Joe Biden had one final bit of advice for these very successful students. No matter how accomplished their lives turned out to be, they would not be able to control the fates.
“Reality has a way of intruding,” the vice president told thousands of graduating Yale University students two weeks ago.
Biden spent the next several minutes unfurling a story he had told hundreds of times before: his improbable 1972 Senate victory, the car crash that took his wife and daughter, the weeks spent coaxing his two young sons toward recovery.
What the crowd didn’t know was that reality had once again intruded in the vice president’s life.
Biden spoke knowing that his eldest son was dying of brain cancer – the same son whose injuries forced Biden in 1973 to take the Senate oath in a hospital room, beside his son’s bed.
Beau Biden had already been admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., for what the vice president’s staff would later call “aggressive treatment” of brain cancer.
Joseph Robinette Biden III, 46, the former attorney general of Delaware and a leading candidate for governor in 2016, died Saturday.
In the stoic tradition of Irish Catholicism, the vice president kept his son’s deteriorating condition to a tightknit circle of family, his closest friends, top advisers and President Obama. The president, along with first lady Michelle Obama, visited the Biden home at the Naval Observatory on Sunday to pay their respects to the vice president and his wife, Jill.
In a rare Sunday session scheduled to deal with contentious anti-terrorism laws, senators began with tributes to the Bidens.
Joe Biden’s adult life, spent almost entirely in the public eye, has now been bookended by tragedy.
Before he could formally begin his Senate career, Biden buried his wife, Neilia, and daughter, Naomi.
Now, as his vice presidency heads toward its final months, he will bury his oldest son, the heir to the family dynasty who was fast carving his own political identity with seemingly limitless opportunity.
In the past few weeks, the vice president’s closest confidants grew worried about how he could handle another loss.
Ted Kaufman, 76, the former senator and Biden’s longtime Senate chief of staff, returned to work for the vice president in a part-time capacity, mostly just to be at his side during the difficult time. Some worried about whether Biden could deliver the Yale speech, given that the invitation came with a specific request that he tell his personal story.
Rather than skip the address, Biden, 72, turned it into a personal explanation of his career, from sorrow to the Senate, from tragedy to global diplomacy.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.