What we lost when we lost Beau Biden

Ten years ago today, I sat at my kitchen table with a list of personal cell phone numbers for Democratic attorneys general, waiting for a call. When it came, I cried. My boss — my friend — Beau Biden had succumbed to a glioblastoma, and my job was to let his colleagues know.

For the next hour, I tried my best to hold back tears as I broke the news to people who had worked alongside Beau, standing up to the banks that caused the housing crisis and confronting social media executives whose platforms put children at risk.

Unspoken on those calls was a profound sense of loss, beyond personal grief. Because to work with Beau, to know Beau, to love Beau, was to have hope for something larger than the success of a single politician. Hope for a politics centered on compassion rather than calculation, where public service meant selfless service guided by conscience, that moral compass that directed his every decision.

Beau often quoted Atticus Finch, one of literature’s most celebrated advocates, who asserted, “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

He embodied what Delawareans call “the Delaware way,” and what the late Pope Francis called “servant leadership” — politics as public service, not as performance or power. It is a politics grounded in empathy and listening, especially for and to those with whom we disagree.

Beau had a famous last name, but never traded on it. He turned down an appointment to the Delaware attorney general’s office to instead campaign for the job.

In 2008, he deployed to Iraq with his National Guard unit, rather than accept an appointment to the U.S. Senate. Two years later, he once again chose duty over ambition, declining a Senate run to remain as Delaware’s attorney general and complete the prosecution of one of the nation’s most gruesome child sex abuse cases.

His conscience and moral compass didn’t just drive his career and political decisions. In early 2013, Beau and I were in Boston a few weeks after the marathon bombing. We visited a makeshift memorial in Copley Square. Someone recognized him and thanked him for paying his respects. The man asked for a photo, and Beau quietly suggested we move away from the memorial first, that it was a place to focus solely on remembering the victims.

That was Beau.

After completing his second term as Delaware’s attorney general, Beau went to work at a law firm in Wilmington. After the customary first-day partner breakfast, Beau turned to me with a twinkle in his eyes. By then, speaking was difficult for him, but he insisted on meeting everyone at the firm. He walked the halls introducing himself to associates and secretaries, even the young man who stocked the vending machines.

He wanted to hear their stories.

With Beau in your corner, you may have felt helpless, but you were never hopeless. As attorney general, he focused on the vulnerable, prosecuting child predators and elder abusers. For family and friends, Beau was the steady center, the person you called when you needed help (if he didn’t call you beforehand). He carried the burdens of others without complaint.

And how the political landscape has shifted in 10 years! In an era of performative outrage and personality cults, Beau could have offered something fundamentally different: service over self-interest. Facing today’s biggest challenges — immigration, climate change, economic inequality — he could have started by listening to those most affected, building coalitions across seemingly unbridgeable divides.

In a speech in 2011, Beau said, “Conscience ties together all the individuals who have left a mark on American life by fighting for what they believe.” For friends of Beau, the hardest part isn’t just the challenges our country faces — it’s knowing Beau could have been doing something about them.

What we lost when we lost Beau Biden was a model of leadership guided by that unwavering conscience: A vision of service that prioritized the vulnerable, built bridges across divides, and always put the needs of others before his own.

In that same speech in 2011, Beau said, “Our conscience gives us faith in a better day.”

And so, in a world without Beau, it is our responsibility to carry forward his vision of service — to maintain the hope he embodied for those who fight for what they believe and faith in better days for all of us.

Joshua Alcorn worked for Beau Biden in 2006 and again from 2013-2015. He currently serves on the board of directors for the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children.