WORLD LEADERS: heads of state and government
Revista Estilo de Vida Latin America
The President of the United States comes from an Irish family and, in addition to being asthmatic, he was a stutterer and a lousy student. His life has always been marked by tragedy and certain moments of glory.
Magazine: Revista Estilo de Vida by Claudia M. Gómez – Photo: Presidente Joe Biden
August 15/2022: The life of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, the Democrat who in January 2021 took office as President of the United States, could be counted between success and misfortune. The truth is that he has a side of his personality marked by tragedies: a few weeks before starting to work in the Senate, he lost his first wife (Neilia Hunter, with whom he had three children: Beau, Hunter and Naomi) and his little daughter, in a big traffic accident, in 1972. However, in 1977 he married again, but to Jill Jacobs, an English teacher with whom, in addition to raising his two children, he had Ashley, his only daughter.
Likewise, the first time he tried to become president of the United States, in 1987, his campaign ended prematurely with his retirement after he was accused of plagiarism. And his eldest son, Beau, an Iraq veteran and rising star in the Democratic Party, died prematurely of cancer in 2015, at the age of 46.
Although he was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on November 20, 1942, he always considered Claymont, Delaware, his home, where his family, which was struggling financially, moved when he was just a child. There, in a modest house, he lived with his parents (Joseph Robinette Biden Sr. and Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden) and his three siblings, heirs to deep Irish Catholic roots.
The pressure of his father to bring money to the home and his constant drinking of liquor made it impossible for everyone to live together. And this was witnessed by Joe, who was also the target of ridicule at school and in the neighborhood where he lived, because of his stuttering, a fact that prevented him from developing and showing his talents. But at the same time he was able to cope with it, thanks to the help of his mother, who insisted on making him recite poems -for hours- in front of a mirror, as an infallible remedy for this problem.
A NEW WORLD
As his adolescence went by, he was conquered by the ideas of characters such as Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, who dragged him by the eloquence, conviction and authentic size of their improbable dreams. This motivated him to choose history and political science as his college majors, which he pursued at the University of Delaware, later earning a law degree from Syracuse University, which he received in 1968, amid accusations of plagiarism.
However, his political career has been beset by problems. In fact, although he was elected six times senator from Delaware, he had to desist from his presidential path in 1988, after being accused of copying a campaign speech. On top of this, after the rise of the #MeToo movement, seven women pointed him out for sexual abuse.
But then, during his eight years as vice president in Barack Obama’s two administrations, Joe Biden was in charge of shaping military policy in Iraq (an invasion that, by then, was already seen as a failure) and helping to pass the budget.
Now, in the midst of all this storytelling, Biden came into office as the oldest to take office, at 78, and he did so with a mission to restore Obama’s legacy and reconnect a country that, as much as its name implies, requires everyone to unite again.
