Tie dye, disco, and John Travolta’s career—these are just a few things from the 70s that don’t hold up today. One thing that does stand the test of time? This 1974 Kitty Kelley profile of Joe Biden. It is very good, very horny and contains at least one unprintable antisemitic joke. Which is all to say Joe Biden probably hasn’t changed much since 1974, and for that I am grateful.

Much of the article focuses on Biden’s late wife, Neila, who died in a car accident in 1972. And most of the discussion about Biden’s late wife, Neila, focuses on the terrific sex they had while she was still alive. Some key quotes:

  • “Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover. The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports.”
  • “Let me show you my favorite picture of her,” he says, holding up a snapshot of Neilia in a bikini. “She had the best body of any woman I ever saw. She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?”
  • “My beautiful millionaire wife was a conservative Republican before she met me. But she changed her registration.”
  • “At first she stayed at home with the kids while I campaigned but that didn’t work out because I’d come back too tired to talk to her. I might satisfy her in bed but I didn’t have much time for anything else.”

But Biden was also looking forward, to being adored again: “I would like very much to fall in love and be married again because basically I am a family man. I want to find a woman to adore me again.”

Biden, in 1974, wanted to be adored—just not by his special reporter friend, Francine Barnard, then a correspondent for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“In spite of all the rumors around town right now, I can look you straight in the eye and say that I have no present or future plans of getting married,” Biden said. “Besides, why should someone like Francie marry a guy like me who is still in love with his wife, who has a political constituency and a readymade family. She deserves better than that.”

That’s a lot of talk about women—but what of women’s rights? Well, 1974 Biden was against them, and also for the draft, so at least he gave both sexes a raw deal. To wit:

  • “I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”
  • “I support a limited amnesty, and 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.”

Other highlights of the interview include a story about routinely rejecting dinner invitations from the Kennedys.

“I am the youngest man in the Senate and I am also the victim of a tragic fate which makes me very newsworthy. I’m sure that’s why I get so many invitations all the time. I don’t accept them and most people understand why. Rose Kennedy is always calling me to come to dinner. She has invited me at least ten times and I’ve only gone once,” Biden says. “Most guys would kill to get invitations like that but I don’t accept them because I like to be with my children as much as possible. Whenever Ted and Joan Kennedy call me for dinner—and they call quite a bit—I usually say I have to go home. They are great because they understand why.”

That covers the Catholics, but what about the Jews? That, I’m sad to say, has been lost to the annals of time: writes Kelley, “Biden tells [Senator Eagleton] a joke with an antisemitic punchline and asks that it be off the record.”

It was kept off the record.

H/T Washingtonian. Image via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.