And Then There Were Six

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Who killed Joseph Biden's presidential campaign? The Delaware Senator, announcing last week that he "will stop being a candidate" for the Democratic nomination, singled out one person. Said he: "I'm angry with myself for having . . . put myself in ((this)) position." Indeed, he could hardly blame anyone else for passing off the eloquent words of other politicians as his own and thus starting the media furor that drove him out of the race.

But if Biden stupidly loaded a metaphoric gun and pointed it at his forehead, he had help in pulling the trigger. It certainly was not Biden who alerted the press to those unattributed word-for-word quotations, and it strains credulity to think that reporters for two influential newspapers just happened to discover them simultaneously at the precise moment when the Senator was about to make his big bid for national attention by presiding over hearings on the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.

In fact, informed sources have told TIME, the primary tipster or tipsters were connected with the rival presidential campaign of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Aides to Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt, another Democratic presidential hopeful and the focus of early suspicion, appear to have done little more than call the attention of reporters to an already published story after the uproar had begun. The Reagan White House, also a target of rumor and innuendo, denies any involvement at all.

Biden's troubles began with stories in the New York Times and Des Moines Register three weeks ago pointing out that the Senator's emotional closing statement during an Iowa Democratic debate duplicated a televised speech by Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock during last spring's British election campaign. The Register implied its source was an "attack video" that contained snippets of both speeches spliced together by the campaign camp of one of Biden's Democratic rivals. The Times did not mention it, but two sources say it had a duplicate video in its possession. The tapes of the two speakers, which were eventually aired on U.S. television, show Biden not only echoing Kinnock's words but aping his gestures.

A Register staffer involved in preparing his paper's story has told colleagues the video was supplied by the Dukakis campaign. A reliable source says someone connected with the Dukakis campaign also gave the video to the Times. Craig Whitney, the Times's Washington bureau chief, insists that "nobody spoon-fed us the story," which he says resulted from "brilliant reporting" following up "several tips." Told about the alleged Dukakis campaign involvement, however, he says, "I just don't know if your information is correct."

Dukakis' aides strongly deny being the source of the Kinnock tape, which is hardly surprising. Though the Biden revelations were true and raised legitimate questions about him, all the Democratic contenders are anxious to avoid any appearance that they are trying to knife one another. Paul Tully, Dukakis' political director, says his organization checked "up and down the line" and concluded "it was not this campaign and not our people in Iowa." Could it, however, have been a campaign ally -- a financial backer, say, or a media consultant -- acting without the knowledge of Dukakis' headquarters? Says Tully: "That would astound us."

At any rate, the Kinnock tape opened the floodgates. Students of Robert Kennedy's rhetoric began pointing out that some of Kennedy's words -- and Hubert Humphrey's too -- had been coming out of Biden's mouth, without attribution. Mark Johnson, a Gephardt staffer, passed copies of a story containing Kennedy-Biden quotes to CBS News, which dug up tapes to confirm the point. Thus the Gephardt campaign did help marginally to keep the furor going but, despite many rumors, did not originate it.

Two legal publications began chasing reports that Biden, while a law student at Syracuse University in 1965, had plagiarized large portions of a law-review article for a course assignment. The story somehow got to CBS, which aired it, and it was true. Syracuse is investigating whether a faculty member violated confidentiality by talking about that incident. Craig Christensen, former dean of the law school, told Biden in a June 11 letter that his file had been locked in a safe. But a source who attended a Sept. 4 dinner with Christensen told TIME that the former dean discussed Biden's student problems with his guests and said nothing about confidentiality. ^ Christensen admits talking at the dinner about the problem of securing student records but denies discussing the details of Biden's transcript.

Biden was just about the last politician who could survive such an onslaught. Any number of Democratic pros were happy to see him stumble; Biden had surrounded himself with aides, notably Pollster Pat Caddell, who struck them as arrogant. Caddell particularly antagonized Democratic elders by talking about leading an "inside insurgency" that would capture the party for the baby-boom generation.

To a number of people in the press and party, Biden came across as a glib wise guy, a candidate of style rather than substance. Says a Democratic strategist of his fellow pros: "This is a fairly liberal bunch, and we saw Biden trying to appropriate the liberal mantle with rhetorical tricks." Accusations of plagiarism thus hurt as almost nothing else could. They turned Biden's strong point, the passionate oratory that could bring a crowd to its feet, into a subject for ridicule and fed deep suspicions about his ability to be President.

Nonetheless, as late as last Sunday afternoon the Biden camp still thought it might be able to rescue the campaign. Then a Biden aide got a phone call from a friend at Newsweek, who read him a story from the coming week's issue that contained more damaging details. The story described how C-SPAN, a cable- TV network, had filmed Biden lying about his academic credentials at a campaign stop in Claremont, N.H., earlier this year. What was truly devastating was the tape itself, aired on TV last week. There was Biden, finger jabbing the air, haranguing a man who had asked about his law-school record. After boasting that he had a "much higher I.Q. than you do," Biden passionately recited a highly exaggerated list of his academic accomplishments. He said, for example, he had graduated in the "top half" of his law-school class; in fact, he was 76th in a class of 85.

The C-SPAN tape was the final blow in a barrage of stories that threatened not just to overwhelm Biden's presidential campaign but to endanger his prospects for re-election to the Senate in 1990. Two days of conferences reached the inevitable conclusion. Biden would have to go through what is becoming a new ritual of presidential politics: the press conference at which a candidate reluctantly pulls out of the race before a single primary vote has been cast.

Nothing in Biden's campaign became him like the leaving of it. Unlike Gary Hart four months earlier, he sounded wistful rather than self-righteous. Bidding farewell to supporters in Iowa on Thursday, he asserted, "Nobody did this to Joe Biden. There had to be something there . . . to stitch together." Addressing reporters directly, he added, "I think you all have treated me fairly. I have no rancor, no complaints."

Biden's withdrawal will probably not have any profound effect on the Democratic race. Rivals did fear that he could eventually become a serious threat, since his hot oratory made him stand out from a rather bland field. But he was running near the bottom of national polls among Democrats. He had done better in Iowa, which will select the first delegates to the Democratic Convention in caucuses next Feb. 8, but even there his support seems likely to scatter too widely to make much difference. Analysis of the second choices of probable caucus-goers polled by the Des Moines Register indicates Gephardt, Dukakis and Jesse Jackson might all gain 2 or 3 points, a minor pickup in a state in which no candidate has yet won the support of even a fourth of all voters polled.

What the departure of Biden does is deepen the air of frustration hanging over the splintered Democratic race. Since the nomination campaign began with high hopes, all the news has been negative for the party: Hart's and Biden's crackups, the refusal of such powers as Mario Cuomo and Sam Nunn to enter, the persistence of the demeaning seven-dwarfs metaphor. (Unless Pat Schroeder officially enters, that will have to be changed to the six -- what? Survivors?) About the only consolation is that Biden did not come close to threatening Hart's world speed record for political self-immolation. Biden quit the race eleven days after the first negative stories broke; Hart was out in only five days.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett and Michael Duffy/Washington