Joe Biden

• 1. Introduction

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  Joe Biden took the oath as the 46th president of the United States on the 20th of January 2021. At 78, he was the oldest person to assume the office up to that point. The inauguration was a muted affair, shaped by pandemic precautions and unusually heavy security.

  Few who watched that day could have guessed how long the road had been. Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. had been in public life since his twenties, and his career was crowded with triumphs, reversals and regrets.

  How does a boy who struggled to speak become one of the most recognizable voices in the Senate? What did a lifetime of public service cost him at home? And why did a man so often counted out keep coming back, only to see a presidency that began with so much ceremony end in so much doubt?

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• 2. Scranton to the Senate

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  St. Mary's Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania, is where Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born on the 20th of November 1942. He was the oldest child of Catherine Eugenia Finnegan, known as Jean, and Joseph Robinette Biden Sr. The family was Catholic and mostly of Irish descent. Biden grew up with a sister, Valerie, and two brothers, James and Francis.

  Money shaped his earliest memories in both directions. In 1946 the family bought a home in the wealthy Long Island suburb of Garden City, New York, because his father had been prosperous. Business setbacks arrived around the time Biden turned seven, and the family moved in with Jean's parents in Scranton. The city slid into economic decline through the 1950s, and Joseph Sr. could not find steady work. In 1953, when Biden was ten, they moved into an apartment in Claymont, Delaware, and later to a house in nearby Mayfield. His father eventually became a successful used-car salesman, and the family settled into a middle-class life.

  At Archmere Academy in Claymont, Biden played baseball and stood out as a halfback and wide receiver on the football team. He was a poor student, yet his classmates chose him as class president in both his junior and senior years. He graduated in 1961. At the University of Delaware in Newark, he briefly played freshman football and took a bachelor's degree in 1965, with a double major in history and political science. Throughout, he fought a childhood stutter, and he worked to overcome it by memorizing lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Butler Yeats.

  Law school took him to Syracuse University, where he met Neilia Hunter, a Syracuse student. They married on the 27th of August 1966 in a Catholic church in Skaneateles, New York, after he overcame her parents' reluctance to see her wed a Catholic. Biden earned his law degree in 1968, though not smoothly. In his first year he failed a course after plagiarizing a law review article, and the failing grade was later stricken. He finished 76th in a class of 85 and was admitted to the Delaware bar in 1969.

  His politics were not yet Democratic. In 1968 he clerked at a firm headed by William Prickett, a prominent local Republican, and he called himself a Republican. He disliked the conservative racial politics of Democratic governor Charles L. Terry and backed the more liberal Republican Russell W. Peterson, who defeated Terry that year. Local Republicans tried to recruit him. His distaste for presidential candidate Richard Nixon led him to register as an independent instead.

  In 1969 Biden returned to practice as a public defender in Wilmington, Delaware, where most of his clients were African Americans from the city's east side. He then joined a firm led 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. He opened his own firm, Biden and Walsh, but corporate law did not appeal to him and criminal law paid poorly. To fill the gap, he managed properties.

  In 1970 he ran for the fourth district seat on the New Castle County Council on a liberal platform that included public housing in the suburbs. He defeated Republican Lawrence T. Messick and took office on the 5th of January 1971. He opposed large highway projects, arguing they might disrupt Wilmington neighborhoods. His council service ended on the 1st of January 1973.

  Vietnam had barely touched his public life. While studying at Delaware and Syracuse, Biden obtained five student draft deferments. A physical examination in 1968 earned him a conditional medical deferment, and in 2008 a spokesperson said the reason was "asthma as a teenager". He took no open position on the war until his Senate run, when he opposed Nixon's conduct of it.

  Almost thirty percentage points separated Biden from Republican incumbent J. Caleb Boggs a few months before the 1972 Senate election. Biden was the only Democrat willing to challenge Boggs, and with minimal funds he was thought to have no chance. Family members managed and staffed the campaign. It relied on meeting voters face-to-face and hand-distributing position papers, an approach that worked because Delaware is so small. The AFL-CIO and Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell helped. His platform covered the environment, civil rights, mass transit, equitable taxation, health care and public dissatisfaction with "politics as usual".

  His energy, his young family and his knack for connecting with voters' emotions closed the gap. He won with 50.5 percent of the vote, and at 30 he became the seventh-youngest senator in American history. He had been elected for only a few weeks when everything changed.

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• 3. Loss and Amtrak Joe

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  On the 18th of December 1972, an automobile accident in Hockessin, Delaware, killed Neilia Biden and her one-year-old daughter, Naomi. Their sons Beau, aged 3, and Hunter, aged 2, were in the car. Both were taken to the hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening.

  The new senator considered resigning to care for his sons. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield persuaded him to stay. Biden has described contemplating suicide, along with anger and religious doubt. He wrote that he "felt God had played a horrible trick" on him, and he had trouble focusing on his work.

  A blind date in 1975 introduced him to Jill Tracy Jacobs, a teacher. They married at the United Nations chapel in New York on the 17th of June 1977. They spent their honeymoon at Lake Balaton in the Hungarian People's Republic. Biden credits Jill with renewing his interest in politics and in life. Their daughter Ashley, born in 1981, became a social worker, activist and fashion designer. Jill helped raise her stepsons, who were seven and eight when she married their father.

  The two boys followed different paths. Beau became an Army judge-advocate in Iraq and later Delaware attorney general. He died of brain cancer in 2015. Hunter worked as a Washington lobbyist and investment adviser, and his business dealings, personal life and legal troubles drew heavy scrutiny during his father's presidency.

  In February 1988, after several episodes of severe neck pain, Biden underwent surgery for a leaking intracranial berry aneurysm. During his recovery he suffered a pulmonary embolism. A second aneurysm was repaired in May. Together the ordeals kept him away from the Senate for seven months.

  The voters of Delaware stayed loyal through all of it. Biden was reelected in 1978, 1984, 1990, 1996-2002 and 2008, usually with about 60 percent of the vote. He was junior senator to William Roth until Roth lost his seat in 2000, and he remains one of the longest-serving senators in American history. From 1991 to 2008 he also co-taught a constitutional law seminar as an adjunct professor at Widener University School of Law.

  He went home every night. For 36 years Biden commuted by Amtrak between Washington and Wilmington, and the habit earned him the nickname "Amtrak Joe". It also shaped his Senate agenda, because he strongly supported more money for the railroad and for rail security.

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• 4. Gavel and Hearings

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  By a vote of 5-9 in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and then 42-58 on the Senate floor, Robert Bork was rejected for the Supreme Court. Biden chaired that committee from 1987 to 1995. He had been its ranking minority member from 1981 to 1987 and would be again from 1995 to 1997.

  The Bork fight began with a reversal. In an interview the previous year, Biden had approved of a hypothetical Bork nomination, and then he turned against the real one. Conservatives were angry. Yet by the close of the hearings, Biden was praised for his fairness, humor and courage. He framed his objection as a clash between Bork's strong originalism and the view that the Constitution protects liberty and privacy beyond the rights spelled out in its text.

  The 1991 hearings for Clarence Thomas went far worse for him. Biden's questions on constitutional issues were often so convoluted that Thomas sometimes lost track of them. Thomas later wrote that they were like "beanballs". After the hearing closed, the public learned that Anita Hill had accused Thomas of unwelcome sexual comments when they worked together. Biden had known of some of the charges but shared them only with the committee, because Hill was then unwilling to testify.

  The hearing reopened and Hill testified. Biden did not allow other witnesses, including a woman who had made similar charges and experts on harassment. The Senate confirmed Thomas by 52-48, with Biden opposed. Liberal legal advocates and women's groups felt strongly that he had mishandled the process and failed to support Hill. In 2019 he told her he regretted his treatment of her. Hill said afterward that she remained unsatisfied. In all, Biden oversaw six Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

  His legislative record from the same committee is mixed. He was a Democratic floor manager for the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which supporters said he improved by softening some of its worst provisions. In 1994 he helped pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which included a ban on assault weapons. The same year came the Violence Against Women Act, which he has called his most significant legislation. Progressives disliked the crime law and blamed it for mass incarceration, and Biden later expressed regret for passing it.

  Other votes also aged badly. In 1993 he backed a provision declaring homosexuality incompatible with military life, which barred gay people from serving. In 1996 he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. In the mid-1970s he had been one of the Senate's strongest opponents of busing for school integration, and he supported a 1976 ban on federal funds for busing students past their nearest school. President Carter signed a strengthened version into law in 1978. In 2005 he was one of only 18 Democrats to back a bankruptcy bill sought by credit card issuers such as MBNA, one of Delaware's largest companies.

  He could also surprise his own side. During the independent counsel investigations of the 1990s, he predicted that it would be a "cold day in hell" before another counsel got such powers, and he voted to acquit Bill Clinton. The Defense of Marriage Act was ruled unconstitutional in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges. In 2022, Biden himself, as president, signed the Respect for Marriage Act, which repealed it.

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• 5. Wars and Resolutions

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  At least 150 leaders from 60 countries and international organizations met with Biden during his years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He became its ranking minority member in 1997 and chaired it from June 2001 to 2003 and again from 2007 to 2009. His outlook was liberal internationalist. He worked well with Republicans and sometimes broke with elements of his own party.

  In 1991 he voted against authorizing the Gulf War. That same year he grew absorbed in the Yugoslav Wars after hearing about Serbian abuses in the Croatian War of Independence. When the Bosnian War broke out, he was among the first to call for a "lift and strike" policy. Both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton hesitated, fearing entanglement in the Balkans.

  In April 1993, Biden sat through a tense, three-hour meeting with Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević. He then drafted several versions of legislative language urging deeper American involvement. He has called his role in Balkan policy in the mid-1990s his "proudest moment in public life" on foreign policy. In 1999, during the Kosovo War, he backed the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. He and Senator John McCain co-sponsored a resolution urging Clinton to use all necessary force, including ground troops, against Milošević.

  Afghanistan drew his unqualified support. "Whatever it takes, we should do it," he said of the war there.

  Iraq proved far harder. In 2002, as committee chairman, Biden said Saddam Hussein was a threat to national security and that there was no choice but to "eliminate" it. In October 2002 he voted for the authorization of force against Iraq. He also assembled witnesses to testify in favor of it. Their testimony grossly misrepresented the intent, history and status of Saddam's government, and it touted weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

  By 2005 Biden was calling his vote a "mistake", yet he did not push for withdrawal. He supported funding for the occupation while arguing that the war should be internationalized, that more soldiers were needed, and that the Bush administration should "level with the American people" about its cost and length.

  By late 2006 his stance had shifted considerably. He opposed the 2007 troop surge and said General David Petraeus was "dead, flat wrong" to think it could work. With Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, he developed a different plan. It would divide Iraq into a loose federation of three ethnic states. A non-binding resolution endorsing the idea passed the Senate in September 2007, but the proposal never gained traction. Even as that vote took place, Biden's attention was turning to a second run for the presidency.

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• 6. Falling Short

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  On the 9th of June 1987, Biden declared his candidacy for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. He looked strong on paper. He had a moderate image, a gift for speaking, an appeal to Baby Boomers, and a high profile as chair of the committee about to hold the Bork hearings. In the first quarter of 1987 he raised more money than any other candidate.

  Then it came apart. By August his campaign messaging was confused by staff rivalries. In September he was accused of plagiarizing a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Biden had credited Kinnock on earlier occasions but failed to on two occasions in August. Reporters also found that he had used passages from Robert F. Kennedy and from John F. Kennedy's inaugural address. Two years earlier he had used a 1976 passage by Hubert Humphrey.

  Biden answered that politicians often borrow from one another without credit. He added that rival Jesse Jackson had called to say Jackson had used the same Humphrey material. A few days later came word that, in law school, Biden had taken text from a Fordham Law Review article without adequate citations. At his request, the Delaware Supreme Court's Board of Professional Responsibility reviewed the matter and found that he had broken no rules.

  More damaging were several false or exaggerated claims about his past. He had said he earned three degrees in college, attended law school on a full scholarship, graduated in the top half of his class and marched in the civil rights movement. A thin news cycle amplified every disclosure. On the 23rd of September 1987, Biden withdrew.

  He tried again in January 2007, running on the Iraq War, his record as a committee chairman and his foreign-policy experience. His one-liners drew notice. Of Republican Rudy Giuliani, he said, "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, and a verb and 9/11." But Biden struggled to raise money and to draw crowds. He never rose above single digits in national polls. On the 3rd of January 2008, he placed fifth in the Iowa caucuses with slightly less than one percent of the state delegates, and he withdrew that evening.

  The failure still raised his stature, and it changed his relationship with Barack Obama. Although the two had served together on the Foreign Relations Committee, they were not close. Biden resented Obama's quick rise to stardom, and Obama saw Biden as garrulous and patronizing. During 2007 they got to know each other. Obama came to appreciate Biden's campaign style and his appeal to working-class voters. Biden said he became convinced Obama was "the real deal".

  In August 2008 the two met in secret, and Obama announced Biden as his running mate on the 22nd of August. The choice reflected a desire for foreign policy and national security experience. The Democratic National Convention in Denver nominated Biden on the 27th of August. Coverage of his campaign was thin, because the press focused on Republican nominee Sarah Palin. Under instructions to stay succinct, Biden still produced slips that staffers called "Joe bombs". Privately, Obama once asked angrily, "How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?" The campaign kept Biden out of strategy talks, which irked him. Relations stayed strained for a month, until Biden apologized.

  He voted for the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act during the financial crisis. On the 2nd of October he debated Palin at Washington University in St. Louis. Polls found that Palin exceeded expectations, but Biden won overall. Obama and Biden were elected on the 4th of November. Delaware law let Biden run for the Senate at the same time, and he waited until after being sworn in for a seventh term to leave. He resigned on the 15th of January 2009.

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• 7. Deputy and Comeback

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  White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Biden helped counter groupthink. Members of the Obama administration saw his role as that of a contrarian who forced others to defend their positions. Biden was sworn in on the 20th of January 2009. He was the first vice president from Delaware and the first Roman Catholic vice president. He said he wanted to drop some of the explicit roles that Dick Cheney had assumed.

  His first assignment was overseeing infrastructure spending from the Obama stimulus package. In July 2009 he admitted the administration had "misread how bad the economy was". When he finished the job in February 2011, he said fraud incidents involving stimulus money had been under one percent. He and Obama formed a friendship, helped by the fact that Obama's daughter Sasha and Biden's granddaughter Maisy attended Sidwell Friends School together.

  On Afghanistan, Biden lost an internal debate with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over sending 21,000 new troops. His skepticism was still valued as Obama reconsidered the strategy. Obama also made him the point man on Iraq policy before the exit of American troops in 2011.

  After big Republican gains in the 2010 midterms, Biden's old Senate friendships became valuable. He led the administration's push to win Senate approval of the New START treaty. His negotiations with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell helped produce the December 2010 tax compromise, the Budget Control Act of 2011 and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Obama named him to head the Gun Violence Task Force.

  In late 2011, White House chief of staff William M. Daley ran secret polling on replacing Biden on the 2012 ticket with Hillary Clinton. The idea was dropped when the results showed no real improvement. In May 2012, Biden said he was "absolutely comfortable" with same-sex marriage, ahead of Obama's own declared position. Obama's aides were irked, but within days Obama announced his support too. In August 2012, Biden warned a mixed-race audience that Republican plans would "put y'all back in chains".

  The 11th of October 2012 brought his best night. Facing Republican nominee Paul Ryan, Biden gave what some analysts called one of the best debate performances of his career. He dismissed Ryan's attack on the response to the Benghazi embassy attacks as "a bunch of malarkey", a phrase he reused in 2020. Obama and Biden were reelected on the 6th of November.

  In his second term, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democrats cut Biden out of direct talks with Congress, feeling he had given too much away before. He visited Latin America 16 times, more than any other president or vice president. He never cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate, which makes him the longest-serving vice president with that distinction. In 2015, with family, friends and donors urging him to run, a "Draft Biden 2016" committee formed. In October, Biden announced he would not run.

  Biden left office on the 20th of January 2017 and was succeeded by Mike Pence. He became an honorary professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he developed the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. In 2017 he published a memoir, Promise Me, Dad. By 2019 he and Jill reported earning over $15 million from speaking and book sales. In 2018 he delivered a eulogy for Senator John McCain.

  The question of 2020 hung over all of it. A committee called Time for Biden formed in January 2018. When asked whether he would run, he often replied, "never say never".

  He launched his campaign on the 25th of April 2019, saying he was worried about the Trump administration and felt a "sense of duty". Polls showed him among the strongest Democrats against Donald Trump, and that mattered to voters focused on electability. In September 2019, it was reported that Trump had pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate alleged wrongdoing by Biden and his son Hunter. No evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens was produced, and the episode led to Trump's impeachment. In spring 2019, eight women accused Biden of inappropriate physical contact. He pledged to be more respectful of personal space.

  The early contests went badly. He finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, and in Nevada he finished 21.6 percentage points behind Bernie Sanders. Then South Carolina rescued him. After strong appeals to Black voters, he won that primary by more than 28 points. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out and endorsed him, and Biden made large gains on Super Tuesday. He won 18 of the next 26 contests. When Sanders suspended his campaign on the 8th of April 2020, Biden became the presumptive nominee. "I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else," he had said, and he called himself a "transition candidate". On the 11th of August he chose Kamala Harris, the first African American and first South Asian American on a major-party ticket.

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• 8. The Presidency

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  On the 23rd of November 2020, General Services Administrator Emily W. Murphy formally recognized Biden as the apparent winner of the election he had won against Donald Trump. Trump and many Republicans had repeatedly claimed that widespread fraud had occurred, and the White House had ordered agencies not to cooperate, delaying the transition by several weeks. Most resulting lawsuits were dismissed or lost. Trump's team also submitted false documents in several states Biden had won, hoping the presiding officer of the Senate would reject those electors on the 6th of January 2021, leaving 232 votes for Trump and 222 for Biden. Pence refused. Trump urged supporters to march to the Capitol, and hundreds stormed the building. Biden called it "an unprecedented assault unlike anything we've seen in modern times".

  In his first two days in office, Biden signed 17 executive orders. By day three, they covered rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization, mask requirements on federal property, and revoking permits for the Keystone XL pipeline. On the 11th of March 2021 he signed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion relief package. It included direct payments, extended unemployment benefits, vaccine funds and an expanded child tax credit. A proposed $15 federal minimum wage was removed after the Senate parliamentarian ruled against it.

  On the 14th of April 2021, Biden announced that American troops would leave Afghanistan by the 11th of September, ending direct military involvement after nearly 20 years. The Trump administration had struck a deal with the Taliban in February 2020 to withdraw by May 1. The exit was chaotic, and the Taliban swiftly retook control.

  The economy offered a mixed ledger. Real GDP grew 5.9 percent in 2021, the fastest rate in 37 years, and unemployment fell at a record pace. Inflation reached a nearly 40-year high of 7.1 percent by the end of 2021 and peaked at about 9 percent in June 2022. In February 2023 unemployment fell to 3.4 percent, a 53-year low. Yet consumer prices rose 21.3 percent across his term, and average wages rose 19 percent, falling behind. The national debt reached $36.2 trillion.

  A bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure law passed in mid-November 2021. The larger Build Back Better bill stalled when Senator Joe Manchin rejected it, even after the price fell from $3.5 trillion to $2.2 trillion. It was reworked into the Inflation Reduction Act, which authorized $370 billion for energy and climate. The Senate passed it 51-50 on the 7th of August 2022, with Vice President Harris breaking the tie. Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act on the 9th of August to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing. He protected 674 million acres of land and ocean, more than any other president.

  Biden appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court after Stephen Breyer announced his retirement in January 2022. She was nominated on the 25th of February and sworn in on the 30th of June. By the end of his term he had appointed 235 judges. He also sent aid to Ukraine and imposed sanctions on Russia after its invasion, and he backed Finland's and Sweden's NATO bids.

  Immigration became his sharpest vulnerability. Border crossings surged from 2021 and reached an all-time monthly high in December 2023. In January 2024 the Border Patrol had confirmed more than 7.2 million illegal crossing attempts across his term, and 2023 alone saw over 2.5 million encounters. A bipartisan bill led by Senators Kyrsten Sinema and James Lankford won Biden's support, but Trump opposed it and it died. In June 2024, Biden issued an executive order allowing him to restrict the border.

  He issued more individual pardons and commutations than any other president. In December 2024 he granted clemency to about 1,500 nonviolent felons in home confinement, the largest single-day clemency act in history. He commuted the sentences of 37 of 40 federal death row inmates. On the 1st of December 2024 he gave his son Hunter a "full and unconditional" pardon, breaking a pledge he had made in June. He said Hunter had been "selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted". On his last day in office he pardoned five family members and others, including Mark Milley and Anthony Fauci, calling the pardons preemptive protection against political vengeance.

  Age shadowed him throughout. He was the first president to turn 80 in office. He won the Democratic primaries and became the presumptive nominee for 2024, but after the first presidential debate, scrutiny from across the political spectrum led him to withdraw. His approval ratings, which began with majority support, fell sharply over inflation. Several historians and scholars nonetheless ranked his administration favorably, at odds with the public's view.

  When Donald Trump took office again in 2025, Biden became the oldest living former president. Later that year, with the death of Dick Cheney, he also became the oldest living former vice president.

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