Joe Biden Beatrice Gormley (classic children's novels txt) 📖

the Amtrak train to Washington. Neilia had decided not to go with him this time. She had some major Christmas shopping to do, and Christmas was only a week away. She packed the three children into the station wagon and went off to look for a Christmas tree. The following day, Neilia planned, she’d go to Washington with Joe and sign the papers on the house they were buying.

That afternoon, Joe was sitting with Valerie in his borrowed office in Washington when the phone rang. Valerie picked it up. It was Jimmy, calling from Wilmington. As Valerie listened, her face turned white.

Valerie hung up and tried to break the news to Joe gently. “There’s been a slight accident. Nothing to be worried about. But we ought to go home.”

Somehow Joe knew—from Val’s expression, or her tone of voice—what the news really was. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

They flew back to Wilmington and rushed to the hospital, where Joe learned the full story. After Neilia had driven off on her Christmas errands, her station wagon had collided with a tractor-trailer. Her car rolled into a ditch. She and Naomi, the baby, were killed. Beau’s leg and some other bones were broken, and Hunter had a cracked skull.

“I could not speak,” Joe wrote years later, “only felt this hollow core grow in my chest, like I was going to be sucked inside a black hole.”

The next several days he spent at the hospital, never leaving the boys. He was in a weird state, dozing off now and then and waking to a nightmare reality. Neilia, the love of his life, the partner of his dreams, was gone. The happy family they’d grown together was shattered: the baby dead, Beau in a full body cast, Hunter with a fractured skull and possibly brain-damaged. There was a part of Joe that wanted to die too—but then remembered that Beau and Hunter needed him more than ever.

What pulled Joe through the ordeal, he remembered later, was his family. Someone—Valerie, Jimmy, their mother—was always there to support him. As Joe’s vigil at the hospital dragged on, he began going out for nighttime walks around the city, trying to walk off his growing rage.

Jimmy went along to keep an eye on him, fearing that his brother was looking for a fight. And Joe would have been glad for an excuse to punch someone, as he admitted later. He was shocked at how angry he was, even angry at God. “I felt God had played a horrible trick on me.”

Now Joe Biden’s seat in the Senate, and all his plans for the great things he’d expected to achieve there, meant nothing to him. The only future he could imagine was one of taking care of his sons. He called Mike Mansfield, the majority leader of the Senate, and told him he was giving up his Senate seat. Biden had already told the governor of Delaware, who would appoint someone to fill in temporarily.

Young Senator Biden

In Joe Biden’s black mood after the accident, nothing mattered except four-year-old Beau and three-year-old Hunter. He didn’t want to go on living, but he would live for them. At least the boys were recovering well. The doctors assured Joe that Beau’s broken bones would heal, and Hunter’s brain had not been damaged.

At first Joe assumed that the best thing for his sons would be for him to stay home with them. But when he talked to his friends and family about the future, his mind began to change. There was his father’s advice from long ago, which had always served Joe well: “If you get knocked down, get up.”

Valerie, Joe’s first best friend and trusted advisor, argued that he didn’t have to choose between the Senate and his sons. She and her husband, Bruce, would move into the North Star house with Joe. She would quit her teaching job at Wilmington Friends School and take care of the boys full-time.

And Joe didn’t need to move to Washington, DC, as he and Neilia had planned. Washington was only a train ride away from Wilmington. Senator Biden could live at home and commute to work, while taking his boys to school every morning and tucking them into bed every night.

Val loved her nephews and wanted the best for them. But she also believed it would be best for her brother to plunge into the demanding work of the Senate. It would give him some sense of purpose, a way to recover from his crushing tragedy. And it would be good for Beau and Hunter to see their father following through on his commitment to the people of Delaware.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield would not give up on Joe, and he continued to call him every day. He was sympathetic with Biden’s loss, but he was determined to keep him in the Senate. He talked about the votes he was counting on Biden to support. He tempted Biden with the promise of a place on the Senate Democratic Steering Committee—an unusual favor for a freshman senator.

Finally, the wily Mansfield told Joe that by taking his seat in the Senate, he would be honoring Neilia’s memory. That was the clinching argument for Joe. Neilia had worked for this victory as hard as he had. She had believed in him and encouraged him, from that first day on the beach in Nassau. For Neilia’s sake, he could at least try.

By the beginning of 1973, Joe Biden had agreed to serve in the Senate for at least six months. But he refused to travel to Washington to be sworn into office in the Senate Chamber, as was customary. Hunter was back home, but Beau was still in the hospital, and Joe wouldn’t leave him. So Mike Mansfield sent the secretary of the Senate to the Wilmington General Hospital to administer the oath to Joe.

On January 5 a crowd of witnesses and TV crews watched the ceremony in the chapel