In December 1972, Joe Biden’s life was perfect.
At age 30, he had just been elected to represent Delaware in Congress, making him the second-youngest senator in history.
He had been married to a beautiful woman, Neilia, for six years. They had three healthy children: Beau, 4, Hunter, 3, and Naomi, 13 months.
In fact, his good fortune was so great that Biden’s young wife admitted it made her nervous.
Sitting by the fire in their Wilmington home, writing Christmas cards together, she turned to him, filled with fear.
“What’s going to happen, Joey?” he asked. “Things are going too well.”
In December 1972, Joe Biden’s life was perfect: he had a beautiful, loving wife of six years, Neilia, and three healthy young children: 4-year-old sons Beau and Hunter, 3, and 13-month-old daughter Naomi.
But in December 1972, all that changed when Biden’s wife and daughter were killed in a horrific car accident.
Days later, the newly elected Biden was working in Washington DC, interviewing potential employees, when the phone rang.
“They put a pretty young woman on the phone. She was very nervous,” Biden recalled nearly 50 years later at a rally for his 2020 presidential campaign. “She said, ‘You need to go home. There’s been an accident.’”
At approximately 2:30 p.m. on Monday, December 18, Neilia was driving on a suburban highway with her three children on their way to pick up a Christmas tree in Hockessin, Delaware, when she slid through a stop sign directly into the path of a speeding tractor-trailer.
His Chevrolet pickup truck was hit on its side and thrown 150 feet down an embankment.
“Biden for Senate” campaign flyers still stacked in the trunk of the car filled the air and were scattered across the road, along with shards of glass and twisted debris.
Neilia, also 30, and Naomi were rushed to Wilmington General Hospital, but it was too late.
They were declared dead on arrival.
Beau and Hunter were seriously injured but alive. Beau had a broken leg and Hunter had a fractured skull.
Beau and Hunter were hospitalized after the crash, and Biden was sworn in as Delaware’s senator from the hospital chapel where they were being treated.
Beau was wheeled into the small chapel attached to the hospital and Hunter sat on the edge of the bed as his father was officially sworn in.
At that moment, Biden became a widower and a single father with two children under the age of five.
He fell into a state of deep grief and depression, later revealing that he even contemplated suicide.
“I thought about what it would be like to just go to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, jump off and end it all,” Biden told CNN for a 2020 documentary about his political life.
By all accounts, Neilia was a great love.
They met in 1963, both in their 20s, while Biden was on spring break in Fort Lauderdale.
He and his friends were bored and decided to take an impromptu trip to Nassau, where Neilia was on vacation.
Neilia’s wealthy Republican parents were staying at a luxury beach resort that Biden, who grew up in a working-class family, could never afford. But he and his friends had stolen towels bearing the hotel’s logo and managed to get into the resort’s pool.
Upon seeing Neilia, Biden said it was love at first sight, but he had competition as his friends liked her too. So they flipped a coin to decide who could talk to her.
Biden won.
That night he invited Neilia to dinner and told her he was going to marry her. Three years later, they were married.
He was in love with her and described her in a 1974 interview as “my best friend, my greatest ally, my sensual lover.”
After her death, he considered resigning from public office to focus on raising his children, but Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield persuaded him not to.
Two and a half weeks after the accident, a media circus descended on the hospital where Hunter and Beau were still receiving treatment for their injuries.
Beau was wheeled into the small chapel attached to the hospital and Hunter sat on the edge of the bed as his father was officially sworn in as a senator.
By all accounts, Neilia was the great love of his life. They met in 1963 during spring break in Fort Lauderdale.
After her death, he considered resigning from public office to focus on children, but Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield persuaded him not to.
Photos of the ceremony, showing Biden solemnly raising his hand to take the oath of office with his sick children in the foreground, went viral around the world.
As he left the hospital, his mother, Catherine Eugenia ‘Jean’ Biden, turned to him and said, ‘Out of all the terrible things that happen to you, something good will come out of you if you look hard enough for it.’
But he would have to wait a while. Over the next few months, he did his job and, instead of moving to Washington, began commuting daily (two hours each way) from his home in Wilmington.
“I did it because I wanted to be able to kiss them (Beau and Hunter) goodnight and kiss them in the morning the next day,” Biden said. Eventually, his sister Valerie moved into the Wilmington home to help care for the young children.
Meanwhile, Biden’s depression worsened. In his 2017 autobiography, he wrote that “I felt like there was a small, dark hole in the middle of my chest (that) threatened to suck my entire being out.”
She began rating her mood on a scale of one to ten, recording them daily on a calendar in hopes of feeling better.
The number one meant he felt like he was having the worst day of his life, ten meant the best day. For six months, he filled the calendar with ones.
In his 2017 autobiography, Promise Me, Dad, he wrote: “I felt like there was a small, dark hole in the middle of my chest, and I knew that if I dwelled in its presence, it would grow until it threatened to suck my entire being dry.”
It wasn’t until three years after Neilia and Naomi’s deaths that life began to change for Joe, 32, when he was set up on a blind date with Jill Jacobs, 23.
Biden would later say, “No man deserves one great love, much less two.”
In 1977, Joe and Jill married. Four years later, they welcomed their first and only child, Ashley.
But another family tragedy came in 2015, when Joe’s son Beau died of brain cancer at age 46.
As a result, “many voters view Joe Biden primarily through the prism of his history of defeat,” Biden biographer Ben Schreckinger told DailyMail.com.
‘In many ways, he shaped his political identity around his pain, using his personal experience to help him empathize with the public and his colleagues on Capitol Hill.
‘In political circles, he is known for reaching out personally to console people, whether or not they are his political allies, who have lost loved ones.’
But not everyone has received such empathetic treatment.
The driver of the truck that crashed into the Biden family’s car, Curtis Dunn, then 33, escaped unharmed and was cleared of any wrongdoing when police determined Neilia had accidentally hit the car. his path.
It wasn’t until three years after Neilia and Naomi’s deaths that Joe’s life began to change when he was set up on a blind date with 23-year-old Jill Jacobs (pictured).
Every year, Biden, Jill Biden and Hunter visit the graves of their relatives in Wilmington, Delaware.
Investigators also found that Dunn had tried so hard to avoid the collision that he overturned his vehicle, before running to help Neilia and the children.
But in the decades that followed, Biden repeatedly and falsely suggested that Dunn was to blame and had been drinking, describing him as “a guy who supposedly — and I never looked into this — drank his lunch instead of eating it.”
In 2009, Dunn’s daughter, Pamela Hamill, was asked about Biden’s claims for a CBS News report.
Her father had died in 1999, but Pamela said she was so upset that she asked Biden for an apology.
She later admitted that he had, at least privately, been “very apologetic” by calling her personally. But, she said, he had drawn the line at issuing a “public apology”, saying that if he did so he would “end up in every trashy magazine in the supermarket”.
Hamill never accepted Biden’s offer to meet his family in person and never heard from him again.
As the 81-year-old president prepares to retire from politics after announcing Sunday that he would no longer accept the Democratic nomination to run again in November’s general election, it seems unlikely that Hamill will ever see his record corrected.
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