by MATTHEW COOPER
Photoillustration by GLUEKIT
Five months—five agonizing months. That’s how long it had been since Joe Biden’s eldest son, Beau, died of an aggres an Iraq War veteran and Delaware’s attorney general, but by the spring of 2015 he was gone. The pain of his son’s death was still raw for the vice president as he stepped behind a microphone in the White House’s Rose Garden in October 2015, flanked by his wife, Jill, and President Barack Obama. You could see Joe Biden’s hurt; his normally ebullient smile was gone, replaced by a fatigued grimace. Facing a small crowd and live cameras, Biden announced what many had long expected: He would not be running for president in 2016. The longtime senator was not emotionally ready. The “grieving process,” Biden said, “doesn’t respect or much care about things like filing deadlines or debates and primaries and caucuses.”