Born: November 20, 1942 in Pennsylvania, USA
Education: College of Law - Syracuse University (1968), University of Delaware (1965), Archmere Academy (1961)
Spouses: Neilia Hunter (1966–1972) Jill Biden (m. 1977),
Children: He had his three eldest kids—*Hunter, Beau, and **Naomi
Biden—with his late wife, Neilia Hunter.
He had his
youngest daughter, Ashley Biden,
with his second wife
* Hunter passed away in 2015 after battling brain
cancer.
**Naomi was 1 year old when she died in a car
crash in 1972. Her mother, Neilia, also passed in the same accident.
New Yorker writer Evan Osnos, who writes about the Democratic presidential candidate in his new book, Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, notes that the 2020 election represents Biden's third bid for the presidency.
In 1987, during Biden's first run, "he was
regarded as a bit of an arrogant guy," Osnos says.
That campaign ended abruptly after Biden was
accused of plagiarizing a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock. The joke became that Joe Biden was not an authentic
person. It took him a while to acknowledge that it was his own arrogance that
cost him that race.
Within a few months of dropping out of the race,
Biden nearly died from two brain aneurysms. He was rushed to the hospital,
where the doctors called in a priest to deliver last rites. Biden survived
brain surgery but spent months in recovery.
More than 30 years later, Osnos sees a candidate
who has come to terms with the tragedies and mistakes that have shaped his
life.
"If you talk to the 77-year-old Joe Biden now, he's a man who is at peace," Osnos says. "He's at peace from a series of hard-won scars. And it's a very different mindset than he had back then."
Highlights of interview with writer Evan Osnos
- On how Biden was defined by the tragic death of his wife, Neilia, and baby daughter, Naomi, in a car accident in 1972
When it happened, the reality is that Joe Biden did
not expect to take his seat in the Senate. He thought that period of his life
was over. He didn't see practically or spiritually how he could go on. The
reality was he considered suicide. Some older members of the Senate said to
him, "You need to do this not only because it's the right thing to do for
your voters, but it's also the right thing to do for you personally, because if
you don't do something, you will cave in." His sister Valerie told me that
one of the ways that they were able to get him off the floor, in effect, was by
telling him, "You have two boys at home now who have no mother. And if you
collapse, then they have nobody."
Biden struggled in that period with what it meant
to become this kind of public symbol of grieving. widower and father. He didn’t
like that. His image of himself was that he was the college football player
who'd been elected to the Senate and in his 20s, and that's what he had the
idea that he could become a great foreign policy statesman. That's what he
wanted to be. He didn't want to become a symbol of human vulnerability. But it
was thrust upon him and he had to decide whether to embrace it or rebel against
it or something else. ...
It was only later in his life, after the death of
his son Beau in 2015 when Biden came to accept more fully that that's something
that people wanted from him as a political person. They wanted actually
somebody in politics to talk to them about something like suffering and like
vulnerability. And he embraced it, but he didn't come to it quickly. It took a
long time for him to acknowledge that.
- On what Biden stood for in his early years in the Senate
In his very early years as a senator, he was a
moving target politically. I mean, to be blunt about it, he was more concerned
about being reelected than he was about specific policy items.
- On Biden's work on domestic issues
On the domestic front, one of the things that he
defined himself by was being active on issues of law enforcement and crime and
punishment. He was one of the authors of the Violence against Women Act, and he
was active very much in the crime bill of 1994. So these became some of the
issues that he was best known for. He was chairman of the Judiciary Committee,
which is a very powerful position. And all of those began to give him more
stature as a kind of technician in the ways of Congress. He was somebody who
knew how to get things accomplished.
From NPR (edited)
