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Thank you to @zachdcarter for linking here to Washingtonian's 1974 profile with Joe Biden, which continues to fascinate me. huffpost.com/entry/joe-bide…
Kitty Kelley wrote the profile, which looked at the young senator not long after his wife and daughter died. washingtonian.com/1974/06/01/joe…
As Zach points out, Biden was concerned at the time that readers might mistake him for a liberal. So he pointed out some issues on which he wasn't a liberal.
“I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion," he said. "I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”
“I don’t think marijuana should be legalized.” “Now, if you still think I’m a liberal, let me tell you that I support the draft. I’m scared to death of a professional army.”
One particularly intriguing passage: a meeting between Biden and two fellow senators, William Proxmire and Thomas Eagleton, Kelley reports, "Biden tells him a joke with an antisemitic punchline and asks that it be off the record."
I called a Biden spokesperson to ask what the joke was, and you know, it was weird but they were not particularly thrilled by the question.
As it turns out, a Biden aide wrote to Washington to complain about the article in September 1974 and disputed that such a joke was told. So Kitty Kelley replied in the letters section with an account of the joke: 
Kelley wrote in September 1974: “I agree that anti-Semitic is too strong a description, and again I apologize.”
>@ryangrim wrote about the profile in 2015 for HuffPost, and a Biden spokesperson told him, "As with much of this article, then-Senator Biden was taken out of context. The Vice President is and has been a long-time supporter of a woman’s right to choose." huffingtonpost.com/entry/joe-bide…
“Nothing was out of context,” Kelley told me. washingtonian.com/2015/10/05/joe…
