“I did it because I wanted to be able to kiss them goodnight and kiss them in the morning the next day.

“And I began to commute thinking I was only going to stay a little while – four hours a day, every day – from Washington to Wilmington, which I’ve done for over 37 years,” he said in his Yale speech.

With an intense, heartbreaking focus on his family, Mr Biden then began commuting daily from Washington to Delaware to remain with his young sons. Mr Biden said in his Yale speech: “I can remember my mother – a sweet lady – looking at me, after we left the hospital, and saying, ‘Joey, out of everything terrible that happens to you, something good will come if you look hard enough for it.’” The freshman senator had also planned for Neilia to organise his Capitol Hill office, the Evening Journal had reported. He was officially sworn in at his sons’ bedside while they were still in the hospital. I made it through, with a lot of support, and reconstructed my life and my family.” seemed unbearable in the beginning, and it took me a long time to heal, but I did survive the punishing ordeal. In his 2017 book Promise Me, Dad, Mr Biden wrote that “the pain. Roughly 1,200 people crowded a memorial service for Neilia and Naomi, the Delaware State News reported. Police determined that Neilia accidentally drove into the path of the tractor-trailer and didn’t see it coming. One week before Christmas, the senator-elect was in Washington DC interviewing staff members for his new office when he received the news about the deaths of his wife and daughter.Īfter that phone call, “my whole world was altered forever”, Mr Biden later said in a speech to Yale University graduates. The following month, Neilia asked her husband, “What’s going to happen, Joey? Things are too good,” The News Journal reported. The 30-year-old underdog won the race in November 1972. It also was the first year 18 year olds were eligible to vote. The family campaigned across the state, mounting a lucrative grassroots campaign attacking his Republican incumbent as old and out of touch, a shock to the status quo highlighting the generational divide between the elder conservative statesman’s base and a much younger electorate following the Vietnam War and civil rights movement. Neilia became his closest adviser and the “brains” behind his campaign, The News Journal reported. One year later, Mr Biden challenged Republican incumbent J Caleb Boggs for a Delaware seat in the US senate seat. The couple’s first and only daughter Naomi was born 8 November 1971, the youngest of three children, with two older brothers Beau and Hunter. Though Neilia Hunter was a Republican, Neilia Biden registered as a Democrat, according to The News Journal. He has called his time there “a dangerous combination of arrogant and sloppy” and ultimately graduated 76th in a class of 85.įollowing his graduation, the couple moved to the suburb of Wilmington, where he practised law and joined the New Castle County Council. They married on 27 August 1966 while he was still enrolled in law school. There, Neilia earned her master’s degree in English and taught special needs students. In 1963, Neilia, then a college sophomore at Syracuse University, met Mr Biden, then a junior at the University of Delaware, on the beach in Nassau during spring break.Īsked about his career goals, Mr Biden told his future wife’s mother: “President.” After he earned his bachelor’s degree in Delaware, Mr Biden moved to Syracuse for law school. She participated in French club, hockey, swimming and student council, and was the photography editor of the Penntonian, and vice president and then president of the International Relations Club, according to her school’s yearbook. She graduated from Penn Hall preparatory school in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1960. The daughter of successful diner operators in New York state, Neilia Hunter was born on 28 July 1942 in the affluent town of Skaneateles. More than 40 years later, Beau died following a brain cancer diagnosis.Įverything you need to know about Dr Jill Biden Their two sons, Joseph “Beau” Biden III and Robert Hunter Biden, survived.

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