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approve it. On January 17, 1991, the US, the United Kingdom (UK), and other allies attacked Iraq. In a matter of weeks, Kuwait was liberated and Iraq was defeated. The American public overwhelmingly approved of such a swift and successful military action.

That summer, on June 27, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement at the age of eighty-two. He was the first and the only African American on the court. President Bush was determined to replace him with a reliably conservative judge.

To the surprise of Joe Biden, the rest of the Judiciary Committee, and many others, Bush’s choice was Clarence Thomas. Thomas, a judge in the federal court system, did not have nearly the experience and prestige of Judge Robert Bork, or even of most candidates for the Supreme Court. But he was very conservative, and he was Black.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Joe Biden, was in a bind. If Judge Thomas had been white, it would have been easy to reject him because of his lackluster record. However, if the committee rejected an African American nominee, they could be accused of racial bias. Even more than with Robert Bork, Biden was anxious to run the committee’s hearings in a way that was absolutely fair.

Leading the questioning of Thomas, Biden’s plan was to expose him as so stubbornly conservative that he would not be able to judge a case fairly. Biden was sure Thomas had already made up his mind about issues likely to come before the Supreme Court, especially about a woman’s right to choose whether or not to bear a child. But Thomas refused to state his position on that issue.

As senators continued to question him, Thomas even insisted that he had no opinion on the issue one way or the other. This was hard to believe. But Thomas would not be pinned down and give the committee a chance to reject him.

Then the Judiciary Committee learned of an entirely different reason why they should consider rejecting Clarence Thomas. Anita Hill, a law professor who used to work for Judge Thomas, accused him of a pattern of sexual harassment. If Hill was telling the truth, Thomas had abused his power as her employer, and he was not worthy to be seated on the highest court in the land.

Biden wasn’t sure what to do. Clarence Thomas’s nomination was already a high-profile news story. Anita Hill’s accusations could make it “a giant incendiary bomb,” as he said later.

Anita Hill did not want to be publicly involved in the hearings, but in the end, she came and testified before the committee. Clarence Thomas denied all her accusations. Furthermore, he angrily accused the Senate Judiciary Committee of racial bias for even allowing Hill’s testimony. He called the hearings “a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks.”

The committee decided to make no recommendation to approve or disapprove. On October 15, 1991, the full Senate narrowly confirmed Thomas as the new justice on the Supreme Court.

As for Judiciary chair Joe Biden, he had lingering bad feelings about these hearings. Against his will, they had turned from hearings into a trial of Clarence Thomas, and then into a trial of Anita Hill. He was afraid that Anita Hill’s supporters thought he had allowed her to be unfairly humiliated and dismissed.

Biden was also afraid that Thomas’s supporters would accuse him of racial bias. He talked and talked, during and after the hearings, trying to assure all sides that he was doing his best to be fair. Many simply thought he was talking too much.

While the Clarence Thomas hearings had dragged on, Joe Biden had been hearing alarming reports from Yugoslavia in eastern Europe. Biden had made many trips to the region for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he knew more than most senators about Yugoslavia. The country was an ethnic mix, and the Serbian majority was abusing the Muslim and Roman Catholic minorities. But in 1991 the Bush administration was mainly concerned that the country was breaking apart. To help keep Yugoslavia together, they supported the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic as the president.

By August 1992, civil war was raging in the former Yugoslavia. Bosnia, a section populated mainly by Muslims and Croats, had tried to declare independence. Milosevic’s artillery was pounding every city in Bosnia. Worse, the Serbs were carrying out a policy of what they called “ethnic cleansing”—actually, murdering or driving out all the non-Serbs in Bosnia.

In fact, Milosevic was committing genocide, trying to destroy a whole ethnic group. The next year, traveling to Yugoslavia to meet Milosevic, Biden would not shake his hand or sit down to a meal with him. He told the Serb leader to his face, “I think you’re a damned war criminal.”

While Joe Biden was more and more worried about the horrifying crimes being committed in Bosnia, most of the US was focused on the presidential election of 1992. Reporters had asked Biden if he was thinking of running this time, but he wasn’t. In the previous four years, he’d almost died from the aneurysms, and he’d led the Judiciary Committee through two of the most difficult Supreme Court nominations in the history of the US. And he’d tried hard—and failed—to push his Violence Against Women Act through Congress.

As it happened, Democrat Bill Clinton defeated Republican president George H. W. Bush in November 1992. At the time, the Democratic Party had a reputation of being “soft on crime,” and Clinton promised that his administration would act to control crime. Joe Biden worked hard with others in Congress to write the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. His Violence Against Women Act was part of this sweeping crime control bill. So was a ban on assault weapons, the military-grade guns used in mass shootings.

In 1994, President Clinton signed the bill. Biden was proud of his accomplishment, and he was widely praised at the time, by the police as well as women’s groups. Unfortunately, the Violence Against Women Act would be weakened later by the Supreme Court. And