Biden's long career filled with triumphs and tragedies
"In the aftermath I had to remake my health, my reputation, and my career in the Senate," he wrote in his memoirs.
Jerry Kremer, a former state assemblyman from Long Beach and Biden fundraiser, recalled how stoic Biden was after the plagiarism scandal. "He'd already had a lot of bad things in life happen to him. He didn't say, 'I'm going to quit politics.' His attitude was, 'I may not be viable now, but someday, I will be,'" Kremer said.
And that was not the worst of his shattering episodes - not even close. On Dec. 18, 1972, five weeks after Biden was elected to the Senate, his wife Neilia, infant daughter Naomi and sons Beau and Hunt were out in the family station wagon getting a Christmas tree when a tractor-trailer broadsided them.
Neilia and Naomi died in the crash. The boys were critically injured.
Biden devoted himself to the care of his sons and was sworn in at the bedside of one of them before they both recovered fully, growing up to become lawyers. In 1977, Biden married Jill Tracy Jacobs. They have a daughter, Ashley. He still will not work on Dec. 18, the date of the accident, and afterward began the practice, kept to this day, of commuting from his home near Wilmington, on Amtrak, 80 minutes to and from Washington.
