Feisty Nevadan led Senate Democrats as tough dealmaker
LAS VEGAS — Harry Reid, the former U.S. Senate majority leader and Nevada’s longest-serving member of Congress, has died. He was 82.
Mr. Reid died Tuesday, “peacefully” and surrounded by friends at home in suburban Henderson, “following a courageous, four-year battle with pancreatic cancer,” according to family members and a statement from Landra Reid, his wife of 62 years.
“Harry was a devout family man and deeply loyal friend,” she said. “We greatly appreciate the outpouring of support from so many over these past few years. We are especially grateful for the doctors and nurses that cared for him. Please know that meant the world to him,” Landra Reid said.
Funeral arrangements will be announced in coming days, she said.
Harry Mason Reid, a combative former boxer-turned-lawyer, was widely acknowledged as one of toughest dealmakers in Congress, a conservative Democrat in an increasingly polarized chamber who vexed lawmakers of both parties with a brusque manner and this motto: “I would rather dance than fight, but I know how to fight.”
Over a 34-year career in Washington, Reid thrived on behind-the-scenes wrangling and kept the Senate controlled by his party through two presidents — Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama — a crippling recession and the Republican takeover of the House after the 2010 elections.
He retired in 2016 after an accident left him blind in one eye, and revealed in May 2018 that he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was undergoing treatment.
Less than two weeks ago, officials and one of his sons, Rory Reid, marked the renaming of the busy Las Vegas airport as Harry Reid International Airport.
Neither Harry nor Landra Reid attended the Dec. 14 ceremony held at the facility that had been known since 1948 as McCarran International Airport, after a former U.S. senator from Nevada, Pat McCarran.
Mr. Reid was known in Washington for his abrupt style, typified by his habit of unceremoniously hanging up the phone without saying goodbye.
“Even when I was president, he would hang up on me,” Obama said in a 2019 tribute video to Mr. Reid.
Reid was frequently underestimated, most recently in the 2010 elections when he looked like the underdog to tea party favorite Sharron Angle. Ambitious Democrats, assuming his defeat, began angling for his leadership post. But Mr. Reid defeated Angle, 50% to 45%, and returned to the pinnacle of his power.
Born in Searchlight, Nevada, to an alcoholic father who killed himself at 58 and a mother who served as a laundress in a bordello, Reid grew up in a small cabin without indoor plumbing. He hitchhiked to Basic High School in Henderson, Nevada, 40 miles from home, where he met the wife he would marry in 1959, Landra Gould. At Utah State University, the couple became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The future senator put himself through George Washington University law school by working nights as a U.S. Capitol police officer.
Elected to the U.S. House in 1982, he won his Senate seat in 1986. After his election as Senate majority leader in 2007, he was credited with putting Nevada on the political map by pushing to move the state’s caucuses to February, at the start of presidential nominating season. That forced each national party to pour resources into a state that only had six votes in the Electoral College.