Biden's Choice Is Weighed Down With Ambition and Personal Tragedy

Joe Biden had a de­cision to make.

It was Decem­ber 1972, and his daugh­ter, Na­omi, and wife, Neil­ia, had just been killed in a car ac­ci­dent. Biden was in Wash­ing­ton—he’d just been elec­ted to the Sen­ate at age 30, but not yet sworn in—when he heard the news about his fam­ily. His sons, Hunter and Beau, were in­jured in the ac­ci­dent, and Joe Biden was left a single par­ent.

“We, not the Sen­ate, were all he cared about,” his son Beau, who died this spring , said in a 2008 speech . “He de­cided not to take the oath of of­fice. He said, ‘Delaware can get an­oth­er sen­at­or, but my boys can’t get an­oth­er fath­er.’ However, great men like Ted Kennedy, Mike Mans­field, Hubert Humphrey—men who had been tested them­selves—con­vinced him to serve. So he was sworn in, in the hos­pit­al, at my bed­side.”

Fast-for­ward 43 years and Joe Biden, whose ca­reer has spanned Sen­ate chair­man­ships and the vice pres­id­ency of the United States, is faced with a tra­gic­ally sim­il­ar de­cision. Just over three months after Beau Biden died after a battle with brain can­cer at age 46, Joe Biden is very pub­licly re­con­cil­ing his dec­ades-old dream of win­ning a pres­id­en­tial elec­tion with the emo­tion­al load he and his fam­ily have to bear.

In an in­ter­view that aired Thursday even­ing on The Late Show with Steph­en Col­bert , Joe Biden con­fessed he isn’t any closer to an­noun­cing his in­ten­tions to the Amer­ic­an people, even as spec­u­la­tion about the polit­ic­al cap­it­al he has to spend con­tin­ue to per­sist and a su­per PAC hop­ing to draft him in­to the race staffs up in Iowa.

“I’d be ly­ing if I said that I knew I was there,” Joe Biden said, in a heavy TV in­ter­view un­char­ac­ter­ist­ic of a Col­bert-hos­ted show, Biden’s first since the death of his son.

After the death of a loved one, the smal­lest of choices can over­whelm a per­son. Something as weighty as join­ing a fierce race to as­sume the lead­er­ship of the free world is near-un­ima­gin­able. Back in 2012 , Joe Biden ad­vised the fam­il­ies of fallen armed-ser­vices mem­bers to “keep think­ing what your hus­band or wife would want you to do” and use that as guid­ance. For Biden, back in the early 1970s, what his wife wanted was for him to be a sen­at­or, en­cour­aging him to run when he was waff­ling in his de­cision at age 28.

“Joey, I think you should be all the way in or all the way out,” Joe Biden quoted Neil­ia as say­ing in a 2007 mem­oir , which The Wash­ing­ton Post sug­ges­ted re­cently could help VP-watch­ers un­der­stand his cur­rent think­ing. “If polit­ics is what you want to do, let’s do it—full time.”

He fol­lowed through on his wife’s wishes when he as­sumed the sen­at­or­ship—though it’s un­clear how much of a factor her am­bi­tions for him weighed in­to his de­cision. But as Joe Biden con­tin­ues to re­cov­er from the loss of his son, he’s con­sid­er­ing his en­tire fam­ily’s ex­pect­a­tions of him.

“You gotta get up,” he told Col­bert Thursday, ac­cord­ing to a tran­script in the pool re­port. “And I feel like I was let­ting down Beau, let­ting down my par­ents, let­ting down my fam­ily if I didn’t just get up.”