Joe Biden has admitted that he contemplated suicide when his first wife and their 18-month-old daughter died in a tragic car accident in 1972.
In a radio interview with Howard Stern, the US president spoke of his pain, his sense of helplessness and his desperation for the loss of Neilia and little Naomi. “I sat down and thought: Now I’m going to open a bottle of scotch and drink it and get drunk,” said Biden, known as someone who has never drank alcohol. “I thought you didn’t have to be crazy to commit suicide. And I thought: I’m going to the Delaware Memorial Bridge and jump”, added the president, saying that he had pushed away that idea only by thinking of Beau and Hunter, the other two children who survived the accident. «I thought that I had two children and that I probably wouldn’t commit suicide. But I told myself that I would never be well again.”
Since then he has had a long and successful political career, he remarried First Lady Jill Biden with whom he had a daughter, who was given the same name as the little girl he lost years earlier. But in his life there were other tragedies such as the death of his son Beau, a veteran of the Iraq war, struck down by cancer. Hunter is the only child left from his marriage to Neilia, a constant presence in the president’s life despite his problems, including drug addiction.
Biden’s appearance with Stern follows the controversy of the major American newspapers, especially the New York Times, for the small number of interviews given by the president. Criticisms that the Biden campaign flatly rejected, explaining that the show with Stern was an attempt by the president to meet and speak to voters through non-traditional means. Among these there is also TikTok, where the president will remain during the electoral campaign despite having signed the measure approved by Congress which provides for the ban of the popular app in the US if Bytedance, the Chinese giant to which it belongs, does not sell it in 9- 12 months.
(Unioneonline/ss)
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