Joseph R. Biden Jr.

## Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

Official portrait of Vice President Joe Biden in his West Wing Office at the White House, Jan. 10, 2013.

## Physical description

### Height

6'0

**Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.** (born November 20, 1942) is an American politician who served as the 47th vice president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Biden also represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate from 1973 to 2009. A member of the Democratic Party.

Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and lived there for ten years before moving with his family to Delaware. He became a lawyer in 1969 and was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, when he became the sixth-youngest senator in American history. Biden was re-elected six times and was the fourth most senior senator when he resigned to assume the vice presidency in 2009. Biden was a long-time member and former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He opposed the Gulf War in 1991, but advocated U.S. and NATO intervention in the Bosnian War in 1994 and 1995. He voted in favor of the resolution authorizing the Iraq War in 2002, but opposed the surge of U.S. troops in 2007. He has also served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, dealing with issues related to drug policy, crime prevention, and civil liberties. Biden led the efforts to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Violence Against Women Act. He also chaired the Judiciary Committee during the contentious U.S. Supreme Court nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Biden unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and in 2008.

In 2008, Biden was the running mate of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and became the first Roman Catholic to serve as vice president of the United States. As vice president, Biden oversaw infrastructure spending aimed at counteracting the Great Recession and helped formulate U.S. policy toward Iraq through the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011. His ability to negotiate with congressional Republicans helped the Obama administration pass legislation such as the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010, which resolved a taxation deadlock; the Budget Control Act of 2011, which resolved that year's debt ceiling crisis; and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which addressed the impending fiscal cliff. Obama and Biden were re-elected in 2012.

In October 2015, after months of speculation, Biden announced he would not seek the presidency in the 2016 election. In January 2017, Obama awarded Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom with distinction. After completing his second term as vice president, Biden joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was named the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Presidential Practice.

## Early life (1942–1965)

Biden was born on November 20, 1942, at St. Mary's Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Catherine Eugenia Biden (née Finnegan) and Joseph Robinette Biden Sr. He was the first of four siblings in a Catholic family, with a sister and two brothers. His mother was of Irish descent, with roots variously attributed to County Louth or County Londonderry. His paternal grandparents, Mary Elizabeth (Robinette) and Joseph H. Biden, an oil businessman from Baltimore, Maryland, were of English, French, and Irish ancestry. His paternal third great-grandfather, William Biden, was born in Sussex, England, and immigrated to the United States. His maternal great-grandfather, Edward Francis Blewitt, was a member of the Pennsylvania State Senate.

Biden's father had been wealthy earlier in his life but suffered several financial setbacks by the time his son was born. For several years, the family had to live with Biden's maternal grandparents, the Finnegans. When the Scranton area fell into economic decline during the 1950s, Biden's father could not find sustained work. In 1953, the Biden family moved into an apartment in Claymont, Delaware, where they lived for several years before again moving to a house in Wilmington, Delaware. Joe Biden Sr. became a successful used car salesman, and the family's circumstances were middle class.
Biden while a student at Archmere Academy in the 1950s.

Biden attended the Archmere Academy in Claymont where he was a standout halfback/wide receiver on the high school football team; he helped lead a perennially losing team to an undefeated season in his senior year. He played on the baseball team as well. During these years, he participated in an anti-segregation sit-in at a Wilmington theatre. Academically, he was an above-average student, was considered a natural leader among the students, and was elected class president during his junior and senior years. He graduated in 1961.

He earned his bachelor's in 1965 from the University of Delaware, with a double major in history and political science, graduating with a class rankof 506 out of 688. His classmates were impressed by his cramming abilities, and he played halfback with the Blue Hens freshman football team. In 1964, while on spring break in the Bahamas, he met and began dating Neilia Hunter, who was from an affluent background in Skaneateles, New York, and attended Syracuse University. He told her that he aimed to become a senator by the age of 30 and then president. He dropped a junior year plan to play for the varsity football team as a defensive back, enabling him to spend more time visiting out of state with her.

He then entered Syracuse University College of Law, receiving a half scholarship based on financial need with some additional assistance based on academics. By his own description, he found law school to be "the biggest bore in the world" and pulled many all-nighters to get by. During his first year there, he was accused of having plagiarized five of 15 pages of a law review article. Biden said it was inadvertent due to his not knowing the proper rules of citation, and he was permitted to retake the course after receiving an "F" grade, which was subsequently dropped from his record. This incident would later attract attention when further plagiarism accusations emerged in 1987. He received his Juris Doctor in 1968,graduating 76th of 85 in his class. Biden was admitted to the Delaware bar in 1969.

Biden received student draft deferments during this period, at the peak of the Vietnam War, and in 1968, he was reclassified by the Selective Service System as not available for service due to having had asthma as a teenager. He never took part in anti-war demonstrations, later saying that at the time he was preoccupied with marriage and law school, and "wore sports coats ... not tie-dyed".

Negative impressions of drinking alcohol in the Biden and Finnegan families and in the neighborhood led to Biden becoming a teetotaler. He suffered from stuttering through much of his childhood and into his twenties, and says he overcame it by spending many hours reciting poetry in front of a mirror.

## Early political career and family life (1966–1972)

On August 27, 1966, while Biden was still a law student, he married Neilia Hunter. They overcame her parents' initial reluctance for her to wed a Roman Catholic, and the ceremony was held in a Catholic church in Skaneateles. They had three children, Joseph R. "Beau" Biden III in 1969, Robert Hunter in 1970, and Naomi Christina in 1971.

During 1968, Biden clerked for six months at a Wilmington law firm headed by prominent local Republican William Prickett and, as he later said, "thought of myself as a Republican". He disliked the conservative racial politics of incumbent Democratic Governor of Delaware Charles L. Terryand supported a more liberal Republican, Russell W. Peterson, who defeated Terry in 1968. The local Republicans tried to recruit him, but he resisted due to his distaste for Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon, and registered as an Independent instead.

In 1969, Biden resumed practicing law in Wilmington, first as a public defender and then at a firm headed by Sid Balick, a locally active Democrat. Balick named him to the Democratic Forum, a group trying to reform and revitalize the state party, and Biden switched his registration to Democrat. He also started his own firm, Biden and Walsh. Corporate law, however, did not appeal to him and criminal law did not pay well. He supplemented his income by managing properties.

Later in 1969, Biden ran as a Democrat for the New Castle County Council on a liberal platform that included support for public housing in the suburban area.He won by a solid, two-thousand vote margin in the usually Republican district and in a bad year for Democrats in the state. Even before taking his seat, he was already talking about running for the U.S. Senate in a couple of years. He served on the County Council from 1970 to 1972 while continuing his private law practice. Biden represented the 4th district on the county council. Among issues he addressed on the council was his opposition to large highway projects that might disrupt Wilmington neighborhoods, including those related to Interstate 95.

### 1972 U.S. Senate campaign

Biden's entry into the 1972 U.S. Senate election in Delaware presented a unique circumstance. Longtime Delaware political figure and Republican incumbent Senator J. Caleb Boggs was considering retirement, which would likely have left U.S. Representative Pete du Pont and Wilmington Mayor Harry G. Haskell Jr. in a divisive primary fight. To avoid that, U.S. president Richard Nixon helped convince Boggs to run again with full party support. No other Democrat wanted to run against Boggs. Biden's campaign had virtually no money and was given no chance of winning. It was managed by his sister Valerie Biden Owens (who would go on to manage his future campaigns) and staffed by other family members, and relied upon handed-out newsprint position papers and meeting voters face-to-face; the small size of the state and lack of a major media market made the approach feasible. He did receive some assistance from the AFL–CIOand Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell. His campaign issues focused on withdrawal from Vietnam, the environment, civil rights, mass transit, more equitable taxation, health care, the public's dissatisfaction with politics-as-usual, and "change". During the summer, he trailed by almost 30 percentage points, but his energy level, his attractive young family, and his ability to connect with voters' emotions gave the surging Biden an advantage over the ready-to-retire Boggs. He won the November 7, 1972 election in an upset by a margin of 3,162 votes.

### Family deaths

On December 18, 1972, a few weeks after the election, Biden's wife and one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in an automobile accident while Christmas shopping in Hockessin, Delaware.Neilia Biden's station wagon was hit by a tractor-trailer truck as she pulled out from an intersection. Biden's sons Beau and Hunter survived the accident and were taken to the hospital in fair condition, Beau with a broken leg and other wounds, and Hunter with a minor skull fracture and other head injuries. Doctors soon said both would make full recoveries. Biden considered resigning to care for them, but was persuaded not to by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. In later years, Biden commented that the truck driver had been drinking alcohol before the collision, but these allegations have been denied by the driver's family and were never substantiated by the police.

## United States Senate (1973–2009)

### Recovery and remarriage

Biden was sworn into office on January 5, 1973, by Francis R. Valeo, the Secretary of the Senate in a small chapel at the Delaware Division of the Wilmington Medical Center. Beau was

wheeled in with his leg still in traction; Hunter, who had already been released, was also there, as were other members of the extended family. Witnesses and television cameras were also present and the event received national attention.

At age 30 (the minimum age required to hold the office), Biden became the sixth-youngest senator in U.S. history, and one of only 18 senators who took office before reaching the age of 31. But the accident that killed his wife and daughter left him filled with both anger and religious doubt: "I liked to [walk around seedy neighborhoods] at night when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight ... I had not known I was capable of such rage ... I felt God had played a horrible trick on me." To be at home every day for his young sons, Biden began the practice of commuting every day by Amtrak train for 90 minutes each way from his home in the Wilmington suburbs to Washington, D.C., which he continued to do throughout his Senate career. In the aftermath of the accident, he had trouble focusing on work and appeared to just go through the motions of being a senator. In his memoirs, Biden notes that staffers were taking bets on how long he would last. A single father for five years, he left standing orders that he be interrupted in the Senate at any time if his sons called. In remembrance of his wife and daughter, Biden does not work on December 18, the anniversary of the accident.

Biden's elder son, Beau, became Delaware Attorney General and an Army Judge Advocate who served in Iraq; his younger son, Hunter, became a Washington attorney and lobbyist. On May 30, 2015, Beau died at the age of 46 after a two-year battle with brain cancer. At the time of his death, Beau had been widely seen as the frontrunner to be the Democratic nominee for Governor of Delaware in 2016.

In 1975, Biden met Jill Tracy Jacobs, who grew up in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, and would become a teacher in Delaware. They had met on a blind date arranged by Biden's brother, although it turned out that Biden had already noticed a photograph of her in an advertisement for a local park in Wilmington, Delaware. Biden would credit her with renewing his interest both in politics and in life. On June 17, 1977, Biden and Jacobs were married by a Catholic priest at the Chapel at the United Nations in New York. Jill Biden has a bachelor's degree from the University of Delaware; two master's degrees, one from West Chester University and the other from Villanova University; and a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware. They have one daughter together, Ashley Blazer (born 1981), who became a social worker and staffer at the Delaware Department of Services for Children, Youth, and Their Families. Biden and his wife are Roman Catholics and regularly attend Mass at St. Joseph's on the Brandywine in Greenville, Delaware.

### Early Senate activities

During his first years in the Senate, Biden focused on legislation regarding consumer-protection and environmental issues and called for greater accountability on the part of government. In mid-1974, freshman Senator Biden was named one of the *200 Faces for the Future* by *Time* magazine, in a profile that mentioned what had happened to his family and characterized Biden as "self-confident" and "compulsively ambitious".

Biden was one of the Senate's leading opponents of desegregation busing. In his Senate campaign, Biden expressed support for the 1971 *Swann* decision of the Supreme Court, which supported busing programs to integrate school districts to remedy *de jure* segregation, but opposed it to remedy *de facto*segregation, as in Delaware. He said Republicans were using busing as a scare tactic to court Southern white votes, and alongside Boggs voiced opposition to a House of Representatives constitutional amendment banning busing. In 1974, Biden voted to table an amendment to an omnibus education bill promoted by Edward Gurney (R-FL) which contained anti-busing measures and anti-school desegregation clauses. In May, Senator Robert Griffin (R-MI) attempted to revive an amended version of this amendment. Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-PA) and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) offered a compromise to leave intact the text of Griffin's amendment but added the qualifier that such legislation was not intended to weaken the judiciary's power to enforce the 5th and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Biden voted for this compromise, which angered his local voters.

Following this, an organization of Delaware residents met at the Krebs School in Newport to protest integration. Biden spoke to the auditorium and said that his position on school busing was evolving, emphasizing that busing in Delaware was (in his opinion) beyond the restriction of the courts. The crowd was unconvinced, and heckled him until he yielded the microphone. This, alongside the prospect of a busing plan in Wilmington (see "Delaware matters"), led to Biden aligning himself with civil rights opponent Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) in opposing busing. Biden and anti-busing senators wanted to limit the scope of Title VI of Civil Rights Act of 1964 as relating to the power of federal government to enforce school integration policies. After 1975, Biden took a harsher line on further legislative action to limit busing. That year, Helms proposed an anti-integration amendment to an education bill which would stop the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) collecting data about the race of students or teachers and therefore could not stop funding districts which refused to integrate. Biden supported this amendment, saying: "I am sure it comes as a surprise to some of my colleagues ... that a senator with a voting record such as mine stands up and supports" the amendment. He said busing was a "bankrupt idea [that violated] the cardinal rule of common sense," and that his opposition would make it easier for other liberals to follow suit. However, he had also supported integrationist Senator Edward Brooke's (R-MA) initiatives on housing, job opportunities and voting rights. Biden's support was criticized by civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg (director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), who said that the bill "heave[d] a brick through the window of school integration", with Biden having his hand on the brick.

Biden supported a measure sponsored by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), that forbad the use of federal funds to transport students beyond their closest school. This was adopted as part of the Labor-HEW Appropriations Act of 1976. In 1977, Biden co-sponsored an amendment alongside segregationist Thomas Eagleton (D-MO) to close loopholes in Byrd's amendment. A 1977 status report on school desegregation by the federal Civil Rights Commission in Washington, D.C. said, "the enactment of Eagleton-Biden would be an actual violation, on the part of the Federal Government, of the fifth amendment and Title VI" of the Civil Rights Act. The amendment was signed into law by the Carter administration in 1978. Biden repeatedly asked for, and received, Eastland's support on anti-busing measures.

Such opposition to busing later led his party to mostly abandon school desegregation policies.

Biden became ranking minority member of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 1981. In 1984, he was Democratic floor manager for the successful passage of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act. Over time, the tough-on-crime provisions of the legislation became controversial on the left and among criminal justice reform proponents, and in 2019, Biden characterized his role in passing the legislation as a "big mistake". Biden and his supporters praised him for modifying some of the Act's worst provisions, and it was his most important legislative accomplishment at that point in time. He first considered running for president in that year, after he gained notice for giving speeches to party audiences that simultaneously scolded and encouraged Democrats.
Senator Biden, Senator Frank Church and president of Egypt Anwar el-Sadat after signing the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty, 1979

Regarding foreign policy, during his first decade in the Senate, Biden focused on arms control issues. In response to the refusal of the U.S. Congressto ratify the SALT II Treaty signed in 1979 by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and President Jimmy Carter, he took the initiative to meet the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, educated him about American concerns and interests, and secured several changes to address objections of the Foreign Relations Committee. When the Reagan administration wanted to interpret the 1972 SALT I Treaty loosely in order to allow the Strategic Defense Initiative to proceed, Biden argued for strict adherence to the treaty's terms. He clashed again with the Reagan administration in 1986 over economic sanctions against South Africa; he received considerable attention when he excoriated Secretary of State George P. Shultz at a Senate hearing because of the administration's support of that country, which continued to practice the apartheid system.