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Facts About Joe Biden - Biography and Background

by Melissa Cornett

At the time this article was published (August 2008), Senator Joseph Biden had just announced he would run for Vice President on the ticket with Barack Obama. As you might imagine, this announcement led to a lot of research into Joe Biden and his political background. So we thought it was a good time to create a fact sheet about Senator Joe Biden.

21 Interesting Facts

1. Joe Biden was born on November 20, 1942 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was the first of four children.
2. In 1953, the family moved to Claymont, Delaware in New Castle County. Joe Biden lived in Delaware for decades (still does) and would eventually become a senator for the state.
3. He attended the University of Delaware and graduated in 1965 with a double major in Political Science and History. He then attended Syracuse University College of Law and graduated with a Juris Doctor (graduate-level law degree) in 1968.
4. Biden married his first wife, Neilia, in 1966 while attending law school.
5. Before he was elected to serve in the United States Senate, Joe Biden practiced law in Wilmington, Delaware. He also served on the New Castle County Council from 1970 to 1972.
6. Joe Biden was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972 at the relatively young age of 29.
7. In December of 1972, shortly after his election to the Senate, Biden's wife Neilia and daughter Naomi were killed in an automobile accident. His sons Hunter and Beau survived the accident but were seriously injured by it.
8. Biden considered resigning from the Senate to care for his two sons. His supporters persuaded him to stay in the Senate. Thus began, in 1973, his now-famous daily train commute between Washington D.C. and Wilmington, Delaware. He continues the daily train ride to this day (as of August 2008).
9. In January of 1973, Joe Biden was officially sworn into the United States Senate. The brief ceremony took place in the room of his still recovering sons, Beau and Hunter.
10. Joe Biden became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee in January of 1975. He served on that committee for more than two decades and eventually become the chairman (a position he still holds at the time of this writing).
11. He married his second wife Jill in June of 1977.
12. In June of 1987, Biden announced that he would seek the Democratic party's nomination for president of the United States. He withdrew from the race later that year amid allegations that he plagiarized a speech.
13. Biden underwent emergency surgery in February of 1988 for two brain aneurysms (a weakened and widening of blood vessels in the brain). He was away from the Senate for seven months while recovering from the surgery.
14. Senator Joe Biden wrote the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which was eventually passed in 1994. The new legislation made violence against women a more serious crime and imposed tougher penalties for those guilty of battering women.
15. On May 11, 1999, Biden reached a career milestone when he cast his 10,000th vote in the Senate. By this time, he had been a senator for 26 years.
16. In 1994, the senator authored a crime bill that helped put 100,000 additional cops on American streets, which in turn helped to lower crime rates across the nation.
17. Since 1991, Biden has been teaching a seminar on constitutional law at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Delaware, where he serves as an adjunct (part-time) professor.
18. In 2006, the Delaware senator authored the Adam Walsh Act, which (among other things) grants federal resources to help states protect children from convicted sex offenders, Internet predators and the like. Biden's state of Delaware was one of the first states to use those federal resources.
19. On January 31, 2007, Joe Biden announced his bid for the 2008 Democratic nomination for President of the United States.
20. Biden has three children: sons Hunter and Beau from his first marriage, and daughter Ashley from his current marriage to wife Jill. His son Beau is currently the Attorney General for Delaware, as well as a JAG lawyer for the Delaware Army National Guard. Beau is scheduled to deploy to Iraq in October 2008.
21. In August of 2008, Barack Obama announced that Joe Biden would be his running mate for the position of Vice President of the United States of America.

I hope you've enjoyed this brief biography of Joseph Biden — the man and the politician. It's important to learn as much about a political candidate, so you can make an educated decision on election day. I hope this list of Joe Biden facts has helped in that regard.

References: Much of this fact sheet was compiled from widely available information. I also referred to the Biden's section of the U.S. Senate website, as well as his own personal website.