Joe Biden's legacy after historic decision to give up 2024 reelection campaign

Inaugurated on the very steps of the U.S. Capitol that insurrectionists had overrun just weeks earlier on Jan. 6, 2021, Joe Biden was sworn in with the most pressing needs of a divided, sick and demoralized nation calling on him to act.

"We will act, knowing that time and tides and history are upon us," he declared. "We will press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and possibility."

On the day before he was sworn in, Biden marked the tragic toll of 400,000 dead from the coronavirus. Less than five weeks later the death toll hit 500,000, and in his remarks remembering the fallen, he made it personal with a level of empathy and compassion that was the trademark of his political life.

"That is more lives snuffed out by this virus than any other nation on Earth," he said. "To heal, we must remember. I know it's hard. I promise you, I know it's hard."

The pandemic was even more devastating than Biden could understand that day. The coronavirus killed more than 700,000 Americans on his watch, and as he began to face questions in the 2024 Democratic primary, his age became a political target. His opponent in the primary, Vice President Kamala Harris, used the virus and his age to cast Biden as out of touch. Just days before his decision to drop out, Biden had battled COVID-19. In the last weeks of the primary, the virus forced him to self-isolate and caused him to cancel a campaign appearance in Philadelphia.

The symptoms from his bout with COVID-19 were the reason for Biden's sudden announcement that he will not run for reelection. He made the announcement on social media, rather than in person. The last time Biden made a major political announcement, it was to tell viewers of NBC's "Late Night with David Letterman" that he wouldn't run in the 2016 presidential field because of his son Beau's recent death.

A lifelong fighter, Biden was born in 1942, the first president born before the baby boom generation since 1993 and the oldest president ever to be inaugurated. He was raised in a working-class family in Scranton, Pennsylvania. When the economy suffered and his father lost his job, the family moved to Delaware.

It was in Delaware that his father instilled in Biden the values of hard work.

"My dad had an expression," Biden often said. "He said, Joey, it's not a question of succeeding, it's not a question whether you get knocked down, it's how quickly you get up.

"And it's that value of getting back up that has shaped my whole life."

He played football, graduated in 1965 from the University of Delaware, and attended Syracuse University for law school.

Three years earlier, at the age of 23, he began making a name for himself as a politician, winning an upset victory for the New Castle County Council. He was a local star in a state where the political scene was dominated by larger-than-life characters who were unabashedly glad-handing and glad-drinking.

"I think one of the reasons I won is that they have more confidence in me that I will say what I believe," he told 60 Minutes at the time.

In the fall of 1972, Biden made national news when he ran for the U.S. Senate, a longshot 29-year-old with a tell-it-like-it-is personality.

"If you like what you see, help me out," he told voters in New Castle County. "And if you don't, vote for the other fella."

Four months later, tragedy struck. Joe Biden Jr. and his wife Neilia had three young sons: Hunter, 12; Beau, 9; and Naomi, 1.

On December 18, as he sat in the car with his wife and Naomi waiting for his sons to exit school in the after-school rush, a driver lost control of his car. Biden's wife and daughter were killed, and the force of their car hitting the tree propelled Naomi to her death.

Biden's two sons were in the car behind him; Beau suffered a broken neck, and Hunter had a broken collarbone.

"I felt a piece of me die that day," Biden said.

The Delaware General Assembly swore Biden in at the hospital.

He later would say it was his boys who kept him going -- the promise to them and to his wife.

"You have no idea what it is to come home at night and look at your sons and know they'll never have a mother again, and you wonder how you're going to help them. How you're going to be strong enough for them."

Biden took his boys home every night from their grandparents' house and commuted to Washington, D.C., every day for work so that he could be home with them in the evenings.

In 1975, Biden met Jill Jacobs on a blind date; two years later, they got married. Their daughter, Ashley, was born in 1981.

Years later Biden would say, "Ask any woman, everyone knows I love her more than she loves me."

In the U.S. Senate, Biden was a young liberal Democrat who opposed the Vietnam War and became an early and outspoken voice against the South African system of racial segregation known as apartheid .

He first ran for president in 1987 but dropped out of the race after questions about whether he had plagiarized a portion of a speech he had delivered in London.

The next year he suffered two brain aneurysms. He told 60 Minutes he wasn't afraid of dying.

"I was a pretty cocky guy at the time, I just had no fear," Biden later told 60 Minutes. "It's really quite amazing. You don't want to die, but you're not terribly concerned about it."

His most high-profile work in the Senate was during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Attorney Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexually harassing her in the early 1980s when she worked for him at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Her testimony was scorned by an all-White male Senate Judiciary Committee. Biden weathered heavy criticism then and later for the way she was treated. Thomas repeatedly has denied the allegations. Biden declared the FBI's investigation inconclusive.

In 2019, Biden said "To this day I regret I couldn't come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved." Speaking at a event recognizing women who showed "Biden Courage," Biden said Hill "paid a terrible price" when she testified before a "bunch of white guys."

"She went home and she was hounded. I mean really, she was hounded," he said. "It was unbelievable how cruel we were to her ... It still sticks in my craw."

In 1994, Biden shepherded a historic crime bill through the Senate. He considered it one of his proudest legislative achievements. Critics say the bill drove up the prison population and contributed to mass incarceration in the U.S. It also included a ban on assault weapons.

Biden ran for president in 2008 and came in second to the eventual winner, then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. Obama then chose Biden to be his running mate, and as vice president, Biden supervised hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus spending during the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

He famously beat President Obama to the punch in endorsing same-sex marriage. "What this is all about is a simple proposition: who do you love," Biden said in a landmark interview on NBC's Meet The Press in May 2012.

He advised President Obama to wait for more intelligence before launching the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. He also was a vocal advocate for the troop surge in Afghanistan in 2009.

He is known for some memorable verbal gaffes, the most famous of which were: "We choose truth over facts," he said at the Iowa State Fair in 2019.

"They're gonna put y'all back in chains," he told voters in Virginia, referring to the Republican budget plan.

Biden passed up a chance to run for president in 2016 after his son Beau, a Delaware Superior Court judge, died of brain cancer.

Biden was in his home state in January 2015 when his son died of brain cancer at age 46. "I want to make one thing clear: Beau's the toughest guy I've ever known. He did not give up," Biden said at Beau Biden's funeral. "He fought and fought and fought and fought and fought. Beau's the real Biden."

Biden's 2020 presidential campaign got off to a lackluster start with losses to then-Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the Iowa caucus and in New Hampshire.

But the campaign made a comeback with Biden's decisive win in South Carolina.

"To all those who have been knocked down, counted out, left behind, let me say to you: This is your campaign," he declared in his Super Tuesday victory speech.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, for months Biden campaigned virtually -- from his basement. "This is a war against this virus," he said.

He made history by picking California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. Harris was the first woman of color of a major party to be nominated for vice president. "She's ready to do this job on Day One," Biden said of Harris.

That November, Biden defeated President Donald Trump by 7 million votes. He brushed off Trump's claims of election fraud and immediately began making preparations to bring the pandemic under control. In his first 100 days, Biden accelerated vaccine distribution and strong-armed a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan through Congress with thin Democratic majorities.

Biden positioned himself as a steady hand of moderation and sought to portray himself as a peacemaker who would put political rancor aside. He pledged to "restore the soul of America," and promised to be president "not of half of Americans, but all of America."

"The soul of America is one thing, and that is decency," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos the day after his election.

"I am a progressive. And I have been for a long time," he told a crowd in South Carolina in January 2021. "Now, that doesn't mean I can accomplish all that we have to do. But I believe strongly that I can accomplish a damn sight more than the person that is the alternative."

As president, Biden signed the biggest U.S. infrastructure bill in a generation, appointing the first Black woman to the Supreme Court -- Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is Biden's only current Supreme Court nominee. He has moved the United States to a more progressive place between his past and his present, and toward a more just, inclusive future.