The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Former Vice President Walter Mondale dies at 93
Walter F. Mondale, a preacher’s son from southern Minnesota who climbed to the pinnacle of U.S. politics as an influential senator, vice president and Democratic nominee for president, died on Monday. He was 93.
Known as Fritz to family, friends and voters alike, Mondale died in Minneapolis, according to a statement from his family.
After serving four years as vice president under President Jimmy Carter, Mondale was the Democratic nominee for president in 1984. He lost to the incumbent, President Ronald Reagan, in a historic landslide.
“A night like that is hard on you,” Mondale wrote in his 2010 memoir, “The Good Fight.”
Even in defeat, Mondale made history by choosing as his running mate Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice president on a major-party ticket. It followed a series of political landmarks in a public career that spanned seven decades.
A protege of Hubert H. Humphrey, another Minnesota politician who rose to the vice presidency and lost a presidential election, Mondale served as a U.S. senator from Minnesota for a dozen years. He played a lead role in the passage of social programs, civil rights laws and environmental protections that defined President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society.”
As vice president from 1977 to 1981, Mondale transformed the office from what had historically been a punchline into what both he and Carter called a true governing partnership. Mondale’s role as chief adviser and troubleshooter, working from a West Wing office near the Oval Office, became a model for successors including George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Dick Cheney and Joe Biden.
“The first person I called was Fritz,” Biden once said about the time President Barack Obama offered him the No. 2 position.
“Just as George Washington set the contours for the presidency, Mondale more than anyone else made the vice presidency into a robust and constructive institution,” said vice presidential scholar Joel K. Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University.
Mondale’s high profile in the Carter administration as it grappled with inflation, an energy crisis and the 444-day Iranian hostage standoff set him on a path to his party’s presidential nomination in 1984. But his overwhelming defeat did not end his public career.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. ambassador to Japan, a post he held for three years. And in 2002, tragedy pulled Mondale back into Minnesota politics.
When Sen. Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash just 11 days before he was up for re-election, Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party put Mondale’s name on the ballot in Wellstone’s place. He lost to Republican Norm Coleman — the first time he lost a race in his home state. It was the last time Mondale’s name appeared on a ballot.
Wry and unassuming, Mondale had an honest, down-to-earth approach that didn’t always serve him well as a candidate. Notoriously, in a debate with Reagan, he said he would raise taxes on Americans. He was attempting to argue that he and Reagan both would raise taxes, but that only Mondale was willing to admit it.
“I did what I thought was right,” Mondale wrote in his memoir.
Early life
Walter Frederick Mondale was born in Ceylon, Minn., on Jan. 5, 1928, to Theodore and Claribel Mondale. His mother was a music teacher, his father a Methodist minister who admired progressive lions like Minnesota Gov. Floyd B. Olson and Sen. Robert La Follete of Wisconsin.
‘Equal partner’
Mondale announced in 1973 that he was considering a run for president in 1976. But by 1974 he changed his mind, in typically self-deprecating fashion: “I had pulled about even with ‘None of the Above’ in national opinion surveys, and I dropped that bid - to widespread applause,” Mondale later wrote.
Soon, Mondale was on the shortlist of running mates for James Earl Carter Jr., a Georgia governor who became the Democratic nominee in 1976. A centrist and a Washington outsider, Carter found in Mondale a savvy D.C. player with credibility on the party’s left.
At Carter’s side when he negotiated a historic peace accord between Egypt and Israel, Mondale was closely involved in foreign policy decisions. .
When Carter lost his 1980 re-election bid to Reagan, Mondale quickly emerged as the Democratic front-runner for the 1984 election. He birthed an early political meme when, in a Democratic debate, he diminished a rival’s vague proposals with a quip lifted from a popular fast-food commercial of the time: “Where’s the beef ?”
But Mondale’s focus on social justice and his promise to raise taxes to reduce the federal deficit did little to win over voters charmed by Reagan’s genial conservatism. In the end, Reagan carried 49 states; Mondale won only Minnesota and the District of Columbia.