Joe Biden (Joe Biden) Story
For Joe Biden, it's been a long road to accepting the Democratic presidential nomination and becoming the next president of the United States. The 77-year-old politician has gone through extreme highs and lows in his personal life, including the devastating deaths of his first wife and two of his children.
Joe ,Jill Biden and kids They had three children together -- sons Beau and Hunter, and daughter Naomi. In 1972, Biden suffered unimaginable tragedy when, just one month after winning the U.S. Senate election in Delaware at just 29 years old in a stunning upset against two-term incumbent J. Caleb Boggs, Neilia and their daughter Naomi -- who was just a year old at the time -- were killed in an automobile accident. A tractor-trailer slammed into their car while they were Christmas shopping just a mile away from their home. Beau, who was 4 years old at the time, and Hunter, who was 2, were also in the car but survived, though not without suffering serious injuries. Hunter recalled the devastating accident while delivering Beau's eulogy in 2015, after he died from brain cancer. "The first memory I have is of lying in a hospital bed next to my brother," Hunter said. "I was almost 3 years old. I remember my brother, who was one year and one day older than me, holding my hand, staring into my eyes, saying, 'I love you, I love you, I love you' over and over and over again." In an interview with The News Journal, Biden said 30-year-old Neilia eerily foreshadowed the tragedy before the accident. He recalled the two spending a night in together at their home and her telling him, "What's going to happen, Joey? Things are too good." In a CNN documentary, Biden shared that he contemplated suicide following the deaths of Neilia and Naomi, but his sons kept him going. "I thought about what it would be like just to go to the Delaware Memorial Bridge and just jump off and end it all," Biden said. "But I didn't ever get in the car and do it or wasn't ever even close." "I don't drink at all," he also said. "I've never had a drink in my life, but I remember taking out a fifth of, I think it was gin, and put it on the kitchen table. But I couldn't even make myself take a drink. What saved me was really my boys." Biden has acknowledged his fragile state at the time, sharing that he used to purposely take walks in unsafe neighborhoods around the hospital his sons were recovering in. "I liked to go at night when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight," Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep. "I was always looking for a fight. I had not known I was capable of such rage. I felt God had played a horrible trick on me." "The first few days, I felt trapped in a constant twilight of vertigo, like in the dream where you're suddenly falling … only I was constantly falling," he also wrote. "I began to understand how despair led people to just cash it in; how suicide wasn't just an option but a rational option. But I'd look at Beau and Hunter asleep and wonder what new terrors their own dreams held, and wonder who would explain to my sons my being gone, too. And I knew I had no choice but to fight to stay alive." Biden was sworn in to the Senate in January 1973 at Beau's bedside at the hospital, where he and Hunter were still recovering at the time. The tragedy he suffered drew national attention. Joseph Biden takes the oath of office from the U.S. Senate's secretary, Frank Valeo with his father-in-law Robert Hunter and son Joseph Beau Biden at his side, in Beau's hospital room. "I am the youngest man in the Senate and I am also the victim of a tragic fate which makes me very newsworthy," he told Washingtonian in a 1974 interview. "I'm sure that's why I get so many invitations all the time. I don't accept them and people understand why." Following the accident, he began taking the 90-minute Amtrak trip to and from Washington, D.C., every day so he could be at home with his sons in Delaware, earning him the nickname "Amtrak Joe." To this day, he does not work on Dec. 18 to commemorate the day Neilia and Naomi died. In his 2015 Yale commencement speech, Biden once again talked about how the love of his sons helped him persevere through tragedy. "Many people have gone through things like that. But because I had the incredible good fortune of an extended family, grounded in love and loyalty, imbued with a sense of obligation imparted to each of us, I not only got help," he said. "By focusing on my sons, I found my redemption." "The incredible bond I have with my children is the gift I'm not sure I would have had, had I not been through what I went through," he continued. Vice-President Joe Biden and sons Hunter Biden (L) and Beau Biden walk in the Inaugural Parade January 20, 2009 in Washington, DC. David McNew/Getty Images In 1975, Biden began dating his current wife, Jill. In a 2016 Vogue interview, Jill noted how it wasn't exactly love at first sight. "I was a senior, and I had been dating guys in jeans and clogs and T-shirts, he came to the door and he had a sport coat and loafers, and I thought, 'God, this is never going to work, not in a million years,'" she recalled. "He was nine years older than I am! But we went out to see A Man and a Woman at the movie theater in Philadelphia, and we really hit it off. When we came home ... he shook my hand good night ... I went upstairs and called my mother at 1 a.m. and said, 'Mom, I finally met a gentleman.'" Joe and Jill Biden Image:Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images Jill said he actually proposed five times before she said yes, always keeping his young sons in her mind. "I said, 'Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.' Because by that time, of course, I had fallen in love with the boys, and I really felt that this marriage had to work," she explained. "Because they had lost their mom, and I couldn't have them lose another mother. So I had to be 100 percent sure." Jill has never forgotten the importance of Neilia. In her 2019 autobiography, Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself, she talked about actually meeting her husband's first wife just weeks before her death, and recalled her "easy, natural beauty." "To take a mother from her children; to take a daughter from her father," she wrote of the deaths, "Joe Biden had had everything, and in a horrible second, it was gone." "In our family, Neilia would always be Mommy, but I was Mom," she added. "There was room enough, there was love enough, for us all. ... I owed her so much: my loyalty, my gratitude for the gift of these beautiful boys, and yes, my love." She and Biden eventually tied the knot on June 17, 1977, and they welcomed their daughter, Ashley, in 1981.
"She gave me back my life," Biden said of Jill in his memoir. "She made me start to think my family might be whole again."
"You'd be amazed at the number of people who come up to me," he shared. "I mean hundreds of people over time. They'll throw their arms around me, men and women, and say, 'I just lost my son, I just lost my father, I just lost my wife.' And all they want to know is that you're going to make it."
In August, Biden reached out to President Donald Trump after the death of Trump's brother Robert.
"Mr. President, Jill and I are sad to learn of your younger brother Robert's passing," Biden tweeted. "I know the tremendous pain of losing a loved one -- and I know how important family is in moments like these. I hope you know that our prayers are with you all."
As Biden ran for president of the United States, it was clear Beau's memory had been at the forefront. During the closing night of the DNC, the convention took a moment to pay tribute to Beau with a video about his life and career accomplishments.
"Beau is with me every single day," Biden tweeted after the video aired. "If he was here tonight, he would remind me 'just be who you are.' I'm a better person because of him."
Jill talked about how he's dealt with Beau's tragic death in her DNC speech.
Part Two, Masters of our own fate
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