Jill Biden spoke to her husband’s deep faith and perseverance through multiple tragedies in her Democratic convention speech, describing a personal side of Joe Biden that she may know better than anyone.
“How do you make a broken family whole? The same way you make a nation whole. With love and understanding — and with small acts of compassion. With bravery. With unwavering faith,” she said of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The former vice president’s first wife, Neilia, and 1-year-old daughter Naomi died in a 1972 car crash just after he was first elected to the Senate. His sons, Hunter and Beau, survived the crash but were in critical condition, and Biden was sworn in to the Senate at his sons’ hospital bedside.
Beau Biden grew up to become Delaware’s attorney general and a decorated Army National Guard veteran, but tragedy struck the vice president again when Beau died from brain cancer in 2015.
“There are times when I couldn’t imagine how he did it — how he put one foot in front of the other and kept going. But I’ve always understood why he did it,” Biden said of her husband. “He does it for you.”
The former second lady, who made history by continuing her teaching career at a community college through her husband’s tenure as vice president, made the prerecorded speech from her former classroom at Brandywine High School in Wilmington, Delaware. She spoke about the emotional impact that the coronavirus pandemic is having on education by keeping masses of schools across the country shut down.
“You can hear the anxiety that echoes down empty hallways. There’s no scent of new notebooks or freshly waxed floors. The rooms are dark, and the bright young faces that should fill them are confined to boxes on a computer screen,” Biden said.
Earlier on Tuesday, Biden shared the first words that she says she uttered to Joe Biden in 1975: “How did you get this number?”
The day before, her ex-husband publicly suggested that she and Joe Biden have not been truthful about how they first met. The Bidens say that they became a couple in 1975 after a blind date, but Stevenson said the two met in 1972 and that he suspected that they were having an affair in 1974.
“How did you get this number?”
Those were the first words I spoke to Joe when he called me out of the blue on a Saturday in 1975.
I’ll be speaking tonight at the #DemConvention. I hope you’ll tune in! pic.twitter.com/t0amDEM2kT
— Dr. Jill Biden (@DrBiden) August 18, 2020
