WASHINGTON — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. delayed making a decision about a potential presidential campaign for months, in part because of the tears of his 11-year-old granddaughter. That time for family healing after the death of her father, the vice president’s son Beau, in May ultimately meant he would not be able to win, Mr. Biden said.

Mr. Biden recalled a moment by the family swimming pool this summer when his granddaughter Natalie was sitting on his lap. She “turns around and puts her arms around me and starts sobbing and says: ‘Pop, I see Daddy all the time. I see Daddy all the time. Pop, you smell like Daddy. You’re not going to leave me, are you, Pop?’ “ Mr. Biden said in an interview televised on Sunday night on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

Mr. Biden suggested that just a week ago Natalie was in a better place emotionally, and he described how she had finished a cross-country running race and said: “Daddy would be happy, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he?” Beau Biden, 46, died on May 30 of a cancerous brain tumor.

“It just takes time,” Mr. Biden said to the interviewer, Norah O’Donnell. “And until you get there, you know, it’s not — not an appropriate thing to throw your — and by the way, you can’t run for president unless you throw your entire being into it.”