NEWS

Beau Biden: Undaunted by tragedy

Cris Barrish
The News Journal

On a sunny October day in 2006, Beau Biden bounded through the parking lot of an Ogletown ShopRite, hunting for votes.

Biden, son of Delaware's political titan Joe Biden, was in the homestretch of his first campaign, a tight race for attorney general against respected prosecutor Ferris Wharton.

The campaign had been a bruiser, and polls showed a dead heat. A Republican web site asked whether Biden, who had failed the state bar exam three times, was "ready."

None of that mattered, though. What was important to the shoppers was that Beau was Joe's son.

It didn't hurt that he was handsome and had an earnest manner. Biden pumped hands as he moved through the lot, and squeezed shoppers' arms – his dad's trademark clutch.

I watched Biden moving across the asphalt and followed up with the citizens he had approached to ask who would get their vote. Almost all pointed to Biden, expressing the same rationale: "I like his dad. I'll vote for him."

2006: In October 2006, during the waning days of his first campaign for attorney general, Beau Biden chatted with Kenneth Hilton at the ShopRite supermarket in Ogletown. Many told a reporter tailing Biden that day that he had their vote, in large part because they liked his father, then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden.

Beau had them at hello. And they rewarded him with a narrow victory.

What a charmed life, I thought. Bashed by detractors as a lightweight with no business being attorney general, he had capitalized on his family name and a winning personality to capture the state's second most powerful political office.

Yes, he was blessed. He had power, wealth, looks, and once his dad became vice president in 2008, national fame. A lovely wife, two beautiful children and a home in Delaware's Chateau Country.

Yet for all his gifts, Joseph Robinette Biden III was most of all cursed.

At 3, he almost died in a crash that killed his mother and baby sister.

As a teenager, he almost lost his beloved father to an aneurysm.

At 41, he suffered a mild stroke.

At 44, he was diagnosed with brain cancer.

At 46, Beau was gone.

A long-distance runner spending his last five years fighting to return to normal, Beau couldn't beat the disease inside him.

He enjoyed people and the spotlight and enjoyed making speeches. But as the cancer took its toll, he communicated with the public solely through press releases issued by his staff. He ventured out less and less, and when friends saw him at church or a restaurant, they were saddened to see a man who once glowed with good health have trouble making small talk.

Near the end, he struggled to walk. Beau also had to use one hand to lift the other, just so he could shake hands with a friend.

Stunned by his reticence

During that first campaign nearly a decade ago, I spent hours hearing Beau's ideas for running the attorney general's office. We had lunch a couple of times and spoke regularly – at press conferences, after debates, on the phone.

Though he could sound programmed and be a bit intense, when he got comfortable and opened up he displayed a good sense of humor, and a command of local and national issues. He almost always had a good answer to even the toughest question, including his quip when asked about flunking the bar exam so many times: "It is what it is."

Biden could be feisty and challenge his inquisitor. Nor was he afraid to – "off the record, right?" – drop an F-bomb. Beyond his polished veneer, the National Guard major had a salty, irreverent side.

2009: Then-Attorney General Beau Biden is greeted by a fellow National Guard member upon returning from a year of active duty in Iraq in September 2009.

Before he took office in January 2007, I envisioned many more years of lively conversations and some testy but respectful exchanges.

Once he became attorney general, though, Biden retreated behind his press secretary, usually content to have his words to the press and public filtered through a written news release.

News Journal reporters were stunned by his reticence. We constantly pleaded with Jason Miller, his press guy, to let us sit down with Beau or at least "put him on the phone." It was almost a tradition, we argued, for Delaware's attorney general to give interviews on even the most controversial topics.

After Joe Biden became vice president in 2009, I did sit down with Beau at Cosmos diner near Newport where I remember asking him why he was so guarded. Look at your dad, I implored. He's made some famous gaffes, I noted, that didn't stop him from becoming vice president of the United States.

2010: Then-Attorney General Beau Biden with fellow Delaware leaders, including senator-elect Chris Coons, at Return Day. Thursday, Nov. 4, 2010.

Beau said he would think about it. But he wouldn't budge. He rarely gave interviews.

That was just his way. He was his dad's son, a Biden through and through, but when it came to his public persona, Beau was his own man.

Not that he never talked to the media. He and I spoke a few times during the prosecution of pedophile pediatrician Earl Bradley, when authorities, especially those in Beau's office, were criticized for not acting sooner on allegations that Bradley was sexually abusing children.

Biden stressed during those conversations that he was focused "like a laser'' on bring Bradley to justice – which his office eventually did – but was evasive when I asked for specifics about the failure to arrest him earlier.

In May 2010, an independent report found that a judge who denied a search warrant a year before Bradley was arrested told a prosecutor he would instead "sign a criminal arrest warrant." During that period, Bradley had raped or abused nearly 50 more young children, some in vicious attacks he filmed.

When that damning report was released, Biden was in the hospital – having suffered what doctors later called a "mild stroke."

I've often wondered if the stress of the Bradley prosecution – and the accusations that he and his office had fumbled – contributed to the stroke.

Beau recovered and continued to focus on the case, with colleagues saying he showed no signs, either physical or mental, of being stricken.

When my mother suffered a bad stroke in 2011, he even reached out to me. That day I had to cancel an interview with Beau's press secretary. While parking outside Christiana Hospital, my cell phone rang. "It's Beau," he said, as if we spoke every day. "I heard about your mom. Please send her my best."

Though he had his detractors as attorney general, Biden seemed in top form late in 2012, when he and chief prosecutor Kathy Jennings spent more than an hour answering my questions on Wilmington's epidemic of gun violence.

2012: Then-Attorney General Beau Biden was expansive late in 2012 when he gave a rare interview, accompanied by State Prosecutor Kathleen M. Jennings. The topic was Wilmington’s gun violence and ways to stop the bloodshed and punish the most dangerous criminals.

Biden talked about how Delaware faced no bigger problem than the shootings destroying Wilmington, block by block. He brainstormed about ways to make the streets safer. He talked about how much it pained him personally, of visiting shooting scenes.

I thought Biden was truly back and would be around for decades.

Conflicting messages in final months

I never spoke to Beau again.

After he was treated at Houston's MD Anderson Cancer Center in August 2013, I tried dozens of times to interview him.

I asked to speak about his health. I tried to get an interview about his political future. I sought him out in several criminal cases such as his office's plea bargain with a du Pont heir who raped his daughter but avoided prison and the child porn prosecution of Tower Hill School's headmaster.

Through aides, he always declined to sit down for an interview or to return a call.

In February 2014, colleague Jonathan Starkey saw Biden for a few minutes at Legislative Hall. He looked relatively healthy, and said, "I told you, I'm all good. I got very lucky."

I glimpsed Beau briefly in July, when he and his dad and Gov. Jack Markell made an appearance at the funeral of Jack Carney, U.S. Rep. John Carney's father. From across the church, Biden looked healthy, an observation others shared.

2013: After undergoing a surgical procedure at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center in August 2013, a smiling Beau Biden posed with his parents and wife and Tweeted: “On our way home! Can’t wait to get back. Thank you, Houston.”

Over his last several months in office, though, Beau's public appearances dwindled to almost zero, fueling speculation that his health was deteriorating, even as his office released a statement saying he would not seek a third term so he could concentrate on a 2016 gubernatorial run.

I was flabbergasted, considering what I was hearing from sources who said his visits to his state office were increasingly rare. One state employee who saw him in an elevator in November gave a grim report. His leg was in a brace, he couldn't move his arm, and he had trouble recognizing people he had known for years. "Just let the man go in peace" she told me.

When he left office in January, Biden was instantly hired by the law firm Grant & Eisenhofer, run by big Democratic donor Stuart Grant.

Beau remained out of the public eye but on May 1, the firm issued a press release proclaiming that Biden "will expand his work" there. Noted Grant: "This is a natural extension of what Beau does best."

Less than three weeks later, Joe Biden acknowledged Beau was at Walter Reed military hospital near Washington. Everyone assumed the worst, but no one in the ultra-tight Biden circle would say anything.

Was he getting treatment for some new ailment? Another round of chemo? Some experimental therapy?

At 9:27 Saturday night, a source sent me the text I hoped would never come.

"Beau just died."

I wish I could have said goodbye.

Contact senior investigative reporter Cris Barrish at (302) 324-2785, cbarrish@delawareonline.com, on Facebook or Twitter @crisbarrish.