Joe‘s enthusiasm had its downside. In a town filled with people who liked to hear themselves talk, he had peer.
If a speech was scheduled for fifteen minutes, Joe went for at least a half hour. If it was scheduledfor a half hour, there was no telling how long he might talk. His solilo-quies during committee hearings were legendary. His lack of a filter pe-riodically got him in trouble, as when during the primaries, he had pronounced me "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,"
a phrase surely meant as a compliment, but interpreted by some as suggesting that such characteristics in a Black man were noteworthy.
As I came to know Joe, though, I found his occasional gaffes to be trivial compared to his strengths. On domestic issues, he was smart,
practical, and did his homework. His experience in foreign policy was broad and deep. During his relatively short-lived run in the primaries, he had impressed me with his skill and discipline as a debater and his comfort national stage. Most of all, Joe had heart. He‘d overcome a
bad stutter as a child(which probably explained his vigorous attachment to words) and two brain aneurysms in middle age. In politics, he‘d
known early success and suffered embarrassing defeats. And he had endured unimaginable trag-edy: In 1972, just weeks after Joe was elected to the Senate, his wife and baby daughter had been killed and his two young sons, Beau and Hunter, injured in a car accident. In the wake of this loss, his colleague and siblings had to talk him out of quitting the Senate, but he‘d arranged his schedule to make a daily hour- and-a-half Amtrak commute between Delaware and Washington to care for his voys, a practice he‘d continue for the next three decades. - P163