Devil’s Advocate

In November 1972, just a couple of days out from Election Day as twenty-nine-year-old New Castle County councilman, Joseph Robinette Biden waged a long-shot campaign for the US Senate, a story in local newspapers threatened to derail Biden’s surprisingly formidable run. A Jewish campaign volunteer quit, pointing to what he alleged was the upstart politician’s public dishonesty on Israel.

By not speaking out, the volunteer said, he would have been ​“helping to sucker Jews out of their money.”

Apart from my 2020 history of Biden’s political career — Yesterday’s Man (Verso) — the episode appears to have largely been forgotten or left out of reporting on the president’s Gaza policy.

In an August 9 meeting, according to reports by the Wilmington News Journal and Philadelphia Inquirer, Biden told Victor Livingston, the volunteer, that he needed a firm position on the Israel-Palestine issue because his campaign was pursuing contributions from Jewish donors — and he couldn’t have his personal views included because ​“it would be political suicide to state my true beliefs.”

Whatever position on Israel Biden took now, Livingston recalled the candidate allegedly telling him, would be the one he would publicly take for the rest of his career.

“But if you want to know my true beliefs — I think the only solution is to have the United States and Russia negotiate a settlement in the Middle East, make Jerusalem an international city, and have Israel give back all the territory it has occupied,” the Inquirer quoted Biden as saying, based on Livingston’s recollection. Biden also allegedly said: ​“I don’t think the United States would be one bit weaker if Israel went under — we shouldn’t get tied down to countries like this.”

Biden’s campaign pushed back to the newspapers fiercely. The candidate charged Livingston was ​“stupid, emotionally mixed up or a downright liar” before later calling him ​“a flat-out liar.”

Biden claimed he had merely been arguing as the devil’s advocate if he had ​“said something like that,” referring to other alleged remarks that Israeli leaders were the world’s biggest arm-twisters and that Jews were too emotional about the country. One campaign staffer told the Inquirer the same, adding that, ​“in the confines of an office, things can always be said that can be misconstrued.”

Another staffer first said it was simply a ​“brainstorming” session where lots of ideas were floated, before later saying he couldn’t remember what was said and that Livingston was carrying out ​“a vendetta.”

Yet the reporter who broke the original story — Norm Lockman, the News Journal’s first full-time black reporter, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize at the Boston Globe — didn’t appear to buy the non-denials. Two years later, writing about then senator Biden’s refusal to read the transcripts of the Richard Nixon White House tapes, Lockman offered his own theory of what lay behind Biden’s decision: ​“He’d had a taste of being criticized for private remarks that later became public.”

In the column, Lockman offered more details of the October 1972 incident. After Biden had commissioned the position paper, a philosophical argument followed about the wisdom of the US commitment to Israel ​“with Biden generally taking the position that Israel might be expecting too much of the United States.” Lockman noted the candidate ​“immediately acknowledged that he had made some of the statements attributed to him” and claimed he had been playing devil’s advocate.

“He still reacts bitterly when he is reminded of it,” wrote Lockman. ​“Biden is a rough talker when he thinks it’s private, and I suspect a lot of other politicians are, also. I doubt if there is a politician on Capitol Hill, anywhere perhaps, who could safely allow his private conversations to be made public.”

Both of the men who reported the story at the time, Lockman and the Inquirer’s Robert Schwabach, passed away years ago. Biden’s senatorial papers are locked away from the public and as this article is being published, attempts to reach Livingston have been unsuccessful.

But other documents shed light on the various relationships surrounding a young Biden as he formulated his political stance on an issue that will undoubtedly play a large role in defining his presidency.

Joe and Golda

Nathan Barnett, who served as executive director of the Jewish Federation of Delaware (JFD — formed in 1935) — described 1967, in an interview for the Jewish Historical Society, as a key year as the JFD’s leadership successfully raised some $850,000 — more than three times what they raised the year before — in the wake of the Six-Day War. It showed ​“that we as a community were able to raise significant dollars,” said Barnett, and gave ​“the non-Jewish community an understanding that the Jewish community was the second-largest fundraising organization in the state.”

Biden’s 1972 Senate campaign wanted the support of this activated constituency. Eight days from voting, Biden and other candidates took part in a questionnaire put out by the Jewish Voice, a local paper published by the JFD. Biden also took out a full-page ad on the back page, declaring ​“America must insure Israel’s existence” by, among other things, ​“ensur[ing] that Israel receives whatever weapons she needs.”

Biden already had the support of one particularly influential pro-Israel leader in Delaware: campaign donor Irving S. Shapiro, chair and CEO of DuPont, a preeminent corporate power in the state.

“Irving Shapiro, I consider a good personal friend,” Biden said three years later, in 1975. ​“I’ve sought out his opinion on a number of occasions.” Shapiro had swiftly come to Biden’s defense when the Livingston story broke, insisting that both Biden and his opponent ​“have clearly demonstrated their commitment to the state of Israel,” and likening any suggestion to the contrary to the ​“big lie.”

Shapiro was not just a local industrialist. As a former JFD president, he was deeply involved in pro-Israel advocacy at both the local and national levels. Shapiro sat on the DuPont executive committee that Biden early on requested a meeting with to discuss positions he had taken on the 1973 oil embargo and to ​“exchange views on national issues”; together, in October 1973, the two arranged a breakfast with a visiting Walter Mondale to discuss US-Israel policy with local Jewish leaders. Years later, as Shapiro led the effort to pass legislation undermining the decades-old Arab League boycott of Israel, documents show that Biden was one of the small circle of congressmen kept in the loop. (Biden ultimately voted with fifty-five other senators to make it law).

In 1975, the elected senator was asked which of the state’s interest groups tried to influence him. ​“The interest groups that I hear from are the Jewish interest groups concerned about Israel,” he replied, and then went on to list a handful of other groups. ​“And they’ve always been reasonable when they’ve come to me, they’ve never threatened me in any way. Maybe it’s because I tend to vote their way.”

Archival documents provide a window into how this outreach worked. In April 1975, Barnett followed up on a personal request from Biden to put ​“together a group to discuss Israel further,” and he recorded the senator’s comments. Alongside Biden’s thoughts on the mood in Congress and his less-than-flattering opinion about Gerald Ford’s foreign policy, Biden laid out his position on Israel and Palestine — one that had strayed far from what he allegedly told Livingston.

Biden did ​“not believe that Israel is intransigent,” thought ​“the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] is nothing but a murdering group of people,” and questioned why Israel should ​“move simply for a promise.” Barnett also noted Biden ​“will change his principles to support aid for Israel if necessary,” the notes from that April 14, 1975, meeting stated, and would bend on Israel’s obligation under international law to return the territory it was occupying. ​“1948 is irreversible,” Biden said, according to the notes. ​“Israel does exist and the starting point is 1975, not 1948.”

It was a starting point that came after Israel’s seizure of various territories in 1967, including Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Biden seemed to hint he would be willing to accept Israel’s expansion two years prior, in 1973, when recounting his conversation with then Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in a letter to a Jewish refugee advocate. Biden met Meir in August 1973 on his first trip to the country during a congressional junket.

“In my conversations with Mrs. Meier [sic], I conveyed my support for the security of Israel, including retention of certain geographical points she said were necessary to assure Israel’s existence,” he wrote.

A Delaware Politician

In September 1972, a month after the meeting with Livingston, Biden sent Barnett a position statement, the earlier assignment that outraged the young campaign volunteer. Among other things, the statement called for providing Israel with ​“whatever weapons it needs to maintain the military balance in the Middle East” and for the United States to ​“support the position that the city of Jerusalem should remain under unified Israeli rule” — the opposite of what Biden had earlier allegedly suggested was his personal view. The last measure is an inflammatory move that Biden would, two decades later, vote for, and which former president Donald Trump finally followed through with to widespread criticism in 2018.

Biden, a month later, also forwarded the same paper to the lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), enclosed with his responses to an AIPAC questionnaire on US-Israel policy.

“Please let me know your reaction to my statement,” Biden wrote to Barnett. ​“I would like to discuss it with you personally.”

The two appeared to forge a friendly relationship in the years ahead, archival correspondence shows, exchanging personal messages, for example, regarding the shocking death of Biden’s wife and son.

But typically, the correspondence In These Times and Jacobin found was strictly business. Five months into Biden’s first Senate term, Barnett delineated whom to listen to if Biden really wanted to take the temperature of Jewish opinion in Delaware, creating a short list of ​“people who can represent the Jewish community in the state,” including several JFD personnel.

JFD’s president, he wrote, ​“represents the entire Jewish community.”

Biden was often proactive in seeking input. In one December 1973 letter to Barnett, Biden explained at length why he voted against aid for Soviet refugees resettling in Israel. Barnett passed the letter on to two leaders of national Jewish groups for comment, noting the senator ​“makes a very persuasive argument.”

After another April 1975 meeting to discuss the Middle East, several letters of gratitude informed Biden his ​“open and frank comments” were appreciated and his ​“honesty was quite refreshing,” and thanked him for his ​“very supportive stance” regarding the US-Israel relationship. ​“I don’t ever remember coming out of a meeting where there was total unanimity in the positive feelings that everyone had in your comments,” Barnett wrote, thanking the senator for being willing to ​“get to know the facts and then to let us know the facts.”

Oval Aspirations

Biden’s pro-Israel advocacy didn’t proceed in a straight line. Throughout the early 1970s, Biden cast several votes against military aid to Israel, usually when packaged with military spending more broadly, such as to Vietnam or Cambodia. Through 1975, he waged a headline-grabbing, almost one-man campaign against an Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement on the same basis he had once allegedly said was his personal view, that ​“we shouldn’t get tied down to countries like this.” Biden vehemently opposed the deal’s apparent requirement of sending two hundred US civilian technicians to Sinai to operate radar stations because it could ​“prove to be just the beginning of an ever-expanding American presence in the Mideast,” drag the United States into a ​“moral quagmire” and ​“bind us.”

But Biden still found himself on the list of seventy-six senators telling the president, in May 1975, that cutting back US aid for Israel would be dangerous, then the largest number to have ever signed a pro-Israel letter or resolution. That letter came only one month after Biden told local pro-Israel advocates he would ​“change his principles to support aid for Israel if necessary.”

By the latter half of the decade, Biden sounded much more like ​“one of Israel’s most ardent backers” in Congress, as he was often called. Biden waged a similarly ferocious, losing campaign against Jimmy Carter’s plan, opposed by Israel, to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Two weeks from his first reelection, his campaign ran an ad in the Jewish Voice — “an open letter to the Jewish community” urging a vote for Biden and signed by dozens of community members — touting these efforts, insisting ​“that Joe Biden’s support for Israel is more than an interested concern. It is a heartfelt commitment.”

The following year, in what one senator called a ​“valuable test” of whether US support for Israel was shrinking, Biden voted with the overwhelming Senate majority against cutting $100 million from a $1 billion military aid package to Israel, as well as with the much smaller majority who narrowly beat back an attempt to cut it by 5 percent. A month earlier, he had received a standing ovation from a pro-Israel group in Pittsburgh as he called for the United States to reestablish its ​“special relationship” with Israel and commit to more military aid.

Biden’s public rhetoric began stressing Israel as a core part of US security. After Reagan’s election, Biden would find himself consistently to the right of the famously pro-Israel Republican, fighting his 1981 arms sale to the Saudis once Israel officially came out against it — a major AIPAC priority — and pushing legislation, that Reagan opposed, stepping up US aid to Israel while alleviating its US debt. Another key example was his justification of hard-wing Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin’s brutal war on Lebanon, which had so outraged the US public, even Reagan moved to end it.

“What did you do in Lebanon? You annihilated what you annihilated,” Biden told Begin, according to Begin’s recollection. ​“It was great! It had to be done! If attacks were launched from Canada into the United States, everyone here would have said, ​‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.’”

Less than a week after the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon in 1982, Biden flew to a retreat held by the United Jewish Appeal Young Leadership Cabinet, where he spoke alongside AIPAC’s executive director and an official at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, named Benjamin Netanyahu. A year later, even as other pro-Israel politicians urged Israel to withdraw from the country, Biden insisted that ​“Israel’s presence in Lebanon is vitally important.”

His steadfast backing reflected only one segment of Jewish opinion. In Delaware, Jewish Voice assistant editor Bill Frank excoriated the JFD, which put out the publication, for dragging its feet on issuing an ultimately weak statement on the massacre, noting the outrage at Begin’s government both in Israel and among Jewish leaders around the country that followed.

Biden’s closeness to the pro-Israel lobby deepened through the 1980s, speaking regularly at AIPAC conferences and other events. AIPAC was deeply embedded in Biden’s 1987 presidential campaign, which members of the lobby group donated to, fundraised for and served on, with five former AIPAC staffers ending up in key posts, turning his campaign into a fundraising juggernaut. ​“The candidate’s all-important National Finance Committee is well stocked with AIPAC activists and regional United Jewish Appeal leaders,” reported the Detroit Jewish News.

The relationship remained strong even after his first tilt at the presidency fizzled out. In June 1989, one year before Biden’s third Senate reelection, he wrote a letter to major pro-Israel backers Stephen Lowey, an antitrust lawyer, and his wife Nita, who had then just won a congressional seat while insisting she was ​“firmly opposed to an independent Palestinian state.”

“You have helped me in the past, and I need your help again,” read Biden’s hand-signed letter to the couple. ​“If I can amass a substantial warchest by June 30, I’m convinced this special fundraising effort will clearly impact on potential opposition, and do more to help my reelection than would many such contributions later.”

Legacy

As an incumbent president going into reelection (until he wasn’t), Biden has relied heavily on pro-Israel fundraising. According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the president has benefited from a ​“a deep groundswell of support” from pro-Israel megadonors, who have given him millions of dollars.

One of those megadonors — entertainment mogul Haim Saban, who once said of himself, ​“I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel” — was swift to criticism after Biden took initial tentative steps to halt arms deliveries to Israel, pausing shipments of five-hundred-pound and two-thousand-pound bombs in May over concerns about a ground invasion of Rafah, where 1.2 million Palestinians had been corralled on the premise that it was safe.

“Bad, Bad, Bad, decision, on all levels, Pls reconsider,” Saban emailed two of Biden’s top advisors. ​“Let’s not forget there are more Jewish voters who care about Israel than Muslim voters who care about Hamas.”

Biden ultimately did little to stop the Rafah invasion from proceeding, despite publicly calling it a ​“red line,” with disastrous human consequences. Before too long, Biden reversed his pause on the five-hundred-pound bombs.

We may never know exactly what has gone into the president’s thinking on US-Israel policy. It may well be that the president’s thinking exists in a different political reality, one forged all those decades ago in the crucible of an ambitious young man’s unlikely Senate victory, far removed from a world where Israeli policies have lost the support of so many and voter anger over an ongoing massacre of Palestinians has become the political liability it has — and may leave the legacy it will.