Biden didn't want to take his Senate seat, said Ted Kaufman, another longtime friend who worked on that campaign and would serve as Biden's chief of staff for 22 years.
Waiting for his sons to recover in the hospital, Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir, "Promises to Keep," he would take long walks around the seedy neighborhoods nearby. "I liked to go at night when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight," Biden wrote. "I was always looking for a fight. I had not known I was capable of such rage."
The loss also shook his deep Catholic faith. "I felt God had played a horrible trick on me," he wrote.
Montana Sen. Mike Mansfield, the Democratic leader at the time, convinced Biden to stay in the Senate. (He was sworn in at one son's bedside in the hospital.) But Biden resolved not to be separated from his family. He gave up a house that he and his wife had planned to buy in the capital and instead went back to Delaware every night.
"The rule in the office was if the boys called, he was to be interrupted no matter what he was doing or who he was talking to," Kaufman said. "He was never out of communication with them."
Biden's father, a proud man who had made his children talk about foreign affairs around the dinner table, would frequently come down to the Capitol to see the young senator, sitting in on his son's hearings and other meetings. "His dad loved it," Kaufman recalled.
Under the tutelage of Mansfield and other senior senators such as Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey, Biden quickly landed plum committee assignments.
The ambitious young senator showed an early affection for the limelight. After traveling with five other senators to Moscow in 1979, Biden emerged from a meeting with Premier Alexei Kosygin to tell reporters of the arms control demands he had put to the Soviet leader.
By the late 1980s, Biden was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a post from which he presided over the controversial Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, both of whom Biden opposed.
Biden was accused of mismanaging the 1991 Thomas hearings, which erupted into a dramatic examination of Thomas' alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill.
But Biden had burnished his image as a Capitol Hill eminence. He would push through major legislation to combat domestic violence and the drug-fueled crime wave.
