Mr. Reid used his place on the Senate Appropriations Committee and his eventual majority management to dam nuclear waste from being deposited in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, a decades-long battle, whereas relentlessly earmarking spending for his state, the place 85 p.c of the land was federally owned when he left workplace. He additionally helped create Nevada’s Nice Basin Nationwide Park, ensured that tens of millions of acres within the state have been protected as nationwide parks or monuments, and made certain that federal funds have been directed to cleansing and preserving Lake Tahoe, which straddles Nevada’s border with California.
Mr. Reid ran Nevada’s Democratic Celebration within the method of an old-style political boss, figuring out which candidates would run up and down the poll, arranging his personal succession and even remaining in cost after his most cancers prognosis and thru the 2018 midterm elections, almost two years after his retirement from the Senate.
He additionally used his clout to raise his state’s function within the presidential nominating course of, shifting Nevada’s caucuses as much as change into one of many early voting states within the Democratic primaries, and in 2016 he quietly helped Mrs. Clinton salvage her nomination there.
A Tough Begin
Harry Mason Reid Jr. was born on Dec. 2, 1939, in Searchlight, a mining outpost that had about 200 residents in his youth. Certainly one of 4 sons of Harry Sr. and Inez (Jaynes Reid), he grew up in privation. His father suffered from melancholy and was typically unemployed. Harry labored at a gasoline station in highschool, incomes sufficient cash to buy his mom a brand new set of false enamel.
Boxing metaphors about Mr. Reid would ultimately change into clichéd — he even named his memoir “The Good Combat” — however he was fairly the pugilist. He obtained into bodily altercations together with his father (when his father would change into violent towards his mom) and together with his future father-in-law (who was uneasy about his daughter marrying Mr. Reid).
To attend highschool, he would hitchhike 40 miles to Henderson, close to Las Vegas, the place he had relations. And it was there that his political profession successfully started. He had a instructor and boxing coach named Mike O’Callaghan, who could be elected governor in 1970 with Mr. Reid as his operating mate.
With monetary help from Nevada businessmen, Mr. Reid graduated from Utah State College, the place he transformed to Mormonism. He then attended legislation college at George Washington College in Washington, D.C., moonlighting as a Capitol Police officer to pay his manner by means of.