Beau Biden obit

Remembering Beau Biden

He was not on the list.


It would be easy, too easy, to remember Beau Biden as a kind of permanent son who existed as a public object of his father’s joy, pride and unfulfilled ambition, the grown boy who first helped shoulder, and ultimately deepened, Joe Biden’s grief.
But while he shared the vice president’s name—Joseph Robinette Biden III is on his birth certificate—Beau charted a path that was distinct from, if vine-woven with, his father’s. There are public lives and private ones, and Beau, despite his political aspirations, thoughtfully straddled the line his famous father, whose innermost thoughts so often match his outermost expression, ignores.

People close to both say that Joe Biden harbored dreams that his 46-year-old son—who looked and talked more like a Kennedy than a Biden—would eventually do what he couldn’t: ascend to the presidency. It’s not clear if the son, who died after a 20-month struggle with brain cancer in May, harbored any such aspiration. Apparently, he never told anyone he did, and he seemed to linger on the life-rungs his father climbed with all deliberate speed in his own youth.

Joe Biden was a United States senator by the time he was 30. He took law school in a careless careen, worked briefly as public defender in Delaware before taking a job with politically connected law firm back home in Wilmington, and avoided military service in the Vietnam era, through educational and health deferments.

Beau Biden walked just outside his father’s footsteps: He attended the same high school Joe did, then went to Syracuse law school, his father’s alma mater. Then, a divergence. He was captivated by the life of a white-hat prosecutor, and spent his first nine years as a lawyer working for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Philadelphia, followed by a stint as a rule-of-law adviser in postwar Kosovo.

Another difference from his father: Beau joined the Delaware National Guard in 2003, rising to the rank of major in the Judge Advocate General’s office. He was elected state attorney general in 2006, then had to turn over many of his day-to-day duties after his unit was deployed to serve a tour in Iraq from 2008 to 2009. “I’ve come here many times before as a Delawarean, as a United States senator,” vice presidential candidate Joe Biden told a crowd gathered at the Air Force base in Dover for the deployment ceremony. “But today I come, as you prepare to deploy, as a father—a father who had some sage advice from his son this morning: ‘Dad, keep it short. We’re in formation.”

Over the years, Joe would tell everybody (myself included) the story of how his son refused to wear his desert camo—or his Bronze Star—in campaign ads. The point he was groping for—that his son wouldn’t play by the same politicians’ rules that governed his own life. “That was just the kind of guy he is,” the elder Biden told me during an interview for a 2014 profile.

The most important political moment in Beau’s life—if only because it represented the most dramatic divergence from his father’s career—came in January 2010, when he announced he wouldn’t seek the Senate seat vacated by his father. He would run for a second term as attorney general. There was political sangfroid behind his decision: The Tea Party backlash was building, and 2010 was shaping up to be a wipeout year for his party. (Even so, Beau had stood a solid chance of winning; fellow Democrat Chris Coons would ultimately prevail.) There was a more practical reason for staying out of the race, too: Beau was obsessively committed to prosecuting sex crimes, and one in particular—the ghastly case of pediatrician and serial child molester Earl Bradley, who abused dozens of children, including a 3-month-old baby.

Beau began setting his sights on another political prize, the 2016 governor’s race. It wasn’t to be. In late 2010 came word that he had been admitted to a hospital after suffering a small stroke. Three years later, after a fainting spell during vacation, came the cancer surgery. His health steadily deteriorated, and on May 30, Beau died at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, leaving behind his wife, an 11-year-old daughter, Natalie, and a son, Hunter, who was eight at the time of his father’s death.

That was the man, now for the boy. On December 18, 1972, just a month after his father had been elected to the Senate, Beau—three months short of his fourth birthday—went Christmas shopping in the family car with his mother, Neilia, younger brother, Hunter, and infant sister when they were struck by a truck. Neilia and 13-month-old Naomi were killed. Hunter suffered a skull fracture, Beau a badly broken leg. Biden briefly considered chucking the Senate before he ever cast a vote, was talked out of it by party leaders and was sworn into office at the boy’s Wilmington hospital bedside. The news photographs from that day show little blond Beau, leg in a cosseted sling, staring off into the middle distance as his father and reporters crowd around a blanket-less bed.

“One of my earliest memories was being in that hospital, Dad always at our side,” Beau told the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, after his father had been nominated. “We, not the Senate, were all he cared about.”

Over the years, Beau would become a source of stability at the side of his oft-mercurial father, providing wise-beyond-his-years support after Joe’s humiliating withdrawal from the 1988 Democratic primary. And Beau grew especially close to his stepmother, Jill, who took his death as hard as anyone in the family. In his 2007 memoir, the vice president credited his then-7-year-old older son for welcoming his wife to the Bidens. “We think we should marry Jill. What do you think, Dad?” Beau told him, with 6-year-old Hunter in tow.

Beau Biden’s illness and excruciating decline wore heavily on his father, and toward the end, the two men’s fates tangled inevitably in ways that weren’t healthy for either of them. The son always thought the father deserved to be president and, as he was dying, reportedly told him to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, the same year Beau was supposed to win the Delaware governor’s race. Joe Biden, shattered by his son’s predicament but also seeing one last chance at the presidency, spread the story, and it ended up in the papers, feeding an ugly media frenzy that ended with the vice president’s emotional Rose Garden announcement that he wasn’t running, in part because he couldn’t quite move past “the grieving process.”

Biden had always drawn strength from his son, and those final few months preceding the decision not to run were no exception. Shortly before the end, Beau had told him, “I know how much you love me. Promise me you’re going to be all right.” Joe complied.

“I was a hell of a success,” the vice president told Stephen Colbert a few months after the funeral, repeating something his father had told him. “My son was better than me.”