Father’s Tough Life an Inspiration for Biden

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Father’s Tough Life an Inspiration for Biden

By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: October 23, 2008


WILMINGTON, Del. — Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. has worked with titans of the Senate and met countless heads of state. None of them have left as deep an impression on him as his father, Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., a prideful man.


This is part of a series of articles about the lives and careers of the Republican and Democratic candidates for president and vice president in 2008.


Though life had dealt Joe Sr. a tough hand early in life in drunken, faithless bosses and a thieving partner, he never bemoaned his fate.

Joe Sr. had it all in his 20s, sailing yachts off the New England coast, riding to the hounds, driving fast cars, flying airplanes. A decade later, he found himself with a wife and four children living in a two-bedroom apartment in a dreary, treeless suburb of Wilmington, selling used cars.

His children saw hints of his former life in his wardrobe — he was always impeccably dressed with a perfect pocket square — and in the back of his closet, where he kept his riding pinks, his polished boots and his polo mallet.

His son the senator said the old man preached one lesson that had been the guiding principle in his own life, which has seen its share of defeats, some dealt by cruel fate, some self-inflicted. It is what has kept him going when he has faced tragedy and humiliation, the leitmotifs of the Biden story.

“My dad always said, ‘Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly he gets up,’ ” Senator Biden said of his father, who died in 2002 at age 86.

This is the recurring theme of his speeches as running mate to Senator Barack Obama and the coda to many of Mr. Biden’s appearances on the stump.

“I’ve never seen a time in my career when so many Americans have been knocked down,” Mr. Biden said last week at a campaign appearance in Rochester, N.H., his voice rising, his face reddening beneath a thin crown of white hair. “As my father used to say, when you get knocked down, GET UP!”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/us/politics/24biden.html?ref=us