Jill Biden: The stoic first lady who won’t give up her job
SCRANTON, PA - OCTOBER 12: Dr. Jill Biden listens in at a rally in support of Democratic presidential nomineee U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL)October 12, 2008 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Jeff Fusco/Getty Images)
First lady of the United States is a funny old job — unelected, but impossibly influential, crucial in humanising the most powerful man in the world, but with no actual political power of its own.
The office, however, makes single-moniker superstars of its most high-profile inhabitants — Jackie, Hillary, Michelle, Melania — and displays their dresses in museums.
In her eight years as second lady of the United States, the wife to Barack Obama’s vice- president, Jill Biden, by contrast, kept a deliberately low public profile. So low, in fact, that at her nine-minute keynote speech at August’s Democratic National Convention, the majority of Americans were meeting the 69-year-old teacher properly for the first time.
In a green coat dress and minimal jewellery, Biden looked polished but relatable, seemed elegant but unthreatening.
Humble, folksy, familiar, not sassy like Michelle Obama, but not cosy like Laura Bush either, and definitely not divisive like Hillary Clinton. She was, for sure, a damn sight warmer and more human than the much- maligned Melania Trump.
Biden’s speech — recorded in the poignantly empty classroom of a high school at which she had formerly taught — extolled her husband’s empathy, his strength in the face of unimaginable grief: losing his first wife and daughter in a car crash at 29, then his beloved eldest son Beau five years ago, after a battle with brain cancer.
“Four days after Beau’s funeral I watched Joe shave, and put on his suit,” his wife said.
“I saw him steel himself in the mirror, take a breath, put his shoulders back, and walk out into a world empty of our son. There are times when I couldn’t even imagine how he did it, how we put one foot in front of the other and kept going.
“I know that if we entrust this nation to Joe, he will do for your family what he did for ours: bring us together, and make us whole, carry us forward in our time of need,” she continued, before her 77-year-old husband, now the newly minted president-elect, appeared beside her to congratulate her on a “great job”.
Jill Biden appeared every inch the political spouse: loyal, adoring, supportive, the stoic power behind the future presidential throne.
But there’s another iteration too: the Jill Biden who, in 2004, when her senator husband was considering an earlier White House run, was dead set against the idea.
When a group of supporters showed up at their Delaware home to convince Joe to put himself forward, Jill walked into the room, wearing nothing but a bikini, with a large “no” scrawled on her stomach.
“I won’t tell you who was sitting in that room, but they got the message,” she said this year.
That’s the feisty Jill Biden the public first caught a flash of when, on the campaign trail in Los Angeles in March, she leapt into action and body-blocked two anti-dairy protesters who lunged at her husband on stage. Trophy wife or flashy fashion plate the incoming first lady is not.
Born Jill Jacobs in New Jersey, the oldest of five sisters, she grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, where her father worked in a bank and her mother was a housewife.
As a teenager, she has admitted: “I was rebellious in high school. I just had a good time. I enjoyed life. I enjoyed dating, I enjoyed my friends. But there was always that love of English class.”
She enrolled to study fashion merchandising in college in Pennsylvania, but lasted only a semester before switching to study English at the University of Delaware.
She was still a student when she met Joe Biden, already a senator and nine years her senior, in a meet cute that has assumed legendary status.
What is not in factual doubt is that Joe Biden lost his first wife, his college sweetheart Neilia, and their one-year-old daughter, Naomi, when a truck hit their station wagon in 1972.
Their sons, Beau, 3, and Hunter, 2, survived the crash, but spent months in hospital, from where Joe — who had been elected to the Senate just six weeks earlier — was sworn into his seat.
According to the couple’s oft-repeated account, Jill had done a spot of amateur modelling for a local advertising company, and Joe, a young widower raising two young sons alone, spotted her on a poster at Wilmington airport. His brother, Frank, said he knew her, and got Joe her number, then called her to ask her on a date.
“I was a senior and I had been dating guys in jeans and clogs and T-shirts. He came to the door and he had a sport coat and loafers, and I thought, ‘God, this is never going to work, not in a million years,’” Jill has said of that first date.
“But we went out to see 'A Man and a Woman' at the movie theatre in Philadelphia and we really hit it off. When we came home , he shook my hand good night
"I went upstairs and called my mother at 1am and said, ‘Mom, I finally met a gentleman.’”
Her colleagues at Saint Mark’s High School, where she taught after graduation, still remember the three-dozen long-stem yellow roses delivered by courier one day, to the desk of the newest English teacher, from her charismatic young senatorial boyfriend.
The story then goes that Joe proposed five times, and his boys apparently agreed.
One day, while Joe was shaving, six-year-old Hunter told him: “Beau thinks we should get married.”
Beau, aged seven, explained: “We think we should marry Jill.”
“I said, ‘Not yet. Not yet. Not yet,’ ” Jill has said. “Because by that time I had fallen in love with the boys, and I really felt that this marriage had to work.
Because they had lost their mom, and I couldn’t have them lose another mother. So I had to be 100 per cent sure.”
There’s another, slightly less aw-shucks version of this wholesome, adorable narrative, however. Jill had been married at just 18 years old to a college football star, Bill Stevenson, who, in September this year, put forward his side of the story.
“I was betrayed by the Bidens. Joe was my friend, Jill was my wife,” he told the talk show Inside Edition. He claims that, in 1972, he introduced Jill and Joe, while Neilia was still alive. He also claims that, in 1974, he discovered they were having an affair and asked his wife to leave.
A spokesman for Jill has denied Stevenson’s assertion, saying: “These claims are fictitious . . . Jill Biden separated from her first husband irreconcilably in the fall of 1974 and moved out of their marital home. Joe and Jill Biden had their first date in March of 1975.”
What’s not in doubt is that Jill capitulated eventually.
“He’s very persuasive — when he sets his eyes on something, he gets it done,” she has said — but not before being taken out to dinner by Joe and Frank and delivered a vision of the future.
“They wanted to let me know that the family plan was that Joe would some day be president,” she revealed in a PBS interview this year.
“But I sort of brushed it off. It didn’t really faze me because it just didn’t seem possible at that moment.”
The couple married in 1977, in front of 40 family and friends, in the United Nations chapel in New York, with Beau and Hunter beside them at the altar; the four then went on honeymoon together because, as they all reportedly saw it, they were all “marrying each other”.
They never used the term “stepmother’’, with Beau and Hunter informing their father: “No, we have a mom and a mommy. Our mommy died, this is our mom.” Ashley, Joe and Jill’s daughter, was born in 1981.
The family settled in Wilmington, Delaware, and Joe would famously travel to Washington DC and back daily, on Amtrak, to put his children to bed, while Jill built her career teaching in local state schools, and a community college, and later earning her doctorate in education.
When Joe was chosen as Obama’s vice-president in 2008, Jill became the first second lady to continue working.
“I want my own money, my own career, my own identity,” she told The News Journal in 2007.
“Being a teacher is not what I do, but who I am,” she added in her 2019 memoir, Where the Light Enters, describing “scrambling into a cocktail dress and heels” in the school bathroom before a White House reception, and marking papers onboard Air Force Two.
“For eight years that was my life’s dichotomy,” she wrote. “State receptions and midterms. Dinner with the most powerful man on Earth — and study sessions with single mums.”
She has vowed to continue working outside the White House as first lady too.
“If [Jill] Biden continues to teach, she will forever change the expectations and limitations of the position,” Kate Andersen Brower, the author of First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies, told AFP recently.
“I think it will expand our ideas of what first ladies are capable of. We will surely have a male presidential spouse one day, and I don’t think anyone would expect him to give up his day job.”
After Joe left the office of vice-president, the couple launched their own foundation, focusing on education, cancer and military families — it’s expected that Jill will focus on similar issues in her official capacity as first lady — and earned a not inconsequential $15 million, including fees from their joint book deals, and $700,000 from Jill’s speaking engagements.
“Middle-class Joe”, as the president-elect has long dubbed himself, is now rather more comfortably off than that.
The couple has five grandchildren too, and Jill’s granddaughters report that she’s not your regular grandma, running marathons and “waking you up at 5am to do a SoulCycle class”.
She also has a reported fondness for playing pranks with fake rats and snakes, so she should feel right at home in the heart of American politics.
But even her husband, it must be said, has lied to her on occasion. In 1977, when she finally agreed to marry Joe, “I promise you,” the senator told her, holding her shoulders and looking her in the eye — “your life will never change.”
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