Joe Biden

Joe Biden: Fifty Years to the Oval Office

On December 18, 1972, a thirty-year-old senator-elect from Delaware was in Washington hiring staff when word came from Hockessin: a car crash had killed his wife, Neilia, and their one-year-old daughter, Naomi, and left his two small sons in the hospital. He took the oath beside Beau's hospital bed and told colleagues he meant to quit; Majority Leader Mike Mansfield talked him into staying six months. Biden stayed thirty-six years, then eight more as vice president, then won the presidency at seventy-eight. Few American careers have been built so completely out of refusing to leave.

Scranton, Claymont, and the Stutter

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born on November 20, 1942, at St. Mary's Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the eldest of four children in an Irish Catholic family. The Bidens moved to Claymont, Delaware, in 1953 when his father found work there, and Delaware became the identity he never shed. He graduated from Archmere Academy in 1961, took a double major in history and political science at the University of Delaware in 1965, and earned his law degree at Syracuse in 1968. The formative struggle of his youth was a stutter, which he beat down by memorizing and reciting Emerson and Yeats in front of a mirror — a private drill that produced a lifelong public style: rhythmic, repetitive, prone to running ahead of itself.

He clerked briefly at a firm run by a prominent Republican, then worked as a public defender in Wilmington representing mostly African American clients before joining a Democratic lawyer's practice and switching his registration. In 1970 he won a seat on the New Castle County Council, running to the left of his district on public housing.

The Longest Apprenticeship in Washington

Biden unseated the popular Republican incumbent J. Caleb Boggs in 1972 with 50.5 percent of the vote and a campaign run largely by his own family. He arrived as the seventh-youngest senator in American history and left as one of its most senior figures, re-elected six times, typically near 60 percent, commuting home to Wilmington on Amtrak nearly every night for thirty-six years — the origin of "Amtrak Joe."

The committee gavels defined him. He was ranking member and then chairman of the Judiciary Committee from 1987 to 1995, presiding over the hearings that sank Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination 42–58 on the floor, and over the Clarence Thomas hearings of 1991, where he declined to call additional witnesses corroborating Anita Hill and later expressed regret to her directly. He chaired the Foreign Relations Committee in 2001–2003 and 2007–2009. He co-authored the 1994 crime bill, whose assault weapons ban he defended and whose incarceration consequences he came to regret, and the Violence Against Women Act, which he has called his most significant legislation. In 1988, a leaking brain aneurysm nearly killed him and kept him out of the Senate for seven months.

His record is not a straight line. He voted against authorizing the Gulf War in 1991 and for authorizing the Iraq War in 2002, calling that vote a mistake by 2005. He opposed school busing in the mid-1970s and voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. He championed the Balkan intervention he later called his proudest foreign policy work.

Two Failed Runs

Biden announced for president on June 9, 1987, led the field in early fundraising, and destroyed the campaign himself by September, caught reproducing without credit passages from British Labour leader Neil Kinnock — plus borrowings from Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, and inflated claims about his academic record. He withdrew on September 23. His 2007–08 attempt never cleared single digits; he placed fifth in Iowa and quit the same night.

Number Two

Barack Obama named him to the ticket on August 22, 2008 — the first Catholic and first Delawarean vice president. In office, Biden functioned as the in-house contrarian, a role Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel credited with breaking up groupthink; he lost the internal argument over the 2009 Afghanistan surge but shaped later reconsiderations. He oversaw Recovery Act infrastructure spending, ran point on Iraq through the 2011 withdrawal, drove Senate ratification of New START, cut the December 2010 tax deal with Mitch McConnell, and led the talks producing the Budget Control Act of 2011. In May 2012 he said on television that he was "absolutely comfortable" with same-sex marriage, without clearing it with the White House, and forced Obama's own announcement within days. He never cast a tie-breaking Senate vote — the longest-serving vice president who never had to.

Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015. In October, Biden announced he would not run in 2016.

The Bridge

He entered the 2020 race on April 25, 2019, describing himself as "a bridge, not as anything else" to a younger generation of Democrats. He finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire before a better-than-28-point win in South Carolina, powered by Black voters, turned the race in a week; he took eighteen of the next twenty-six contests. He chose Kamala Harris on August 11, 2020, and defeated Donald Trump that November — a result Trump contested with false fraud claims, certified only after rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Governing at Seventy-Eight

Sworn in on January 20, 2021, the oldest person ever to assume the office, Biden signed seventeen executive orders within two days — rejoining the Paris Agreement, reversing the Keystone XL permit, restoring ties to the World Health Organization. Then came the legislation: the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, a bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the first significant federal gun legislation in three decades, and Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the Supreme Court. Abroad, he executed a withdrawal from Afghanistan that collapsed into a chaotic Taliban takeover, organized sanctions and arms for Ukraine, and brought Finland and Sweden into NATO.

The politics did not follow the statutes. Approval that began in majority territory sank under inflation and never recovered. After a widely criticized debate performance, Biden withdrew from the 2024 race — the first sitting president to abandon a nomination he had already effectively won since 1968.

Why Joe Is Called a Genius

Almost nobody calls Biden a genius, and the sources bear that out: the descriptor attached to him is not intellect but endurance. He is, in the record, an indifferent student of his own biography — he exaggerated his class rank and scholarship in 1987 and lifted another man's words — and his verbal fluency has always run ahead of his precision. What he actually possessed was rarer in Washington than brilliance: a physical and institutional stamina that outlasted a brain aneurysm, two humiliating campaign collapses, and the deaths of a wife, a daughter, and a son, and a legislator's instinct for the exact price at which a Republican would trade. That instinct produced the Violence Against Women Act, New START ratification, the 2010 tax compromise with McConnell, and the Budget Control Act — deals cut by a man senators found it hard to hate. His feel for the country's emotional temperature was likewise unusual: the same-sex marriage comment in 2012 was ahead of the president he served. The honest counter-case is severe. He misjudged Iraq in 2002, misjudged the Bork-era Judiciary Committee's obligations to Anita Hill, misjudged the Afghan collapse, and — most consequentially — misjudged his own capacity to run again at eighty-one. Political timing, not cognitive firepower, was his gift, and it failed him at the end.

Legacy

Biden leaves a paradox: a president ranked favorably by scholars for legislative output while polling badly with the voters who lived through it, and a fifty-year career that reached its summit only in its final act. He is the oldest person to have served as president, the oldest living former president, and an unusually literal argument for persistence in public life — that showing up, for decades, is itself a kind of qualification.

Achievements

• Vice President of the United States (2009–2017)
• United States senator (1973–1975)
• United States senator (1975–1977)
• United States senator (1977–1979)
• Order of the Three Stars, 2nd Class
• St. George's Order of Victory — 2009
• Order of Liberty — 2017
• Ellis Island Medal of Honor — 1992
• Educated at Syracuse University and University of Delaware