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Joe
Biden's Promises To Keep details his life and his political
career.  Biden not only provides an excellent analysis of how he would
deal with the problems facing this country, but also valuable insights into his
internal motivations.

For example, Biden starts the book by discussing a
stuttering problem that hampered him greatly until high school.  He
worked hard to overcome the stutter, often standing in front of the mirror
for hours repeating a single phrase until the stutter went away.  Biden's
work ethic got him into a high school that his parents could afford; instead of
settling for less, he spent the summer doing "work-study" -- grounds
crew/janitorial work -- to make up the tuition difference.

But Biden's dedication wasn't always perfect.  He drifted through half of college and most of his time at Syracuse Law, attending class so rarely that at Syracuse that he didn't even understand legal citation rules.  It got him in trouble in his first semester when he was accussed of plagirism (he was cleared of all charges and merely cited improperly).

Biden's political career got off to an amazing start with
two big upsets, winning a county commissioner seat in 1970 in a heavily
Republican district, and at the age of 29 beating an incumbent Republican
senator who had not lost a race in Deleware since 1946.  His first Senate
victory was a tremendous story, to say the least.

Sadly, Biden's life was soon marked by tragedy when his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident just before he was sworn into office. With the help of family, Biden overcame the struggles and slowly came back to life.  He later remarried, and his distinguished political career began to point to the White House.

Then came 1988.  Biden made a bid for the Democratic nomination that year. His campaign was going along well when it was instantly derailed by charges of plagiarism (Biden failed to credit Neil Kinnock when he borrowed a few lines from one of his speeches at one event, though he had done so every other time he referred to Kinnock's speech).  Biden withdrew from the race, focused on the contentious Robert Bork hearings, and tried to put his disastrous campaign behind him.  But further tragedy stuck when shortly thereafter, he nearly died from a brain aneurysm.  After intensive brain surgery that could have been fatal, Biden healed and went back to work.  Talk about tough times, but Biden, a man who won’t allow himself to be beaten down, overcame them all.

This same fiery, feisty Biden appears throughout the book.  At a foreign policy briefing hosted by Henry Kissinger during Biden's first year in office – a meeting intended for sitting Senators – Kissinger initially prevented Biden (then barely 30 years old, making him the fifth youngest senator in history) from asking a question, noting that staffers were not allowed.  A member of Kissinger's staff informed Kissinger that Biden was, in fact, a senator.  Kissinger apologized, but then badly mispronounced Biden's name.  Biden acerbically responded by saying, "No problem, Secretary Dulles."

While I enjoyed Biden's discussion of the Bork hearings, his role in getting the United States involved in the Balkans, and his recount of getting the Violence Against Women Act passed, Biden's discussion of the War in Iraq is disappointing. 

Before getting into Iraq, Biden notes some initial problems the United States faced in rebuilding Afghanistann as well as the ideological dichotomy in the Bush Administration between Colin Powell and the neocons led by Cheney-Rumsfeld.  While Biden did attempt to limit the President's authority through a more restrictive resolution than the one that ultimately passed, his resolution failed and Biden ultimately voted for the resolution that led us down the path of war.  Biden claims that he did this in order to give the President a strong hand at the United Nations in order to get a meaningful response
from the United Nations. 

But Biden's explanation is unsatisfactory.  He doesn't
explain why he had little to no concern about Iraq prior to the summer of 2002
and why his opinion about Hussein flouting U.N. resolutions suddenly
changed.  He didn't say that it was based on a new-world view after 9/11,
so I'm left trying to understand what motivated him to vote for that
resolution.  He had been in the Senate for almost 30 years at that point,
so he should have known that the intelligence was malarkey (a favorite word of
his).  My guess is that it had something to do with the fact that he was
up for reelection that year and he didn't want to have that issue hanging over
his head.  After all, of 23 Senators who voted against the resolution, only three, Levin, Reed, and
Wellstone, were up for reelection (if that number is incorrect, I apologize, I
had to check that myself, I may have missed one or two).

In fairness to Biden, he admits that the vote was a mistake
and that he just underestimated how badly Bush and Co. would handle
everything.  I had a hard time wrapping my head around that at first, but
then it all just fell into place.  I realized that a man who forgot more
about foreign policy than Bush will ever know is unlikely to think that someone
could just screw something like that up so badly.  In my opinion, Biden
just couldn't foresee Bush being wrong on every single thing in Iraq, and while
I know that a lot of us thought that the war was a mistake, I'm not sure that
too many people thought that Bush would make nothing but wrong decisions.

Biden saw the problems and knew how to deal with him, but I don't think he understood that Bush's people wouldn't be able to do the same thing.  And Biden's constant criticism since demonstrates that he can be trusted to never let something like that happen again; he told Bush and Cheney face-to-face that Bush should fire Rumsfeld and, were it not for the fact that Cheney was a constitutional officer, Cheney should have been fired too.

This is a must-read book that I can’t recommend highly enough.  It confirms for me that Biden must be our next Secretary of State, despite his terrible mistake on Iraq.  He talks constantly of the need to engage in diplomacy and to talk to foreign leaders in order to resolve problems.  Biden is the man Obama needs to start talking with our enemies.   He appears willing to engage in the kind of diplomacy that Obama continues to put at the center of his campaign.

Here's a brief anecdote demonstrating just why Biden
is so perfect for the position of Secretary of State. In the 1970s,
Biden was sent by President Carter to meet with Soviet leaders
regarding the arms limitation deal.  Biden spent much
of the time listening to the concerns of the Soviet government, wanting
to make
sure he understood what motivated them, and what drove their
worldview.  But when the Soviet Premier, Kosygin, began to make outlandish comments in order to bully the delegate into
additional concessions, Biden would have none of it.  At the age of
38, Biden earned the respect the Soviet Premier who by looking him in the eye and telling him not to
"bullshit a bullshitter".  Ballsy and brilliant, Biden knows how to talk, he knows how
to listen, he knows how to understand, and he knows how to be tough; in short, he
knows how to be a diplomat.  He's the man that Obama needs as Secretary of
State.

Read this book, and I believe you’ll come to the same conclusion.