WASHINGTON — The personification of the white-haired Washington insider, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. has spent more than half his life in the Senate, seemingly so in love with his own voice that his colleagues must fight to be heard at his hearings.
A hundred miles away from Capitol Hill, however, is another Joe Biden -- more a character in Mister Rogers' neighborhood than a globe-trotting statesman or a pontificating fixture on the Sunday talk shows.
He is a putterer who plants bushes in his backyard and designed his own house, including space for his elderly parents. He's a man quick to find a doctor for someone's sick grandmother or hold a fundraiser for a local firefighter battling cancer.
This Joe Biden is the son of a car salesman who lost nearly all his money and moved his family from Scranton, Pa., to a hardscrabble neighborhood in Delaware. As a boy, Biden struggled to overcome a bad stutter and the nickname Joe Impedimenta.
As a 29-year-old freshman senator-elect, he lost his wife and infant daughter in a car crash that also severely injured his two young sons. The tragedy almost caused Biden to abandon his political career. And for years afterward, he took the train home almost every night from Washington to Delaware to be with the boys as they grew up.
"I tell people that you get to know Joe Biden the closer you get to Wilmington, Del. And when you see him with his family, then you know the man," said John Marttila, a longtime friend and advisor who worked on Biden's first Senate campaign in 1972.
Biden's family was at the core of his first run for office. His sister, Valerie, ran that campaign, as she has each one since. His brother headed the fundraising operation. His mother and father sat in on most of the strategy meetings.
Biden was challenging a popular incumbent Republican who maintained a huge lead in the polls in a year that would sweep Richard Nixon to his second term in the White House.
The campaign had so little money to advertise, Marttila recalled, that Biden's army of volunteers had to get mailers to voters by walking neighborhoods around the state. But Biden eked out a victory.
A month later, as he was in Washington interviewing candidates for his office staff, the fatal accident occurred. His wife and three children had been out shopping for a Christmas tree.
