Joe Biden’s personal tragedies have shaped his career, from policy to politicking.
In December 1972, the president – then a 30-year-old senator-elect from Delaware – was weeks away from being sworn into office when he lost his first wife Neilia and 13-month-old daughter Naomi in a car accident. His two sons, Joseph “Beau” Biden III, and Hunter Biden, were also in the car, and suffered injuries.
In 2015, Beau Biden, an Iraq War veteran and Delaware attorney general, died from brain cancer. He was 46 years old.
In a statement following his death, Joe Biden wrote: “Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known.”
Beau had experienced a stroke in 2010, and three years later was treated at MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas, where doctors removed a lesion from his brain.
In 2015, his cancer returned, and he received aggressive treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He died on May 30, 2015.
Beau was laid to rest at St Joseph’s on the Brandywine in Wilmington, Delaware, where Joe Biden’s late wife Neilia and daughter Naomi are also buried.
He is survived by his widow Hallie and his two children Natalie and Hunter.
Beau was three years old when his mother was killed in the crash that also took the life of his little sister. Beau and his brother Hunter, then two, were also in the car. Their father was sworn into the Senate at their hospital beds.
During his 2012 speech at the Democratic National Convention, Beau moved his father to tears while nominating him for vice president.
“One of my earliest memories was being in that hospital, dad always at our side. … He decided not to take the oath of office. He said, ‘Delaware can get another senator, but my boys can’t get another father.’
“However, great men like Ted Kennedy, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey — men who had been tested themselves — convinced him to serve. So he was sworn in, in the hospital, at my bedside,” Beau said.
In 1977, Joe Biden married Jill Jacobs, who became the boys’ stepmother and helped “rebuild” the family, Beau later said in 2012. “I have two moms now,” he added.
Beau studied at the University of Pennsylvania and went to law school at Syracuse University, where his father also attended.
He served as a prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Philadelphia before running for Delaware attorney general in 2006, winning by 13,000 votes. In his reelection in 2010, he won by more than 149,000 votes.
In 2008, as a captain in the Delaware Army National Guard, Beau was deployed to Iraq during a war effort that then-senator Joe Biden had previously voted to support. Beau briefly returned to the US for his father’s vice-presidential swearing-in ceremony in January 2009, then shipped out to complete his yearlong service.
President Joe Biden believes his son’s cancer was caused by the burn pits used in Iraq to burn the waste created from warfare.
As Delaware’s chief law enforcement official, Beau didn’t seek a third term, as he planned to run for governor in 2016, before his health began to rapidly decline.
In a statement following his death, then-president Barack Obama cited a poem by William Butler Yeats. “Beau Biden believed the best of us all … For him, and for his family, we swing our lanterns higher.”
During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in the lead-up to the 2020 election, then-candidate Joe Biden said: “Beau should be the one running for president, not me.”
He recalled how Beau had supported him on the campaign trail in the past. Biden said his son told him: “Look at me, dad. Remember: home base. Just remember who you are.”
“He’d grab me by the lapel,” Biden said. “He still grabs me by the lapel.”
He went on: “Every morning I get up… not a joke, I think to myself, ‘Is he proud of me?’ Because he’s the one who wanted me to stay engaged … He walks with me. I know that sounds to some people kind of silly, but he really, honest to God, does. I know he’s in me.”
Beau’s death enormously impacted his family, including his younger brother Hunter who recalled in his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things that the grief became overwhelming.
Hunter said he struggled with drug and alcohol addiction after Beau died in 2015. During his federal gun charges trial in June 2024, Hunter’s attorneys said his relapse stemmed from the grief he felt over the loss of his older brother.
In the wake of Beau’s death, Hunter dated his brother’s widow, Hallie, on and off. The two have spoken about their shared grief over the loss of Beau. They eventually ended their relationship in 2019 and Hunter entered a treatment program to get sober.
Hunter’s fifth child with his second wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, is named in honor of Beau.
