As Jill Biden‘s husband, former US President Joe Biden, announces his prostate cancer diagnosis, we revisit the profile we ran in The Australian Women’s Weekly’s February 2021 issue, detailing her extraordinary achievements. Read on here …
It was the night in March 2020 when Joe Biden knew in his heart he had seen off his Democratic rivals and earned the right to go head-to-head with Donald Trump in the presidential election. Back then, the coronavirus had yet to devastate America. Big gatherings were not considered a health hazard. So the former Vice President celebrated his string of victories on a date in the US political calendar known as Super Tuesday, in front of a packed crowd of supporters at an outdoor rally in Los Angeles. With his wife Jill and sister Valerie at his side, the 50-year Washington veteran’s trademark grin seemed wider and brighter than ever.
Five minutes into his victory speech, however, there was a commotion behind him, and the future President’s face betrayed concern, even alarm. A protester had somehow evaded security and jumped on the stage.
Alert to the danger, Jill managed to block the protester from reaching her husband. Then, as the first protester was bundled away by security, another rushed the podium. This time, Jill leapt to her husband’s defence, raising her arms to stop what turned out to be an anti-dairy activist.
Her poise in that dramatic moment was extraordinary. “We’re okay, it’s okay,” she reassured her husband, as campaign aides belatedly managed to restore order. Then she started clapping, like a mother on the sidelines encouraging a child who has just been tackled to get on with the game. Her broad smile was the signal for Joe to resume his speech.
Within seconds, Jill had gone viral. She was trending on Twitter. She became the heroine of a torrent of admiring memes.
“No need for Secret Service when your wife is Jill Biden,” read one. “Jill Biden leaps in front of Joe to protect him, while Melania can’t barely bring herself to hold Donald Trump’s hand,” observed another.
America realised that night what those close to the Bidens have known for decades: the country’s new First Lady is the most formidable of women.
“That moment was Jill in all her encapsulations,” says family friend Wade Randlett, a key figure in Team Biden. “‘I’m in the fray. I’m going to do crazy stuff, but it’s still going to be fun.’”
If the country’s outgoing First Lady, Melania Trump, looks like she has stepped from the set of a high-end ’80s soap opera like Dynasty or The Colbys, Jill Biden could easily be cast as a much-loved matriarch, like Sally Field in Brothers & Sisters. Hers is a distinctly American beauty – so much so, that when Vogue conducted a family photo shoot near the Bidens’ holiday home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, the writer thought the pictures looked like they belonged in a Ralph Lauren catalogue.
But it is the mind and character of Jill Biden that should interest us more. The 69-year-old has four degrees, including a doctorate in education.
She is a professor of English at the Northern Virginia Community College, a role she kept up while her husband served as Vice President for eight years under Barack Obama. White House aides said it would be insane to juggle a full-time teaching role with her duties as the Second Lady, but Jill was undeterred.
“Teaching is not what I do,” she explains. “It’s who I am.”
Whenever she accompanied her husband on official overseas trips or speaking engagements around America, she would bring with her a stack of student coursework to mark.
When Jill delivered her keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention last summer, she did so from an empty classroom where she used to teach in Delaware. “This quiet is heavy,” she said of the school forced into shutdown by COVID-19. “The rooms are dark as the bright young faces that should fill them are now connected to boxes on a computer screen.” Rather than affecting faux concern, it seemed to be the real thing.
Even though she has now become America’s First Lady, following in the footsteps of luminaries such as Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, she has no intention of giving up her day job. With that, she is breaking new ground. No presidential wife has ever continued to pursue her paid career after moving into the Executive Residence at the White House.
Already she has become something of a lightning rod. In December, an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal called on her to drop the “Dr.” from her title and referred to her, condescendingly, as “kiddo”. There was an immediate backlash against what was seen as a misogynistic hit piece. Michelle Obama jumped to Jill’s defence, writing on Instagram: “We’re all seeing what happens to so many professional women … We’re doubted by those who choose the weakness of ridicule over the strength of respect.”
Like her husband, Jill grew up in Pennsylvania, a state that was vital to his victory over Donald Trump. Her mother was of English-Scottish stock, while her father, who served in the Navy during World War II, hailed from Sicily. She was the eldest of five sisters, who describe her with grateful affection as their “godmother”. Once, when one of the younger girls was being bullied at school, Jill knocked on the boy’s door and punched him in the nose. “Don’t you ever throw worms at my sister again!” she said, before marching off down the street.
Her husband, she thinks, is too forgiving of political opponents who have slighted him. She freely admits that she is the one who bears grudges.
At college in Pennsylvania, she met her first husband, Bill Stevenson – “a tall ex-footballer who drove a fast yellow Camaro,” she wrote in her recent memoir, Where the Light Enters. They married when she was 18, but drifted apart and divorced five years later. “Looking back,” Jill reflected, “it may seem like that relationship was a mistake of youth.”
The Bidens’ love story is the stuff of political legend. Their relationship began in the mid-’70s. Joe had lost his first wife, Neilia, and baby daughter, Naomi, in a car accident the week before Christmas 1972 – just after he had been elected to the US Senate.
Grief-stricken, this young politician (who travelled home each night on the train from Washington to Delaware to be with his surviving children, Beau and Hunter, at bedtime) showed no interest in dating new women.
His brother, Frank, had other ideas, and implored him to meet a young teacher called Jill. For Joe, it was love at first sight. After their first two dates, he thumbed through his diary to see when they could meet again, and suggested the very next evening. “I thought, ‘Buddy, you’ve really blown your cover’,’’ Jill later recalled. Afterwards, she told her mother: “I finally met a gentleman.”
Jill quickly came to love the Biden boys as if they were her own, and it was Beau and Hunter who urged their father to propose. “Dad, we think it’s time we married Jill,” said Beau one morning, while his father was brushing his teeth. Joe proposed five times, and eventually, at what he claims would have been his last attempt, she simply said, “Okay”.
“I loved the boys so much,” she would later reflect, but she was still scarred by the failure of her first marriage. “I had to be sure that it had to be forever.”
Beau and Hunter, rather than looking upon her as their stepmum, called her “Mom” (they called Neilia, their birth mother, “Mommie”). In 1981, she gave birth to a daughter, Ashley, completing their family.
Jill Biden instantly became a political wife, the spouse of an ambitious young Democrat with his eyes fixed on the White House. He announced his first presidential run in 1987, but had to withdraw in humiliating circumstances after plagiarising phrases from a speech by the former British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Twenty years later, he ran again, but came up against two Senate colleagues with dazzling star power, Hillary Clinton and freshman Senator Barack Obama. His victory in 2020 was a case of third time lucky, and came 48 years after he was first elected to the Senate. As with his serial marriage proposals, he’d persisted.
Though she does not think of herself as a natural political spouse, Jill has always thrown herself fully into her husband’s campaigns, with one notable exception. When Democratic party bosses came to their home in 2003 trying to persuade Joe to challenge Republican President George W. Bush, she donned a bikini, took out a black marker and penned “NO” on her stomach. Ahead of the meeting, the couple had decided not to run that year, partly because of their unhappy experience when he crashed out of the race in 1987. Joe instantly got the message and told the party bosses he wasn’t interested.
The episode speaks to Jill’s mischievous streak. Ever the prankster, she’s been known to pick up dead snakes during her morning runs – she completed her first marathon aged 47 – and leave them around the house for others to find. According to staffers, once, when Jill and Joe were travelling on Air Force Two, she arrived early, swore his aides to secrecy, then climbed into an overhead locker and waited for him to arrive. When Joe opened the locker, she greeted him with a cheeky “Surprise!”. Then there was the Valentine’s Day when she covered his West Wing office window with red paper hearts. She’s also a “cool grandma”, according to her granddaughters, whom she once woke at 5am the day before Christmas to go to a fancy “SoulCycle” gym.
Yet it is the Bidens’ story of grief and bereavement that finds a mournful echo in these sorrowful times, when more than 400,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID-19. In 2015, the pair watched their elder son, Beau, die from a rare form of brain cancer, and their mourning was on public display.
At the funeral service, cameras captured the agonising sight of the then Vice President tilting his head backwards, eyes clenched closed, as he paid his respects to his son surrounded by loved ones. He struggled to contain his emotions as his close friend, President Obama, delivered the main eulogy.
Throughout this ordeal, Jill was the steadying hand, a role acknowledged during the service by their surviving son, Hunter. “It’s your strength that holds this family together,” he said, looking at his stepmother. “I know you will make us whole again.”
It was a theme she picked up on during her speech to the Democratic convention last year, when the Bidens presented themselves as a couple who could heal America’s chronic divisions and help it recover from the COVID pandemic.
“How do you make a broken family whole?” she asked. “The same way you make a nation whole: with love and understanding, and with small acts of kindness.”
Along with all the grief, the Bidens have experienced many of the other travails of a modern family. Hunter, who was discharged from the Navy Reserve in 2014 after testing positive for cocaine, is in recovery, following years of alcohol and substance abuse. After Beau’s death, there was tabloid fascination with the relationship that developed between Hunter and his late brother’s widow, Hallie – a liaison that ended around the time Joe declared for the presidency in 2019.
Then there was the controversy that Donald Trump tried to stir up surrounding Hunter’s business dealings with Ukraine, a smear campaign that backfired on the president and contributed to his first impeachment in 2019. The whole time, Jill has been fiercely protective of her family, displaying the same shielding instincts on display at that rally in Los Angeles.
“Other than the Kennedys, no [political] family has been through more than the Bidens,” says Wade Randlett. “Joe is a centred person, especially by Washington standards, but she is the steady rudder.”
Over the past 100 years, only a few First Ladies have been transformative. Eleanor Roosevelt, a political activist and global figure in her own right, set the gold standard. Lady Bird Johnson was the first to make a solo campaign trip on behalf of her husband. Betty Ford made a huge contribution to women’s health when she announced she was suffering from breast cancer (and, after leaving the White House, that she was an alcoholic). Nancy Reagan was the power behind the throne. Hillary Clinton was given by her husband the job of trying to enact landmark healthcare legislation, a failed initiative that came to be known as “Hillarycare”. Michelle Obama was not only the first woman of colour to occupy the role, but also a high-flying executive who sacrificed her business career to be with her husband in the nation’s capital.
The newest First Lady could join that pantheon and also become a star of this administration. Most of her husband’s cabinet appointments have been reliable choices who haven’t set the world on fire; the idea is for them to put out the fires. What’s more, you don’t have to watch the Bidens for long to realise which one is more vital and energetic. As well as championing educational issues – Jill has been a strong advocate of making higher education more accessible for poorer children – she will continue working on behalf of military families. Beau was deployed to Iraq, and during her years as the Second Lady, she wrote the children’s book Don’t Forget: God Bless Our Troops, which detailed the experience through the eyes of her granddaughter, Natalie.
But it is Jill Biden’s trailblazing multi-tasking that means she will make history the moment she walks through the door of a classroom, or teaches her students online, and receives a pay cheque for doing so. America’s new First Lady will be an American first.
This article originally appeared in the February 2021 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
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