President Biden’s political career began with tragedy: the death of his wife, Neilia, pictured here, and baby, Naomi, in a car crash in 1972, the month after he was elected to the Senate.
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Mr. Biden’s sons, Beau and Hunter, were injured in the crash. He was sworn into the Senate by their hospital bedside in Delaware on Jan. 5, 1973.
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More than three decades before he would be elected president, Mr. Biden began his first presidential campaign in June 1987 alongside his second wife, Jill, and children, Hunter, Ashley and Beau.
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But just three months after declaring his first presidential run, Mr. Biden withdrew from the race, felled by accusations of plagiarizing speeches and law school work.
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At the same time he ended his presidential campaign, Mr. Biden was, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, presiding over the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Robert Bork.
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By persuading several Republicans to vote against Judge Bork, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, he helped sink a nomination that would have shifted the court significantly to the right.
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Four years later, Mr. Biden presided over Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, leading an aggressive interrogation of the law professor Anita Hill that would haunt both of them.
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Mr. Biden ended the hearings without calling witnesses willing to back up Ms. Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment by Mr. Thomas. He was confirmed and remains a Supreme Court justice.
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The year 1994 brought two of Mr. Biden’s biggest legislative accomplishments, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Violence Against Women Act, both of which he sponsored.
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The Violence Against Women Act has been renewed several times, though not without fights. The crime bill helped open the era of mass incarceration of Black people, and Mr. Biden said in 2020 that it had been a “mistake.”
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As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Biden was deeply involved in negotiations to authorize the invasion of Iraq. He later said he had been wrong to think President George W. Bush “would use the authority we gave him properly.”
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By the mid-2000s, Mr. Biden — who has traveled to Iraq multiple times — had disavowed his vote for the war and was a vocal critic of its handling.
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Mr. Biden’s second presidential campaign, 20 years after his first, went little better: The 2008 Democratic primary quickly narrowed to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, leaving Mr. Biden in the cold.
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Mr. Biden dropped out after winning less than 1 percent of the vote in Iowa, and Mr. Obama chose him as his running mate that summer.
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Mr. Biden finally made it to the White House in 2009, albeit not in the role he had imagined, but as vice president.
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He oversaw the administration of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, led negotiations with Congress over fiscal standoffs and was in the Situation Room during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
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In 2020, as Mr. Biden homed in on his lifelong goal of becoming president, the coronavirus shut down the country. With in-person campaigning suspended, he appeared mostly virtually from his home.
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But the third time was the charm for Mr. Biden, who became one of only a handful of candidates to oust an incumbent president with his defeat of Donald J. Trump.
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Forty-eight years after he was sworn into the Senate by his sons’ hospital bed, Mr. Biden once again took an oath of office in the wake of disaster.
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Two weeks after the storming of the Capitol, which took U.S. democracy to the brink and led to multiple deaths, he said, “At this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”
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Produced by Vi Nguyen
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
