An Emotional Joe Biden Opens Up to Brody File about Family Tragedy
November 28, 2007
It happened 35 years ago yet it is still painful for Joe Biden to talk about. In 1972, a week before Christmas and roughly six weeks after Biden was elected to be a U.S. Senator, his wife Neilia and his little daughter were killed in a car crash by a drunk driver.
On the campaign trail, Joe Biden hardly ever talks about it. In the few times he's been asked, he doesn't go into detail. It's painful. Well, in a rare emotional moment, Joe Biden did open up and talk to me about that time in his life. You can see the emotional pain even to this day. Read the transcription below but the video clip above really says it all. Click play above to watch.
Brody: I know this is emotional for you still some 30-odd years later. Can you emotionally take me back there and tell me a little bit about what was going on and how that probably never leaves you till today.
Biden: Five years after this no one man deserves one great love, let alone two. I met and married my wife of 30 years who actually put my life back together again and put my family back together again.
But you know, when something like that happens to you. It's like there's a big black hole in your chest, and you feel like you're being sucked in to that black hole. You feel like there isn't anything that will ever get better again in your life. But my mom has an expression, she said God sends no cross that you cannot bear, and she said, I remember literally the week of the accident her saying "Joey, out of everything horrible something good will come if you look hard enough." And I thought that was the cruelest thing in the world someone could say, but it's true.
Obviously I wished it never, ever, ever happened, but my sons and I, it's like a steel belt that runs through our chest connecting us. My family is so strong, and I really believe and my wife Jill of 30 years believes that Neilia my wife, is looking down on us. You just never, it never leaves, but there comes a time and it happens earlier than you think, there comes a time when the memory brings a smile to your lips rather than a tear to your eyes. And so many people have gone through tough stuff, but I had family.
When I went through it I had people helping me. It has taught me that I have such intense admiration for people who are alone and these things happen to and they fight. There are so many people right outside this library, this morning got up, put one foot in front of the other, dealing with crisis that were similar to mine and they do. And they do it for their kids and they do it for their family and they do it without the kind of help I had. I was really lucky. I just had an awful lot of people to help me and they were my family.
I'm not very good talking about it as you can see, but I know there is a continuum. I know that God is -- there's a giant piece of my deceased daughter, a giant piece of my deceased wife that is in me and in my children and in my wife.
By the way, Joe Biden did remarry and has been married to the same woman for thirty years. People who know the Bidens say their family is a close as ever. Also, you may know this but for those of you who don't, here's an interesting tidbit. Ever since that day in 1972 when tragedy struck, Joe Biden has commuted home from the U.S. Capitol in Washington to his home in Delaware. In the 1970's, it was to make sure he was home for his two young sons every night before they went to bed. They were also seriously hurt in the accident. He continues to do it even to this day because his mother lives with him now.
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