Joe Biden life and biography

Joe Biden (also known as Joseph Robinette Biden), born November 20, 1942 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, United States is an American politician, former U.S. Vice-president who is the 46th and current president of the United States.


One month after Joe Biden became one of the youngest senators in history in 1972, he suffered a personal tragedy that shattered his life and nearly ended his political career. But Biden persevered and became a respected senior member of the Senate, despite a reputation for being overly candid and a record that defied traditional labels. The Delaware Democrat ran for president in the 1988 and 2008 races, dropping out of each race early on. But the second race enhanced his reputation, and in August of 2008, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama chose Biden as his running mate. The Democratic ticket won the 2008 election and Biden became an active vice president.

Biden was born to a working-class family in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and grew up in suburban Wilmington, Delaware. As a child, he played rugby and football. Childhood friend Marty Londergan told Esquire in 1982 that when he and Biden played football together, Biden was such a fierce competitor that he often got into on-field fights. "The guy just wanted to win too much," Londergan observed.

Biden enrolled at the University of Delaware, where he played safety on the football team. In the classroom he depended less on hard study than on his native intelligence and glib wit. "He had a talent for getting it done when it had to get done," college roommate and future law partner David Walsh told the Wilmington News Journal. During spring break of his junior year, Biden met Syracuse University student Neilia Hunter. He quit football before his senior year to spend more time with her and, after graduating, enrolled in Syracuse University Law School. They married in 1966 and two years later moved to Delaware, where Biden opened a law practice. He quickly became prominent in Wilmington by defending the accused in the toughest criminal cases.

Biden, who registered as a political independent in 1970, was asked to run for the New Castle County Council by Delaware Republicans impressed with his legal oratory skills. Biden decided to run, but as a Democrat. Although the district was 65 percent Republican, Biden--at 27--won by a large margin. The next day he began planning his Senate U.S. campaign. Just two years later, at 29, Biden challenged J. Caleb Boggs, 63, a two-term senator who had held office in Delaware for 26 years. No other Democrat wanted to challenge the popular Boggs, who was said to have known every state resident on a first-name basis and sent cards to every Delaware family at Christmas. So when the unknown Biden entered the race, people saw him as a sacrificial lamb. He expected the race to cost $80,000 and obtained a second mortgage on his home for the first $20,000. "We had trouble getting money from the regular Democratic sources because none of them wanted to invest in what looked like a losing campaign," his sister, Valerie Biden Saunders, told Good Housekeeping.

But Biden gained recognition by meeting voters in six coffee klatches a day throughout the state and by deploying battalions of high school students to pass out leaflets. He argued that Boggs was a do-nothing senator who would prefer to retire. His tenacity impressed donors, and money began to pour in. In the end, the campaign spent $300,000, the most for a statewide campaign in Delaware at that time.

On election night, Biden won took Boggs' seemingly safe seat by 3,162 votes. "Upstairs in his suite," Esquire reported, "Joe Biden took the concession call from Boggs and then began to cry. 'I didn't want to hurt him,' he said. 'I didn't want to do that.'" At 29, Biden was the youngest senator ever popularly elected, and the fourth-youngest ever chosen to serve. His political future shone so brightly that Time mentioned him as a presidential possibility before he even arrived in Washington.

Then, on December 18, 1972, tragedy struck. Biden's wife and three children were returning from shopping for a Christmas tree when, on a highway west of Wilmington, their station wagon was hit by a hay truck. The car was thrown over an embankment, killing Neilia Biden and infant daughter Naomi. Biden's two sons--Beau and Hunt--were hospitalized with serious injuries.

Biden called Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and told him he wanted to give up his seat. "They can always get another senator," he said, "but my boys can't get another father." Mansfield convinced Biden to stay and gave him several prestigious committee assignments. In January 1973, Biden was sworn into office in his sons' hospital room, where he had lived for a month.

He went to Washington, but--raising his two sons alone--decided to commute daily from Delaware, an 80-minute trip each way. He was still taking the daily train ride from Wilmington to Washington 36 years later. Some said Biden's commuting hurt his effectiveness as a senator. "It's a club here," Senator Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina) told the Washingtonian in 1985. "The atmosphere of club is missing with Joe. You never really get to know the others unless you go on a trip or to parties with them." Biden conceded that might be true, but told the Washingtonian, "Family has always been the beginning, the middle and the end with me." He had gone to Washington with no interest in making friends among his Senate colleagues. "There used to be great senators here who made a difference, men like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay," he told Good Housekeeping in 1975. "But not any more. There are still a few guys you can trust and respect but there is not much greatness here anymore." In that same article, Biden lived up to his reputation as an enfant terrible. "Why should I be here just to be one of 100 guys who vote?" he said, "I want to be one of those guys who change people's minds."

During a 1975 Judiciary Committee hearing, Biden interrupted himself in mid-sentence to say, "I obviously don't know what the hell I'm talking about." Such statements earned him a reputation for unblushing candor. "He's candid--maybe to a fault," Senator Bill Cohen (R-Maine) told the Washingtonian. Senator Hollings, a sort of foster father to Biden, told the Washingtonian, "Joe gets worked up. Some people think he gets too candid sometimes, but that's a mark of his generation. Better his short fuse than no fuse at all."

Mansfield placed Biden on several plum Senate panels, including the Steering, Judiciary, Foreign Relations, Budget and Intelligence committees. He became friendly with Senate leaders Hubert Humphrey and Edward Kennedy. In the late 1970s, he was President Jimmy Carter's chief Senate salesman on the SALT II treaty. Colleagues considered him a lively debater, quick on his feet and nimble with his questions. But some saw him as a senator who wouldn't do the grunt work, was not always prepared or interested, and thought making a speech was enough. Senator Gary Hart (D-Colorado), a potential competitor for the 1988 presidential nomination, called Biden "a buzz saw, all noise and bite."

"Joe just didn't give a damn," brother Jim Biden told Esquire in 1982. "He didn't give a damn about anything. [Sons] Beau and Hunt were the sole exceptions." Biden admitted he felt disjointed during his first term. "I viewed the Senate as a way station," he told National Journal. "I was going to serve my time and get out."

That feeling changed in 1977, when Biden met Jill Jacobs, who was finishing college in Delaware. They married that year and had a daughter in 1981. Biden's new wife gave him stability at home, he said, and helped him pursue his career without feeling he was abandoning his family.

In 1978, Biden was re-elected with 58 percent of the vote. Much of his support came from his position as the Senate's leader in opposing busing for school integration. In the mid-70s, Biden successfully proposed an amendment to prevent the Department of Health, Education and Welfare from ordering school districts to institute busing. Two years later he proposed a bill that failed by two votes on the Senate floor to restrict court-ordered busing. "Is it racist because people don't want to send their kid instead of across the street to a school six miles away?" he asked on the Senate floor.

Such stands created a confusing image of Biden. For every liberal act--opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1970s and El Salvador in the 1980s, grilling of the CIA over covert espionage--there was an equal and opposite conservative act--opposing busing, aiming to cut off federal funds for abortion, beefing up the defense budget.

Yet by 1984, Biden ranked fifth in how often he had voted in opposition to President Ronald Reagan, according to Congressional Quarterly. Two years later, the Democratic Party recaptured control of the Senate, elevating Biden to the post of chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee. He came to be regarded as an expert on criminal justice and foreign policy. In 1983 he co-sponsored a comprehensive anti-crime bill criticized by some as anti-liberal. He was a Senate leader on such issues as the MX missile, arms control, Lebanon, U.S. Soviet relations and civil rights.

That record, plus Biden's oratorical skills and attractive demeanor, spurred talk as early as 1983 that he would make a run for the presidency. Biden backed away from a 1984 run and was easily re-elected to the Senate. In 1987, he ran for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, but his candidacy was wounded when an opponent's campaign released a videotape showing Biden using, without credit, parts of speeches originally delivered by British politician Neil Kinnock. He dropped out of the race in September of 1987, saying he wanted to focus on chairing Senate hearings over a controversial Supreme Court nominee.

President Reagan had nominated arch-conservative judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. As Judiciary Committee chairman, Biden presided over Bork's contentious Senate confirmation hearings, and he also led the opposition to his nomination. The Senate rejected Bork in the fall of 1987. That battle helped make Biden well-known to the American public, as did a second contentious debate over a Supreme Court nominee. In 1991, when Clarence Thomas was nominated for the court, Biden's committee heard dramatic testimony from Anita Hill, a former employee of Thomas' who accused him of sexual harassment. As Thomas defended himself before the committee, the conflict gripped the nation's attention. The Senate voted narrowly to confirm Thomas.

In early 1988, Biden collapsed in a hotel in Rochester, New York, from an aneurysm. He underwent emergency surgery, suffered a second aneurysm later that year, and had another surgery performed. When he returned to his Senate work later that year, he dedicated himself to developing experience in foreign policy. He eventually became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Biden met with top Middle East leaders to discuss the war on terrorism and conflicts in the Middle East. In 2002, he voted to authorize war with Iraq, a decision he later regretted. He later became strongly critical of President George W. Bush's Iraq policy. In 2004, Biden, addressing the Democratic National Convention in Boston, said history would judge the administration of George W. Bush "harshly for the mistakes it has made."

Ran for President and Vice-President

Twenty years after his first run for president, Biden decided to try again. He announced his candidacy in January of 2007. However, in keeping with Biden's reputation for speaking carelessly, an ill-considered remark of his soon attracted severe criticism. He referred to another presidential hopeful, U.S. Senator Barack Obama, as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" (according to Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times. Presumably he was trying to note that Obama was the first black presidential candidate with a serious chance of winning, but his remark was widely considered racially insensitive.

However, Biden performed well in the Democratic presidential candidates' many debates. In a debate in Philadelphia in October of 2007, he memorably mocked Republican presidential candidate Rudy Guiliani for dwelling on terrorism as a campaign issue. "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11," Biden complained (according to Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times).

After winning only 1 percent of the vote in the first contest of the campaign, the January 3, 2008, Iowa caucus, Biden pulled out of the race. However, he had improved his political reputation by running, displaying his seasoned knowledge of foreign policy. Political observers speculated that if a Democrat won the White House, Biden might be a leading contender for a Cabinet position, possibly secretary of state.

But Obama, who won the Democratic nomination for president that June, had even bigger plans for Biden. On August 23, 2008, Obama announced he had chosen Biden as his vice-presidential running mate. Biden was viewed as a shrewd choice, given his years of political experience, including deep knowledge of foreign policy and in national security issues, helped offset the Illinois senator's youth.

During his acceptance speech at the convention, Biden criticized Obama's Republican opponent, U.S. Senator John McCain, who had served in the Senate with Biden for decades. Like Obama, Biden criticized McCain for supporting Bush on the Iraq war. "Again and again," he said (according to John M. Broder of the New York Times.), "on the most important national security issues of our time, John McCain was wrong, and Barack Obama was proven right." Biden attempted to undercut the political appeal of McCain's history as a Navy pilot and prisoner of war in Vietnam. "These times require more than a good soldier," Biden said (according to Broder). "They require a wise leader."

On October 2, 2008, Biden debated Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for vice president, in St. Louis, Missouri. Rather than challenge Palin directly, Biden used the platform to attack McCain, portraying the Republican presidential candidate's response to the Wall Street financial crisis as out of touch and erratic. Biden defended his ticket's plan to withdraw combat troops from Iraq within 16 months, arguing that McCain and Palin did not have a plan to end the war.

After a spirited campaign, the Obama-Biden ticket won the November election. Biden won his senate race in Delaware as well, and did not resign from the Senate seat until shortly before he was sworn in as vice president in January 2009. As vice president, Biden planned on reinventing the office after his predecessor, Dick Cheney, turned into an extremely powerful position. Biden did not want to be a "do nothing" vice president either, but worked to strike a balance that would allow him to be active but subordinate to President Obama. In his first few months in office, for example, Biden was put in charge of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, traveled to Georgia to pledge American support in the face of Russian threats, and tried to garner international support for an escalated war in Afghanistan.

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