3 candidates touched by tragedy

WASHINGTON -- Presidential candidates Fred Thompson, John Edwards and Joe Biden belong to a club that no one wants to join. Each has lost a child.

In their campaigns, they raise the subject of their personal tragedies only occasionally and, even then, usually in a tangential way.

Edwards has talked about the death of his 16-year-old son in the context of his wife's battle with cancer. Biden has recalled the people who helped him when his wife and young daughter were killed in an auto accident. Thompson has cited his 38-year-old daughter's death as one of the events that have shaped his outlook.

"It's a sensitive subject," said Stanley Renshon, a political science professor and psychoanalyst at City University of New York. "The loss of a child ordinarily is devastating to families. It ranks up there with loss of a spouse, probably even higher on the life stress rating scales they use in psychology."

For the candidates, there are risks and gains to opening up to voters on such sensitive subjects, experts on political psychology said.

"Some (voters) consider these matters private. They wouldn't talk about it themselves. It makes them uncomfortable," said Jerrold Post, director of the political psychology program at The George Washington University in Washington.

"Yet I think on balance there is a humanizing aspect to it that they, too, have known what it's like to lose a child, a loved one," said Post, a psychiatrist and a former psychological profiler for the CIA.

Thompson, the actor and former GOP senator from Tennessee, recently mentioned his daughter's death from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs as he sought to explain a lifetime of events that prompted him to consider running for the White House.

"I've had a lot of sobering experiences in my life," Thompson told The Associated Press during a break in campaigning at the Iowa State Fair last month. "I've had the ultimate tragedy of losing a child. I've had the ultimate joy of having a child and then another one a little later in life than most. You don't come out of living through those things without having a deeper understanding of what's important and what's not," said Thompson, who joined the GOP field last week.

Elizabeth Thompson Panici, who suffered from bipolar disorder, died in January 2002. Her death was a major factor in Thompson's decision two months later not to seek a second full term in the Senate, friends and colleagues said at the time.

"I simply do not have the heart for another six-year term," Thompson told reporters.

In June of the same year, he married Jeri Kehn, a political and media consultant. They have a daughter, Hayden, born in 2003, and a son, Samuel, born in 2006. Thompson, 65, also has two grown sons and seven grandchildren.

It is not unusual for tragedies such as the loss of a child to serve as a source of motivation and resolve, Post said.

"In particular," Post said, "what one sometimes sees -- and there are no total rules in this by any means -- is that with the emphasis on the fragility of life there comes a kind of commitment to make every moment count and to focus all the more closely on the importance of relationships and how one lives one's life."

In March, Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced that her breast cancer had spread to her bone. As an example of their ability to cope with adversity, the couple cited the death of their son, Wade, in a car accident in 1996. Wade was driving with a friend to the beach in North Carolina when a strong wind blew his Jeep off the road and it flipped over.

Elizabeth Edwards said her husband "has an unbelievable toughness, a reserve that allows him to push forward with what needs to happen."

Edwards, a former North Carolina senator and the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, has opened up more at campaign events about his son's death.

"This is not the first challenge like this Elizabeth and I have been through," Edwards said at a candidate forum in Las Vegas this spring. "As many of you know, we lost our son about 10, actually about 11 years ago now -- in 1996."

Over the years, political associates have recalled Edwards privately telling them that if he could climb onto a medical examiner's table to hug his son goodbye, he could handle whatever political difficulties might come his way.

The subject also has arisen during the campaign in unexpected ways.

In a debate last month in Iowa, Democrats were asked whether they believe prayer has the power to stop events such as hurricanes. Most of the candidates sidestepped the question. But Edwards and Biden, a Delaware senator, were quick to answer "no."

Edwards noted that prayer did not prevent his son from dying, but he also said prayer can be source of strength in the wake of tragedy. Biden expressed similar sentiments.

Biden was just 29 when he was elected to the Senate in an upset in 1972. Before he could take office, his wife, Neilia, and his 18-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed when a tractor-trailer truck hit the family's station wagon. His two young sons were hospitalized with serious injuries.

Biden sometimes raises the deaths of his wife and daughter with voters. For example, in an appearance before the nation's largest firefighters' union, Biden described how firefighters saved his sons' lives after the accident.

On several occasions, he has expressed appreciation to South Carolina voters for the friendship of one of the state's most popular political figures, former Sen. Fritz Hollings, and his wife, who consoled him when he wanted to quit the Senate and drew him into regular social gatherings.

"They literally walked me through a difficult period in my life," Biden said during a stop at the Kiwanis Club in Orangeburg, S.C., in March.

Discussion of such tragedies are not new to the presidential race.

In a 1988 debate with Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, for example, Republican George H.W. Bush described how he learned his 3-year-old daughter, Robin, was terminally ill with leukemia.

"The doctor said, 'Beautiful child, your child has a few weeks to live,' " Bush said. After her parents took her to a New York specialist, "the child stayed alive for six months and then died."

Some people may find such moments revealing, but they probably will not be remembered by most voters or factor into support, said Jon Krosnick, a professor of political science and psychology at Stanford University.

Discussions of the death of child or other close family member "happen very rarely and they happen in these specialized audience situations where the press is paying attention, but American voters are not paying close enough attention for that 5 seconds or 25 seconds or even 45 seconds to really sink in amidst all the other stuff that is going on at that moment," Krosnick said.