The Untold History of the Biden FamilyRelatively little has been known about the President’s father, whose story reveals a family’s fraught relationship with money, class, and alcohol.By Adam Entous
August 15, 2022In 2019, I wrote a piece for this magazine about Hunter Biden, the younger son of the current President, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Hunter, describing his childhood in Wilmington, Delaware, told me that after church his father would sometimes drive him and his brother, Beau, through wealthy neighborhoods, where they would sneak onto empty estates that were either abandoned or on the market. If the front door was locked, the boys’ father would hoist them through a second-floor window, and they would run downstairs and let him in. If a real-estate agent arrived when they were there, Biden, who at this point was a senator, would charm the agent into giving them a tour.
Hunter insisted that he grew up middle class, but his family lived on an estate of their own—a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion with a ballroom. (His father, on a tight budget, would close off large sections with drywall to save on heating costs.) “Even as a kid in high school I’d been seduced by real estate,” Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir, “Promises to Keep.” The fixation seemed anomalous, almost self-defeating, for someone who wanted to be known as Middle-Class Joe.
One of Biden’s skills as a politician is his ability to connect with working-class and middle-class Americans. In speeches, he often emphasizes his modest upbringing. “I grew up in a family where, if the price of food went up, you felt it,” he said in his 2022 State of the Union address.“I remember when my dad had to leave our home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to find work.” And yet the anecdotes I heard about Biden’s father, Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr., told a different story. He was working at a car dealership when his son was elected to the Senate, in 1972, but according to Jimmy Biden, one of the President’s younger brothers, his father’s idea of casual attire was a sport coat and an ascot. Biden, in his memoir, wrote about opening a closet and finding his father’s polo mallet, equestrian boots, riding breeches, and hunting pinks—items that suggested a past life of privilege. At one point, Biden, Sr., had a lot of money, but he lost it all, for reasons that went mostly unexplained. “I never asked him much about his life, and he didn’t offer,” Biden wrote.
On top of the family’s fraught relationship with class is a tragic history with alcohol. Hunter has had issues with drinking and substance abuse, which, along with his controversial business dealings, have been weaponized by his father’s political opponents. If Republicans take over the House of Representatives in November, they plan to hold more hearings focussed on Hunter.
The President considers alcoholism a kind of family curse. After growing up around hard-drinking relatives, he chose to abstain from alcohol. He also urged his siblings, and, later, his children, not to drink, although all of them eventually did—some in moderation, others to the point of addiction.
Relatively little has been written about the life of Biden, Sr., or about the Biden family’s history. The earliest and most detailed study is in Richard Ben Cramer’s 1992 book, “What It Takes,” a lengthy, character-driven account of the 1988 Presidential campaign. But Biden, Sr., wouldn’t speak with Cramer, and the journalist relied mostly on interviews with Jimmy Biden—who shared family stories he’d heard—and with Jean Biden, the President’s mother. When Joe Biden published “Promises to Keep,” he repeated many of the stories from Cramer’s book, some of them almost verbatim, with similar gaps.
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