Beau Biden
Beau Biden survived the crash that killed his mother and sister as a toddler and died of a brain tumour at forty-six. He was the elder son of Joe Biden, and was three when a lorry hit the family car in December 1972, weeks after his father's first election to the Senate; he and his brother Hunter spent months in hospital, and his father was sworn in at their bedside. That is the reason the senator commuted to Wilmington by train every night for thirty-six years. He became a federal prosecutor and then attorney general of Delaware, elected in 2006, and made his name on child protection and on a case against a paediatrician who had abused more than a hundred patients. He served a year in Iraq with the Delaware National Guard while attorney general, declining to take leave from the office. He was expected to run for governor and was widely assumed to be the family's political future. A stroke-like episode in 2010 was followed by a glioblastoma diagnosis in 2013, and he died in May 2015 at Walter Reed. His father decided not to run for president the following year and said afterwards that he had not had the emotional fuel. The cancer initiative announced in 2016 and revived in 2022 was named for the moonshot programme and driven by his death. His father did run in 2020, and the argument that he had been persuaded to by the events of 2017 rather than by ambition is one his critics have never accepted and his family have never stopped making. Delaware named its courthouse and a stretch of the railway he watched his father commute on after him.
- Lived: 1969 CE – 2015 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: politician, lawyer
