As Joe Biden marks a somber anniversary, his son's fate weighs on him

During the eulogy for his brother in 2015, Hunter Biden recalled his first memory of Beau: hearing him repeat, “I love you,” as they lay together in a hospital bed. The toddlers — Beau was just 3, Hunter 2 — were the only survivors of a car crash that 51 years ago killed their mother and baby sister.

The accident was the first of the personal tragedies that have shaped President Joe Biden’s political career, coming just weeks after he won the U.S. Senate seat. The death of Beau Biden after a battle with brain cancer kept Joe Biden out of the 2016 presidential race, but his dying admonition to his father to stay engaged became a foundation for his 2020 candidacy.

Now, Biden is preparing to wage his final campaign while his remaining son faces two separate criminal indictments.

Biden will remain in Wilmington, Delaware, on Monday on the somber anniversary, which has remained a sacred and protected day on his calendar as president, as it was when he was vice president and a senator. It comes just days after his son made his most public response yet to allegations from House Republican investigators that are the basis of the impeachment inquiry against the president they formally approved on Wednesday.

Speaking not far from the Senate chamber where his father served for 36 years, the younger Biden said his parents “literally saved my life” amid his battle with addiction, and blasted Republicans who he said “have taken the light of my dad’s love for me and presented it as darkness.”

Hunter Biden has also said Republicans are weaponizing the president’s love for him to distract him in the campaign.

“They’re trying to kill me knowing it will be a pain greater than my father could be able to handle,” he said in a podcast interview with the recording artist Moby.

In private conversations, the president has blamed himself for the fact that his son remains such a political target, telling associates it would not be happening if he were not in office and running for another term. Hunter Biden “comes up all the time,” one source who has spoken with the president said, sometimes out of concern but also with pride at how he has endured the harsh spotlight recently.

Not everyone in the West Wing, even at senior levels, knew what Hunter Biden would say Wednesday. But the president, who speaks with his son most days, if not multiple times each day, knew. And sources close to the president quickly praised the remarks as “powerful” and “forceful.”

Republicans have made “where’s Hunter” a calling card of the 2024 race, with merchandise bearing the slogan. Biden advisers have noted, though, that Hunter Biden was also a target in the 2020 race and said the president’s critics often miss that the president’s standing by his son, especially supporting him in his recovery, has often made those attacks backfire.

This election could be different. In a September NBC News poll, 60% of respondents said they had major concerns (45%) or moderate concerns (15%) about Biden’s possible awareness or involvement in the business dealings of his son including alleged financial wrongdoing and corruption.

The Long Recovery

Hunter Biden’s last words to his brother in 2015 were the same as the first he’d heard from him 42 years earlier. And after his illness and death, he “completely unraveled,” as he told Moby.

“It’s not an excuse, but it is the reason,” he said.

But Beau Biden’s passing only reignited addiction challenges Hunter Biden had faced before. In his 2021 memoir, Hunter said he felt the unresolved trauma both he and his brother dealt with after the accident in 1972 “manifested themselves differently in each of us,” for the rest of their lives.

To blame it for his own substance abuse battles would be a “cop-out,” he wrote, but added later that it took him decades “to acknowledge that original loss, address that original trauma, recognize that original pain.”

Reflecting on grief recently in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Joe Biden said that as difficult as losing Beau was for him, it “was even more profound for Hunter” and his daughter, Ashley.

“It made me a little more fatalistic. It also caused me and Jill enormous pain because he should be the one sitting there talking to you, Beau. He was a better man than I am, and so is Hunter,” Joe Biden said.

Hunter, in his book, wrote that he and his father initially “dealt with our grief in ways that often were incongruent with helping each other.” His father immersed himself in his work, as vice president and then in the run-up to his 2020 campaign, but ultimately the attacks on him in that campaign helped bring them together again.

“Whenever I apologized to him for bringing so much heat onto his campaign, he responded by saying how sorry he was for putting me on the spot, for bringing so much heat onto me, especially at a time when I was so determined to get well,” he wrote. “That’s the biggest political debate my dad and I had for months: Who should apologize to whom?”

Ambassador of Grief

The president has often discussed how the 1972 accident nearly led him to quit the Senate before he’d even taken office, saying after he took the oath of office in his sons’ hospital room that if there was ever a conflict between him being a good father and a good senator, he’d choose the former.

A career full of personal trials has also led Biden to say, as he often did ahead of announcing his plan to seek a second term, that he is a “great respecter of fate. It also helped him not only build personal relationships across the aisle but was the root of what Biden aides have long called his “superpower,” his empathy.

Just moments after Hunter Biden delivered his statement at the Capitol on Wednesday, Joe Biden held his first in-person meeting with family members of hostages being held by Hamas terrorists.

During the two-hour meeting, which began in the East Wing and included a tour of the Oval Office, Biden shared his own history of loss, specifically raising with the families about the upcoming anniversary of the 1972 accident, according to multiple attendees.

“He recounted getting the worst call a parent can receive, that his wife and three children had been in a car accident right before Christmas,” Yael Alexander, the mother of 19-year-old hostage American Edan Alexander, told NBC News. “There is no question he understands the longing I feel as a mother to have my son home with me during the holidays, and the urgency with which we need a deal to bring the hostages home now.”

A hostage parent would later say they were able to remain composed during the emotional session until the president himself teared up.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com