Joe Biden, Fabulous Hero

By David Harsanyi

Thursday, April 29, 2021

 

In 1962, Joe Biden, the future president of the United States, butted heads with an infamous local gang leader named “Corn Pop” at a public swimming pool in an African-American neighborhood in Wilmington, Del.

 

This character-building incident transpired at the same pool complex where, four years earlier, a teenage Biden had inquisitively turned to his father after witnessing two men making out on the working-class streets of his adopted hometown in the late 1950s. Such an event might seem anachronistic to us. Yet Biden’s uncannily liberal-minded father simply responded, “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.”

 

Joey, now a lifeguard, wasn’t contemplating the deeper meaning of love when gang leader Corn Pop refused to wear a bathing cap to cover the pomade in his hair before diving into the deep end of the public pool. “Corn Pop was a bad dude,” Joe recalled in 2019. “He ran a bunch of bad boys. I said, ‘Hey, Esther’” — as in Esther Williams, the noted ’50s actress and swimmer — “‘you, off the board. I’ll come up and drag you off.’”

 

Corn Pop, predictably, did not take kindly to this slight to his manhood and responded by saying, “I’ll meet you outside.” Meet they did. When Biden was headed for his car at the end of his shift, Corn Pop was “waiting there with three guys and straight razors.” Biden, never one to back down from danger, stared down the gaggle of toughs and calmly explained: “First of all, when I tell you to get off the board, you get off the board, and I’ll kick you out again. But I shouldn’t have called you ‘Esther Williams.’ I apologize for that.”

 

Biden, even then courageous yet conciliatory, prepared for combat but yearning for peace, treated his adversary with respect and was thus able to defuse a potentially perilous situation. Corn Pop, won over by Biden’s decency and straightforwardness, decided to put his razor away, and the two men became great imaginary friends.

 

The Corn Pop incident steeled a young man for his future showdowns with some of the world’s most notor­ious bullies. I was reminded of the president’s formative confrontation when he recently told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos about a high-stakes meeting he had as vice president with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. “I said, ‘I looked in your eyes and I don’t think you have a soul.’ He looked back at me and said, ‘We understand each other.’”

 

Simply because no one witnessed it — and simply be­cause Biden is on the record being obsequious toward Russian leaders as architect of the Obama administration’s “reset” policy — doesn’t mean this extraordinary standoff, in which the future president accuses the leader of a nuclear power of being evil — and the leader concurs! — isn’t his truth.

 

We are, ultimately, all the hero of our own story. Some of us just have more courageous imaginations. And Biden has a Forrest Gump–like capacity to place himself at the center of the nation’s valiant struggles. “When I marched in the civil-rights movement,” Biden, who also claims to have represented the Black Panthers as a lawyer, once noted, “I did not march with a twelve-point program. I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes. And we changed attitudes.” It was Biden whose “soul raged upon seeing the dogs” of the racist Bull Connor. (One wonders whether the senator regaled his claimed mentors, pro-segregationist senators like James O. Eastland and Herman Talmadge, with these exploits.)

 

“When I was 17,” the president once told a crowd, “I participated in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses.” Biden was 17 in 1959, a year before four black students known as the Greensboro Four staged what is generally considered the first sit-in, at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, but who’s counting?

 

During the 2007 campaign for the presidency, Biden often thrilled small groups of cheering supporters with the tale of how he stood up to the infamous Slobodan Milošević in a secret meeting on a cold night in 1993. “I think you’re a damned war criminal,” Biden supposedly told the stunned Serbian. Biden took credit for shifting the entire U.S. policy on Bosnia. The Washington Post, however, reported in 2007 that the future president had little if anything to do with that shift — by the time Biden had signed on to the Bob Dole–Joe Lieberman Bosnia-arms-embargo bill, he was the ninth co-sponsor. As the paper reported, he “gently” made the case that Milosevic might become a war criminal if he continued on his path.

 

Only recently, Biden revived a debunked claim about being “shot at” during a trip to the Green Zone in Iraq in the 2000s. As vice president, Biden would humble-brag about standing up to American generals, demanding to fly to Afghanistan and personally pin the Silver Star on a Navy captain who had rappelled down a steep ravine in the mountains of Kunar Province in an unsuccessful bid to rescue a wounded comrade. “And everybody got concerned, a vice president going up in the middle of this,” Biden recalled, “but we can lose a vice president. We can’t lose many more of these kids. Not a joke.”

 

Now simply because Biden got the time, location, heroic act, medal, military branch, and rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony, doesn’t mean he didn’t feel like he was there. The president’s fabulist life story has always been rich in spirit. And if we’ve learned anything from Joe Biden, it’s that you make your own story and live your own truth.