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The portrait of Joe Biden that emerges from What It Takes (1992), Richard Ben Cramer's thousand-page New Journalismstyle report on the 1988 presidential race, in which Biden ran for a few steps until he stumbled over his own shoelaces, is a familiar one.
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We turn to page 248 of Cramer's tombstone-sized book. A couple of years into his Senate career, Biden has a dream of living grandly by buying on the cheap a former du Pont manse, together with a huge chunk of land, for $200,000. The house was boarded up and soon, probably, to be torn down. But Biden saw something in it. Sure, it needed some fixing up. Never fear, Joe is here! Joe is a can-do fellow. The first winter he and Jill spent in the house, it used up 3,000 gallons of fuel oil. It turned out the third floor was wide open, to the stars. Squirrels were living up there. Oops. The judgment on display here is not great.
Next year, Biden starting selling off bits of the land for development to pay for improvements such as storm windows. Small problem here: One of the lots he sold off was his own driveway, and the new owner blocked it off so he couldn't pass through it. So Joe built a second driveway, which turned into a swamp in winter. He sold off another piece of property that, it turned out, included the front of that second driveway, so he couldn't use that one anymore either. So I built a third. He hated that one for being a dumpy little thing. Eight years went by, and he made a deal to buy back the original driveway, the one he sold off when he first bought the house. Which cost him a fortune in landscaping to reshape.
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Meanwhile Biden was struggling with the upkeep of the grounds; he'd let the grass get three feet high, then attack it with a riding mower. Mysteriously, year after year, the mowers kept breaking down. He'd go buy a new one, and wreck that one too. "These damn things aren't built right," he'd mutter. The mower was always the problem, you see. And the next one. And the next one.
To pare down costs, Biden figured he'd rearrange the floor plan a bit. At one point he decided to have the entire third story removed; at another he figured he'd have the ballroom and a bunch of other rooms, plus the carved staircase, taken apart and reassembled on a smaller footprint. It turned out this idea was kind of expensive, so he didn't follow through.
Then he got to work on the trees. Privacy was what Joe wanted, a screen of hemlocks and rhododendron bushes to form a green wall around the property. Joe even drove a 40-foot flatbed full of trees an hour and a half from Wilmington, dug himself a 45-foot trench three feet deep. He was out there in hiking boots and shorts doing the work himself. Then he started in with the yews. Glorious. He ringed the swimming pool with them. Finally, he had his privacy!
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So how'd all this end? "Two years, of course, they're all dead," reports Cramer. Oh. Biden built a stockade fence around the property friends started calling the place Fort Apache but the neighbors complained. He had to take down the fence. At some point visitors noticed he had staked off the area around the very swimming pool, a plot he announced he was going to sell to raise more cash. Joe's plan for the existing pool was to move it. Move a swimming pool. "Whaddya think?" he'd ask. "I think you're f***in' crazy," friends would tell him.
