Details were kept top secret until the moment the ceremony started, which is fitting given Naomi and Peter’s wedding is only the 19th wedding to ever take place at the White House. The last one was for President Obama’s chief photographer, Peter Souza, who married in the Rose Garden in 2013. Jenna Bush had her wedding ceremony and main celebration at her family’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in 2008, but her father, President George W. Bush, hosted approximately 600 guests at the White House for his daughter’s second reception. (When looking back at the grandest weddings in White House history, Naomi Biden’s is most similar to that of Tricia Nixon, who married Edward Finch Cox under a white gazebo in the Rose Garden in 1971.)
To set the tone for such a historic wedding weekend (which also happens to be the same weekend President Biden is turning 80), the invitations, which were complete with the presidential seal, read: “The President and Dr. Biden request the honor of your presence at the marriage of their granddaughter…”
Naomi is the daughter of the president’s younger son, Hunter, and his ex-wife Kathleen Buhle and an associate at the D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter. The bride’s parents met while working for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Portland, Oregon, and Naomi was named after the president’s firstborn daughter, who died at age one in a car crash in 1972, along with his first wife, Neila.
According to reports, the bride has played an important role in her grandfather’s political career. In 2019, she called a family meeting where she, her two sisters, and her cousins urged him to run for president against Donald Trump.
Peter, who works as an associate at the Georgetown Law Center on National Security, is also politically active. He studied political communications while at George Washington University and served as a White House intern during President Obama’s administration as well as worked on Hilary Clinton’s campaign. He grew up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and his parents, William Neal and Mary C. Neal, are both doctors. (Like the Bidens, the Neal family has suffered tragedy; Willie, one of Peter’s two brothers, was killed when he was struck by a car while roller skating.)
The newlyweds were first set up by a mutual friend in 2018. Naomi was in law school at Columbia University at the time, and New York City served as the setting for the first date and the courtship that followed.
