2020 Presidential Candidates

The worst moment of Joseph R. Biden’s life — the 1972 car crash that killed his wife and baby daughter — has drawn renewed attention over a falsehood that the former vice president repeated for years: that the other driver was drunk.

From 2001-07, Mr. Biden indicated at least twice that the tractor-trailer driver who hit his wife’s car had been drinking, even though the state official who oversaw the investigation and the driver’s daughter said that wasn’t true.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Pamela Hamill, the daughter of driver Curtis C. Dunn, called on Mr. Biden to apologize publicly after he told a crowd that her father “drank his lunch” before the accident, according to a 2008 article in the Newark [Delaware] Post.

In a January article in Politico, Ms. Hamill said that Mr. Biden called her to apologize following a 2009 CBS report on the discrepancy.

“He apologized for hurting my family in any way,” she said. “So we accepted that — and kind of end of story from there.”

Biden's plagiarism became a hot campaign issue which his 1988 Democratic rival, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, used in a video attack ad that was passed around to several media outlets, according to a Washington Post article in 1987.

Dukakis — who would go on to win the nomination but lose the general election to the late-President George HW Bush — ultimately fired his political director Paul Tully and campaign manager John Sasso over the ad.

In a telling moment demonstrating how much more collegial primary battles were just three decades ago, Dukakis even held a news conference where he apologized to Biden, "his family and his friends for what happened and for the involvement of my campaign in this whole situation," The Times reported in 1987.

Biden reiterated that he was wrong, but did not deliberately intend to plagiarize while in law school.