Joe Biden

Joe Biden Jr. was born November 20, 1942, at St. Mary's Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania to Catherine Eugenia "Jean" Biden (née Finnegan) and Joseph Robinette Biden Sr.

EARLY LIFE

Joe Biden had an extremely audible stutter when he was a child, from stumbling over his words to not being able to voice them at all. Biden has worked hard throughout his life to solve this problem - he even practiced public speaking holding pebbles in his mouth - and can now manage the speech condition. 

Biden played American Football at Archmere Academy, a Catholic prep school. A standout wide receiver and running back, he caught an impressive 19 touchdown passes. A poor student but a natural leader, he was class president in his junior and senior years.

Biden at age 10 (1953)

After finishing law school at Syracuse University, he was drafted for service in the Vietnam War. But he failed the medical due to his asthma.  

CAREER

Biden practiced law first as a public defender and then at a firm headed by a locally active Democrat. Corporate law, however, did not appeal to him, and criminal law did not pay well, and he supplemented his income by managing properties.

Biden started his political career in 1969 when he was elected to a county council seat in a usually Republican district of New Castle County, Delaware. He served on the council, while still practicing law, until 1972.

A member of the Democratic Party, Biden was first sworn in as a Delaware senator aged 30 which made him the sixth-youngest senator to ever hold office. He served as a United States senator for Delaware from 1973 to 2009. 

Biden was the first senator to endorse Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential bid.

During his first presidential campaign in 1987, Biden was considered one of the potentially strongest candidates in the field. However, it fell apart he was found to have plagiarized a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock.

Biden served as the 47th vice president for two terms under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.

Portrait, 2013

Days before former President Barack Obama ended his second term, he awarded Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the USA's highest civilian honor.

PRESIDENCY

In April 2019, Biden announced his candidacy in the 2020 presidential election, and he reached the delegate threshold needed to secure the Democratic nomination in June 2020.

Biden was elected the 46th President of the United States following the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Biden was the oldest man to assume the presidency of the United States. When he was inaugurated on January 20, 2021, he was 78 years and 61 days old. This surpassed the previous record held by Donald Trump who was 70 years old when he took office in 2017. 

PERSONAL LIFE

Neilia Hunter met Joe Biden in Nassau, Bahamas, while Biden was on spring break from college. Shortly after, Biden moved to Syracuse and attended law school. The couple married on August 27, 1966.

Neilia Hunter Biden

They had three children, two sons (Beau and Robert) and a daughter (Naomi). 

Nelia Hunter died in a car crash on December 18, 1972 with her infant daughter, Naomi; her two sons, Beau and Hunter, were severely injured but survived.

Biden married his second wife, Jill Jacobs on June 17, 1977, at the Chapel at the United Nations in New York City. The pair were first introduced on a blind date and Joe Biden had to propose five times before Jill agreed to marry him.

Jill Biden is an English teacher, who since 2009, has been a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College. She is the first president's wife to hold a paying job outside the White House during her husband's tenure. 

Jill Biden in 2012

In 1981, they had a daughter, Ashley, who is now a social worker. 

His oldest son Beau, died of brain cancer in 2015.

Biden and his wife are Roman Catholics and regularly attend Mass at St. Joseph's on the Brandywine in Greenville, Delaware.

Joe Baden loves his pasta and his favorite dessert is ice-cream. Biden once claimed, “I am a genuine lover of ice cream. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. But I eat a lot of ice cream.” There's even a Tumblr page dedicated to his obsession.

He is teetotal having seen the effect of alcohol addiction on others. 

The Bidens have two German Shepherds, Champ and Major. Champ was named because Mr. Biden’s father had told him growing up, “Get up, champ,” when his life was challenging. Major is a rescue dog who the Biden family adopted from the Delaware Humane Association.

Source The Independent