Old-school liberal trounced by Reagan
IUS politician b January 5, 1928 d April 19, 2021
n years to come, Walter Mondale is likely to be the subject of Trivial Pursuit or pub quiz questions. Who was Jimmy Carter’s vicepresident, they will ask. Who was Ronald Reagan’s Democratic opponent in the 1984 presidential election? Who was the first presidential nominee from a significant US party to pick a woman as his runningmate? Which presidential candidate suffered the heaviest defeat of the 20th century, winning just one state?
Such questions would do a disservice to Mondale, who has died aged 93. He was a substantial politician and formidable strategist who did much to improve the lot of America’s disadvantaged during his 12 years in the Senate. Thereafter, as Carter’s vice-president, he reinvigorated that muchderided post by insisting that he play a central part in the administration, not some peripheral and ceremonial role.
Mondale was an old-school politician of a sort that is all-but extinct. He was anew Deal liberal, but preferred to describe himself as a ‘‘pragmatic progressive’’. Preferring substance to style, he was softspoken, self-effacing, sober and cautious.
To unwind he would read Shakespeare, watch Monty Python and take fishing trips to the remote lakes of northern Minnesota. Once asked why he fished, he said: ‘‘It’s cheaper than a psychiatrist.’’ His emotional restraint was sometimes construed as dullness, or a lack of charisma, though in private he was quickwitted and irreverent. Yet during his two decades of distinguished public service he got things done and made a difference.
In old age Mondale decried the polarisation of US politics and called President Trump ‘‘an outrage’’. By that stage Carter and he were America’s oldest surviving former president and vicepresident, throwbacks to amore civil era.
Walter Frederickmondale, commonly known as Fritz, was born in the tiny town of Ceylon, in the flat prairie land of southern Minnesota, and raised in the equally tiny nearby town of Elmore during the Depression.
His father, Theodore, was a farmer of Norwegian descent who became a Methodist minister after experiencing a religious epiphany while ploughing a field. His mother, Claribel, was amusic teacher. His parents were poor, but they imbued Mondale with progressive political beliefs, a strong sense of social responsibility, and modesty. ‘‘Inmy family, the two things you were sure to get spanked for were lying or bragging about yourself. Both were equally unacceptable,’’ he said.
He helped his familymake ends meet by singing at weddings, selling vegetables door-to-door and working in a pea canning factory. He had to leave college after a year because his father died and he had no money.
Mondale had worked for the successful US Senate campaign of Hubert Humphrey, helping the mayor of Minneapolis, a Democrat, win Mondale’s staunchly Republican home district. Humphrey reciprocated by findingmondale a job in Washington DC as head of the student branch of a liberal pressure group called Americans for Democratic Action.
He subsequently served two years’ National Service in the US Army, earned a law degree and beganwork as a lawyer in private practice. After awhirlwind courtship, he married Joan Adams. They went on to have three children, before Joan died in 2014.
Mondale’s first big political break came in 1960 when Minnesota’s governor appointed him state attorney-general. In 1964, when Humphrey was selected to be Lyndon Johnson’s presidential runningmate, Mondale was appointed to finish Humphrey’s term in the US Senate.
Mondale spent the next 12 years in that chamber, comfortably winning two subsequent elections and becoming a big player. In 1972 George Mcgovern, the Democratic presidential nominee, considered Mondale as a possible running-mate but Mondale was not interested. In 1974 he announced his candidacy for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination and dropped out after a year, saying he disliked Holiday Inns and had no ‘‘overwhelming desire to be president’’. At 2 per cent in the polls, he was running three points behind ‘‘don’t know’’, he quipped.
Yet when Carter won the Democrats’ 1976 presidential nomination and invited Mondale to join the ticket, he accepted. The two men were a good fit, personally and politically, but Mondale imposed conditions. He wanted to be much more than merely a ceremonial vice-president, and presented Carter with an 11-page memo outlining his proposed role. ‘‘We agreed he would truly be the second-incommand, involved in every aspect of governing,’’ said Carter, who was as good as his word.
In return, Mondale gave Carter his total loyalty. He fought for congressional support for some of Carter’s more controversialmeasures, including a strategic arms reduction treaty and a treaty relinquishing US control over the Panama Canal. He played an important role in securing the Israeli-egyptian Camp David accords, improving relations with China, putting pressure on South Africa’s apartheid regime and organising amultinational response to the 1979 exodus of Vietnamese boat people.
‘‘From our first meeting, Fritz Mondale impressed me as a good and decent man, honest and intelligent, and I have always been grateful that we formed this partnership,’’ Carter wrote in his memoirs. ‘‘During our four and a half years together I never had reason to doubt his competence, his loyalty or his friendship.’’ Mondale claimed he had been ‘‘closer to a president than maybe any vice-president in history’’.
The last months of Carter’s term were consumed by the Iranian hostage crisis and the aborted attempt to rescue 52 Americans held in the US embassy in Tehran by Islamic revolutionaries. The president mostly remained in the White House while his wife, Rosalynn, and Mondale campaigned on his behalf.
‘‘Send this good man back to Washington,’’ he begged the voters, but Carter was swept aside by Ronald Reagan in the presidential election of 1980. Some pundits thought Mondalewould have done better to distance himself from a failed administration.
He returned to the law, but was soon a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1984. He fended off a stiff primary challenge from Gary Hart, a young Colorado senator, including the devastating put-down that Hart’s ‘‘new ideas’’ reminded him of the advertising slogan of a popular fast-food chain: ‘‘Where’s the beef?’’
The general election pitched Mondale against Reagan. Trailing badly in the polls, and aware that he had to do something dramatic to beat a popular president, he selected Geraldine Ferraro, a congresswoman from New York, to be his running-mate. She was the first woman and the first Italian-american to appear on the presidential ticket of a big party. In the event, Ferraro spent much of the time fighting off questions about her husband’s financial affairs.
But Mondale lacked Reagan’s charm and presence. He was a far less polished performer and came across as an uninspiring old-school politician despite being almost 20 years younger than his opponent. ‘‘I will not make age an issue of this campaign,’’ Reagan joked during a TV debate. ‘‘I’m not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.’’
On election day, Mondale won just 40 per cent of the popular vote and only his home state of Minnesota, plus the District of Columbia, in the electoral college. The scale of his defeat led to the emergence of centrist ‘‘New Democrats’’ such as Bill Clinton, who rejected Mondale’s traditional liberalism.
In picking awoman as his runningmate Mondale earned a place in the history books. It would be 37 years before the first female vice-president, Kamala Harris, was sworn in. Speaking to The Times last year, Mondale said he did not imagine it would take so long.
‘‘I knew after the election that we lost it was going to take some time, there’s just some kind of deep reluctance on the part of the American people to allow a female in the White House,’’ he said. ‘‘It reminds me of the Kennedy thing, ‘You’re not going to have a Catholic in the White House’, then we finally did it and, guess what, it works fine.’’
The election in 1984 was not quite the end of Mondale’s political life. He returned to Minnesota to become senior counsel at the Minneapolis law firm of Dorsey and Whitney. In 1993 Clinton appointed him US ambassador to Japan, where he helped to promote trade and defuse tensions over the US military presence in Okinawa during his threeyear tenure.
In 2002 Paul Wellstone, the Democratic senator for Minnesota, was killed in a plane crash two weeks before he faced re-election. At the request of Wellstone’s family, Mondale agreed to stand in his place, though hewas by then 74.
There was to be no fairytale end to his career, however. He lost to the Republican candidate, Norm Coleman, earning himself the unique distinction of having lost a state-wide election in all 50 states, thanks to his drubbing in 1984.
If Mondale felt bitter, he did not show it. ‘‘Inwhat is obviously the end ofmy last campaign,’’ he decclared in his concession speech, ‘‘I want to say to Minnesotans, you always treated me decently.’’ – The Times
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