Joe invokes his late son, Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III, frequently, the former Army major and two-term Delaware attorney general’s courage and devotion to his family still an inspiration to his father. Beau died of glioblastoma in 2015, which influenced the still-grieving vice president’s choice not to run for president in 2016—but also his decision to go for it in 2020.
“I wanted to celebrate Beau’s life and the people he touched,” Joe told the New York Times in 2017, explaining the motivation behind his memoir Promise Me, Dad. “Beau had a strict code of honor. That may sound silly, but it’s true. My Dad had an expression: ‘Never explain and never complain.’ I never once heard Beau complain. Not once.”
Joe continued, “One night, when it was clear that the odds weren’t good, he asked me to stay after dinner at his house, about a mile from here. He said: ‘Dad, I know you love me more than anyone in the world. But promise me you’ll be O.K. I’ll be O.K., Dad.’ He had come face to face with his mortality. He watched me go through the loss of his mother and sister. And he didn’t want me to turn inward. He didn’t want me to give up on the robustness of life.”
In his eulogy for his brother, Hunter recalled his first memory of Beau: Waking up in the hospital next to him in 1972 after the car wreck that killed their mom and sister.
Joe told the New York Times in 2017, “Hunt had a skull fracture, almost every bone in his body was broken. And Beau, just 4, in the next bed, held his hand and kept saying: ‘Hunt, I love you. Look at me. I love you, I love you, I love you.’ At the funeral Hunt said in 42 years that ‘he has never stopped holding my hand.'”
On Jan. 19, he spoke at the National Guard/Army Reserve center named after his son before leaving for Washington, D.C., expressing how proud he was to be “a son of Delaware. And I am even more proud to be standing here doing this from the Major Beau Biden facility. Ladies and gentlemen, I only have one regret: He’s not here. Because we should be introducing him as president.”
