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would become the president of the United States. Jill listened, but she didn’t take this information too seriously at the time.

On June 17, 1977, Jill Jacobs married Joe Biden at the United Nations Chapel in New York City. It was a Catholic ceremony. Beau and Hunter, ages eight and seven, stood beside the bride and groom at the altar. Compared with most Biden gatherings, the wedding was small, just family and close friends.

After the luncheon reception, Joe and Jill Biden—and their two sons—went off on their honeymoon. The four Bidens saw the Broadway musical Annie and ate hamburgers at Blimpie’s restaurant. Back at their hotel, Joe and Jill let the boys choose between the two hotel rooms they’d reserved. As Beau told it years later, the boys picked the honeymoon suite for themselves.

More seriously, Beau said how lucky he felt that Jill had come into their life. “Led by my mom as much as my dad, we rebuilt our family.”

As for the boys’ aunt Valerie, her commitment to mothering the boys for more than four years was now complete. She and her husband, Jack Owens, moved out of the Station to a house of their own.

“We Rebuilt Our Family”

“Independent almost to a fault,” President Jimmy Carter called Joe Biden. Biden had helped Carter win the presidency, and now President Carter was expected to help Senator Biden win reelection in 1978. And Carter did fly into Wilmington by helicopter in November 1977, and appeared briefly at two fundraising events. But he was not that enthusiastic about Biden.

Joe Biden, for his part, was disappointed in President Carter. He’d worked hard for Carter’s election in 1976, but now he criticized the president openly. He didn’t think Carter knew how to work with Congress. And he disagreed with Carter about busing. President Carter, as well as the NAACP and other civil rights groups, believed that busing was necessary to break down racial segregation in the schools.

The Supreme Court had ruled in 1971 that school districts could use busing to achieve racial balance. More recently, federal courts had ordered New Castle County, Delaware, to bus students to achieve racial balance. Public-school busing was the big issue of the Senate campaign in Delaware. Joe Biden’s position was that he disagreed with the court order, but he thought it must be obeyed.

Biden bluntly called busing “an asinine concept.” At the same time, he didn’t want to be associated with most opponents of busing, who simply wanted to maintain racial segregation. “I don’t want to be mixed up with a George Wallace,” Biden had complained to an interviewer. George Wallace, governor of Alabama, was famous for declaring, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

But Joe Biden’s liberal colleagues in the Senate did accuse him of letting the “racists” get to him. The Judiciary Committee was divided between the liberals, including Mike Mansfield, and the die-hard segregationists, including Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, chair of the Judiciary Committee since 1957.

Biden was for racial integration, and he’d supported most of Senator Edward Brooke’s efforts to achieve equality, such as the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. But he believed that public-school busing would only cause white parents to pull their children out of the public educational system because they feared their children would be bused to inferior schools. Even parents who believed in equal education for all were not willing to take a chance on their own children’s future.

So Biden thought that busing was the wrong way to go about integration. He’d made this argument in his first campaign for the Senate. It would work much better, Biden thought, to fight racial discrimination with housing, job opportunities, and college education. However, in 1974, Biden did vote with the liberal senators to make sure federal courts retained their power to enforce school integration if necessary.

Back home in Wilmington, parents against school busing were even angrier with Joe Biden than his Senate colleagues were. They knew he’d cast the deciding vote in 1974, leaving the courts with the power over local school districts to require school busing. Joe feared that the citizens of Delaware would vote against him for not preventing school busing, and so did Biden’s chief aide, Ted Kaufman. Joe’s Republican opponent tried to use this point, calling Biden too liberal for Delaware. Joe was seriously afraid of losing this election.

Jill campaigned alongside him, beginning in the summer of 1977 with a huge picnic for Biden supporters. Thousands of them showed up, and they all wanted to meet Jill and tell her how wonderful Neilia had been. Jill could have felt threatened by the task of following in Neilia’s footsteps, but she greeted everyone graciously. After all, she and Joe both believed that Neilia’s spirit was blessing their marriage.

Valerie managed Joe’s campaign the same way she’d done in 1972. Four thousand volunteers swarmed over the state of Delaware, knocking on doors for Joe Biden. As it turned out, Biden didn’t need to have worried about losing. On the first Tuesday in November 1978, Senator Biden easily won reelection, 58 percent to 41.

Afterward, Biden thought that the voters had trusted him, even though he couldn’t solve the busing problem, because he listened to them. He let them vent their anger. As he wrote later, “I instinctively understood that my most important duty was to be a target.”

Biden did remarkably well in the elections of 1978 compared with some of his fellow Democratic senators. Partly because President Carter was unpopular, several of them were voted out. And in Mississippi, Senator James Eastland’s racism finally caught up with him.

The African Americans of Mississippi had gained voting rights and organized behind their Independent candidate, Charles Evers. The NAACP informed Eastland that they would not support him for reelection in 1978. Rather than lose, Eastland announced his retirement.

Meanwhile, at home in Wilmington, the Biden family continued to evolve. In spite of the fact that Beau and Hunter had advised their father to marry Jill,