Meet the Joe Biden Whisperer, His Sister Valerie Owens

That first Senate campaign together—when Valerie was still a teacher at Wilmington Friends School and Joe was a city councilman—cemented the siblings’ professional relationship, as well as their personal one. “A lot of people thought it was a fool’s errand,” Owens told PBS’s Frontline this summer, pointing out that Boggs “had been twice governor, twice U.S. House, and he was running for his third term.”  The press dubbed it, “The Children’s Crusade.”

She added: “We weren’t running against the man. We never attacked him, nor he us. We were running for civil rights and civil liberties, for the environment, and to stop the war in Vietnam. So we were running because whatever the senator was doing, Sen. Boggs was doing, we thought were not effective in those—addressing those three problems that we looked at, that weren’t being handled the right way.”

And it was definitely a family affair. As The New York Times described it: “One brother, James Biden, took charge of raising money. Another, Frank Biden, managed volunteers. Their mother ran kaffeeklatsches. Ms. Owens’s first husband, Bruce Saunders, handled the budget.” Ted Kaufman, a former Biden aide, told the Times that Valerie Biden quickly proved a skilled campaign manager. “She was really good at the management part of the campaign,” Kaufman said. “She got a lot of quality people really super involved.”

In a decided upset, Biden won by just over 3,000 votes. But then tragedy struck. His wife Neilia and their 13-month-old daughter, Amy, were killed in a horrific car crash that also severely injured the couple’s two young sons. Though a grief-stricken Biden was on the verge of resigning his newly won seat, the Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield convinced him to stay. Biden took his oath of office by the hospital bed of his two surviving sons, Beau and Hunter. Soon after, Valerie moved into the Biden household to help raise the children, doing so with the help of the Biden parents and the two other Biden brothers.

But, as Owens told Frontline, Joe Biden had to deal with an unimaginable loss in his own way. “At nighttime, when you closed the door, he was still alone, and a widower and a single dad, no matter all the help,” she recalled. “And our friends were wonderful. The state of Delaware was wonderful. But it was a very horrible, horrible time.”

The post Meet the Joe Biden Whisperer, His Sister Valerie Owens appeared first on Honk Magazine.

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