So instead, the secretary of the Senate traveled to the Delaware hospital where Biden’s sons were still being cared for two weeks later, and he was sworn-in at their bedside. On the day he was scheduled to go to Washington to be sworn-in, Biden couldn’t bring himself to go. “At least be sworn in and come for six months.’” “They all came to me and said, ‘Look, your wife worked really hard to get you this job,’” Biden said. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts helped convince Biden to stay. Senate colleagues including Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana and Sen. And to get up and come to Washington every day while he was going through it. “It’s the first time I realized what incredible character he has,” Kaufman said. It was a habit he would carry on throughout his more than three decades in the Senate. To make it work, Biden started a tradition of traveling back to Wilmington via Amtrak every night after work. We talked about mommy all the time,” Biden Owens said. “I wasn’t their mommy, I didn’t try to take the place of their mom. In the era before cellphones and constant contact with home, having his sister watch the boys reassured him that they were being well taken care of. “It was an extraordinarily close call,” recalls Ted Kaufman, Biden’s longtime chief of staff. Biden Owens and her husband moved in with her brother to take care of his sons in Wilmington while he worked in Washington.
“He and Neilia, and the children, had worked so hard for this that it was not right to not at least get up and give it a shot,” said Valerie Biden Owens, Biden’s sister and longtime campaign manager. (WHYY file photo)īoth family and political allies in the Senate convinced Biden to carry on through the heartache. “I didn’t think I could be a father that I wanted to be and a Senator.” Neilia Biden and sons Beau and Hunter join Joe Biden on the campaign trail in 1972. “I asked my brother to meet with the governor-elect, who was a Democrat, to work on who they’d appoint in my place,” Biden said. WHYY thanks our sponsors - become a WHYY sponsorīiden’s sons, Beau and Hunter, were also badly injured in the crash that happened while Neilia and the children were on their way to pick out a Christmas tree.Īs Biden rushed back to Delaware to be with the boys, he started the process of resigning from his Senate seat before he’d even been sworn in. “They found some poor young woman to tell me, and she kind of panicked and she said, ‘Your wife is dead and so is your daughter,’” Biden told WHYY News in the 2018 documentary “Delaware’s Joe Biden. Biden’s sons, Beau and Hunter, were seriously injured in the crash just before Joe Biden started his first term in the U.S. Neilia Biden, seen here holding daughter Naomi, was killed along with the infant girl in a car accident in 1972. Senator Cale Boggs in 1972.īiden was in Washington hiring staff in preparation for his first term in the Senate when he got the news that his wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident in Delaware. Tragedy struck Joe Biden’s family just weeks after the then-29-year-old New Castle County Councilman won a surprising upset victory over longtime U.S. On the 48th anniversary of the tragic accident that killed his wife and infant daughter, President-elect Joe Biden visited the Wilmington-area church where they are buried.