“The man understands the joys and sorrows of life,” Jochum said. “Good lord, woman, you’ve been through the wringer,” she remembers Biden telling her. Pam Jochum, a Democrat, remembers Biden calling to comfort her after her daughter Sarah died, and then again after he got wind that her sister had died just six months later. “For many politicians, empathy is a strategy,” Israel said. “He just called a few days ago to check in on me.” He called on New Year’s Day, because the start of a new year is hard without someone you love. In 2013, five months after Israel’s father died, the congressman’s mother told him, “Joe called.” Israel assumed she was reminiscing about Biden’s call in 2011. Steve Israel of New York says Biden called his mother in 2011 when the vice president heard that her husband had been diagnosed with lung cancer. “And many of them do.”įormer Democratic Rep. “I have a long list of strangers who have my private number and an invitation to call,” Biden wrote in his 2017 book. They also may come away with his cellphone number. Often, these strangers-turned-partners-in-grief hear a message of reassurance from Biden that’s drawn from his own experience: There will come a day, I promise you, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife “brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.” He’s seen Biden do the same for countless others - the family of a lost firefighter, the parent of a son killed in Afghanistan, the widow of local restaurateur, and so many more. “He knows what you’re going through,” says Coons. The comforting words that the Delaware Democrat heard from Biden, a longtime friend, were different. Chris Coons’ father lay dying in hospice care, there were plenty of expressions of support and concern. When people “see someone who is able to make his way through that in public, which is infinitely more difficult, they have a feeling for him as a human being,” Bradley said. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., who served with Biden in the Senate for nearly two decades, says that while many a politician wrestles with hidden personal tragedies, Biden from the beginning has been open about his pain.
The new senator went home to Delaware every night to kiss them good night.įormer Sen. His sister Valerie moved in to take care of the boys. Senators gave Biden broad leeway once in office. Beau, still in traction, was wheeled into the room in his bed Hunter, by then out of the hospital, perched on his brother’s bed for the ceremony. Two-and-half weeks after Neilia’s death, Biden was sworn in as senator in a small chapel at the hospital in Delaware. He debated relinquishing the Senate seat he’d yet to even occupy but eventually agreed to give the job a try for six months. “And now I’m sure that, uh, she’ll be watching you from now on.”īiden utters a hurried thank you and ends the call. “So uh, so the, uh, but, uh, in any event, uh, I mean, looking at it in a, as you must, in terms of the future, because you, you have the great fortune of being young,” the president tells him. Then the White House operator patches Biden through for a condolence call. 19, 1972, the day after Neilia’s car accident, Richard Nixon’s aides briefed the president on the tragedy, spelling out the name of the unfamiliar incoming senator “B-I-D-E-N.” Surmounting loss helped to shape a determination to overcome hard things that friends see reflected in Biden’s recent talk about the need to work even with those “who may offend every fiber of your being,” and in his can-do attitude toward world trouble spots.
It’s essential to explaining the candidate’s inclination to give others, even political opponents, the benefit of the doubt. Now in his third bid for the White House, the painful story comes up as point of connection to voters and a personal experience on health care policy.īut Biden confidants say the history is much more than that. Loss became central to Biden’s political persona, a history he has often shared - at some points reluctantly, at others readily and on at least a few occasions with inaccuracies in the account. Biden was instantly transformed into a politician whose career would forever be grounded in tragedy.
When the phone rang, Biden said later, “I knew.”