Joe Biden Book Summary

Joe Biden Book Summary Preview

Joe Biden is a man of many accolades: long-running state senator, former vice president to Barack Obama, and 2020 presidential candidate and Democratic nominee. From the outside, his story is similar to most career politicians. 

But there are hidden intricacies in Joe’s biography. For instance, the little-known fact that he nearly quit politics only weeks after winning his first election in 1972. 

The Early Years 

Biden was born into an Irish-Catholic family in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1942. His father had been a wealthy man at one point, but by the time Biden was born he was suffering financially. For the early years of Biden’s life, the entire family lived with his maternal grandparents to save money. 

In the 1950s, formerly prosperous Scranton was a place with few prospects and little to no opportunity for employment. Joe Biden Sr. couldn’t find regular work, so the family moved into an apartment in Claymont, Delaware. They soon moved to Wilmington, where Joe attended high school and found early success as an athlete. 

Biden wasn’t very good at school, but he thrived athletically and was a popular and well-liked kid. By his senior year, he took a chronically losing football team to state championships, and he was voted class president during his junior and senior years of high school. He went on to attend the University of Delaware where he played college football and met his first wife Neilia Hunter. 

Biden’s law career began with lackluster performance At Syracuse University College of Law - he later reflected that law school was “the biggest bore in the world.” He was accused of plagiarizing five pages of a law article, which came up in his first presidential bid. But Biden wasn’t interested in a long-term career as a lawyer. He told his wife Neilia that someday he was going to be the president of the United States. 

An Unexpected Victory 

Biden only worked as a lawyer for a few years, flipping between work as a public defender and a corporate lawyer. He loved criminal law but it didn’t pay well - he had to manage properties on the side to pay the bills. In 1969, he decided to run for New Castle County Council on a liberal platform and won - a surprise for a typically conservative county. As he was taking his seat at the council, he was already talking about running for U.S. Senate. 

The senate race of 1972 was a strange one. Biden was pitted against long-time Republican senator J. Caleb Boggs, who wanted to retire but ran again with Nixon’s encouragement to avoid a fight in the primary between two well-known Republican candidates. Boggs was so well-known and long-standing that no one wanted to run against him. That’s when Biden stepped in. 

Biden had no money for a campaign. His sister managed his campaign, and his family staffed it. He was behind thirty percentage points in the summer before the election, and as far as anyone could tell, he had no chance of winning. But Biden had a captivating platform - he...

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