December 14, 2007
The Long Run
Biden Campaigning With Ease After Hardships
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
IOWA CITY — Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, a back-in-the-pack Democratic candidate for president, was answering a voter’s question last week about negative campaigning when he abruptly began talking about his first, euphoric run for the Senate, in 1972, and the personal tragedy that nearly destroyed his life afterward.
“Let me tell you a little story,” Mr. Biden told the crowd at the University of Iowa. “I got elected when I was 29, and I got elected November the 7th. And on Dec. 18 of that year, my wife and three kids were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree. A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly, and killed my daughter instantly, and hospitalized my two sons, with what were thought to be at the time permanent, fundamental injuries.”
The crowd was silent as Mr. Biden continued. His wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were gone, but his sons, not quite 3 and 4 years old at the time, made full recoveries. “They’re both, thank God, healthy and well,” Mr. Biden told the crowd.
One of them, Beau, 38, is now the attorney general of Delaware and a captain in an Army National Guard unit headed for Iraq. The other, Hunter, 37, is a lawyer in Washington. Both spend weekends in Iowa on their father’s campaign. Mr. Biden’s second wife, Jill, whom he married five years after the accident, is working on the race as well, as is their 25-year-old daughter, Ashley.
Mr. Biden has rebuilt his life, but the long-ago accident has become part of the narrative of his campaign and the most horrific of three major crises — including life-threatening cranial aneurysms in 1988 and the blowup in 1987 of his first presidential race over accusations of plagiarism — that have created the liberated 65-year-old candidate of today.
Mr. Biden has survived so much personal and political catastrophe that not much about this race — not his distant standing in the polls nor his own missteps — seems to get him down. It is the last, great ride of his White House ambitions, and this time, unlike 20 years ago, he seems determined to make it right.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/us/politics/14biden.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=politics&pagewanted=print
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