Joe Biden got on a plane and flew to Chicago. He wanted to talk face to face with the first black woman ever elected to the United States Senate.
It was a surprise visit. In the recollection of Carol Moseley Braun, he cold-called her from O’Hare airport; in the memory of an aide who says she was there, he had the doorman call from the lobby of her apartment building. All agree, though, that nobody was expecting him. He just … showed up.
Moseley Braun was in the frazzled process of moving into Lake Point Tower, but up to her condominium Biden came. It was a cold, clear day, the week afterThanksgiving, barely a month past her pathbreaking victory of 1992. Standing at the sweeping, floor-to-ceiling windows, Biden marveled at the views of the city’s skyline and gazed out over the expanse of Lake Michigan. She was some five weeks away from even being sworn in, and he was a 20-year Senate veteran—but as Biden and Moseley Braun sat on unpacked boxes, he made a pitch over slices of cherry pie that she figured was coming as soon as he’d walked through the door. He was the chair of the Judiciary Committee—and he wanted her on it.
“You just want Anita Hill sitting on the other side of the table,” she said.
She’d meant it as a joke. He didn’t seem to think it was funny.
“He didn’t approve,” Moseley Braun told me. “He didn’t laugh—that’s for sure.”
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Biden had a political problem—and Moseley Braun was a potential solution. He had been elected in 1990 to a fourth six-year term, having proven all but unbeatable in his home state of Delaware. But he also was a mere 13 months removed from what was, and in many ways remains, one of the most damaging chapters of his career. At 50, he was, in Senate terms, still young—and still ambitious. He had tried a first run for president four years earlier on gauzy, new-era themes, but his most recent, highest-profile tour in front of the television cameras had been a nightmare of old-white-guy theater: He was at the helm of the Judiciary Committee for the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the fall of 1991, in which Hill graphically accused Thomas of sexual harassment. The hearings were a national circus, a he-said, she-said crossfire laced with references to pornography, and the coverage revealed something at the very least unbecoming about the Senate itself—with a panel of all white men impugning the character of a black female law professor, calling her charges “scurrilous,” asking if she had “a militant attitude relative to the area of civil rights,” suggestingshe was “delusional” or motivated by ideology or a desire for reprisal as a “scorned woman.” The spectacle left Biden looking not so different than his aged colleagues—at worst sexist, at best out of touch.
His Oval Office ambitions might have been dormant, but they weren’t dead, and Biden needed, he knew, to rehabilitate the image of the all-male, all-white Judiciary Committee—as well as his own. So he did something extremely direct and “very rare,” Ted Kaufman, Biden’s longtime chief of staff, told me—“highly unusual,” “I think I can say almost without precedent”—making an express trip to lodge a special appeal to a black woman who had just made history. Biden’s pitch, said Moseley Braun, was threefold: “The Judiciary Committee needed my voice and my perspective and that I knew these issues,” “he wanted to have some women on the committee,” and “he would personally appreciate it.”
It might have been flattering for a different new senator. But Moseley Braun wanted no part of being on the Judiciary Committee. Even though it had been the “horrible” images of “all these old, white men” grilling Hill that had driven her to run for the Senate in the first place, Biden’s committee was not on her list of preferred posts. At 45, the former federal prosecutor, state representative and county recorder of deeds had been on the judiciary committee in the state Legislature and had tired of the conveyor belt of hot-button issues. “I’d determined I would never want to do that again,” she told me. And so Biden flew home without a commitment.
But he didn’t take no for an answer, and ultimately Moseley Braun said yes, and so did Dianne Feinstein, who was one of the other three female senators-elect who had been swept into Washington on the strength of women’s outrage about Thomas and Hill. It was a triumph of optics, to be sure, but the altering of the makeup of the committee led to more than just a new look. In the two years of the 103rd Congress, Moseley Braun and Feinstein contributed, with their voices and their votes, to the passage of an assault weapons ban, the Violence Against Women Act and—perhaps most resonant right now—a Moseley Braun-led reckoning with the painful legacy of the Confederacy by blocking the continuation of government-sanctioned use of one of its most divisive symbols.
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