Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. devoted his life to public service, spending thirty-six years as a U.S. senator from Delaware, eight years as vice president, and four years as the 46th president of the United States. A life-long Democrat, he embodied the values of family, service, decency, and hard work throughout his long career.

Born on November 20, 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Joe Biden hailed from a working-class, Irish-Catholic family. As a child, he suffered from a severe stutter that he managed to overcome with rigorous practice and sheer will, though it still afflicted him occasionally throughout his life. After graduating from the University of Delaware in 1965 and Syracuse University Law School in 1968, he accepted a job with a corporate law firm defending big businesses but soon recognized that such work was not his true calling, and he became a public defender whose clients were nearly all African Americans from the east side of Wilmington, Delaware.

In 1972, at age 29, he won an unexpected victory in his campaign for a U.S. Senate seat from Delaware, defeating 63-year-old, two-term Senator J. Caleb Boggs, a Republican. Shortly after his election, his first wife Neilia and infant daughter, Naomi, died in a car crash; his young sons Beau and Hunter sustained severe injuries. Biden contemplated giving up his Senate seat, but fellow senators persuaded him to join the Senate as one its youngest members. A widower, raising two young sons with the help of his sister Valerie, Biden made the commute from Wilmington to Washington every day by train. In 1975, Biden met Jill Jacobs, a student at the University of Delaware, almost nine years his junior, and they were married in 1977. They welcomed daughter Ashley to their family in 1981.

Over his many years in the Senate, Biden embraced the institution’s traditions and hierarchy, playing leading roles on both the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He chaired the confirmation hearings of five Supreme Court justices; the most contentious hearings occurred over the nominations of Robert Bork (by Ronald Reagan) and Clarence Thomas (by George H. W. Bush).

Throughout his Senate years, Biden set his sights on higher office. After two failed presidential runs in 1988 and 2008, he won a valuable second prize—the vice presidency. In August 2008, Senator Barack Obama selected Biden as his running mate, inspired by Biden’s foreign policy expertise, his skill in working with Congress, his resilience after profound personal setbacks, and his devotion to his family. Biden served as an experienced adviser to Obama, who entered the White House after only three years in the Senate, and established himself as one of the most significant vice presidents in American history. He and Obama formed an unprecedented partnership. Few presidents and vice presidents had ever worked so closely together and formed such a close bond.

Although Biden considered running for president in 2016, he ultimately decided against it, still grieving the death of his son, Beau, from cancer in 2015. By 2020, Biden decided to toss his hat into the ring for the Democratic nomination. In announcing his candidacy to oppose incumbent Donald Trump, Biden declared, “We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.” He cited as his motivation to run Trump’s neutral reaction to the violent white supremacist march on Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when Trump asserted that there were “very fine people on both sides.” As a cornerstone of his campaign, Biden also focused on the Trump administration’s failed management of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Just before accepting the Democratic nomination at the party convention in August 2020, Biden selected Senator Kamala Harris of California as his running mate, proposing the possibility of the first woman, first Black, and first South Asian American vice president. Biden defeated Trump with a solid majority of 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 votes, collecting 81 million votes overall, 7 million more than Trump’s 74 million.

Biden came into the presidency at age 78, as the oldest president in American history, and he confronted a divided nation wracked by the worst health crisis in a century with the Covid-19 pandemic, an economy battered by closures to prevent the virus’s spread, and internal threats to American democracy after Donald Trump insisted he, not Biden, had won the 2020 race and inspired an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

As president, Biden worked to right the ship of state after what he saw as the missteps of the Trump administration. He reassured U.S. allies and rejoined international efforts, such as the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. He led the country through the Covid pandemic, produced a bipartisan infrastructure bill, presided over a soaring stock market, nominated the first Black woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, guaranteed marriage equality, prioritized policies to address climate change, and lowered unemployment to historic levels. He was challenged by rising inflation, failure to stem illegal immigration (especially at the southern boarder), and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Although he decided to run for reelection in 2024, many voters had concerns about his age, and he dropped out of the race after a disastrous debate performance against Republican candidate Donald Trump. Biden endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, who became the Democratic nominee, but her campaign had too short a window to overcome Biden’s lack of popularity. In the end, Donald Trump was reelected as the 47th president in 2024.