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behind one of the high, forbidding
     mahogany doors. Because he had brought a Utah Mormon with him, Connaughton was granted
     an unscheduled audience right there in the waiting room with the senator himself,
     but he was unable to change Garn’s mind—he had another commitment the day of the debate.
     So Connaughton and the Mormon friend left and wandered around Russell—two young out-of-towners
     dwarfed by the white Vermont marble and Concord granite and dark mahogany and the
     clubby, bipartisan institutional dignity that was still intact, though it would soon
     begin to crack and then crumble—looking for a Republican senator to sign up. But the
     halls were nearly empty, in an undemocratic hush, and Connaughton barely knew what
     any senators looked like. He might have glimpsed Howard Baker, Jacob Javits, Chuck
     Percy, or Barry Goldwater. Among the Democrats, Hubert Humphrey had died recently,
     but Edmund Muskie was still there, and Frank Church, Birch Bayh, Gaylord Nelson, George
     McGovern. All of them soon to be swept away.
    Suddenly a buzzer went off, and out of nowhere the corridor filled with tall, gray-haired,
     distinguished-looking men. Connaughton and his friend followed them into an elevator
     (wasn’t that little Japanese man in the tam-o’-shanter S. I. Hayakawa?), down to the
     basement and the subterranean electric cars that shuttled back and forth along a thirty-second
     track between Russell and the Capitol. Among the senators striding toward the next
     car was Ted Kennedy, who smiled at being recognized and shook hands with the friend,
     who had stepped forward. As for Connaughton, he was too awestruck to move. (The public
     didn’t know it, but Kennedy was preparing to challenge President Carter for the 1980
     Democratic nomination: it was Biden who had first alerted Carter, in early 1978, that
     Kennedy was coming after him.)
    Connaughton returned to Tuscaloosa without a Republican to debate SALT II. It didn’t
     matter. Biden arrived that September wearing one of his tailored suits and power ties,
     trim and flashing his white-toothed smile, and he charmed the hell out of the lovely
     coeds over dinner at Phi Mu on Sorority Row (Connaughton’s girlfriend was a member),
     with Jeff attached to the senator’s elbow as his adjutant for the evening and now
     seriously considering a political career. Two hundred people filled the student center
     for Biden’s speech. Connaughton made the introduction, then took his seat in the front
     row as Biden came to the lectern.
    “I know you’re all here tonight because you’ve heard what a great man I am,” Biden
     began. “Yep, I’m widely known as what they call ‘presidential timber.’” The crowd
     laughed nervously, thrown by his sense of humor. “Why, just earlier tonight I spoke
     to a group of students who had put up a great big sign, ‘Welcome Senator Biden.’ And
     then when I walked under the sign I heard someone say, ‘That must be Senator Bidden.’”
     The laughter rose. Now Biden had the crowd, and he turned to his subject and spent
     ninety minutes arguing lucidly and without notes for the importance of reducing the
     American and Soviet nuclear arsenals, while he dismantled the arguments of SALT II’s
     opponents in the Senate. The day before, the treaty had suffered a blow with the supposed
     revelation of a brigade of Soviet troops in Cuba. “Folks, I’m going to let you in
     on a little secret,” Biden whispered, and he took the microphone and walked toward
     his audience, gesturing for the crowd to lean in and listen. “Those troops have been
     in Cuba all along!” he shouted. “And everyone knows it!” At the end of the lecture,
     the applause was loud and long. When Connaughton got up to approach Biden and thank
     him, he accidentally started a standing ovation.
    A campus security guard drove Biden back to the Birmingham airport, and Connaughton
     went along. Biden looked tired from his speech, but he