goldwater ran as the Republican presidential nominee. And the Boss’s convention speech that year was a shot across the bow of Gold-waterism. He’d listed the many programs that moderate Republicans in the Senate had voted for, following each with "but not Senator Barry Goldwater." They’d unexpectedly run into each other in an airport on the campaign trail a few weeks later and stopped for a friendly greeting. As they parted, somebody overheard Goldwater say, "Well, keep punching, Hubert."

By the end of 1977, it became increasingly clear that the Boss would not be around much longer. And on the Senate floor one day, Barry Goldwater walked across the aisle and enveloped Hubert Humphrey. Goldwater was so big and Humphrey so frail that Humphrey almost disappeared. The two men stood for a long moment, locked in a hug, and I could see that both men were crying. They made no effort to hide it.

Most of all I was numb, but there were moments when the pain cut through like a shard of broken glass. I began to understand how despair led people to just cash it in; how suicide wasn't just an option but a rational option.

When seagull droppings landed on my head at a campaign event at Bowers Beach two days before Election Day, I chose to read it as a sign of a coming success.

I knew I had to be sure-footed about the issues I was talking about. When you're twenty-nine years old, who the hell is going to think you're credible? It wasn't enough to have ideas; I had to know my facts. I had to demonstrate command from the minute I started running. I understood that was the test I had to pass.

We all know- or at least we are told continually- that we are a divided people. And we know there's a degree of truth in it. We have too often allowed our differences to prevail among us. We have too often allowed ambitious men to play off those differences for political gain. We have too often retreated behind our differences when no one really tried to lead us beyond them. But all our differences hardly measure up to the values we all hold in common... I am running for the Senate because... I want to make the system work again, and I am convinced that is what all Americans really want.

Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts.

The system wasn't working, and I thought it was time to err on the side of a new model. What might work, I thought, was a system that promoted personal accountability, consistency, and certainty. Congress could say people who committed the same federal crime, under the same circumstances, were going to jail for the same amount of time. We could give judges a narrower set of sentencing guidelines to work with, and felons would be required to pay the same price. We'd be judging the crime, not the person.

Sleep was like a phantom I was too tired to chase.

I didn't argue that the war in Vietnam was immoral; it was merely stupid and a horrendous waste of time, money, and lives based on a flawed premise.