Joe Biden (Pennsylvania, 1942) had fulfilled the promise he made to his son Joseph (Beau) Biden, Delaware attorney general, before he died in 2015 from a brain tumor: be well and get to the White House by leaving out playing Donald Trump. This feat would have been tried as early as 2016, however, she abandoned the race in favor of Hillary Clinton when the tragedy settled again in the course of her life. A fate that, moreover, seems to haunt him permanently, but one that recovers in an astonishing way, they say, thanks to a phrase from his father that does not stop echoing in his memories: “Get up after being knocked down. Get up!".
In November 1972, Biden won a seat in the US Senate from the state of Delaware and became the youngest senator in American history. There was no doubt, the Democrat was the paradigm of American success: successful, married to a beautiful woman and father of three children. He could not imagine Biden that on December 18 of that same year, in the middle of the afternoon, he would receive the most painful call of his life and would have to swear to his public office in a hospital room. His wife Neilia Hunter Biden and their young daughter Amy (13 months) had died in a traffic accident and his other children, Beau (3 years) and Robert Hunter (2 years), were very serious.
Neilia and the children had announced to Biden that they were going to buy a Christmas fir tree, but a corncob storage truck ran over the vehicle and ended the celebration. Since then, the new president has never worked on the day of the year in which he lost his wife and daughter with the sole purpose of honoring his memory and alleviating, even with a temporary bandage, the wound of loss.
"I looked at my children and knew that I had no choice but to fight to stay alive"
A widower in his early 30s, Biden buried himself at work and raised his children with fierce dedication. To the point that every day for three decades, the young senator traveled 300 kilometers by train from Delaware to Washington D.C. in order not to be separated from them. “I began to understand how despair leads people to liquidate everything, how suicide was not just an option but a rational option. But I looked at Beau and Hunter asleep and, honestly, I wondered what terrors they had in their dreams and who would explain my absence. And I knew I had no choice but to fight to stay alive, ”Biden wrote years later.
In 1977, Biden met Jill Tracy, an American teacher somewhat younger than him, on a blind date organized by his brother, whom he married almost immediately, with the approval and encouragement of Beau and Hunter, and with whom he a new daughter: Ashley. Jill, as in the case of Melania Trump with her husband, has also had a very important role in Biden's 2020 election campaign because, among other aspects, she has been in charge of making known one of the most valued aspects of the new president: your empathy and your ability to connect with people who suffer significant losses. "She will do for your family what she did for ours: unite and complete us," the future first lady said in a speech in Michigan.
It will do for your family what it did for ours: unite and complete us"
In this sense, political analysts often point out that his family and his little fluency in terms of public speaking are two of the weak points of the former US vice president and, probably, they are right. Biden was deflated in one of the debates with Trump when the Republican blurted out in prime time that he did not know who his son Beau was, a personal friend of Kamala Harris, but that he did know about the problems with the cocaine of Hunter, the only son who it remains alive.
The little Biden, according to his career, has turned out to be the black sheep of the president's circle. He has been married three times and has had a romantic relationship with his sister-in-law and his brother Beau's widow, he was expelled from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for drugs and alcohol, and now he is also facing a lawsuit. parenthood brought by a younger Arkansas woman who he apparently met at a strip club in the back-and-forth of her detox phases.
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