Jill Biden: Is she the person to heal America’s divisions?

As the Bidens prepare to enter the White House, Sean O’Grady considers what America – and the world – can expect to see from the soon-to-be first lady

The next first lady has signalled her intent to continue as a professor of English (Getty)

Christmas was very different for the Bidens this year and not just because it was the last they will spend before moving into the White House. No doubt some family rituals were honoured: Joe insisting on the careful personal placement of each ribbon of tinsel on the tree, for example. Usually they have 26 or so assorted members of the clan around, but this year they pared it down to just a few. Though the president-elect and soon-to-be first lady have had their Covid jabs, that wasn’t long ago and they are anxious to set an example of restraint and self-discipline. Maybe next year, when the new first lady will be in charge of the White House decorations, there will be a bigger reunion. Presumably Jill will not be asking her mates, “Who gives a f*** about Christmas stuff?” as poor Melania Trump was caught doing. 

This year’s restrictions are a wrench for everyone, of course, but maybe particularly for the Bidens, given the extra-special closeness of Jill and Joe. This is not a sentimental point, as much as a simple statement of fact, and of something that America and its friends around the world will have to get used to. For very soon, America will have the most cosy, lovey-dovey couple in the White House that they have had in living memory, and a first lady with maybe more influence than most. It will certainly be a partnership of equals. 

Anyone who watches their joint media appearances cannot fail to be struck by the symbiosis. Married in 1977, Jill Biden sometimes merges their personas in the way she speaks, as when she talks about when “we” were elected vice president in 2008. As couples do, she sometimes finishes his sentences, and not just in case he’s forgotten his lines. Their hands fall into each other’s readily, instinctively – none of that awkward moving away we still sometimes saw with Melania and Donald Trump when getting off Air Force One. They are almost a single organism. At one Biden election rally, a protester managed to get on the stage and lunged at Joe, but not before Jill, telepathically, had detected the attack and stuck an arm out to shield him, quarterback-style. She is extremely defensive of her other half, and will no doubt continue to be so in the White House, where she (a youthful 69) may have to make up for any of the president’s frailties as time goes by, though he is a youthful 78. It is an informal tradition that some of her predecessors have had to undertake a more supportive role with older incumbents, as Nancy Reagan did for Ronald in the final stages of his presidency in the late 1980s. The other would be Edith Wilson exercising “stewardship” after Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke at the end of his term of office.  

No doubt Jill will make time for all her official duties, even though she has signalled her determination to continue to work as a professor of English at North Virginia Community College. When Biden served as Barack Obama’s vice president and she was “second lady”, she was the first in that role to hold down another, paid job, and she expects to be the first of the first ladies to do so very shortly. This may present special challenges for her secret service detail, as it did before when they had to try to “blend in” and dress up like students half their age. Last time round she was able to get away with a certain amount of anonymity, until some of her students spotted “their English teacher with Michelle Obama on TV” and she was rumbled. Otherwise she just brushed off enquiries by telling people she was “related to” her namesake, the vice president. Times are more violent now.  

She is also ready to have to cope with all the fame and the public speaking. She got used to asking her sisters to buy “personal items” on her behalf when she was second lady, to avoid press intrusions, for one thing. She is less shy, though, otherwise. Nowadays she is quite natural on a platform, if a touch nervous. She explains that talking to a class of 25 is different to appearing before an audience of hundreds or thousands. She used to be “scared to death” and couldn’t sleep at night before a public meeting. But she changed when the vice presidency came along: “I have been given such a platform. I can talk about all the things I love. Education. Community colleges [the equivalent of British HE colleges]. Military families. And I thought, I cannot waste this platform and I’d better get better at this. So I practised and made myself ... I had to push myself.”  

Thus, she seems unlikely to ever run for office herself. However, she certainly has strong views about the causes she pursued as second lady and will continue to work for on a new, even higher-profile platform. From her Twitter account, you might think she was more on Bernie Sanders’s wing of the party than her husband’s. For example, during the campaign, she stated: “We are going to fight for education and students. That means hiring more counsellors and school nurses. That means paying educators what they’re worth. That means protecting the right to organise.” She also talks movingly about the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, and how it saved the life of Jan, one of her sisters, because, as a waitress, she was underinsured and couldn’t afford stem-cell treatment.  

Her immediate task, though, is for them to try and heal America. She puts this in very personal terms, about love and resilience, values that help to define herself as a human being. She declares: “Teaching is not what I do. It’s who I am.” But she is also about family, or as her Twitter bio puts it: “Lifelong educator. Military mother. Grandmother. Sister. Wife to @JoeBiden”.  

She is Biden’s second wife, and has long had to deal with the appalling and continuing aftermath of the car crash on 18 December 1972 that killed his first partner, Neilia Hunter Biden, and their baby daughter, Naomi, and which seriously injured his sons, Beau and Hunter, then toddlers. Much later, in 2015, she had to cope again with the death from brain cancer of Beau, another tragic, defining moment for the family. Beau, like his father, was a successful lawyer-politician and rose to the position of attorney general of Delaware. He had previously completed a year’s tour of duty in Iraq as a major in the national guard. He died aged 46, before he could run for state governor. Beau’s time in the army inspired Jill Biden’s passion for military families and the charities that support them. In the last few weeks, she has been filling Christmas parcels for the troops with the non-profit organisation Operation Gratitude.  

She declares that ‘teaching is not what I do. It’s who I am’

Her father, of Italian descent, served in the Second World War. Her maiden name, Jacobs, by the way, was adopted, because her grandfather presumably felt the family name, Giacoppa, might invite more prejudice. In any case, Jill’s father, Donald, made it from bank teller to ex-GI to president of a savings and loan institution (like a British building society). Her mother, Bonny, brought the family up at home. Jill Tracy Jacobs was the eldest of five sisters and enjoyed an “idyllic” upbringing in a nice suburb of Pennsylvania, brought up as a protestant, which she remains while worshipping in the Catholic church. She was a bit of a prankster and a rebel, by her own account, and combative with it. One of her favourite anecdotes is when her sister came home one day crying because Drew, a school bully, had thrown worms at her at the bus stop. The vengeful Jill, then 15, immediately set out for his house, knocked on the door, pulled back her fist, punched him in the nose and told him not to throw worms at her sister ever again. “I was so scared, I ran all the way home,” she recalls. “My father was home and I said, ‘Daddy, I just punched Drew in the face,’ and he said, ‘Good for you, Jilly Bean.’” So maybe Trump had better watch out.  

Growing up, reflecting on her parents “unconditional love”, she says she only had “one small request from the universe: give me a love like theirs. Give me a family.” After an unsuccessful marriage straight after college, she eventually found it with the Bidens.  

Yes, “Bidens” plural, because at the ceremony at which she married Joe, the two boys, aged eight and six, toddled up the aisle with her on their own initiative, having lobbied their dad for years to marry her. She then took two years out of work to help bring them up, and in 1981 they were joined by a sister, Ashley.

In Jill Biden’s worldview, a nation, like a family, can be brought together with love. It’s long been a central aspect of her personal life, and now of her renewed second career in public life, and it occupies a good deal of her memoir Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself. The title derives from a work by the Persian Sufi poet Rumi, who taught that “the wound is where the light enters you”.  

Dr Biden – she is proud of her title despite some derision for using it when her PhD is in education, not medicine – offers an insight into her life history: “It’s hard to know what you owe a spouse who died before you came along. A lot of people wrestle with the fact that the love of their lives loved someone else first and perhaps never stopped loving that person. Some people feel jealousy, some people feel inadequate, some people let questions of what might have been eat away at their peace of mind. As President Theodore Roosevelt is rumoured to have said, comparison is the thief of joy.”

“I understand those complicated emotions, but I have never felt threatened by Neilia. Joe has always made sure that I feel his love for me. In fact, he often jokes that he loves me more than I love him.”

“From the beginning, I knew, and this is what I said to Joe, that if he could love Neilia that deeply, that completely, then maybe I could be loved that completely too, and that this could be the love that I had been looking for, the kind of love my parents had. Joe used to tell the boys, ‘Mummy sent Jill to us.’ He believed it, so the boys did as well. How else could they make any sense of the injustice of losing their mother and sister? They had to have faith that the incredible love Neilia had for them could somehow bring them a person who would love them as much as they needed. The boys had to cling to that as they grew up. It was a gift that Joe gave them, a way to make sense of the world.”  

It’s a genuinely very romantic, poignant tale; part of it is the often quoted story that Jill first met Joe on a blind date organised by his brother Frank. It goes that the gimlet eye of Joe alighted on the image of a pretty girl in a newspaper ad promoting the local park (Jill also did some modelling), and that Frank set about arranging a meeting. Her first words to Joe were, in this account, “How did you get this number?” The first night out was apparently a great success, as the young senator, a widower, treated the young divorcee just as a gentleman should. Yet this is all disputed by Jill’s first husband, Bill Stevenson, who has been giving interviews lately claiming that the “blind date” story is not true – “No, not even a little bit”. He claims to have been betrayed by the Bidens – “Joe was my friend. Jill was my wife” – and that he and Jill first met and supported Joe, including donations of thousands of dollars and working on the campaign, when he was a county councillor preparing to run for the senate in 1972. The implication is that Joe and Jill were involved before the divorce in 1975, though other accounts suggest that the relationship between Jill and Steve had run its course some time before. In any case, while married to the future first lady, who was something of a rebellious rock chick in the post-Woodstock, fag end of the sixties, Stevenson was becoming a successful businessman through his pioneering student bar, the Stone Balloon. He was later to become a wealthy socialite, making a few million a year from venues. At any rate, Jill did not receive the half-share of the business that she sought in the turbulent divorce case. It was obviously not the kind of loving marriage she yearned for. Her spokesperson rejects Stevenson’s version of when Jill met Joe: “These claims are fictitious, seemingly to sell and promote a book. The relationship of Jill and Joe Biden is well documented.” 

Joe would not be about to take on the presidency without her by his side. Soon, they will be subjected to even more strident attacks from Trump and his “base”, but she at least is ready, and will give no quarter. Quite the opposite, in fact, as she is far less easygoing and has garnered a reputation as the “family keeper of the grudges”. She might not turn the cheek, wisely or not. We’ve seen this already in the way she has defended Joe against the charge that he’s a bit of a personal-space invader, though with a hint she’s had a word with the old boy: “I think what you realise is how many people approach Joe. Men and women, looking for comfort and empathy. But going forward, I think he’s gonna have to judge – be a better judge – of when people approach him, how he’s going to react, that maybe he shouldn’t approach them.” As for all that business about Hunter Biden, the Ukraine and a laptop, “Hunter did nothing wrong and that’s the bottom line.”  

The “job” of Flotus (first lady of the United States) is what you make of it. Some spouses are highly political: Eleanor Roosevelt used it as a base for a later career as a diplomat fighting for human rights through the United Nations; Hillary Clinton was charged by her husband, Bill, with reforming healthcare, controversially, and later went on to be senator, secretary of state and presidential candidate; some talk up Michelle Obama in similar terms.  

Other Flotuses, such as Jacqueline Kennedy, Nancy Reagan and Melania Trump have turned their attention to the style and decor of the White House, though Ms Reagan also ran her “Just Say No” campaign against drugs. The two Ms Bushes, like Ms Obama and Ms Biden, were keen on literacy and educational causes. “Lady Bird” Johnson set herself the huge and worthy task of “beautifying America”. Betty Ford bravely and publicly confronted her own addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs, and set up the famous Betty Ford Clinic. Rosalynn Carter highlighted mental health issues, and her husband, Jimmy, described her as an equal partner and “a perfect extension of myself”, discussing everything except the most sensitive security matters. The Carters, now in their nineties, are the closest parallel to the probable Biden set-up.  

We know that Jill Biden defends her family like a tigress fights for her cubs, and they will be subjected to a four-year campaign of hate from the new breed of Trumpist Republicans through sometimes unregulated social media and multiplying propaganda TV stations. She has said she is daunted, but knows well what to expect from Donald Trump, who will never accept Biden as a legitimate president. 

Will the Bidens get through it? It seems likely. In a moving address at the virtual Democratic Convention, delivered from her old schoolroom, she talked about how, when she was 26, she “never imagined” that she would find herself asking, “How do you make a broken family whole?” The answer was that “love makes us flexible and resilient”. She, her family and her country will need plenty of those qualities in the coming years.