Harry Reid, former Senate majority leader and Nevada’s longest-serving member of Congress, has died. He was 82 years old.
Landra Reid said in a statement about her husband, Reid died “peacefully” on Tuesday and was surrounded by friends “after a courageous, four-year battle with pancreatic cancer”.
“Harry was a devout family man and a deeply loyal friend,” she said. “We are so appreciative of the support of so many over the years. We are especially grateful to the doctors and nurses who cared for her. Please know that she meant the world to her.”
He said arrangements for the funeral would be announced in the coming days.
The belligerent former boxer-lawyer was widely acknowledged as one of the toughest bargainers in Congress, a conservative Democrat in an increasingly polarized chamber, who brutally attacked lawmakers from both parties and with this motto :
“I’d rather dance than fight, but I know how to fight.”
In a career spanning 34 years in Washington, Reid carried out behind-the-scenes wrangling and kept the Senate controlled by his party with two presidents—Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama—through a crippling recession and Republican takeover of the House. After the 2010 election.
He retired in 2016 after an accident that left him blind in one eye.
In May 2018 Reid revealed that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was undergoing treatment.
Less than two weeks later, officials and one of their sons, Rory Reid, renamed the busy Las Vegas airport to Harry Reid International Airport. Rory Reid is the former chairman of the Clark County Commission and the Democratic Nevada gubernatorial candidate.
Neither Harry nor Landra Reid attended the ceremony on December 14 at the facility that had been known as McCarran International Airport since 1948, after Pat McCarran, a former U.S. senator from Nevada, and today the U.S. Ranks as one of the 10 busiest airports in the world.
He was known in Washington for his impromptu style, due to his habit of inexplicably hanging up the phone without saying goodbye.
“He used to hang on to me even when I was president,” Obama said in a 2019 tribute video to Reed.
He was often underestimated, most recently in the 2010 elections when he looked like the underdog of Tea Party favorite Sharon Angle. Ambitious Democrats conceded defeat and scrambled for his leadership position. But Reid beat Angle 50 percent to 45 percent and returned to the pinnacle of his power. For Reid, it was a time of legacy.
Reed told The New York Times in December of that year, “I don’t have people saying ‘He’s the greatest speaker,’ ‘He’s beautiful,’ ‘He’s a man about town. “But I don’t really care. I feel very comfortable about my place in history.”
Born in Searchlight, Nevada, to an alcoholic father who killed himself at age 58 and a mother who worked as a laundress in a Bordello, Reid grew up in a small cabin without indoor plumbing— grew up and swam with other children in a pool at a local brothel. He hitchhiked at Basic High School in Henderson, Nev., 40 miles from home, where he met his wife, Landra Gould, who married in 1959. At Utah State University, the couple became members of The Church of Latter-day Saints.
The future senator placed himself in the law school of George Washington University by working nights as a US Capitol police officer.
At the age of 28, Reid was elected to the Nevada Assembly and at age 30 became the youngest lieutenant governor in Nevada history. Gov. Mike O’Callaghan’s running mate in 1970.
Elected to the U.S. House in 1982, Reid served longer in Congress than anyone else in Nevada history. He avoided defeat in the 1998 Senate race, when he defeated Republican John Ensign, then a House member, by 428 votes in a recount in January.
Following his election as Senate Majority Leader in 2007, he was credited with putting Nevada on the political map by moving the state’s caucus in February at the start of the presidential nomination season. This forced each national party to pour resources into a state that was home to the country’s fastest growth in the past two decades, yet had only six votes in the Electoral College. Reed’s extensive network of campaign workers and volunteers helped deliver the state for Obama twice.
In 2016 Obama praised Reid for his work in the Senate, declaring, “I can’t accomplish what I accomplished without him by my side.”
The most influential politician in Nevada for more than a decade, Reid gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the state and was credited with almost single-handedly blocking the construction of a nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain outside Las Vegas. Calling Social Security “one of the great government programs in history”, he often went out of his way to defend social programs that made easy political targets.
Reed supported suicide prevention, often telling the story of his father, a hard-rock minor who took his own life. She sparked controversy in 2010 when she said in a speech on the floor of the Nevada legislature that it was time to end legal prostitution in the state.
Reid’s political sobriety meant that he was never politically secure in his home state, or relied entirely on the increasingly polarized Senate. Democrats complained about their votes on the so-called partial birth abortion ban and the 2002 Iraq War resolution, something Reid later said was his biggest regret in Congress.
He voted against most gun control bills and, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2013, removed a proposed ban on assault weapons from Democrats’ gun control legislation. He said the package would not pass with the restrictions attached.
Reid’s Senate notably followed members of the House, both Republican and Democrat. When then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, pushed Obama’s health care reform through the House in 2009, a different version passed the Senate and the reconciliation process was in place for Republicans to turn it into an election-year weapon. Stumbled for a long time. California Democrats and pitched the law as a major government power grab. Obama signed the measure into law in March 2010. But angered by the recession and inspired by the small-government Tea Party, voters removed the Democrats from the House majority the following year.
Reid picked a Democratic candidate who won the 2016 election to replace her, former Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, and built a political machine in the state that helped Democrats win a series of crucial elections in 2016 and 2018. Of.
While leaving office, he repeatedly lambasted Donald Trump, calling him “a sociopath” at one point and “a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hatred.”
Eventually, Reed encountered one of them before reaching Washington. Then head of the Nevada Gaming Commission investigating organized crime, Reid became the target of a car bomb in 1980. Police called it an attempt to murder. Reid convicted Jack Gordon, who went to prison for trying to bribe him into a sting operation, after Reid took part in illegal attempts to bring new games into the casino in 1978.
After Reid’s lengthy farewell speech on the Senate floor in 2016, Republican Dean Heller, his Nevada ally, declared: “It’s been said that it’s better to be afraid of love, if you can’t have both. And as my colleagues and I While here today and those in the gallery probably agree with me, no person in American politics today embodies that sentiment more than my colleague Harry Mason Reid of Nevada.”