Fellowship & Fairydust

When Joseph R. Biden Jr. was sworn in as president on January 20, 2021, he was only the second Catholic to become president of the United States of America and the first since John F. Kennedy in 1961. Biden was sworn in on a Bible that has been in his family since 1893. This was the same Bible that he was sworn in on twice as vice president and that was used by his late son Beau when he was sworn in as Delaware’s attorney general.

Joe Biden’s deep rooted Catholic faith and strong ties to family have been constants in his life. They have provided him comfort during times of crisis and sorrow like when his first wife Neilia and one year old daughter Naomi were killed in an auto accident in 1972 and when Beau succumbed to a brain tumor in 2015.

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born into a Catholic family at St. Mary’s Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania on November 20, 1942 to Joseph Robinette Biden Sr. and Catherine Eugenia “Jean” Finnigan, the oldest of four children. Younger sister Valerie followed in 1945, and later, younger brothers Francis and James. Joe Sr. and Jean were both of Irish descent, while Joe Sr. was also of English and French ancestry.

Scranton is the sixth largest city in Pennsylvania, and where young Joe would spend the first 10 years of his life. Biden’s father had been wealthy, but his fortunes had taken a turn for the worst around the time his eldest son had been born. The family’s financial difficulties grew so bad that they moved in with Joe’s maternal grandparents. Scranton also suffered from an economic downturn in the early 50’s, and Biden’s father found himself jobless and unable to find work. In 1953 the family moved to Claymont, Delaware and later to Wilmington, Delaware where Joe Sr. found work as a used car salesman, an occupation he excelled at.

In 1961, Joe graduated from Archmere Academy, a private Roman Catholic College and preparatory school located in Claymont, where he had excelled at sports, especially football. Much has been written about Biden’s poor academic performance while attending Archmere, but in his book Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, author Jules Witcover, wrote that Joe maintained a B-average. Young Biden also overcame his childhood stutter and was class president during his junior and senior years.

As both a grade school and high school student, Joe gave serious consideration to becoming a priest. Father Justin Duny, the headmaster at Archmere Academy, suggested that Joe first give college a chance before deciding on the priesthood.

After high school graduation in 1961, Joe attended the University of Delaware in Newark and was an exceptional student. In 1965, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with a double major in history and political science.

Though a long admirer of John F. Kennedy, political journalist Evan Osnos wrote in his book, Joe Biden: The Life, the Run and What Matters Now, that when Biden served two terms as vice president to Barack Obama, he admitted that he probably had more in common with Kennedy’s own vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, than to JFK himself. Like Johnson, Biden was an older man somewhat in the shadow of a more glamorous younger man, but with decades of experience in Congress passing legislation. Biden has often said that his proudest accomplishment with Obama was the passing of the Affordable Health Care Act. Arguably, Johnson’s greatest legislative achievement (though he was president and not vice president at the time) was the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.

When Biden left school in 1965, a political career was far from his mind. He entered Syracuse University to study law and graduated in 1968. A year later he was admitted to the Delaware State Bar Association.

While attending Syracuse, Biden met undergraduate Neilia Hunter, who was studying education, and would later teach elementary school in the Syracuse School District. Despite early hesitation from Neilia’s parents over their daughter marrying a Roman Catholic, Joe and Neilia were wed on August 22, 1966. On February 3, 1969, the young couple welcomed their first child, Joseph Robinette Biden III. Robert Hunter Biden followed in 1970 and daughter Naomi Christina Biden in 1971.

In 1968, Biden began working for a law firm in Wilmington. The firm was headed by a Republican named William Prickett. At the time, Biden considered himself a Republican, and supported Republican Russell W. Peterson, who was elected Delaware’s governor in 1968.

In November 1968, Republican Richard M. Nixon was elected the 37th president of the United States, having narrowly lost to John Kennedy in 1960. Biden greatly disliked Nixon and registered as an Independent and then a Democrat a year later.

Biden was a public defender before practicing corporate and criminal law. In 1970 he ran for the Fourth District Seat on the New Castle County Council, a legislative body of thirteen elected members, and defeated Republican Henry R. Folsom, taking office on January 5, 1971. Biden’s good friend and fellow Democrat Chris Coons would later serve as a member of the council from 2001 to 2005. Biden served until January 1, 1973.

In 1972, Republican J. Caleb Boggs was running for his third term as the Delaware senator to the United States Senate. Boggs had considered retiring but was convinced by President Nixon to run to maintain Republican strength in the Senate. Despite very little chance of beating Boggs, Joe Biden ran against the incumbent on a platform focused on a withdrawal from Vietnam, the environment, civil rights and heathcare. Biden surprised everyone by winning with over 50% of the vote.

In Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, Biden wrote that he suffered a major crisis of faith, following the death of his wife and daughter in an automobile accident.

On December 18, 1972, thirty-year-old Neilia and one-year-old Naomi were killed while Christmas shopping. A semi-trailer truck collided with Neilia’s station wagon at an intersection in Hockessin, Delaware. Beau and Hunter were taken to the hospital, with Beau suffering from a broken leg and Hunter head injuries and a skull fracture.

Biden considered resigning his Senate seat before he was even officially sworn in so that he could dedicate his time to taking care of Beau and Hunter, but Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield convinced him to reconsider. Biden was sworn in on January 6, 1973 in the very hospital room where his sons were recovering from the accident. At age thirty, Biden was the sixth youngest Senator in United History. He remained in the Senate until he resigned in 2009 to serve as Vice President under Barack Obama.

Instead of taking a second home in Washington D.C. like most members of Congress do while in session, to remain closer to his sons, Biden travelled by train, a 90 minute trek both ways, from his Delaware home to the Capitol. In Promises to Keep, Biden wrote that he did this not just because his sons needed him, but because he needed them as well.

During his early years in the Senate, one of Biden’s passion projects was the environment, which would be one of key parts of his platform while running for president decades later. In 1981, Biden became a member of the Senate judiciary Committee.

Biden has credited his family in providing him with a beacon of light at the end of a very dark road, during the most difficult periods in his life. This without question includes his second wife Jill.

Nearly a decade Biden’s junior, Jill Tracy Jacobs was born June 3, 1951 in Hammonton, New Jersey to Donald and Bonnie Jacobs, the eldest of five sisters. On her father’s side, Jill’s heritage can be traced back to the village of Gesso in Cecily where the family name had been “Giacoppo”. On her mother’s side, Jill is of English and Scottish descent. Donald worked as a bank teller and served in the Navy during World War II. Jill was raised in Hatboro, Pennsylvania and later the Philadelphia suburb of Willow Grove. She graduated from Upper Moreland High School in 1969, where she was a good if somewhat rebellious student.

After only a semester at Brandywine Junior College where she studied fashion merchandising, Jill dropped out and married Bill Stevenson, a former college football player. The couple divorced in 1974.

Jill changed her major to English and enrolled in the University of Delaware. In 1975 she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English. While a student at the University, Jill did some modelling on the side. In 1981, Jill received a master’s degree at West Chester State College and in January 2007 at age fifty-five, a Doctorate of Education from the University of Delaware.

Joe and Jill met on a blind date in 1975. At first Jill was somewhat hesitant of becoming involved with Senator Biden, who in a vernacular of the time she saw as a “square” in his sport coat and loafers, but the couple fell in love and were married on June 17, 1977. Joe and Jill are Roman Catholics and prior to moving in 2008 to the White House, attended Mass at St. Joseph’s on the Brandywine in Greenville, Delaware. On June 8, 1981, Jill gave birth to her and Joe’s daughter, Ashley Blazar. While Joe passed legislation in the Senate, Jill focused on her own career as an educator.

On June 9, 1987, Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. If elected he would be the second youngest president ever nominated, his hero John F. Kennedy being the first. Early on, Biden was a very popular candidate. In November, however, several allegations of plagiarism, including that of a 1968 speech by Robert F. Kennedy, were brought forward. On September 23, Biden withdrew from the race with the Democratic nomination eventually going to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. On November 2, 1988, Dukakis lost to Vice President George H.W. Bush.

Having to withdraw from a presidential race would normally be a great political setback. In the case of Joe Biden and the 1988 presidential race, it may have saved the Senator’s life. In the early months of 1988, Biden began to suffer from unbearable neck pains. In February, he was taken to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for emergency surgery. He suffered two aneurysms and had a second surgery in May to correct the problem.

In 2008, Biden once again ran for president. His race was plagued by a lack of funds and under-attended political rallies. He quickly fell behind Senators Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton. He withdrew from the race on January 3, 2008 after a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses.

Not long after Biden withdrew from the presidential race, he was approached by Barack Obama. Biden and Obama had both been members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and had developed respect for one another on the campaign trail. On August 22, 2008, Obama announced that Joe Biden would be his running mate. On November 2, Obama and Biden won the election against Republican John McCain with more than half of the popular vote. McCain was a Vietnam veteran, with an impressive political resume, but his campaign had been hurt by the unpopularity of incumbent Republican President George W. Bush, the financial crisis sparked by the fall of Lehman Brothers, and his choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.

When Barack Obama and Joe Biden took office on January 20, 2009, America was suffering from its greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Biden had previously voted in favor of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, a $700 billion stimulus package that passed in the Senate with a majority vote. The Tax Relief, Unemployment, Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act passed Congress after intense negotiations between Biden and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. On November 2, 2012, Obama and Biden were reelected, beating out Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan with a majority vote. Among other important pieces of legislation, Obama and Biden oversaw the creation of the Affordable Health Care Act, the biggest overhaul in government-based healthcare since Lyndon Johnson signed into law the legislation that created Medicare and Medicaid.

In August 2013, Beau Biden was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, which he succumbed to on May 30, 2015 at age forty-six. Following the death of his son, Biden decided not to run for president in 2016, giving his support to Hillary Clinton in her face-off against Donald J. Trump, who won the November general election and succeeded Obama in 2017. After leaving office, Biden taught at the University of Pennsylvania and published the book Promise Me: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose.

Biden was torn on making a third run for the White House, but concerned for the future of America under a second Trump term, Joe Biden announced on April 25, 2019 that he would run for president, and on April 8, 2020, he officially became the Democratic Party nominee for president. On August 11th, Biden announced California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. Harris was the first African American and South Asian American vice presidential nominee. The winning Biden/Harris ticket won a majority vote against Donald Trump and Mike Pence on November 2nd.

Joe Biden’s journey has been a fateful one, one filled with great achievements and terrible tragedy. It has been his faith in God and the support and love of family that has helped him navigate the storms.