President Joe Biden was celebrated by wife Jill Biden and daughter Ashley Biden at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Despite dropping out of the 2024 presidential race on July 21, the president, 81, made an appearance on day one of the DNC in Chicago on Aug. 19.
Jill Biden first delivered a moving speech, before Ashley Biden made her father tear up with her words. After giving him a warm introduction, Joe Biden was seen wiping away a tear as he hugged his daughter.
“Joe Biden is the OG girl dad. He told me I could be anything and I could do anything,” Ashley Biden said. “...And he wasn’t just a girl dad. I could see that he valued and trusted women.”
Later in her speech, she said, “Dad, you always tell us, but we don’t tell you enough: That you are the love of our lives and the life of our love.”
Ashley Biden also recalled her father crying at her wedding, saying, “Before he walked me down the aisle, he turned to me and said he would always be my best friend.”
Adding, “All these years later, dad, you are still my best friend.”
When it came to his wedding day, in 1975, Joe Biden, then a Delaware senator, met his future wife after they were fixed up by his brother Frank Biden. The future president famously proposed to Jill Biden five times before they tied the knot in 1977.
Prior to meeting Jill Biden, Joe Biden had been living as a single dad for five years after his wife, Neilia, 30, and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash a week before Christmas in 1972.
The young politician’s sons, Beau and Hunter Biden, ages 4 and 3, were critically injured.
In April 2024, Biden opened up to Howard Stern about his struggle with intense grief following the loss of Neilia and Naomi.
“I used to sit there and just think, ‘I’m going to take out a bottle of scotch,’” he recalled. “I’m going to just drink it and get drunk.”
At one point, Joe Biden said he contemplated suicide.
“I thought, ‘Let me just go to the Delaware Memorial (Bridge) and jump,” he told Stern.
He has opened up about grappling with grief before. At a 2012 event organized by the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), Biden reflected on his experience with loss.
“There will come a day, I promise you, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye,” Joe Biden said. “It will happen. My prayer for you is that day will come sooner or later. But the only thing I have more experience than you in is this: I’m telling you it will come.”
Joe and Jill Biden completed their family in 1981, when they welcomed daughter Ashley Biden.
Read on to learn more about Joe Biden's family:
Naomi Biden
Naomi Biden and her mom, Neilia Biden, were killed in 1972, after their station wagon was broadsided by a tractor-trailer. Naomi Biden's brothers, Beau and Hunter Biden, were seriously injured, but survived the crash.
The toddler and Neilia Biden are both buried at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Cemetery in Delaware.
“To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. There’s a hollowness in your chest, you feel like you’re being sucked into it,” Joe Biden said in 2022. “It’s suffocating. And it’s never quite the same.”
Beau Biden
Joseph “Beau” Biden III was 46 when he diedof a glioblastoma brain tumor in 2015. He is survived by wife Hallie Biden, 51, and their two children, Natalie Biden, 20, and Robert Biden II, 18, who often goes by Hunter.
A former Delaware attorney general and member of the Delaware National Guard, who was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in Iraq in 2008 and 2009, Beau Biden was diagnosed with brain cancer in August 2013.
Beau Biden was the acting attorney general when he went to serve in Iraq, and he later refused a bid to run for his father’s seat in the U.S. Senate to handle his obligations as attorney general.
“Beau was in the middle of prosecuting one of the largest child abuse cases in American history and felt that his duty to see that case through to the end was more important than his personal ambition,” Ron Klain, a former chief of staff for Biden, told TODAY's Savannah Guthrie in 2015. “That kind of character is just extraordinary, and that’s the kind of person Beau was.”
Joe Biden announced his son’s passing in a touching statement.
“His absolute honor made him a role model for our family. Beau embodied my father’s saying that a parent knows success when his child turns out better than he did,” Joe Biden, then vice president, wrote in part. “In the words of the Biden family: Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known.”
In President Barack Obama’s statement, he compared Beau Biden to his father.
“Like his dad, Beau was a good, big-hearted, devoutly Catholic and deeply faithful man, who made a difference in the lives of all he touched — and he lives on iour hearts,” Obama wrote.
Hunter Biden
Robert “Hunter” Biden, 54, is an attorney and businessman.
He graduated with a bachelor's degree in history from Georgetown University and earned his law degree at Yale Law School.
Hunter Biden shares three daughters with ex-wife Kathleen Buhle: Naomi Biden, 30, Finnegan Biden, 23, and Maisy Biden, 23. Hunter Biden married South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen Biden in 2019, and the following year, they welcomed son Beau Jr., 4. He is also dad of Navy Joan Roberts, 6. Hunter Biden initially denied paternity of Navy, but a DNA test confirmed that he was the father.
In Hunter Biden's book, “Beautiful Things,” he wrote about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction.
"I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, D.C., and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig. In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself," he said.
When Hunter Biden appeared on the the musician Moby's podcast in 2023, he shared that he is sober and that he paints eight hours a day as a form of meditation.
“If I had my druthers, I would be an artist and then, you know, life interrupts those kinds of dreams for some people," Hunter Biden told Moby.
In September 2023, Hunter Biden was indicted by federal prosecutors on three counts tied to the possession of a gun while using narcotics.
He was found guilty on all three counts in June 2024.
Ashley Biden
Ashley Biden, a social worker, graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University and a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice.
In 2012, she married Dr. Howard Krein, a otorhinolaryngologist and plastic surgeon.
Ashley Biden, 43, preferred to stay out of the spotlight but has been stepping out to praise her father.
“It took about two years to get into the groove of being in this position,” she toldEllein 2023. “I’m doing my work as I always have been, but kind of figuring out the role as first daughter, and how can I use it in the most positive way, where it’s not about me, it’s about Americans. And what I’ve learned is, I want to tell the story of others — I want to lift up organizations and share this information.”
CORRECTION (July 21, 2024, 12:00 pm): An earlier version of this article misstated the year of Neilia Biden's fatal car accident. It occurred in 1972, not 1982.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
