LAS VEGAS (AP) — He was an achieved beginner boxer who’d moderately dance. However Harry Reid was keen on reminding his opponents that he knew find out how to combat, too.
That talent took him far — from poverty in Searchlight, Nevada, to the head of the U.S. Senate.
“I don’t have folks saying ‘he’s the best speaker,’ ‘he’s good-looking,’ ‘he’s a person about city,’” Reid advised The New York Instances in 2010 after a hard-fought reelection victory. “However I don’t actually care. I really feel very snug with my place in historical past.”
WATCH: Harry Reid’s full 2013 interview with Judy Woodruff
Reid, who died Tuesday at 82 after a four-year battle with pancreatic most cancers, was certainly one of Congress’ most expert negotiators, thriving on the behind-the-scenes wrangling that annoyed a lot of his predecessors. As majority chief from 2007 to 2015, he saved the Senate in Democratic fingers via a unstable period of polarizing well being care and financial coverage, recession and battle, and with a Republican after which a Democratic president.
“If Harry mentioned he would do one thing, he did it,” President Joe Biden mentioned in a press release after the demise of his longtime Senate colleague. “If he gave you his phrase, you possibly can financial institution on it. That’s how he bought issues executed for the nice of the nation for many years.”
Not a showman, Reid generally bought in his personal method on the nationwide political stage. He as soon as known as President George W. Bush a “loser,” criticized Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan as a “political hack” and misstated the situation of ailing Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who was then dying of mind most cancers. He apologized to President Barack Obama for calling him “light-skinned” and having “no Negro dialect, except he wished to have one.”
Reid made an unproven political declare he refused to detract. In the course of the 2012 presidential election he mentioned on the Senate ground that GOP candidate and fellow Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints member Mitt Romney had not paid taxes for a decade. Romney denied that, and fact-checkers on the time discovered no proof to assist Reid’s declare.
He was incessantly underestimated. In his 2010 bid for reelection he seemed just like the underdog to tea get together favourite Sharron Angle. Formidable Democrats, assuming his defeat, started angling for his management publish. However Reid defeated Angle, 50% to 45%.
Reid reluctantly retired moderately than search reelection in 2016 after an accident whereas he was exercising left him blind in a single eye. His life after public workplace included a fellowship on the College of Nevada, Las Vegas, legislation faculty and a job main a brand new suppose tank on the faculty with former Home Speaker John Boehner. The Ohio Republican and former congressional rival remembered Reid on Tuesday as “a fighter till the top.”
Former President Invoice Clinton, in a press release, known as Reid “a canny and difficult negotiator who was by no means afraid to make an unpopular determination if it meant getting one thing executed that was proper for the nation.” Obama launched a letter he despatched lately to Reid telling the ailing Democrat that “I wouldn’t have been president if it hadn’t been to your encouragement and assist.”
Reid was born Dec. 2, 1939, the son of an alcoholic hard-rock miner who killed himself at 58 and a mom who served as a laundress in a bordello. He grew up in a small cabin with out indoor plumbing and swam with different kids at an area brothel.
He hitchhiked to Primary Excessive College in Henderson, 40 miles from his Searchlight dwelling, the place he met the lady he would marry, Landra Gould, in 1959; she and their 5 kids survive him. At Utah State College, the couple turned members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He put himself via George Washington College legislation faculty by working nights as a U.S. Capitol police officer.
At age 28, Reid was elected to the Nevada Meeting and at age 30 turned the youngest lieutenant governor in Nevada historical past as Gov. Mike O’Callaghan’s working mate in 1970. Elected to the U.S. Home in 1982 and 1984 and to the U.S. Senate from 1986, Reid served in Congress longer than anybody else in Nevada historical past. In 1998 he held off Republican Rep. John Ensign by 428 votes after a recount that stretched into January.
After his election as Senate majority chief in 2007, Reid was credited with placing Nevada on the political map by pushing to maneuver the state’s caucuses to February, firstly of presidential nominating season. That compelled every nationwide get together to pour assets right into a state which, whereas dwelling to the nation’s quickest development over the previous 20 years, nonetheless solely had six votes within the Electoral School.
Reid’s in depth community of marketing campaign staff and volunteers twice helped ship the state for Obama.
Probably the most influential politician in Nevada for greater than a decade, Reid steered tons of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to the state and was credited with single-handedly blocking development of a nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain exterior Las Vegas.
He typically went out of his approach to defend social applications, calling Social Safety “one of many nice authorities applications in historical past” and championing suicide prevention with the story of his personal father. He stirred controversy in 2010 when he mentioned in a speech on the ground of the Nevada legislature it was time to finish authorized prostitution within the state.
Reid’s political moderation meant he was by no means politically safe in his dwelling state or totally trusted within the more and more polarized Senate. Democrats grumbled about his votes for the Iraq battle decision in 2002, for a ban on so-called partial-birth abortion and in opposition to resolutions endorsing Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Courtroom determination that legalized abortion.
WATCH: Harry Reid Assured of ‘Substantial’ U.S. Troop Drawdown in Afghanistan
He additionally voted in opposition to most gun-control payments and in 2013, after the Sandy Hook Elementary College bloodbath, dropped a proposed ban on assault weapons from the Democrats’ gun management laws. The package deal, he mentioned, wouldn’t go with the ban hooked up.
Reid’s Senate notably chafed members of the Home, each Republicans and Democrats. When Democratic Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi muscled Obama’s well being care overhaul via the Home in 2009, a distinct model handed the Senate and the reconciliation course of floundered lengthy sufficient for Republicans to show it into an election-year weapon to demonize Pelosi and solid the laws as a big-government energy seize.
Obama signed the measure into legislation in March 2010. However angered by the Nice Recession and impressed by the small-government tea get together, voters swept Democrats from the Home majority.
Reid hand-picked a Democratic candidate, former Nevada Lawyer Normal Catherine Cortez Masto, who gained the election to switch him in 2016. He constructed a political machine within the state that helped Democrats win a collection of key elections in 2016 and 2018.
On his method out of workplace, he repeatedly lambasted President Donald Trump, calling him at one level “a sociopath” and “a sexual predator who misplaced the favored vote and fueled his marketing campaign with bigotry and hate.”
Reid dismissed verbal tussles with the seen-it-all calm of a political veteran. In any case, he had confronted a type of earlier than he ever bought to Washington. As head of the Nevada Gaming Fee investigating organized crime, Reid turned the goal of a automotive bomb in 1980. Police known as it an tried murder. Reid blamed Jack Gordon, who went to jail for making an attempt to bribe him in a sting operation over unlawful efforts to convey new video games to casinos in 1978.
An achieved beginner boxer in his teenagers, Reid typically was seen ringside at title fights in Las Vegas. He mentioned assembly Muhammad Ali was certainly one of his biggest thrills. He additionally was a giant baseball fan and will recite particulars concerning the careers of particular person gamers.
His Mormon religion meant Reid generally sided with Nevada’s social conservatives. Apart from defending gun rights and opposing abortion, he mentioned he believed marriage needs to be between a person and a lady however that states ought to determine whether or not it’s authorized for same-sex {couples} to marry.
However, Reid loved sturdy assist from environmentalists on most points, incomes reward for turning Nevada from one of many states with the least federally protected wilderness to some of the throughout his tenure within the Senate.
Laws he authored in 1986 established Nevada’s first and solely nationwide park, Nice Basin Nationwide Park on the Utah line. Reid additionally pushed Obama to create Basin and Vary and Gold Butte nationwide monuments in 2015 and 2016, defending about 1 million acres of rugged desert, mountains and valleys.
In 1997, he persuaded Clinton and Vice President Al Gore to host an environmental summit at Lake Tahoe. 20 years later, he persuaded Obama to make an identical go to. Obama praised Reid’s environmental efforts on the time and declared, “I couldn’t have achieved what I achieved with out him being at my aspect.”
Reid waged an ongoing battle in opposition to the coal business and promoted renewable vitality however annoyed conservationists by warding off federal mining legislation reforms opposed by his allies in Nevada’s gold mining business.
Following Reid’s prolonged farewell tackle on the Senate ground in 2016, his Nevada colleague Republican Dean Heller declared: “It’s been mentioned that it’s higher to be feared than beloved, if you happen to can’t be each. And as me and my colleagues right here at present and people within the gallery in all probability agree with me, no particular person in American politics embodies that sentiment at present greater than my colleague from Nevada, Harry Mason Reid.”
Kellman, an Related Press author in Jerusalem, lined Congress throughout Reid’s time as Senate majority chief. AP writers Michelle L. Value in New York and Scott Sonner in Reno, Nevada, contributed to this report.
