Family losses frame Vice President Biden’s career
Paul Kane
Joe Biden had one final bit of advice, a warning, really, for these very successful students. No matter how accomplished their lives turned out to be, they would not be able to control their fates.
“Reality has a way of intruding,” the vice president told thousands of graduating Yale University students two weeks ago.
Biden spent the next several minutes unfurling a story he had told hundreds, if not thousands, of times before: his improbable 1972 Senate victory, the car crash that took his wife and daughter, the weeks spent coaxing his two young sons toward recovery.
What the crowd didn’t know was that reality had again intruded in the vice president’s life.
Hiding behind a pair of aviator sunglasses that played along with the irreverent traditions of “Yale Class Day,” Biden delivered the speech knowing that his eldest son was dying of cancer — the same son whose injuries in the crash forced Biden in 1973 to take the Senate oath in a hospital room, beside his son’s bed.
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