Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and moved with his family to Claymont in New Castle county, Delaware, at age five. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1965 from the University of Delaware and a law degree in 1968 from Syracuse University in New York. In 1966 he married Neilia Hunter, by whom he had three children.
After law school Biden returned to Delaware, worked in private practice, and soon entered politics in 1970. He served one term as New Castle county’s attorney general before winning a U.S. Senate seat in November 1972 when he was 29 years old, only the fifth youngest person ever elected to the Senate. About a month after taking office, his wife and one of his daughters were killed in a car accident, and his two sons were seriously hurt. Rather than abandoning his political career, Biden was persuaded to go to Washington, D.C., and join the Senate. He was reelected six times to the Senate, becoming Delaware’s longest-serving U.S. senator. In 1977 he married Jill Jacobs, by whom he had one daughter. In addition to his role as U.S. senator, Biden also was an adjunct professor of law (1991–2008) at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Delaware.
Foreign relations, crime, and drug policy were Biden’s principal Senate concerns. His long tenure in the Senate allowed him to be appointed chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations (2001–03; 2007–09) and chairman of the Judiciary Committee (1987–95). He played a prominent role in the Kosovo crisis and advocated military intervention by the United States against the Yugoslav military as a means of protecting the Kosovars from a major offensive by Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević. During the Iraq War he proposed a federal arrangement for Iraq as a means of maintaining an intact, peaceful country. Biden was also a member of the International Narcotics Control Caucus and the lead senator in the fight to enact the position of “drug czar,” a U.S. presidential appointee who oversees national drug-control policy.