Joe Biden Biography
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born in Scranton Pennsylvania on November 20, 1942 to an Irish Catholic family. Due to adverse financial circumstances, the family was forced to move and eventually settled in Claymont, Delaware. Biden graduated in 1968 from the Syracuse University College of Law. |
In 1968, he married Neilia Hunter whom he met at Syracuse University. They had three children. Against impossible odds he was elected to the Senate in 1972 from Delaware. A few weeks after his election, his wife and one-year-old daughter were killed in an automobile accident while his two young sons were seriously injured. He was dissuaded from resigning to look after his sons and took the oath of office at the bedside of one of them. Eventually both sons recovered.
Biden remarried in 1975 to Jill Tracey Jacobs a teacher in Delaware. They have one daughter born in 1981. The family is staunchly Roman Catholic, but Biden fell foul of the Church for his views on abortion. Nonetheless, they are a devout, practicing family. He is a teetotaler.
Biden was in the US Senate since he was first elected in 1973, till he resigned to become Vice President in 2009. It was a long-standing member and chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He came into the limelight with the strenuous efforts to defuse hostilities in the Balkans in the 1990s. His vast experience in foreign relations was a possible reason for his selection as Vice President.
He opposed the first Gulf war of 1991 but was in favor of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, firmly believing that Saddam Hussein had to be ousted. It was a decision he lived to regret.
He made two attempts at the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988 and 2008 and on both occasions he was unsuccessful. Biden is an erudite and convincing speaker but sometimes tends to be long-winded and loquacious.
In August 2008, he was invited by Senator Obama to be his running mate. In November of that year, he was successfully re-elected to both the Senate and the Vice Presidency.
Biden is the 47th Vice President of United States, the first from Delaware, and the first Roman Catholic to be appointed to that office.
More Articles :
|
