by Jeff Wilser
A few weeks after election night, on November 20, 1972, Joe Biden turned thirty years old, making him eligible for the United States Senate, which would begin its session in January. In just over a month, he would take his Oath of Office. In that time he had work to do. He needed to find a new home in DC for Neilia and the kids, shop for Christmas presents and a Christmas tree, learn his way around the DC Senate offices, and hire a staff. Thanks to his popularity with the youth of Delaware, Biden had to weed through 2,500 staffer applications, and all of this by hand.
For his thirtieth birthday, he had a party at Panini Grill. The whole family gathered around a birthday cake. Wearing a crisp suit, Biden cut into the cake as three-year-old Beau and two-year-old Hunter looked on, transfixed, while Neilia, smiling, leaned over to poke the frosting.
In the coming weeks, Joe and Neilia would divide and conquer their bottomless to-do list. They both traveled to DC to hunt for a house. They found a school for the boys. It wasn’t lost on Biden that he was just thirty years old and lived a charmed life, and that this moment, this time with Neilia and their children, “exceeded all my romantic youthful imaginings.”
On Monday morning, December 18, 1972, Biden headed back to DC for more transition work, joined by Val, as always, who continued to serve as a confidante. Neilia stayed in Wilmington, wanting to knock out some Christmas shopping and buy a Christmas tree. She loaded up the station wagon for the errand, strapping in Hunter, Beau, and baby Naomi.
Joe was interviewing candidates for his staff. The phone rang. The call was for Val.
Biden watched his sister take the call. He saw her face go white, and somehow, through some sixth sense, he just knew.
“There’s been a slight accident,” Val said. “Nothing to be worried about. But we ought to go home.”
Biden knew better. He just knew. He felt it in his gut. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
Silence. Joe and Val, brother and sister, raced to a plane and flew to Wilmington. They hurried to the hospital. He soon learned that, as promised, Neilia had gone shopping for the Christmas tree along with the kids. On the way home, she came to an intersection, stopped at the stop sign, and then eased the car forward. A tractor-trailer rolled down a hill. She was broadsided.
Neilia and the baby had died. It was not clear if the boys would live. Hunter’s skull was fractured, and the doctors feared brain damage. The crash had broken nearly every bone in Beau’s body, forcing the three-year-old to remain in a full body cast.
Biden could barely speak. He just stayed with his two young boys in their hospital room, waiting, watching, praying, hoping, grieving, loving. He went numb. The days bled into each other. Dark thoughts, suicidal thoughts, began to ooze into his head. “For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he later said. “Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, but because they had been to the top of the mountain and they just knew in their heart they’d never get there again.”
A few days after the accident, a grief-ravaged Biden somehow managed to speak at Neilia’s funeral. “The night before [Neilia] died, she was writing Christmas cards,” he told the crowd. “We were both in the living room in front of the fire and I was sitting in my lounge chair, a pompous young senator thinking about the big things I was going to do in Washington.” He spoke of a premonition. “We had decided not to have a fourth child because of a fear that something would happen to it….We had three beautiful children. Now I have two.”
Christmas came and went, and the boys stayed in the hospital. Biden felt loss, despair, and then anger. He was mad at the world. He was mad at God. “No words, no prayer, no sermon gave me ease. I felt God had played a horrible trick on me,” he later wrote. In some of the rare moments when he wasn’t with the boys, he would “bust out of the hospital and go walking the nearby streets. [My brother] would go with me, and I’d steer him wordlessly down into the darkest and seediest neighborhoods I could find. I liked to go at night when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight. I was always looking for a fight. I had not known I was capable of such rage.” Yet grief is a complicated thing, as is faith. In all this confusion, at one point he considered quitting politics and joining the priesthood, even reaching out to the local Catholic bishop to see if it was possible. (The bishop told him, “Look, Joe, why don’t you take a year to think about this?”)
He did take some time. And soon he returned from the rage and banished those thoughts of suicide. At least two things kept him alive: Beau and Hunter. He knew that his boys needed him. They had already lost a sister and their mother; no way in hell would he let them lose their father. He would keep going. He would get through this. He had to. For the boys.
That hospital room, with Beau in a body cast and Hunter nursing a crushed skull, became Joe’s entire universe. Early on, when Beau had to be transferred via ambulance to Delaware Division hospital, Joe reassured the boy, “I’m going to jump right in there with you, son.” The idea of “the Senate” became some abstract, distant concept that felt like another lifetime. The Senate felt suddenly small, irrelevant.
“One of my earliest memories was being in that hospital, Dad always at our side,” Beau remembered as an adult. “We, not the Senate, were all he cared about.”
Joe had many friends, and his neighbors rallied to show their support and condolences and love. Consumed by grief, he wasn’t much interested in talking on the phone. Jimmy, his brother, would screen the calls to give him privacy. But one call came through that Jimmy had to have him take.
Biden picked up the phone. “Hello, Mr. President, how are you?”
NIXON: “Senator, I know this is a very tragic day for you, but I wanted you to know that all of us here at the White House were thinking about you and praying for you, and also for your two children.”
BIDEN: “I appreciate that very much.”
NIXON: “I understand you were on the Hill at the time, and your wife was just driving by herself.”
BIDEN: “Yes, that’s right.”
NIXON: “But in any event, looking at it as you must in terms of the future, because you have the great fortune of being young. I remember I was two years older than you when I went into the House. [Laughs.] But the main point is you can remember that she was there when you won a great victory. You enjoyed it together, and now, I’m sure, she’ll be watching you from now on. Good luck to you.”
BIDEN: “Thank you very much, Mr. President.”
NIXON: “Okay.”
BIDEN: “Thank you for your call. I appreciate it.”
The call was recorded and later released to the public, along with a cache of Nixon’s tapes. Biden’s voice is raw, spent, and wrenching. His grief was unimaginable.
How did Biden come back from this? How did he find the will to not only survive but also eventually regain the glimmer in his eye, the spark of wonder, the joy of seeing Cub Scouts on an airport tarmac? To get a glimpse into how he recovered, we can look at a speech he gave, years later, as vice president, to the families of soldiers who had died in the line of duty. To empathize with the widows and widowers and parents of slain children, he shared his own pain.
“There will come a day, I promise you…when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.” He paused, looked at the crowd, and it was clear that he fully understood their grief. “It will happen. My prayer for you is that day will come sooner or later. But the only thing I have more experience than you in is this: I’m telling you it will come.”
WISDOM OF JOE
The smile will come.
The tragedy of the accident, in a sense, helps us understand one of Biden’s most fundamental qualities: empathy. He connects with people. And as he told the class of 2017 at Colby College, forming personal connections—through empathy—is the one successful trait that he sees in all the best world leaders.
Caring about your colleag
ue as they’re dealing with a sick parent, or their child [who] graduated from college, or the child was in an accident. That’s the stuff that fosters real relationships, breeds trust, allows you to get things done in a complex world. The person on the other side of the negotiating table, the other side of the political debate; a person who doesn’t look like you, who lives in a community you’ve never visited, a person who has a different background or religion than yours. They’re not some flattened version of humanity, reducible to a collection of parts and attributes. They’re a whole person, flawed, struggling to make it in the world just like you.
Back in that hospital room in the winter of 1972, as he watched and prayed for Hunter and Beau, reps from the Senate were relentless in asking him to serve. Biden said no. They kept coming back. Biden said no again. The Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, called the hospital every day. Ultimately, Mansfield knew just what card to play: Do it for Neilia. She wanted this. She helped you get elected. She helped you toss that crazy Hail Mary.
Biden finally agreed, but only on two conditions.
The first was this: six months.
Mansfield kept saying, “Just give me six months, and if you don’t feel that you’re up for it, you can quit.”
The second condition: Joe insisted that if he was going to join the Senate, he still needed to be a father to his boys. He needed to see them every day. So unlike virtually every other senator, every day, he would commute back home to see his sons. He would make the boys his number one priority.
And he would commute by Amtrak.
BIDEN AND FAITH
After the tragedy of Neilia and Naomi, Biden’s faith was tested; he was angry, and he blamed God. Yet eventually he would find peace. “Quite frankly, I just got tired of wallowing in grief,” he wrote in Promises to Keep. “What was more self-indulgent than to think God had been busying himself with my particular circumstances?”
Many years later, after yet another life-and-death trial, Biden’s dad, Joe Sr., sent him a cartoon from Hägar the Horrible—to give him some perspective. “I still have it on my desk,” Biden said in 2011. “Hägar is in his Viking boat with his horn helmet, rowing away when a bolt of lightning comes out of the sky. Hägar gets charred. He looks up at heaven and says, ‘Why me, God?!’ And God comes back with ‘Why not?’”
He once told a crowd, “I find great solace in my faith. I happen to be a Roman Catholic, a practicing Catholic….I found that, for me, the externalities of my faith bring me a sense of peace.” (Or in a slightly less serene moment, he said in 2005, “the next Republican that tells me I’m not religious, I’m going to shove my rosary down their throat.”)
His son Beau once wore a set of rosaries. Joe now wears that very set of rosaries, always, every day, and says, “I will wear it till I die.”
When a freshman senator takes the Oath of Office, typically, he or she does this in the chambers of the Senate. That wouldn’t work for Biden. A few weeks after the accident, he still spent most of his days and nights in the hospital, keeping a nervous eye on Beau and Hunter.
So on January 5, 1973, Joe Biden took the Oath of Office in the chapel of the Wilmington Medical Center. The tiny room was packed with Joe’s family, Neilia’s parents, and even a horde of cameras and press; the tragedy had put him on the national map. Just a few feet from his father’s side, little Beau Biden, three years old, wearing a sweater under a blazer, rested on a hospital bed with his leg still hoisted up in a cast.
Biden swore the oath and then said a few words. “I hope that I can be a good senator for you all. I make this one promise: If in six months or so there’s a conflict between my being a good father and being a good senator, which I hope will not occur…I promise you that I will contact [the governor] and tell him we can always get another senator, but they can’t get another father.”
Soon Beau and Hunter were discharged from the hospital. They would be okay, thank God. Val moved into the house to help look after the boys. In the morning, Joe ate breakfast with Beau and Hunter, hustled to the Wilmington Amtrak station to catch the express, and then he came back, every night, to tuck in the boys. And before he said good night, he led them in their nightly prayers, which were inspired by his Grandpop Finnegan: They would say three Hail Marys.
4
Biden Time (1972–88)
“I ain’t changing my brand. I know what I believe.
I’m confident in what I know. And I’m gonna say it.
And if folks like it, wonderful. If they don’t like it, I understand.”
As a rookie senator, in the very beginning, every day Biden kept one eye on the clock, just waiting for that moment when he could bolt for the door and head home to see Beau and Hunter. (He lucked out and had one of the desks closest to the door, so he could make a speedy getaway.) This habit came with a cost. He didn’t make too many friends in the early days, and by his own admission, he “did what was necessary and no more.” He focused on just one day, then the next, then the next.
Some days he wore Neilia’s high school ring on his finger. He would stay bunkered in his office, alone, speaking only to his boys on the telephone. He even had a rule for Beau and Hunter: He told them that they were free to call him any time, for any reason, and no matter what he was doing, he would take the call. He could be drafting a law. He could be meeting with the secretary of state. He would always pick up.
WISDOM OF JOE
Always take the family calls.
He also gave the boys a “wild card,” telling them that if they wanted to come with him to Washington for the day, for any reason, at any time, all they had to do was look at him and say “wild card.” No questions asked. “We have an expression in our family,” Biden later said. “If you have to ask for help, it’s too late. We’re there for each other.”
He was doing right by his family, but aides from around the Senate began to whisper: Biden wouldn’t last long.
Biden also had a more quotidian problem: He still looked too young to be a senator. And no one knew who he was. Security guards would stop him in the hallways and say, “Senators only, young fella.”
Take, for an example, an early meeting with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The meeting was in room S-116 of the Capitol building. Like a college freshman looking for his classroom, Biden jogged up and down the halls in desperate search of the room. Where the hell is room S-116? As Biden later shared in his memoir, he was running late, panicked, drenched in sweat. He finally found the room and stumbled through the door, Chevy Chase–style. The door crashed into a file cabinet. “Um, I’m sorry I’m late,” Biden awkwardly blurted out. He looked around the table and found it packed with Kissinger and senior senators who stared at him.
Kissinger thought he was a young staffer, and then mispronounced his name as “Bid-den.”
Biden didn’t miss a beat. “No problem, Secretary Dulles.”
It had been over thirteen years since Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stepped inside Ike’s Oval Office, and it might not have been the best of jokes…but it was a start. The sense of humor was coming back.
Joe Biden was coming back.
He was helped along by a new buddy of his, Ted Kennedy, who showed him the ropes and took him under his wing. One day he offered to take Biden to the Senate gym, where he was introduced to three old senators…who happened to be buck naked. (In one of the few times of his life, Joe Biden was speechless.)
Yet the recovery from grief is not linear, and sometimes the old anger would bubble to the surface. Early in his Senate tenure, he traveled to New Orleans with his brother Jimmy to give a speech at Tulane. One night they ran into a bunch of drunken jerks. “We were walking the street late at night talking about Neilia and looking for a place to eat,” he told a reporter in 1974.
These four guys were coming toward us, taking up the whole street, looking for trouble, and for a split second it flashed through my mind, “Take ’em on.” We banged into each other. Nothing had happened, nothing had bee
n said, but, you know, we were ready. I’m no fighter, and I’d probably have gotten the stuffing kicked out of me.
At that moment, a New Orleans policeman walked around the corner, and as soon as I saw him, it clicked: What the hell am I doing? I’m a United States senator letting my emotions get to the point that I’m willing to take on four toughs on a side street in New Orleans just to let the frustration out.
Back in DC, with his mind focused on work, it did not take long for Biden to begin speaking his mind—a little too freely, for some. The Joe Biden we know and love was about to make his public debut.
In 1974, the Senate mulled over a pay hike for its members. This is an awkward topic for obvious reasons. And it’s not a topic that’s usually embraced by rookie senators. The economy was in the toilet, and it’s never a good look to raise your salary when the middle class is out of work.
Senators were paid $42,000 at the time. Most were independently wealthy, and almost all of them needed to maintain two households, one in their home state and one in DC. Biden had no real money. He didn’t own a single share of stock. He wasn’t necessarily for the pay raise—he agreed that the timing didn’t make sense—but he brazenly gave a speech supporting it to all of his senior colleagues: “It seems to me that we should flat-out tell the American people we are worth our salt. The American people would understand because they are a lot smarter than we give them credit for.” Here we can imagine the stunned silence. He continued: “I do not think many of the visitors sitting up there in the public gallery or outside the Capitol feel that they want people in the U.S. Senate who are not worthy of a high salary.”