In this Saturday, July 4, 2009. file photo, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, right, talks with his son, U.S. Army Capt. Beau Biden
Beau Biden, the son of Vice President Joseph Biden, whose election as Delaware attorney general at age 37 made him an ascending star in the Democratic Party, has died of brain cancer. He was 46.
Biden died Saturday night after being admitted earlier this month to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland for a recurrence of brain cancer. His health had been in question since August 2013, when he had a surgical procedure at a Texas cancer center after being diagnosed that month. He was treated with chemotherapy and radiation and given a clean bill of health that November, according to the vice president’s office. He’d also had a mild stroke in 2010.
The cancer came back this spring and Beau Biden “immediately sought aggressive treatment,” the vice president’s office said. His parents, wife and children were among the family members with him when he died.
“The entire Biden family is saddened beyond words,” Joe Biden said Saturday in an e-mailed statement announcing his son’s death. “We know that Beau’s spirit will live on in all of us.”
President Barack Obama remembered Beau Biden as a public servant and father.
“Michelle and I are grieving tonight,” Obama said in an e-mailed statement. “Beau Biden was a friend of ours.”
Beau Biden most recently was of counsel at the law firm Grant & Eisenhofer where he worked in the firm’s securities litigation and whistle blower practice groups.
The oldest of the vice president’s four children, Biden played a significant supporting role in his father’s campaign as Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008.
Introducing his father at the Democratic nominating convention that August, Biden told the story of their shared family tragedy: the December 1972 automobile accident that killed his mother and one-year-old sister and injured him and his brother, both toddlers at the time.
“As a single parent” after the death of his wife, Joseph Biden “decided to be there to put us to bed, to be there when we woke from a bad dream, to make us breakfast, so he’d travel to and from Washington, four hours a day,” Biden recalled.
In October 2008, as the presidential campaign in which Joe Biden was Obama’s running mate neared an end, Beau Biden was called to active duty in Iraq as a captain in the Delaware Army National Guard’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps. He spent a year with the 261st Theater Tactical Signal Brigade, flying to Washington to attend the presidential inauguration in January 2009. In 2011 he was promoted to the rank of major.
He announced last year that he would not seek a third term as attorney general and instead planned to run for governor in 2016. Laurence Arnold and Angela Greiling Keane, Bloomberg
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