At lunchtime on a spring day last year, Joe Biden was at his desk in the West Wing. When the door opened, the Vice-President stood up and stretched. He appeared to be in mid-thought. It was a busy week—I was there to talk to him about Iraq, Ukraine, and other dramas—but when I asked what he’d been thinking about at his desk, he beamed. “A First Communion, man!” It was coming up that weekend, in Delaware, and Biden was heading home to his vast, inseparable family. He said, “I look around at my sister, and a lot of my peers, and younger peers with children who are getting out of college, and they’re scattered all over the universe. I’ve really been lucky. My oldest son, Beau, is attorney general, so he lives a mile and a quarter from my home. My other son, Hunter, lives literally a mile and a quarter from the residence here.” His daughter Ashley went to college at Tulane, and, for a while, he feared that she would settle “down in Looziana,” he said, drawing out the vowels. “Fortunately, she married a Philly boy.” He said, “Every Sunday, when we’re home, we have dinner, you know. It’s been that way for twenty-five years.”
On Saturday, Biden's son Beau died of brain cancer. He was forty-six, a father of two, a former Delaware attorney general who had previously enlisted in the Army and served in Iraq. The death of Joseph R. Biden III—the Vice-President’s eldest son, confidant, namesake, and protégé—was, even beyond the immediate facts, almost inconceivably cruel: in 1972, the Vice-President’s first wife, Neilia, and their thirteen-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed when their station wagon was hit by a tractor-trailer, as they drove to buy a Christmas tree. Beau, who was four years old at the time, and Hunter, who was three, were hospitalized. Their father had just been elected to the Senate, and he considered declining his seat. He also considered suicide. He had been raised to believe in a benevolent God. “Well, I didn’t want to hear anything about a merciful God. No words, no prayer, no sermon gave me ease. I felt God had played a horrible trick on me, and I was angry,” he wrote later. In the end, Biden took the Senate seat, in part because he worried what would become of his sons if their father never recovered. He took the oath of office beside the hospital bed where Beau was lying in a cast.
In the decades since then, Joe Biden has found his way—steadily, not flawlessly, but honorably. He rose through the Senate, ran twice for the Presidency, said things he wished he had not, paid for them, recovered—only to find himself, to his surprise, asked to join a fellow senator, Barack Obama, in a historic run for the White House. In the Vice-Presidency—the most maligned job in Washington—Biden has often projected the look of a man who can’t quite believe his good fortune. Ted Kaufman, his friend for more than four decades, once told me, “If you ask me who’s the unluckiest person I know personally, who’s had just terrible things happen to him, I’d say Joe Biden. If you asked me who is the luckiest person I know personally, who’s had things happen to him that are just absolutely incredible, I’d say Joe Biden.”
After the news broke on Saturday, the President praised Beau Biden for “a life that was full; a life that mattered.” He said it was a testament to Jill and Joe Biden that Beau lived "a life that reflected their reverence for family.” “The Bidens,” he said, “have more family than they know.” There is something to that. In a town where “family” is often brandished as a political prop, the Bidens have never attracted a cynical reading. In their tragedy, their striving, their survival, and their improbable optimism, the Bidens are a deeply American family—a clan that, even as it edged into privilege, has never looked out of reach or out of touch.
The father sometimes talks of his people in anthropological terms—“We Bidens,” he says. As he put it in his memoir, “Promises to Keep,” “We Bidens have strong personalities, and we live close.” In the Biden family, nothing is ever a solo decision. Two and a half years after Neilia’s death, when Joe Biden met Jill Jacobs, his sons asked, “Are we gonna get married again?” (They did; she became Jill Biden.)
Many years later, in 1987, Beau Biden would join his father on the campaign trail, urging him to stay in the race even as hopes faded. Richard Ben Cramer, in his book “What It Takes,” described Beau joining his father at a campaign event so dull and quiet that you “could hear wool pants rustling on Naugahyde banquet chairs.” The listeners peeled away, and his father kept talking, “till Beau, toward the end, was staring at his shoes, murmuring, ‘Dad ... finish.’ ”
Among the many tributes to the Bidens, Senator Harry Reid said, “There's a song, ‘A Man of Constant Sorrow,’ that, certainly, if that ever applied to someone, it would be our friend Joe Biden.” The sentiment was true and kind, but somehow the analogy seems temporary. The Bidens’ sorrow has been exceptional, but never constant.
