President Richard M. Nixon called then-Senator-elect Joe Biden after Biden’s wife and daughter were killed in a car crash. Listen to a recording of the phone call:
,” and “only felt this hollow core grow in my chest, like I was going to be sucked inside a black hole.”The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum has a recording of the brief call between two men whose lives were to take different arcs through American history. Nixon had just won reelection to a second term in a landslide victory over the Democratic candidate, George McGovern.
“Val and I were sitting in the office … when Jimmy called from Wilmington,” Biden wrote. “He wanted to talk to Val. When she hung up the phone, she looked white. ‘There’s been a slight accident,’ she said. ‘Nothing to be worried about. But we ought to go home.’” His wife’s car had collided with a truck on a rural road in Hockessin, Del. The Bidens had been married for six years.
He had lost an older brother, Harold, to tuberculosis at age 24, and a younger brother, Arthur, to tubercular encephalitis at age 7, according to the Nixon library.Nixon telephoned Biden at 12:21 p.m. It’s not clear where Biden was at the time. He may have been at the hospital, where, he wrote, he was a constant presence in his sons’ room.
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