In his 2017 book Promise Me, Dad, Mr Biden wrote that “the pain. Roughly 1,200 people crowded a memorial service for Neilia and Naomi, the Delaware State News reported. Police determined that Neilia accidentally drove into the path of the tractor-trailer and didn’t see it coming. One week before Christmas, the senator-elect was in Washington DC interviewing staff members for his new office when he received the news about the deaths of his wife and daughter.Īfter that phone call, “my whole world was altered forever”, Mr Biden later said in a speech to Yale University graduates. The following month, Neilia asked her husband, “What’s going to happen, Joey? Things are too good,” The News Journal reported. The 30-year-old underdog won the race in November 1972. It also was the first year 18 year olds were eligible to vote. The family campaigned across the state, mounting a lucrative grassroots campaign attacking his Republican incumbent as old and out of touch, a shock to the status quo highlighting the generational divide between the elder conservative statesman’s base and a much younger electorate following the Vietnam War and civil rights movement. Neilia became his closest adviser and the “brains” behind his campaign, The News Journal reported. He has called his time there “a dangerous combination of arrogant and sloppy” and ultimately graduated 76th in a class of 85. They married on 27 August 1966 while he was still enrolled in law school. There, Neilia earned her master’s degree in English and taught special needs students. In 1963, Neilia, then a college sophomore at Syracuse University, met Mr Biden, then a junior at the University of Delaware, on the beach in Nassau during spring break.Īsked about his career goals, Mr Biden told his future wife’s mother: “President.” After he earned his bachelor’s degree in Delaware, Mr Biden moved to Syracuse for law school. She participated in French club, hockey, swimming and student council, and was the photography editor of the Penntonian, and vice president and then president of the International Relations Club, according to her school’s yearbook. She graduated from Penn Hall preparatory school in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1960. The daughter of successful diner operators in New York state, Neilia Hunter was born on 28 July 1942 in the affluent town of Skaneateles. More than 40 years later, Beau died following a brain cancer diagnosis.Įverything you need to know about Dr Jill Biden Their two sons, Joseph “Beau” Biden III and Robert Hunter Biden, survived. Campaign literature featuring the young senator-elect from Delaware littered the streets. While out shopping just days before Christmas in 1972, his 30-year-old wife Neilia and 13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident after a tractor-trailer carrying corn broadsided the family’s Chevrolet station wagon. Though not unique to his brand of politicking, the president has famously framed his current ideas through the lens of his past. Joe Biden’s ongoing recovery from the trauma of the deaths of his first wife and youngest child have dramatically shaped his career, from the ways in which he speaks to crowds about grief and mourning to his views on healthcare. Their son Hunter waits for the first piece (Getty) Senator-elect Joseph Biden and wife Neilia cut his 30th birthday cake at a party in Wilmington, Delaware, on 20 November 1972.