Biden Is Also Reborn

By MARGARET CARLSON

Joseph Biden and his family are in their Jeep Wagoneer driving through Cape Henlopen State Park to the annual gathering of the state's Democrats. Nothing as far as the eye can see spoils this strip of beach, which the Delaware Senator reclaimed from the military for his state, the site where he announced his first run for the Senate in 1972. Carrying plastic lawn chairs and coolers, more than a thousand Democrats are pouring into the park, twice as many as have ever come to the party get-together in the past. As three generations of Bidens alight -- his mother, father, sister, wife and two of his three children -- the Senator is swamped by friends and the curious, all straining to get a glimpse of the man who vanished from sight seven months ago. In a blazer and an open-neck shirt that reveals a tiny scar, he looks like the healthiest person here, trim, energetic and tan. He makes his way to a picnic bench, where he waits his turn to speak at what he calls the "most important event in my public life."

Hyperbolic, perhaps, coming from a man whose public life over the past year has included announcing his candidacy and then dropping out of the race for President and chairing the judiciary committee hearings that denied former Solicitor General Robert Bork a seat on the Supreme Court. But this is Biden's first event since February, when he was felled by a life-threatening brain aneurysm. Before he returns to Washington, before he bangs the gavel to open an important set of foreign policy hearings this Wednesday, before he grants any interviews, he wanted to come to the place where it all began so that he could begin again.

Biden is listening as Senate Candidate Sam Beard introduces him, recalling the night he got a call from the state police accompanying Biden's ambulance saying "We don't think he's going to make it." Biden whispers to his wife Jill, "Neither did I." He takes her onto the podium with him, along with his kids, although he says he "usually does not go in for that type of stuff." His talk is simple, without the oratory that made his presidential campaign speeches soar but created doubts that this ambitious young Senator meant what he said. He talks of coming through his ordeal "unscathed but not ungrateful" and of how his wife took charge when that "stab of fear" hit him in the ambulance. There are no tears until he starts talking about his oldest son's inauspicious first year at college, seeing his father the presidential candidate on television regularly for the first four months, not always favorably, then commuting between the University of Pennsylvania and his father's bedside for the next four months. "He's become a man. He's no longer a boy."

Biden first looked death in the face during the heady period after his 1972 election to the Senate at age 29. His wife and three children were returning from buying a Christmas tree in Wilmington when a truck hit them. His wife and infant daughter died; his two sons were critically injured. He considered giving up his seat, but his family rallied around him. His sister moved into the Wilmington house to take care of the boys, and he began his daily three- hour round-trip commute to the Capitol.

His next few years in the Senate were not memorable, but when he remarried in 1977, the cloud lifted and he began enjoying his work. By the start of the current presidential campaign, he was one of the most promising Democratic contenders. But he withdrew before the first primary when allegations of resume bloating and plagiarism surfaced, saying "I have only myself to be angry with."

He looks back not in anger but in wonder at how fate has its way with a man. "There is no doubt -- the doctors have no doubt -- that had I remained in ! the race, I'd be dead," he says. A headache, which he thought was a pinched nerve, came during what would have been his peak campaigning time in Iowa. Had he still been running, he says, he would have toughed it out.

On Feb. 11 he went to a doctor in Wilmington, who discovered an aneurysm, a weakening in an artery supplying blood to the brain; the artery was already leaking. Biden was rushed to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for eight hours of cranial surgery, which many patients do not survive. Lying completely still in intensive care afterward led to the development of a blood clot on his lung, which required an operation to implant a filter in a vein. In May he was back on the operating table, for surgery on a second aneurysm. It was a hellish time, but he is completely recovered. "The good news is that I can do anything I did before. The bad news is that I can't do anything better."

The event is winding down, and Biden, the quick-smiling Irish-Catholic pol, kisses and jokes his way back to the Jeep. He seems to know who among the women in pantsuits sent the fruit baskets, who the flowers. He calls out to George Collins, who brought a truckload of watermelons from his farm, to save one for him.

He planned to refuse all interviews because he wanted to keep the day "personal, just between me and the folks who have been with me for 16 years." But in the pitch-black darkness he talks about how the past seven months have changed him. A man who always thought he spent a lot of time with his kids found out "I really hadn't. I knew I had reached a new level with them when after a month with me at home they cried, 'Oh, no, Dad, not Ragu again!' " About his run for the presidency, he says, "It just wasn't my time. Thank God, because it saved my life." He wakes up each morning to "my second chance in life," looking back at how far he has come instead of grasping for the next rung on the ladder, satisfied, grateful, to be a U.S. Senator. "I'm alive. I'm well. My family is happy. I do something I love." More than enough for anyone.