“He is received that curmudgeonly attraction that’s onerous to switch,” mentioned Obama in March 2015.
Reid, who was the longest-serving senator in Nevada‘s historical past, had been battling pancreatic most cancers. His spouse, Landra Reid, launched a press release Tuesday evening, calling her husband a “religious household man and deeply loyal buddy.” They had been married for 62 years.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called Reid “one of the vital wonderful people I’ve ever met.”
“He was tough-as-nails sturdy, however caring and compassionate, and all the time went out of his method quietly to assist individuals who wanted assist,” Schumer mentioned in a press release. “He was my chief, my mentor, one among my dearest buddies.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) recalled working alongside Reid to get the Taxpayers’ Invoice of Rights handed. He praised Reid for his work representing Nevadans and mentioned he “ran a decent ship” as majority chief.
Reid was a “big,” Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak said in a statement. The Democratic governor mentioned “there’ll by no means be one other chief fairly like Senator Reid.”
“Maybe what I respect most about Senator Reid’s legacy is he by no means forgot who he was or the place he got here from,” Sisolak mentioned.
Harry Mason Reid was born in a city he would characterize in his autobiography as “a flyspeck on the map” and “a boomtown gone bust.”
“I come from a mining city,” he wrote with co-author Mark Warren in “The Good Battle: Exhausting Classes from Searchlight to Washington.“ “However by the point I got here alongside — December 2, 1939 — the main trade of my hometown of Searchlight, Nevada, was not mining. It was prostitution.”
Reid’s father was a miner and his mom a laundress. Reid later wrote that they had “zero” faith at house, however there was one determine his mother and father revered, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In a city of “onerous rocks and inhospitable soil,” their house was constructed from railroad slats and had no sizzling water or indoor plumbing. At age 58, his father killed himself.
To attend highschool, Harry needed to go 45 miles to Henderson, the place he was elected scholar physique president, took up boxing, and met Landra Gould, who would turn out to be his spouse in 1959.
Boxing would form his outlook on life. “In a combat, you’ve gotten no one that can assist you,” he informed Kevin Iole when chosen to the Nevada Boxing Corridor of Fame in 2018, including: “It’s you and that man throughout the ring.“
From Henderson, he went on to Southern Utah College, Utah State, and — since Nevada had no regulation college — George Washington College. His first stint in Washington, D.C., led to a job with the Capitol Police. “I’d go to regulation college at GWU full-time and work full-time in uniform on the Capitol on the 3-to-11 shift,” he wrote in “The Good Battle.” He recalled feeling “fairly invisible.”
Reid returned to Nevada after regulation college, and was elected to the state Meeting on the age of 28. He by no means lacked for ambition; in 1974, he ran for the U.S. Senate however misplaced by 624 votes to Paul Laxalt.
In 1977, Gov. Mike O’Callaghan, Reid‘s outdated mentor and boxing coach, appointed him to guide the Nevada Gaming Fee, a job that required him to give up all naivete he had concerning the state’s mob-ridden casinos. It was, Reid later wrote, “an intense, surreal time when it typically felt as if I’d wandered into some sort of horrible funhouse.” In 1981, a bomb was discovered connected to his spouse’s automotive.
After his four-year time period expired, he took one other shot at D.C. and this time he gained, capturing a Home seat in 1982. On the finish of his second Home time period, when Laxalt retired, Reid captured the Senate seat he had sought 12 years earlier than.
He cultivated a fame for gruff speak. “I converse bluntly,” Reid wrote in 2008. “Typically I could be impulsive. I imagine one thing to be proper, and I do it. After which I don’t fear about it. This has not essentially served me properly, however it’s not who I’m.”
Years later, Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston checked out that 1986 marketing campaign, marveling at the way it had launched the Senate profession of a person he known as “a Machiavelli of malaprops.” Reid was, he mentioned, “a completely unprepossessing man and manifestly horrible candidate who nonetheless achieved unlikely marketing campaign victories and went on to succeed in the head of congressional energy.
Within the Senate, Reid established himself as strongly partisan, a tricky battler on Nevada and Western land administration points, and a liberal with some conservative leanings (similar to on the difficulty of abortion). He typically got here underneath hearth on ethics points, significantly in his fondness for Nevada pursuits, together with the on line casino trade.
Reid additionally quickly developed a fame for direct insults, as when he challenged Ross Perot in a 1993 Senate listening to, not lengthy after Perot had drawn virtually 20 % of the vote within the presidential election. “I believe it’s best to begin checking your information slightly extra, and cease listening to the applause a lot,“ Reid informed him.
He turned a part of the Democratic management in 1995, as co-chair of the Senate Democratic Coverage Committee, then moved as much as turn out to be his get together’s whip in 1999. In November 2004, Reid watched in shock as presidential candidate John Kerry and Senate Minority Chief Tom Daschle had been defeated — and immediately adopted that by gathering the assist he wanted to turn out to be his get together’s chief in Washington.
“By the flip of the millennium, Reid’s group was formidable,” Ralston wrote in 2013. “He introduced in proficient Democratic operatives from across the nation, as he grew extra partisan, too, forsaking any pretense that he was ‘impartial like Nevada.‘ As he moved up within the Democratic hierarchy, Reid needed to fly the partisan flag extra typically.”
Reid’s first large check was on President George W. Bush’s proposal to denationalise Social Safety, on which he led Democratic opposition that helped to in the end doom the laws. “We aren’t going to let Wall Avenue hijack Social Safety. It will not occur,“ he informed NBC‘s Tim Russert in 2004.
Democrats gained management of the Senate in 2006, propelling Reid to the place of majority chief. After the election, Reid turned a extra vocal critic of the Iraq Conflict. By no means a fan of Bush, he informed the president, “Mr. President, this warfare can’t be gained militarily. It’s fallacious to proceed to ship troopers right into a warfare that can not be gained militarily.”
Reid adopted that up with a public pronouncement that the warfare was misplaced, one thing that Bush would later characterize as “one of the vital irresponsible acts I witnessed in my eight years in Washington.” Bush and Reid didn’t typically discover themselves on the identical facet, although Reid was credited In October 2008 with skillfully rescuing a bailout package deal that had gone right down to defeat within the Home.
When one of many junior members of his caucus was elected to succeed Bush, Reid turned one of many strongest advocates for Barack Obama’s initiatives, together with his efforts to shepherd Obama’s 2009 stimulus package deal and move what got here to be generally known as Obamacare. It wasn’t all the time straightforward, as Reid had spoken skeptically of Obama throughout the 2008 marketing campaign, and, after he was elected, Obama stored a sure distance from Congress.
“Reid dealt with a lot of the care and feeding of the caucus,” wrote Jonathan Alter in “The Heart Holds: Obama and His Enemies,” “that Obama spoke even to Democratic senators he genuinely favored not more than than two or 3 times a 12 months.”
For his half, Obama praised Reid’s management within the Senate. “Harry has the hardest job in Washington,” Obama informed the New York Occasions in 2010. “He’s accomplished nearly as good a job as anyone may have accomplished. He simply grinds it out.”
A lot maligned by tea get together Republicans, Reid was the highest Republican goal in 2010. He had confronted a tricky problem in 1998 from John Ensign, retaining his seat by a mere 234 votes. Reid received a lift when former state Assemblywoman Sharron Angle gained the 2010 GOP major over more-established Republican figures and shortly started to implode.
“Within the 20 years that I’ve been concerned politically, I’ve by no means had the misfortune of working with such sheer, utter incompetence,” mentioned Chris LaCivita, political director for the Nationwide Republican Senatorial Committee, of Angle’s marketing campaign after Reid gained by 5 share factors.
That election, nonetheless, did depart Reid with a diminished majority and put the Home in Republican fingers. Legislative victories could be tougher to return by. In 2013, in acknowledgment of that actuality, Reid and his fellow Democrats modified the bottom guidelines when it got here to filibusters, enormously limiting their use when it got here to presidential appointments. “The American individuals imagine the Senate is damaged, and I imagine the American individuals are proper,” Reid mentioned. Republican Senate chief Mitch McConnell dubbed it a “energy seize,“ although the Kentucky Republican would make use of these guidelines as soon as Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.
“We had over 100 judges that we couldn’t get permitted, so I had no selection,” Reid informed the New York Occasions a number of years later. “Both Obama’s presidency could be a joke or Obama’s presidency could be one among fruition.”
Democrats misplaced the Senate majority in November 2014. Weeks later, the health aficionado — the boxer had over time turn out to be a marathon runner — sustained a significant eye damage whereas exercising. The injury to his proper eye was so extreme he underwent a number of surgical procedures and sported an eye fixed patch on the Hill.
In March 2015, he introduced he wouldn’t search a sixth Senate time period. There was some hypothesis that he did so as a result of he feared a tricky battle in 2016, however Ralston dismissed that notion. “Reid is loads of issues: Brusque with everybody, grasp of unusual locutions, nasty along with his enemies. However one factor he’s not is afraid,” he wrote.
Subsequent elections indicated Reid retained appreciable affect on Nevada politics, serving to to drag Democrats Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen over the end line in carefully contested Senate elections in 2016 and 2018. Their victories had been seen as a tribute to Reid’s political power.
“It’s the one state within the nation,” Marc Caputo wrote in 2019, “whose U.S. senators are each ladies and the place ladies represent nearly all of the state Legislature and congressional delegation — a triumph of progressivism and political group powered by former Senate Majority Chief Harry Reid’s vaunted political machine.“
Reid additionally remained a critic of President Donald Trump and his outdated foes in Congress. “Persons are underneath the misunderstanding that Trump created the Republican Congress. Flawed. They created him, they created him,” he mentioned in 2017.