Doug West - Joe Biden: A Short Biography--47th Vice President of the United States

Joe Biden: A Short Biography

47th Vice President of the UnitedStates

Copyright 2018 Doug West

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may bereproduced in any form without written permission from the author.Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews.

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Table ofContents

Welcome to the book, Joe Biden: A ShortBiography. This book is part of the 30 Minute Book Series and,as the name of the series implies, if you are an average readerthis book will take around 30 minutes to read. Since this shortbook is not meant to be an all-encompassing biography of Joe Biden,you may want to know more about this man and his accomplishments.To help you with this, there are several good references at the endof this book. Thank you for purchasing this book, and I hope youenjoy your time reading about this former Vice President of theUnited States.

Doug West

January 2018

When you see a picture of a famous person orhear their name, a mental image enters your mind. For example, whenyou see a picture of one of the worlds greatest scientists, AlbertEinstein, you think of brilliant, or when you see a picture ofthe German dictator Adolf Hitler, the word evil may pop into yourmind. When you see a picture of the former vice president of theUnited States, Joe Biden, maybe the word resilient should enteryour thoughts. The dictionary tells us the world resilient means,A person able to withstand or recover quickly from difficultconditions. For Joe Biden, the word resilient fits him well.

As a young boy growing up in Pennsylvania,Joe Biden, or Joey as his young friends called him, had a problemwith his speech. He stuttered. The problem was obvious enough thathis classmates made fun of him and he had to get help from the nunsat his Catholic school to overcome the problem. Young Joey Bidenwould overcome this problem and become one of the most loquaciousorators of his generation.

Joe Biden was a man on the move and by 1971he had a law degree in hand, a wonderful wife, three children, andto top it off, at age 29 had won a seat in the United States Senatefrom his home state of Delaware. Then, in a single instance, hisworld changed as his wife and children were in a fatal car accidentwhile Christmas shopping; only the two young boys would survive.The tragedy nearly forced him to give up his Senate seat. With thehelp of his family, he was able to stay in the Senate, making thelong daily commute from Willington, Delaware, to Washington, D.C.,for a career that would last for over three decades.

By 1987 Biden was ready for new challengesand threw his hat into the ring of the 1988 presidential election.His campaign didnt go well, as he was accused by his opponents ofplagiarism in a speech. His hopes of becoming the youngestpresident since John Kennedy were dashed and he was forced from therace. His presidential aspirations would not resurface until twentyyears later. In the 2008 election, he would not become president,but the vice president under Barack Obama.

Read on and see the ebbs and flows of thisresilient mans life as he ascends to the second highest office inthe land.

My dad always said, Champ, the measureof a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly hegets up. - Joe Biden

Just a year after Americas entry into WorldWar II, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., was born into a Catholicfamily on November 20, 1942, in blue-collar Scranton, Pennsylvania.He was the first child of Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr., andCatherine Eugenia Biden. Joe was followed by a sister, Valerie, andtwo other brothers, James and Frank. His mother had Irish ancestryand his fathers family descended from an English immigrant withIrish roots from Sussex, who had come to the United States a fewgenerations before.

Joe Senior and a cousin prospered during thewar working for an uncle who manufactured a watertight sealant formerchant marine ships. Business was good, so much so that both menowned the fastest new cars and piloted a small plane on huntingtrips. After the war, the good times for the Biden family came toan end as Joe Senior became involved in a couple of bad businessventures with his cousin. Joe Seniors family moved into the smallhome of Catherines family in the Green Ridge neighborhood made upof Irish, Italian, and Polish families. In Green Ridge, young JoeBiden or Joey, as he was called, enjoyed a childhood of playingbaseball, cops and robbers, and normal boyhood pranks while heattended a Catholic school. At the school, he was a good studentbut suffered from a case of stuttering, which led to ridicule fromthe other students. With the help of the nuns he was able toovercome the problem and later became known for his skills as anorator.

During the 1950s, Scranton and all thesurrounding area went into a severe economic crisis and jobs werescarce. To find steady employment, in 1953, the Biden family movedto their own small apartment in Claymont, Delaware. Once theybecame secure, they bought a house in Wilmington, Delaware, andsettled there. Biden, Sr., found moderate success as a car salesmanand the family started to lead a comfortable, middle-classlife.

Joe Biden attended Archmere Academy, aCatholic prep school in Claymont, and it was during this time thathe found his talent for sports. He played football and baseball forthe high school teams. From an academic standpoint, he wascertainly above average. He was elected class president and waswidely recognized as a natural leader. After graduating from highschool in 1961, he went to the University of Delaware. Four yearslater in 1965, Biden earned his BA with a double major in historyand political science. However, he was a mediocre college studentand didnt have an outstanding academic performance.

During his junior year of college, he metNeilia Hunter while on a spring break trip to Nassau. She came froman affluent family from Skaneateles, New York, and was a student atSyracuse University. Despite the 320-mile round trip to see eachother, they began dating. In order to visit her more often out ofstate, Biden gave up his plan of playing for the varsity footballteam. After getting his BA, Biden entered Syracuse UniversityCollege of Law, which happened to be near Neilias family home. Hereceived a small scholarship due to his financial situation andmanaged to get additional assistance for his academic merits.

An incident occurred in his first year of lawschool that would come back to haunt him many years later. In hismemoir, he explained, I botched a paper in a technical writingcourse so badly that one of my classmates accused me of liftingpassages from a Fordham Law Review article. Biden wascalled before a faculty review board to explain, and they concludedthat he hadnt intentionally cheated but did require that he repeatthe course. As he later revealed, he did not find law schoolenjoyable in the slightest and struggled to get by, calling it,the biggest bore in the world. Into his second year of lawschool, Joe and Neilia were married in a Catholic Church inSkaneateles, New York, on August 27, 1966. In time, the couplewould have three children, Joseph R. Biden, III, Robert Hunter, andNaomi Christina. With some help and encouragement from his newwife, he graduated in 1968 and was awarded the title of JurisDoctor. One year later, he started his own law practice, aftergaining admission to the Delaware bar.