Beau Biden

Joseph Robinette "Beau" Biden III (February 3, 1969 – May 30, 2015) was an American politician, lawyer, and Army National Guard officer who served as the 44th attorney general of Delaware from 2007 to 2015. A member of the Biden family and the Democratic Party, he was the eldest child of 46th U.S. president Joe Biden and Neilia Hunter Biden.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and Syracuse Law School, Biden joined the Delaware Army National Guard in 1995 and served as an officer in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps; deploying to Iraq in 2008. He went on to work as a law clerk for a district judge before serving as a federal prosecutor until 2004. In 2006, Biden was elected Attorney General of Delaware. After his father was elected vice president in 2008, Biden considered running for his father's old senate seat, but instead ran for re-election; winning in a landslide.

In April 2014, Biden announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Delaware in the 2016 election. While his father was vice president, Biden died of glioblastoma, at the age of 46, in May 2015. His death generated national attention, and a portion of the 21st Century Cures Act was named the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot initiative in his honor.

Joseph Robinette "Beau" Biden III was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on February 3, 1969, the eldest son of Joe Biden and his first wife Neilia. On December 18, 1972, his mother and infant sister Naomi were killed in an automobile accident while Christmas shopping. He was almost four years old and his brother, Hunter, was almost three years old. Beau and Hunter were in the car when the crash took place and were critically injured but survived. Beau sustained multiple broken bones while Hunter sustained injuries to his skull and severe traumatic brain damage. They spent several months in the hospital, where their father was sworn into the Senate two weeks after the accident.

According to some accounts, Beau and Hunter Biden encouraged their father to marry again, even going so far as to ask him "when were 'we' going to get married". In June 1977, his father married Jill Jacobs, whom Beau welcomed as a stepmother. His half-sister, Ashley, was born in 1981.

Biden married Hallie Olivere in 2002. They had two children: daughter Natalie Naomi (b. 2004), and son Robert Hunter II (b. 2006).

In 1987, Biden graduated from Archmere Academy, his father's high school alma mater, and the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, where he was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity. He was also a graduate of Syracuse University College of Law, as was his father. After graduating from law school, he clerked for Judge Steven McAuliffe of the United States District Court of New Hampshire. From 1995 to 2004, he worked at the United States Department of Justice in Philadelphia, first as Counsel to the Office of Policy Development and later as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Biden was in Kosovo after the 1998–1999 Kosovo War, working on behalf of the OSCE to train judges and prosecutors for the local judicial system. In 2004, he became a partner in the law firm of Bifferato, Gentilotti, Biden & Balick, where he worked for two years before being elected Attorney General of Delaware.