Biden’s Pain Both Physical, Political : Senate: Lawmaker had two middle-of-the-night root canals during hearings. But his career may have suffered the greater hurt.

For Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the least painful part of the resumed Clarence Thomas hearings may have been the two root canals performed on him by his dentist in the middle of the night.

The committee’s televised sessions--scheduled after the furor that erupted over allegations that Thomas had sexually harassed a former aide--held the nation spellbound, fascinated with the sexually explicit testimony and emotionally explosive charges of sexism and racism.

The pain on the faces of the Judiciary Committee’s 14 members was evident throughout three exhausting days as the normally dignified process of confirming a Supreme Court nominee degenerated into an unprecedented and sordid saga of sex, lies and stereotypes.

In Biden’s case, however, the pain had a physical as well as political dimension. Plagued by throbbing toothaches, the Delaware Democrat was forced to go to his dentist--once at midnight and the next day at 2 a.m.--for two root canal operations. “It was an appropriate metaphor for what was happening,” a committee aide said afterward. “In a sense, the whole nation was undergoing a root canal.”

But for Biden, who eased the ache by keeping a cold Coke can pressed to his face whenever he was out of the sight of television cameras, the worst part of the pain was clearly political.

“We knew going into this that it would be a no-win situation for him politically,” a Biden aide confided.

“Half of the American people think Thomas has been unjustly smeared and that the committee is guilty of racism. The other half thinks Anita Faye Hill omas’ accuser) has been wrongly accused of fantasizing about men and that the committee is guilty of sexism. Where’s the political win in all that?” another aide asked.

When Hill’s allegations were leaked, Biden was sharply criticized by women’s groups for keeping them secret and for not fully investigating the charges before the committee voted, 7 to 7, on Thomas’ confirmation Sept. 27. When the hearings reopened Friday after Hill agreed to testify, the tenor of the calls flooding into Biden’s office changed sharply.

“At first we were getting calls from people demanding to know why we were hushing this thing up. Now we’re getting calls from people demanding to know why on Earth we put all this stuff on TV,” a committee source said.

Biden, who at 49 is the youngest four-term member of the Senate, strongly defended his handling of the affair by arguing that Hill initially hamstrung the committee by insisting that her allegations remain anonymous--a request that he said he felt compelled to honor. “If you came to me again in the same circumstances . . . ,” Biden told Hill at one impassioned point in the hearings, “I would do the same thing again.”

But, as one of the Senate’s strongest advocates for women’s rights, Biden also was clearly stung by allegations that he was unconcerned about issues like sexual harassment. “I do apologize to the women of America if they got the wrong impression about how seriously I take the issue of sexual harassment,” he said.

Most observers think that Biden will weather the storm without serious damage to his career. One aide said the criticism is already abating now that “people begin to understand that he kept the information quiet at first at Prof. Hill’s own request.”

But Biden’s performance before the cameras also underscored the fact that, even after 20 years in the Senate, he remains in some ways a study in perplexing contrasts.

“Joe is a powerful orator whose eloquence frequently awes people,” one friend said. “Yet, he also talks too much and sometimes people misinterpret his emotions because of the way he often smiles at the wrong moment.”

As chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the second-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, Biden has proved adept at crafting legislative compromises. Yet some fellow Democrats also complain that he can be politically impetuous. Frequently, he has found himself caught in the cross-fire between liberals and conservatives on the ideologically polarized Judiciary Committee, which he has chaired since 1986.

Born in Pennsylvania, Biden grew up in Wilmington, Del., and was graduated from the University of Delaware. He earned a law degree from Syracuse University. He and his second wife, Jill, have three children.

Both his professional and personal lives have had a series of ups and downs since he was first elected to the Senate in 1972 at the age of 29. Weeks after that election, his first wife and 1-year old daughter were killed in an automobile crash. In 1988, he almost died from a brain aneurysm. Politically, his career has been clouded by allegations of plagiarizing a speech that forced him to abandon a presidential bid three months after declaring his candidacy.

The political heat he took during the Thomas hearings has not left him scalded, one admirer said. “This is a guy who has been through a lot in his life and can take it.”