Joe Biden

The stutter organized his childhood. He stood in front of a mirror reciting Emerson and Yeats until the sentences came out whole, and he was mocked at school for the way they came out before that. His father had come down in the world — a man from money who ended up cleaning boilers and selling used cars after the family moved to Delaware in 1953. Biden got through the University of Delaware in 1965 and finished 76th out of 85 at Syracuse law in 1968, having failed a first-year course for lifting pages out of a law review without citing them. He married Neilia Hunter in 1966, took a county council seat in 1970, and beat a two-term Republican senator in 1972 at 29.

Thirty-six years in the Senate, chairing Judiciary and then Foreign Relations, riding the train home to Wilmington most nights of it. Two presidential campaigns that collapsed, in 1987 and 2008. Eight years as vice president. Then a single term of his own beginning at 78 — an infrastructure law, a semiconductor law, the largest climate spending Congress has passed, a war in Ukraine, an exit from Afghanistan, and a withdrawal from his own reelection in July 2024. BriefHistory takes those four years end to end. This page takes the 50 in front of them.

Five weeks after he won the Senate seat, a tractor-trailer struck the family station wagon in Hockessin, Delaware. His wife Neilia and their 13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed. Beau, three, and Hunter, two, were badly hurt. He was sworn in on January 5, 1973 beside his son's hospital bed, having considered not being sworn in at all. In 1988 two brain aneurysms nearly killed him and cost him seven months of the Senate. In 2015 Beau died of a brain tumor at 46. The record carries its own wounds: he ran the committee that questioned Anita Hill in 1991 and apologized in 2019 for how, and he wrote the 1994 crime bill and spent years afterward describing what it did to incarceration.

He is alive, and nothing about his standing is settled. He left office in January 2025 as the oldest person ever to hold it. In May 2025 his office announced a diagnosis of prostate cancer with a Gleason score of 9 that had spread to the bone, and he has been treated for it publicly since. The scholarly surveys taken so far disagree with one another, which is the normal condition of surveys taken this soon. Two questions will stay open for a long while: whether the legislation of 2021 and 2022 turns into a durable domestic record, and whether he should have sought a second term at all. Neither has an answer yet that a careful person would sign.

Joe Biden's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Violence Against Women Act law
  He wrote it and called it the achievement he was proudest of 1994
• Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act law
  He drafted it and spent decades afterward accounting for its effect on incarceration 1994
• Promise Me, Dad book
  A memoir of the year his son Beau was dying 2017
• Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act law
  Roads, bridges, water lines and broadband, passed with votes from both parties 2021
• CHIPS and Science Act law
  Subsidies to bring semiconductor manufacturing back inside the country 2022
• Inflation Reduction Act law
  The largest climate spending Congress has ever enacted 2022

• 1965 aged ~23 Graduates from the University of Delaware
• August 27, 1966 aged 23 Marries Neilia Hunter
• November 7, 1972 aged 29 Elected to the Senate at 29, weeks before he is old enough to serve
• December 18, 1972 aged 30 Neilia and their infant daughter are killed in a crash in Hockessin, Delaware Both sons were badly injured.
• January 5, 1973 aged 30 Sworn in as a senator beside his son's hospital bed in Wilmington
• September 23, 1987 aged 44 Withdraws from the presidential race over borrowed passages in his speeches
• 1988 aged ~46 Two brain aneurysms are repaired and keep him out of the Senate for seven months
• May 30, 2015 aged 72 His son Beau dies of brain cancer at 46
• July 21, 2024 aged 81 Withdraws from his reelection campaign and endorses Kamala Harris

• Kamala Harris b. 1964
  First woman, first Black American, and first Asian American to serve as vice president. endorsed
• Ketanji Brown Jackson b. 1970
  First Black woman appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. appointed
• Bernie Sanders b. 1941
  Vermont senator whose presidential campaigns moved single-payer health care into mainstream debate. defeated
• Clarence Thomas b. 1948
  Long-serving justice whose originalist opinions have strongly influenced modern conservative jurisprudence. presided over his confirmation
• Mitch McConnell b. 1942
  Longest-serving Senate party leader who reshaped the federal judiciary through confirmation strategy. opposed by
• Nancy Pelosi b. 1940
  First female Speaker of the House who shepherded major healthcare and economic legislation. allied with