Ex-US Senate majority leader Reid dies at 82
LAS VEGAS, Dec 29, (AP): Harry Reid, the former US Senate majority leader and Nevada’s longest-serving member of Congress, has died. He was 82.
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-turnedlawyer, 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.
“If Harry said he would do something, he did it,” President Joe Biden said in a statement after the death of his longtime Senate colleague. “If he gave you his word, you could bank on it. That’s how he got things done for the good of the country for decades.”
Reid 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. Rory Reid is a former Clark County Commission chairman and Democratic Nevada gubernatorial candidate.
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 US senator from Nevada, Pat McCarran.
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 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 Reid defeated Angle, 50% to 45%, and returned to the pinnacle of his power. For Reid, it was legacy time.
“I don’t have people saying ‘he’s the greatest speaker,’ ‘he’s handsome,’ ‘he’s a man about town,’” Reid told The New York Times in December that year. “But I don’t really care. I feel very comfortable with my place in history.”
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 and swam with other children at a pool at a local brothel. He hitchhiked to Basic High School in Henderson, Nevada, 40 miles (64 kilometers) 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 US Capitol police officer.
At age 28, Reid was elected to the Nevada Assembly and at age 30 became the youngest lieutenant governor in Nevada history as Gov. Mike O’Callaghan’s running mate in 1970.
Elected to the US House in 1982, Reid served in Congress longer than anyone else in Nevada history. He narrowly avoided defeat in a 1998 Senate race when he held off Republican John Ensign, then a House member, by 428 votes in a recount that stretched into January.
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, while home to the country’s fastest growth over the past two decades, still only had six votes in the Electoral College. Reid’s extensive network of campaign workers and volunteers twice helped deliver the state for Obama.
Meanwhile, US and Nevada leaders are mourning former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who died Tuesday at 82, led the Senate under under two presidents, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama. He retired in 2016.
“You were a great leader in the Senate, and early on you were more generous to me than I had any right to expect . ... As different as we are, I think we both saw something of ourselves in each other — a couple of outsiders who had defied the odds and knew how to take a punch and cared about the little guy . ... The world is better cause of what you’ve done.” — former president Barack Obama, in a letter he said he sent Reid before his death.
“He was tough-as-nails strong, but caring and compassionate, and always went out of his way quietly to help people who needed help. He was a boxer who came from humble origins, but he never forgot where he came from and used those boxing instincts to fearlessly fight those who were hurting the poor and the middle class . ... He’s gone but he will walk by the sides of many of us in the Senate every single day.” — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
“To say Harry Reid was a giant doesn’t fully encapsulate all that he accomplished on behalf of the state of Nevada and for Nevada families; there will never be another leader quite like Senator Reid . ... From humble beginnings in Searchlight, he became one of the state’s most powerful and fiercest advocates in Washington, D.C. He spent his life and his career fighting the good fight for all Nevadans.” — Gov. Steve Sisolak, D-Nev.
“Harry Reid was a champion for Nevada, helping preserve our precious environmental treasures, strengthen our rural communities, and build up our great cities . ... And he never hesitated to fight for us, from blocking efforts to dump nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain to getting our state the federal support we deserve.” — Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.