“The place was of course packed and it was very hot from the TV lights, which were really bright,” recalled Tom Oliphant, then a reporter at the Boston Globe. “From right in front of him, I asked him before he started speaking, half-joking, if he was okay with the lights.”

That is, can you take it?

“Just you watch, Tom,” Biden replied. “And then, in the middle of his oration, he looked straight at me and said, ‘I’ll be back, Oliphant, I’ll be back.’ ”

Twenty years later, looking back on the incident, Biden said that the plagiarism “was born out of my arrogance. I didn’t deserve to be president.”

Soon after the debacle, his aides saw a shift in Biden, a more evident humility.

“There was a flaw in himself and he admitted it,” Vallely said. “He reflected: ‘Who am I?’ ”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson once said that to run for president, you don’t need a fire in your belly; you need a volcano.

“Where does the volcano come from?” Wilhelm asked. “For Trump, it comes from ego. For Joe Biden, in ’87, I would have said it came from his absolute sense of commonality with working-class people. But now, it’s more personal, more intimate.”

Biden became more comfortable with his grief and with using it to connect to others in pain. Two things got him there: time and the death of his son Beau.

The line that explains the change comes up again and again in conversations with those who have known Biden for decades: “The memory of pain falls drop by drop upon our heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” The quotation is from Aeschylus, the ancient Greek playwright, as cited by Robert F. Kennedy upon the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Biden passed on running for president in 2016 — Beau’s death was too raw and Hillary Clinton’s candidacy seemed inevitable — but when Trump responded to the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017 by saying there were “some very fine people on both sides,” Biden said that “in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”

He would run in 2020. At the risk of seeming sanctimonious in an era of primitive political tribalism, he would stake a claim on the moral high ground. He still had the ambition and, with age, he was comfortable showing his vulnerability.

“This man has lived a lot of life,” Gitenstein said. “One of Beau’s ‘parting gifts’ was that in his passing and the public reaction to it and how Biden handled it . . . the rest of the world got to see this aspect of Biden — his decency, his strength.”

In search of the center

Through the years, the ambition and the empathy blended with Biden’s regular-guy demeanor to create a political persona that struck many voters as right down the middle — reasonable, honorable, neither a revolutionary nor a reactionary.

The Vietnam War had presented Biden with his first big confrontation between left and center, between antiwar activists and process-oriented politicians who opposed the war but never were comfortable with the rough-and-tumble of street protests.

Biden never felt drawn to the antiwar movement, to marches and demonstrations. “I’m not a joiner,” he told Cramer. “I was married, I was in law school. I wore sport coats.”

For decades, he gravitated toward the center, arguing that Washington was neglecting the middle class, which he often described as “getting clobbered.” Early in his career, he opposed court-ordered busing to integrate public schools, preferring to use housing policy to encourage integrated neighborhoods. In the Senate, he avoided being tagged as a liberal.

In those years, Biden had a stock speech in which he derided the Reagan presidency as a turn toward selfishness. “The cry of the Reagan years has been ‘Got mine! Go get yours! What’s in it for me?’ ” Biden said. “Ladies and gentlemen, something is wrong.”

“He’s always searching for how to get to the vital center,” Vallely said. “He loves making the deal, getting it done. He’s never going to be the ‘woke’ guy.”

That practicality was evident in Biden’s decision in 2008 to accept Barack Obama’s invitation to join his ticket.

Biden “did not want to be vice president of the United States,” said former senator Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), for many years Biden’s chief of staff in the Senate. “Joe Biden’s never worked for anybody in his life. . . . When Obama first called him, he said no.”

But Obama asked again and Biden gathered his family and close friends, including Kaufman, and Biden’s “mother said, ‘Let me get this straight — the first African American man has a chance to be president and he’s come to you and you said no?’ Game, set, match over.”

Biden and Obama complemented each other, reflecting different aspects of the American character — the cerebral Obama, professorial, cool; and Biden, flashing his car-salesman smile, serving as the great comforter — vice presidents have to attend a lot of funerals — alternately warning about his Irish temper and embracing any stranger in pain.

The empathy was most evident then, but the ambition never left him.

[Joe Biden, will lead an American gerontocracy]

In 2020, Biden ran as the steady alternative to the chaos and clamor on the American extremes, rejecting both the reactionary nostalgia of the Trump movement and the left’s denunciations of the country’s history.

If he won the race, Biden promised early in the campaign, “nothing would fundamentally change.”

Yet as 2020 wore on, through the pandemic and protests, he altered his riff. Now he was saying that the country craved “revolutionary, institutional change” — that the answer to the disinformation and division that led to the frightening assault on the Capitol is making Washington work again, delivering on changes that make life better for regular folks.

Biden’s friends say he’s right for this moment — a politician driven not by a cause, but by his desire to ensure a fair shot, stability and the two most intimate of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: freedom from want and from fear.

“In another life,” Gitenstein said, “Biden could well have been a priest or a cop who walks the beat and knows everybody. Helping people deal with their pain is what he does.”

Some time after Biden’s 1988 campaign collapsed, Gitenstein asked Cramer whether he thought Biden had a future in politics.

“Someday, they will come to him,” the biographer replied.

“By that, he meant the party and the country will come to him,” Gitenstein recalled. “The moment will be just right for him. We’re at that moment.”