WHYY offers intimate look at ‘Delaware’s Joe Biden’
John Mussoni and his WHYY teams are finally in the vice president’s office ready to talk to Joe Biden in the last two weeks before he would relinquish those chambers to Mike Pence.
Excitement is rife. Mussoni and his crew, in the midst of assembling “Delaware’s Joe Biden,” airing 8 p.m. tonight on Channel 12, have been trying to nail down a date with Biden for months. “It’s important to us that we interview him in Washington before he leaves there,” Mussoni, Assistant Vice President for News Operations at WHYY, says by telephone from his Delaware home.
Three previous interviews have been scheduled and cancelled. This one is set for 1 p.m. The ‘HYY folks arrive at 10 a.m. They have an hour to set up.
“Then, it’s hurry up and wait,” Mussoni says. “One o’clock comes. One fifteen comes. Tension is high because we know the vice president has to leave at 2. At 1:25, Biden strides in. He’s perfect. He’s classic Joe, the free-talking guy from Delaware showing the connection that created such a bond between him and his Delaware constituency.
“As 2 p.m. approaches, we could feel ourselves being rushed. The vice president’s staff is telling him he has to wrap things up, that he can’t be late. The president is waiting.
“Biden is reluctant to leave. He’s enjoying himself and feeling at home among people he knows from Delaware. He resists, telling his staff to calm down. ‘These are my people,’ he says. ‘They are the most important thing in the world to me. Tell Barack to wait.’
“They mention a parade. It turns out Biden is to join President Obama at a review, and he can’t be late. Biden leaves, but before he does, he is accommodating and open to talking. He is in his stride and doing exactly what we hoped we would.”
“Delaware’s Joe Biden,” Mussoni points out, is not a critique or overview of Mr. Biden’s political career. It doesn’t, Mussoni adds, delve into big issues or big moments of his life as a senator and vice president.
“It’s about a man from Delaware who is Joe to the people who live here. Among the people on the crew in D.C. that day is Charlie O’Neill. I brought Charlie out of retirement to work on this program because he and Biden go to the same church. Charlie is in charge of the collection plate. When Biden wanted a break from services, he would go back to talk to Charlie.
“I bring this up because it illustrates the connection Biden has with people throughout the state. He’s just Joe to them, a guy who will pose for a selfie at Christiana Mall or go for coffee on Saturdays at a favorite local spot.
“This is what we were going for in his documentary, the man with deep roots in Delaware. He may have been an expatriate Pennsylvanian, but he is part of Delaware. He has a connection with the people he served. He talks about trying to explain that to the Secret Service and the ground rules he had to set about the way they covered him when he was in Delaware and home.”
Rather than looking at crucial moments of Biden’s political career, Mussoni makes it clear “Delaware’s Joe Biden” reveals Biden’s evolution as a leader and force in Delaware.
“We begin in 1968 with the Wilmington riots,” Mussoni says. “Biden is affected by this event to think about going into politics. He and other Young Turks in Delaware’s Democrat party want to help turn the Democrats from a Southern party to one that speaks to the North. They also see an opportunity to make changes and improve conditions the riots bring to light.
“One of the more interesting observations Biden makes is noting how the Wilmington train station was used as a makeshift holding tank for the rioters. He remembers 1968 and is moved that in 2009, he is on the platform of that same train station waiting to meet an African-American president and ride to Washington with him to be inaugurated as his vice president. Biden says in 1968, he wasn’t sure black Americans and white Americans would even talk each other.”
“Delaware’s Joe Biden” deals with 1972, the year Biden is elected to the Senate over a previous Delaware icon, J. Caleb Boggs, at age 29. “He won’t become 30, the age of eligibility for the Senate until Nov. 20, and will just be of age to be sworn in that January.
Biden also loses his wife and daughter in a traffic accident in 1972.
Mussoni says “Delaware’s Joe Biden” goes into local landmarks in Biden’s career and into some of the hard times, such as when he almost died from an aneurysm in 1988.
WHYY footage from 1988 shows a telling side of Mr. Biden.
“He is answering a WHYY reporter’s question about whether JFK’s philosophy would hold in 1988,” Mussoni said. “He is saying the philosophy of 1988 is different from that of 1960 and about to expound when his daughter, Ashley, about age 6, walks in the room. He immediately becomes dad and engages his daughter, then goes right back to talking about JFK and the difference 28 years make.”
Mussoni says this footage highlights two things. One is Biden’s attention to family and the importance his family has had on his career. The other is WHYY’s position as a broadcast outlet licensed to Delaware.
“One invaluable and amazing cooperative source for this program is Valerie Biden Owen, the vice president’s sister, who managed every one of his campaigns from 1972 on. She says, ‘We didn’t know what we didn’t know, or we might not have done some of the things that earned us a victory in 1972.’
“In pictures and other items the Biden family provides, you see the closeness and the importance of family. It’s there in the sequence with Ashley. It’s there in a photo of Biden with his son, Beau, when Beau is in braces. It’s part of the conversation when Biden talks about telling President Obama he didn’t know what Beau would do for health insurance if illness forced him to resign his elected job as attorney general of Delaware.”
Pictures, in the form of archives, are an important contribution from WHYY.
“WHYY is in a unique position as a Delaware station that aired a Delaware news program to have years of footage with Biden. Shelley Hoffman, who came aboard about halfway in this process, had the task to look at all of this and choose what we would show in our program. She’s just one of the people who worked tirelessly to bring a project like this to fruition.”
Others are the reporters who worked so hard and conducted the interviews, Shirley Min and Mark Eichmann. Eichmann was with Mussoni as Biden addressed the championship University of Delaware lacrosse team at the vice president’s mansion in D.C. It was the occasion when he spoke first about Beau’s insurance issue. “There was Mark, holding his phone out as far as he could to get the audio while Charlie O’Neill was getting the video,” Mussoni says.
Working with O’Neill on camera was Gene Ashley. Along with Valerie Biden Owens, Mussoni says a major source was Ted Kaufman, a Biden aide who succeeded to his Senate seat for two years after Biden became vice president.
Naturally, Mussoni and team ask Mr. Biden about whether he will run for president in 2020.
“It remains a mystery,” Mussoni says. “We show him talking to Terry Gross about this in
2017, but he won’t commit to be nailed down. A lot of what Biden does depends on fate and what feels right to him at the time. His family, and his Delaware family, may have some influence, but the answer is unknown.”
Following tonight’s 8 p.m. broadcast of “Delaware’s Joe Biden,” WHYY will air the Mark Twain Awards, this year going to television star Julia Louis Dreyfus. “At WHYY, we’re calling in ‘Veep Night,’” Mussoni says.
Broadcast Pioneers
Several people were inducted into the Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame on Friday.
For me, as much I appreciate the career of Channel 6’s Vernon Odom and have special affection for Channel
10’s retired Orien Reid, the honor that warmed by heart was the one bestowed upon new and deserved Hall of Famer Leigh Richards, heard at various times on WMGK
(102.9 FM)
In this column and at speaking engagements, I’ve recalled an iconic personal moment when Leigh and I sat on the trunk of her Chevy in 1976 and shared our ambitions for careers in journalism.
Baby, look at us now! I am in the 36th year of a column and published widely, and Leigh is entertaining radio audiences with her patented warmth and charm for her 42nd year. She is also in the Hall of Fame.
Leigh was surprised when she received the call she would be inducted. She’d been nominated before but was not sure how this year’s vote would go. Of course, she’s happy, but her thoughts are not just on gratitude and the hallmarks of a career that has touched listeners to the extent they have become friends with whom Leigh communicates and about whom she cares.
They’re on the profession she chose when, after hearing the applause of being on stage and marrying and having children, she gave up notions of fame or wealth to be part of a medium and industry she believed best suited her talent and gave her a chance to be part of the community she has served since she was a teen.
Indeed, that night on the Chevy, Leigh and I weren’t coming from the latest journalism gig or class, we were in the parking lot of a community center where I was the p.r. person and she, in her 20s, was on the board.
Leigh’s message on entering the Hall was focused on broadcast personalities to come. It was about ethics in one’s professional and personal life, something I can attest is in the fiber of Leigh Richards’s being.
“I want to urge people, the Broadcast Pioneers, to help the next generation go about their jobs with integrity.
“There was no fake news when I began in this business. There were facts. Facts were facts, and we reported them as such. There wasn’t spin. There weren’t misleading posts. There were simple truths.
“I spend many hours correcting false information I see, information that is bent, in spite of facts, to support a point of view. I believe in confirmation and correct attribution. This is what I want to impart to young people entering radio today.
“Radio was perfect for me because I believed wholeheartedly it was where I could do well, where I should be, and where I could help the most people. I’d been in the theater. I felt the spotlight. After having children, I realized I’d had enough attention in that regard. I loved radio since I was a child, or a teen ruining date after date as I went through the AM radio dial listening for stations from other cities.
“Women were rare in radio when I started. I was told in 1972 radio was a man’s business. When women made some headway, I was told I’d have to go to Wilkes-Barre or some small market before I would be heard in Philadelphia. I persisted and proved the people who told me that wrong.
“Not that I didn’t have my doubts. As a young wife and mother, I owed something to my family. I gave myself a year to get a job in radio. Before six months passed, I had two.”
Leigh was heard for years on the country station, WXTU (92.5 FM). She has been at ‘MGK for about three years now. She has no regular show, but is heard at many hours filling in for the ‘MGK regulars.
“I love the station. Family is important to me, and WMGK feels like a family,” she says.
Inducted with Richards, Odom, and Reid were Gene Arnold, Bob Backman, Amy Buckman, Joyce Evans, Diane Cameron Feinberg, Ted Greenberg, David Madden, Dawn Stensland Mendte, Steve Ross, and Bill Werndl. Posthumous honors were given to Rod Carson, Frank X. Feller, Bill Gregory, Mel Kampmann, Reggie Lavong, Johnny Morris, Dave Parks, Dave Shayer, and Barbara Somers.