Political journalist Jon Ralston’s book “The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight” provides a look at the life of the Latter-day Saint Democratic senator from Nevada.
Ralston says Reid played a role in the coarsening of the political discourse, including calling Mitt Romney a liar about his taxes.
On this episode of “Deseret Voices,” host McKay Coppins asks Ralston about Reid’s role as a fighter in the American political landscape.
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Note: Transcript edited by Steven Watkins
McKay Coppins: Jon Ralston, thank you for coming on “Deseret Voices.”
Jon Ralston: Thanks for having me, McKay.
MC: So, Jon, you have written a fascinating book about arguably one of the most influential political leaders of the 21st century in the U.S., and you frame the book around a specific idea that’s right in your subtitle: “How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight.” And I want to return to that frame in a minute and kind of interrogate the celebration of being a fighter in American politics and what that means. But before we do that, I think we should start with what made Harry Reid the way that he was.
It does seem, reading your book, that at pretty much every stage of his life and career, he was thriving when he had something or somebody to fight against. And to kind of understand where that combativeness came from, I want you to tell us about his early life in Searchlight, Nevada.
JR: I think it all does go back to Searchlight. And I think that even though Reid, McKay, had a kind of an ambivalent feeling towards Searchlight, he loved it in some ways for or what it gave him, but he hated it and how he grew up in this incredible poverty in this speck in the desert, not far from Las Vegas. And, you know, there’s a picture of the shack in which he grew up in the book. So people get a sense of it, but this was real poverty. And he had every adversity to deal with that you can imagine. There were no doctors in the town. The medical care was horrific. He almost died while he was a kid, from an infection and his brother broke his leg and didn’t have it set and it affected him for the rest of his life. And he had an alcoholic father who was very, very gruff and taciturn. And I think all of this combined to make him a driven human being and willing to drive himself no matter what, not just to get out of Searchlight, but for success.
And I think the real key moment in his was when he had to go to high school And that’s where he was introduced to Mormonism, introduced to his wife when he was very young in high school and introduced to the man who would have the greatest influence of him, of any human being, Michael Callahan, his history teacher there later went on to become governor and essentially made Harry Reid who he was.
MC: Reading about that kind of moment in his early teens where he has to decide, like, “Am I going to go to high school?” was really striking, right? Just to get there, his family didn’t have a car. And he had to hitchhike there. I mean, you can imagine for a lot of, you know, 14-year-old boys, they would just throw up their hands and say, forget it. I’m not going to high school. You know, I’m not going to hitchhike every day to get to high school. But it was almost the obstacle drove him.
And you saw this later at law school, right? He went to college and then law school at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. You have this moment you describe where he’s in bad need of some financial aid, right? He’s married and he’s working a shift as a Capitol police officer to make ends meet, but he can’t, he just can’t pay for everything. I think, what did his car breakdown? Did that happen or he needed a car or something? What I remember is that he went to an administrator at George Washington University and kind of laid out his case for it. Like, “I just need a little bit of help.” And he was told, “I think you should drop out of law school.” And his reaction, I think, says a lot about who he was.
JR: He did not like being told that he couldn’t do something or he couldn’t win. You can’t pass a bill. You can’t beat this opponent. And that was in there. And in that moment, he decided he was going to do anything he could to stay in law school. He managed to scrounge the money up to get his car fixed. And he stayed in law school, of course, and became a lawyer and then his political career was launched from there. Whether you liked Harry Reid or you didn’t, his indomitability was never in question for either friend or foe.
MC: I thought kind of as a funny coda to that story, he refused for years to go back to George Washington University, to the law school, even after he became a senator and kind of a pretty prominent politician, he didn’t want to go back. And then when he finally did agree to go back to accept, was it an honorary doctorate or something, he kind of let them have it and talked about how badly mistreated he was there.
JR: He didn’t spend his entire speech on the course, but he certainly mentioned why it had taken him so long to come back to his alma mater for law school.
“Whether you liked Harry Reid or you didn’t, his indomitability was never in question for either friend or foe.”
— Jon Ralston, Author of Harry Reid biography
MC: So fast forwarding a little bit, you know, he was elected lieutenant governor and then for a period served as head of the Nevada Gaming Commission, which is of course a very high profile and important job in the state and also a difficult one. And at the time, this was in the 1970s, there’s still a, you know, a very notable mob element in Las Vegas. There are people constantly trying to threaten him or buy him off. At one point, a bomb is discovered in his wife’s car. So this is a high pressure job and there’s this amazing story that seems to capture something about Reid when he suspects that someone is trying to bribe him and he calls the FBI.
JR: Yeah, that’s a fascinating story. I think that time of his life when he was the gaming commission chairman and was threatened, that forged him in a way to make it to be as tough as he ended up being. But he believed that he was going to be bribed. And so they set up this meeting in his law office and the FBI had the place wired for sound. And as soon as the bribe was announced, the FBI was supposed to burst in. They couldn’t because Reid had accidentally locked the door and his law partner had to come over and unlock the door. And as they burst in, in what was somewhat uncharacteristic for Reid, even though he was, as everybody knows the cliché, a boxer, but he kind of histrionically grabbed the guy and said, “You threatened to bribe me, you SOB,” and had to be pulled off of the person. There are people at the time who thought that Reid was just acting, but I don’t think so. From my conversation with him before he died, he was really, really offended by what was going on.
MC: You know, it’s funny. So in the various FBI investigations and surveillance of the mob, they would eavesdrop on the conversations they had about various Nevada politicians and their nickname for Harry Reid was Clean Face or Mr. Clean. And that kind of alluded to his reputation. He was not somebody who was known to even flirt with taking bribes. He was vigilant about protecting his integrity. So do you think in that moment he was offended by just the suggestion, the assumption that he would take a bribe?
JR: He was offended and he was offended by the clumsiness of it too and how he was approached and that they thought he would actually do this. And because again, whatever criticism might exist of Harry Reid, and there was a lot of that in the book, his reputation for rectitude on the gaming commission was pretty high and he was praised for it. But let me just correct you in a minor way. The Mr. Clean or Clean Face was what one of the mobsters caught on tape referred to him as that later sparked investigations of Reid. And actually what I found out in my research for the book, and this surprised me, I had no idea, that nickname was originally given to him by Hank Greenspun, who was the owner of the Las Vegas Sun, which was an ally of Reid’s, and an editorial, he called him Mr. Clean. That was picked up by this mobster and that’s one of the reasons people knew that he was talking about Harry Reid. But that was his reputation in the state and on the gaming commission as Mr. Clean. And even though that was his reputation, and I don’t know if you want to talk about this or not, he was later investigated several times, by the way, and for a lot longer than people know, for taking money.
MC: This was one of the revelations in your book that there was, for really years and years, even after he was elected to the Senate and came to Washington, he was still being secretly investigated by the FBI. Did the FBI ever find any evidence that he took money inappropriately or was controlled by the mob or other unsavory elements?
JR: You know, I think the answer to that question is no. And I talked to a longtime federal prosecutor who was there at the time and for a long time afterward. And he said, “John, the people who were involved in this, they would have loved to have had the head of the gaming commission or a congressman as a pelt for their office.” And so if they had him, they would have gotten him. But there were a lot of different allegations they investigated. And as you said, into his second term in Congress, which I did not know and nothing ever came of any of it. But I think that affected his view of the FBI for many, many years. And it’s why he sided with some people, including his good friend, a former federal judge named Harry Claiborne, who was eventually impeached by the U.S. Senate when the FBI was investigating them.
MC: At the same time as Reid is kind of, you know, working hard in college and law school and eventually climbing the ladder, he finds religion. And he eventually converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There is a key scene early in your book kind of a moment that drew him to the church. Tell me what it was and generally the role that faith played in Reid’s life.
JR: Religion was a little bit of a bone of contention for Reid with his fiancée because her family was very Jewish and her dad was very, very upset that she was going to marry outside of the faith, essentially said, you’ll be dead to me, eventually came back. But one thing is that Reid had such a contentious relationship at home with his father and there were lots of fighting there that when he boarded with a Mormon family in Utah and one of his friends told me that he clearly remembered Reid coming up from the basement apartment and seeing this family, this Mormon family having dinner and having a jovial time around dinner and a prayerful time around dinner that he decided then that he wanted that in his life. But what was interesting is when Landra decided to convert too, when she had been touched by the church a little bit in her job that she was working at up in Utah, she basically said, one of the things we decided after what happened with my father was that religion, we were going to have religion be a commonality. We were not going to let it be something that divided us. So it was much for that reason as any, I don’t think either of them knew a lot about the religion until they decided, look, this seems like a great religion. Let’s become part of it.
Now later in life, McKay, and I didn’t know much about this, but Landra talked to me about it and so did others, Reid became very devout, much more than people realize. He taught Sunday school. He read scripture very, very frequently. And so he really believed in the church and even some of his good friends like Dick Durbin, you know, talked to him about it and said, “You don’t really believe all that stuff, do you, Harry?” And Harry said, “Yes, I do.” And Durbin, while he couldn’t relate to it, respected Reid’s commitment to the faith.
MC: In any of your conversations with Reid or with the people around him, did you ever hear of, you know, any kind of tension between his faith and his politics?
JR: I think he felt the tension and I think people around him who supported him and were fairly prominent in the Mormon community here were very, very distressed as he moved up the political ladder and became more partisan that became a problem for him with conservative church members. And it became very, very ugly. And I described some of the incidents in the church with leaflets being put on cars in a church parking lot and Reid being portrayed as the devil on Halloween during trunk or treats, as they called it, celebration on Halloween. And so I think Reid was a master of compartmentalization as a lot of, I think, elected officials are. They can separate things. And so it wasn’t an internal conflict for him, but it was for members of the church.
MC: Yeah, and I do think it’s interesting that for all the friction that it caused in maybe his religious community and some of the nastiness he experienced, it never alienated him from his faith, right? And even later in life, he gave a famous speech at Brigham Young University about how his religion makes him a Democrat. And that’s seen, among a lot of more left-leaning Latter-day Saints that I’ve talked to, that’s seen as kind of a totemic speech that’s often referenced and cited. So he remained to the end a faithful member of the church from what you can tell.
JR: Absolutely. As I said, he taught Sunday school and he and Landra read scripture together at home. You know, while everyone else was on K Street, he was there at home reading with Landra.
MC: When he was elected to the Senate in the Reagan era, Reid was essentially a moderate to almost conservative Democrat. He was adamantly pro-life. He had an “A” rating from the NRA. Obviously, once he got to Washington and started climbing the party ladder, he became steadily more liberal on a range of issues. And I’m curious as somebody who has covered him for decades, who’s gone through all of his papers, who’s talked to him, what you make of that ideological evolution. Was it sincere, was it a political calculation or like a lot of these things, it was a mix of both.
JR: I think it was a mixture of things with Reid. I think some of it was out of political convenience because he had to do certain things as he became higher and higher in Democratic leadership, although he never changed being pro-life. And he never really changed being pro-gun even though he had a falling out with the NRA. I think he also, he says this too, I grew up in Searchlight, I didn’t know anything about anything, sure I learned after I left, one of these things that he really changed on was gay marriage to the point where he was adamantly against it and then he actually ended up speaking at one of his gay staffers’ weddings which was a very moving story that staffer told me. And so I think he evolved in some ways in his thinking. And he said to me, you know, anyone who doesn’t change based on experience and is intellectually static is not really thinking. So, listen, some of the stuff that seems clear to me that he changed for different reasons than principle, that he thought he had to do certain things. I mean, some of the speeches he gave on immigration back in the ’90s and the late ’80s could have been given by Donald Trump or Stephen Miller. I mean, I’m not exaggerating and I put some of those in the book and you know, Landra, you know, yelled at him once finally when he gave one of these speeches and you know, my parents came to this country illegally, I believe, and you’re saying this about them too and that was a chastening moment for him and he became as you know, a big advocate for immigration and for the Dream Act and for other kinds of things. So, I think there are different reasons why he changed positions, a combination of all the things you cited. Some principle, some expedience.
MC: Once he gets to the Senate, he distinguishes himself as a very adept legislator, but also somebody who is very good at developing, cultivating strategic relationships with different senators. He gets himself on the Ways and Means Committee early on in Congress. Eventually he becomes Senate majority leader and as Senate majority leader, kind of rules his conference with an iron fist in a way, but never with overt, you know, loud threats or belligerent bullying. I’m curious what lessons you take from politics and leadership from his rise to power and the way he wielded power in the sun.
JR: Well, first of all, Reid was the kind of guy who thought, not unlike others, but maybe unlike some, that if you get power, you should use it. And you should use it for the benefit of your party, for the country, for your friends, whoever could benefit that he thought he could use his power to benefit. So he was going to use it. He was very strategic, as you mentioned, becoming an appropriator early on, knowing that sending money back to a small state with no power generally would be a big deal. That helped him essentially kill a nuclear waste dump proposal that was a not in my backyard thing thrust on Nevada because we were such a small state.
But, I think was underestimated about Harry Reid because of his public milquetoast somewhat, sometimes awkward, often gaff prone public presence that privately he developed relationships with people in amazing ways. He learned, he was a guy who loved to learn about other people and he would remember the wives’ names, the kids’ names, where the kids were going to school. And that’s really how you become a great legislator is developing these relationships sub rosa that pay off at critical times. Some of that comes out in the book, especially with a guy like Joe Lieberman, who was almost ousted from the caucus and was essentially saved by Reid.
But Reid also loved to fight. He did love to fight in a way that I think he saw after he left. And remember the interviews I did with him were all in 2021. He finally agreed to do the book only about six months before he died. I think he was disappointed at that time, even though he wouldn’t say it, with Chuck Schumer and the approach that Schumer took. He loved Schumer personally. They loved each other. They were opposites in many ways. But I think he thought that you had to be more pugilistic. People use that metaphor all the time with Reid because he was a boxer, but he could only fight if he had the votes. And so he assiduously reached out to people in his caucus and — it was the iron fist and the velvet glove — this was a classic example of that with Harry Reid. I mean there were very few times that he wasn’t able to get the votes for something that he needed and that is laid out in the book in the stimulus package in 2009 and then with Obamacare, which, you know, barely passed. And I think even the president, when I interviewed him for the book, credited Reid. And Reid wanted Obama to stay out of that, by the way. Like, “You do your good thing, you gave great speeches, let me handle this.” And he was somewhat irked, even though he and Obama had this incredible relationship when the president or his staff would step into what he thought was his territory, and it was. He just was able to accomplish stuff because he developed these relationships.
MC: When you think about how Reid loved to fight as a senator, does a particular episode or story come to mind?
JR: The Obamacare fight, you know, which was lost several times before it was won, he believed in that. And I think a lot of that was before what I alluded to earlier was the health care or lack thereof that he had during his childhood and thought that health care was a right that every American should have and that galvanized him on this. But he used to, even if he lost at certain points in Obamacare, and this was a general philosophy and his staff was despondent. He was basically, we’ll get him next time guys, don’t give up, that battle’s over, let’s just keep going. And without his relentlessness, Obamacare would not be the law today.
MC: So one of the people that he most famously fought with was the subject of a book that I wrote, Mitt Romney. And there is this famous episode between the two of them from the 2012 election that I want to get into with you in a second, because in a way, I think your book and my book both kind of compliment each other telling that story from two different perspectives. But first I want to ask you, just In general, what was Harry Reid’s perception of Mitt Romney?
JR: So I think Mitt Romney epitomized what Harry Reid really did not like and at a visceral level. And that was someone that he didn’t think had worked hard to become a self-made man, but essentially was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. And I think that’s part of the reason he didn’t like George W. Bush either. So I just think he didn’t like that kind of person.
Now, you know, Mitt Romney and Harry Reid, under different circumstances, could have been friends.
MC: It’s one of the strangest things about that relationship, because I remember talking to people around Mitt Romney saying they just didn’t understand the antipathy between the two men. Obviously, both Latter-day Saints, probably the two most prominent Latter-day Saint politicians in America. They didn’t have any personal history that would have caused them to have bad blood between the two of them. But, the well was poisoned and Harry Reid clearly viewed Mitt Romney as somebody who was born with privilege and just had a totally different background and upbringing. I think Mitt Romney saw Harry Reid as extraordinarily partisan to a fault.
All of that brings us though to this episode in the 2012 election. Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination. Harry Reid famously asserts that Mitt Romney, according to a source of his, did not pay taxes at all for 10 years. Talk a little about why Harry Reid made this allegation, where it came from, and why he didn’t really back away from it even after it was debunked.
JR: So this is something that Harry Reid was very frustrated about at first. He heard, and in Mark Halperin, Jon Heilemann’s book, they said it was Jon Huntsman Sr., which he all but confirmed for me when I interviewed him.
MC: Jon Huntsman Sr. who told Harry, “read this,” right?
JR: That’s right. And the Huntsmans and Romneys famously did not like each other. And so he gets his information and he goes to the White House and the DNC and says, you should use this. This is going to decide the election because ordinary Americans will be furious about this, but they didn’t want to use it. He wouldn’t divulge his source. And he told his staff about this and said, “I’m going to go out and say it.” And his staff kept saying, “Don’t do this, Senator. You don’t have proof of this. Don’t just say this.” And finally during one interview, he said, “By the way, you guys,” and just made this allegation and that’s where it first broke.
And he changed the story a few times. First, it was Mitt Romney never paid any taxes, then it was 10 years. and, but Reid, Romney, as you say, thought he may have been hopelessly partisan. Reid was less partisan, although of course he was a partisan being the Democratic leader, as he was just ruthless in essentially doing almost anything and more than most people would do, to win.
One fascinating thing I found in the archives that I knew nothing about is, after he made this allegation, someone on his staff smartly said, you know, Reid was pretty wealthy by then. Let’s, just in case Romney says, “You release your taxes too.” Let’s see what his tax rate was. And much to their horror, they found out that Reid’s tax rate was pretty low despite being a multimillionaire. And Reid’s response is something like, well, we’re not going to release that. And that never became an issue really publicly, but just the amount of research that was done. And those documents were like one of those, I had many of these moments, McKay, reading Reid’s massive archive: Wow. You know, that is really fascinating. But of course, the most telling thing was after the election when he does the famous interview with Dana Bash and do you regret that? And Reid’s response is, “Well, Romney didn’t win, did he?” And Reid believed, believed to his core that him doing that won the election for Obama.
MC: Well, so I think that gets at something interesting about Reid, right? He obviously believed it was incredibly important for the country that Barack Obama win reelection. And so he justified, and this is not, you know, an uncommon rationalization you hear in politics. He justified what he was doing to Mitt Romney as ends justify the means type situation.
What’s interesting is that after Obama won, and after he made that comment in that interview saying, “Well, Romney didn’t win, did he?” Essentially letting himself off the hook for the lie. He was diagnosed with cancer and he asked for a meeting with Mitt Romney.
Mitt and Ann Romney assume that Reid is going to apologize. So they agree to the meeting and they sit down with him and they start talking and Reid apologizes, but not for the lie. He apologizes for the flippant comment he made in the interview afterward for saying, “Well Romney didn’t win, did he?” And what’s funny is Mitt, I think, wrote about this in his journal.
Ann is sitting there and starts to realize that he’s not going to apologize for the actual lie and starts to kind of get agitated and squirm in her seat and Mitt can feel his wife getting angry and he’s worried there’s going to be a big confrontation and so he just kind of says, “Don’t worry about it, we’re good” and they leave. And afterward Ann turns to Mitt and says, “How could you have let him off the hook like that?” And what he said was, you know, “I was just looking at him, he was, he’s old, he’s sick.” And he said, “I just kind of felt bad for him. And I was like, there’s no point in dragging this out.” But it did leave a pretty bad taste in the Romneys mouth about Reid. And I think it’s fair to say that they never really buried the hatchet even at the end there.
We should note for the audience here that you also were a character in this whole drama. You are, of course, a legendary chronicler in Nevada politics. You were writing your column for the Las Vegas Sun and you wrote a piece criticizing Reid for his handling of all of this. Can you tell us what happened after that?
JR: Yeah, it was pretty lacerating column. And then, you know, I made the comparison to Joe McCarthy and the column was spiked by the owner of the Sun, who had never done anything like this before. It was Hank Greenspun’s, who I referred to earlier, son, Brian Greenspun, who was very close to Reid and helped him in his campaigns and said to me, on more than one occasion, he wants to help Harry and this kind of thing. He killed the column. And that was the last column I ever wrote for the Sun. And I was determined I would never write another column for the Sun. And a few days later, I signed a severance agreement with Brian Greenspun.
I eventually published the column though when I was out on my own. And listen, McKay, that was the only time for some reason that I was invited on almost every Fox show. Listen, my relationship with Harry Reid was quite, quite the roller coaster. And I’m sure he was absolutely fine with Brian firing me and there’s a lot of correspondence.
MC: Well, in fact, I was going to say you found correspondence in Reid’s papers that showed his staff kind of celebrating your departure from the Sun over this, right?
JR: Yeah, I mean, listen, Harry Reid tried to get me fired several times. Not so much from the Sun as he did from the TV station. It was also owned by a very close friend of his. By the way, one of the things underestimated about Reid is how he strategically used these relationships with owners of media outlets and did that make a difference in some of his close races? It might have. So again, his strategic vision. But yeah, he tried to get me fired several times.
And I used the line in the book about some things that he did. With him it wasn’t personal, it was just business. This was a little bit more personal because Landra was very upset about some columns I had written about Reid using his influence to help his sons get jobs in Las Vegas. So when he summoned me to his office to finally agree to do the book that I had wanted to do for so long that his line to me resonates still many years later, McKay, he said, “Jon, you and I have something in common.” And I said, “What’s that, Senator?” And he said, “We’re both survivors.” And I wanted to say, but I did not say, because I wanted to do the book, “I survived despite your efforts, Senator.” But he said, “You know, I was never mad at you myself, but it was the family. I didn’t like that you wrote about my family, blah blah, but forget all that. I know you’re the only person who can write the true story about me. I won’t like it all. Just don’t go after my family in the book.” So, I knew how Reid operated very well and it never surprised me that he tried to get me fired. Not for a second.
MC: OK, so one of the other big episodes that I think will contribute to his legacy is his decision as the Senate majority leader in 2013 to invoke what was known in Washington as the nuclear option. He essentially eliminated the 60-vote requirement to end a filibuster for presidential nominations, other than nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court, basically paving the way for President Obama to get a bunch of nominations through the Senate that Republicans were blocking.
Now, he had a series of justifications for this maneuver at the time, but I think 12 years later, in hindsight, it’s pretty hard to ignore the cascading effects of that decision in the U.S. Senate. His decision to invoke the nuclear option cleared the way for Republicans when they were in control of the Senate to get rid of the 60-vote requirement for Supreme Court nominations and now we have a very conservative Supreme Court who I’m sure Harry Reid disagrees with quite a bit.
In your conversations with him, did he have any regrets about invoking the nuclear option or did he have any response to critics who say that he really damaged the institution of the Senate with that move?
JR: You know, we talked about it several times and I can tell you that he had no regrets, like not even a scintilla of a regret about doing it. The only thing he said he ever regretted that he did in Washington, D.C., was voting for the Iraq War. He said that was a mistake. This was not. He said the Obama presidency would have been lost if he hadn’t done it, that he had to do this to get all those judges confirmed and that the Senate had changed, that there were unprecedented number of filibusters.
Now I think the best explanation for it was provided by one of his key staffers who said, “Let’s face it, he thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the president. It never occurred to him that Trump would win and that then he would do this.” There is another argument that was made by some of his staffers and by some others too, McKay, Mitch McConnell would have done what he did, whether Reid had paved the way as you put it or said the president or not, which Reid and McConnell were very similar in that they were both killers and willing to get where they wanted to go even if they had to push the boundaries of ethics and propriety. There may be some truth to that.
MC: To me, that’s kind of emblematic of the whole problem in Washington, which is that both sides are constantly suspecting that the other side will do the worst possible thing to hold on, to expand their power, that everybody is operating in bad faith, and then that justifies operating in bad faith themselves, right? Like, it’s this kind of self-perpetuating cycle that both parties engage in all the time.
And, you know, I’m not really surprised that Reid didn’t make some kind of big deathbed mea culpa about invoking the nuclear option, but I am a little skeptical of the kind of justifications that you see some of his allies and supporters making. When in retrospect, you know, it clearly did, if nothing else, contribute to the pattern that would lead us to where we are now, right?
JR: Yeah, listen, I think even though Reid did not take responsibility or at least much responsibility for the dysfunction in the U.S. Senate and on Capitol Hill that he was part and parcel of and should have taken more responsibility for. He was much less upset about the criticism from Republicans and from the trolling that he got once Trump got those Supreme Court justices in place than he was by his own Democratic colleagues, essentially, who had voted with him to invoke it in 2013, suddenly as he put it, forgetting that they supported me in what I did.
And you know even Chuck Schumer in the book — and this is going to surprise some people — did essentially “I told you so” on that whole thing, saying he wasn’t for it. But along with Harry, because Harry was the leader that is going to bother some people. I would guess probably Schumer for saying it to me. But that’s a different issue. But listen, yeah, listen, this dog eat dog, bad faith, complete polarization that has occurred now in D.C. and all everyone likes in the good old days the senators used to eat together and bipartisan way and they were friends and it doesn’t exist anymore. To not say that Harry Reid is partly responsible for that kind of attitude is just ridiculous. Of course he was.
MC: OK, I have to ask you, this is kind of a side quest in this conversation but I have to ask you about UFOs.
In 2007, Harry Reid initiated the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to study essential UFOs. And he steered a lot of money toward this program, which was operating in secret for many years, and this is where a lot of the reporting that we’ve seen in the last eight years about evidence of UFOs has come from. It started with this program that Harry Reid created. And there has always been a cynical part of me that suspected that Reid was steering money toward this kind of pet project at the urging of his billionaire friend, Robert Bigelow, and that the leaks that we’ve seen since then are basically about justifying the expense of the program more than alerting the public to the threat of UFOs. But I will say, reading your book, it does seem like Reid genuinely believed in UFOs.
JR: I think he did. I’m not sure if he believed in little green men. but he believed that there were UFOs, that there were things that were being essentially covered up in the past. He didn’t quite know what to make of them and he was a little uncertain — because I pushed him on this a little bit in one of our interviews — but one of the best things was talking to Dick Durbin about it, who as you know, was very close to Reid and before he left the Senate said, “Dick, I really believe in this program and I really believe you’ve got to make sure that this stays funded.” He thought Reid was nuts on this. And so he basically said to me, “I promised him I’d do it. And I did it for a year. I funneled money, but that was it,” is what he told me. And so, did Reid believe in UFOs? Yes. But what exactly did he believe in? I’m not sure.
MC: I want to now circle back to the subtitle of your book, “How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight.” To me, it’s kind of an interesting Rorschach test that subtitle and knowing you a little bit and following your very good work for a long time, I assume that was kind of intentional, right? If you are a partisan Democrat who is a big Harry Reid fan, you probably see that subtitle as a celebration, right? If you are a Harry Reid detractor, you might read something else into remaking the rules and showing Democrats how to fight.
To me, there are kind of two different ways to read his legacy. I’m gonna go through both of them and get your kind of response to them. So in the epilogue of your book, I actually have it right here. You can tell that I actually read it, Jon, because the spine is cracked and it’s kind of falling apart here.
JR: Appreciate that, McKay. Thank you.
MC: As somebody who’s gone on a book tour and done a lot of interviews with people I could tell I’ve not read the book, I thought I would tell you.
JR: Yeah, right.
MC: At Harry Reid’s funeral in 2022 an array of former presidents and senators, politicians show up to pay their respects. Barack Obama speaks at the funeral. And this is what he says about Harry Reid. He says, “He didn’t believe in high-falutin’ theories or rigid ideologies. He thought most people make decisions based on their life experience, based on their immediate needs of their families, based on their own self-interest no matter what they may tell themselves. And as a result, Harry met people where they were, not where he wanted them to be, and he was willing to cut deals, even with folks he didn’t agree with or particularly like.”
Now that is one way to read his career. And I think there’s some truth to that and I think it’s fair. The other way to read his career gets at this kind of phenomenon that’s really manifested in our politics in the past decade, but really, throughout the century, which is this celebration, even fetishization of fighting in American politics, right? We see this on both sides. President Trump’s admirers, his supporters, will excuse almost any behavior on his part by saying, “Well, he’s fighting for me. At least he’s a fighter.”
And I think as a description of Harry Reid as a person, as a political figure, it’s very clear he was a fighter and he was a very good, skilled fighter. But I wonder if, as you look at Harry Reid’s career, his legacy, if you have any kind of ambivalence about the celebration of his kind of instinct to fight all the time, I mean, is that a good thing in our politics or has that actually been one of the factors that’s kind of led to this ruinous division that characterizes our politics right now?
JR: So, I guess I have to plead guilty during my career of being one of the people who through my reporting on him and writing columns about him, maybe this is the wrong word to use, maybe it’s not, celebrated his ruthlessness and his willingness to push the boundaries, to get what he thought he needed to get. He was ruthless. He was utterly, utterly ruthless. He was a win at all costs guy. I think, though, and there was a duality to him that I hope comes across in the book. Part of it is what Obama said. I think Obama got him and Obama’s description of him is very, very apt. But Reid also trampled over a lot of people and a lot of norms in his career in pursuit of what he thought, or convinced himself, or was convinced, were righteous goals. And even using his power to help his friends or his family, in addition to helping the country or the party, he was willing to go to lengths, I think, that others would not have.
He needs to take some responsibility for the coarsening of the discourse, for the willingness to go on the Senate floor and call Mitt Romney a liar about his taxes and say this kind of stuff on the Senate floor and to really do whatever he thought he needed to do or say to win.
And there are a lot of people who will — I’ll use the word again — mostly partisans, who will celebrate that. They’ll say it’s OK. It’s a lesser offense than what the other side would have done. Or they’re doing it. We need to do it too. And so we’ve spiraled downward in this way. Now, of course, anybody who knows anything about history knows that in different periods in American history, much worse stuff happened, either with presidential candidates or leaders of the party. So it’s hard to put it in perspective. And I myself, even when I was writing about Reid, and even though he sometimes went after me personally in my employment, I had mixed feelings about him. But I will admit to you that I admired his ability to get certain things done, even if the tactics or strategy he used might have been anathema to me and others. He was willing to really go to great lengths. I mean, just real quickly just, he openly admitted that he threatened bankers who were going to close down a key project on the Strip. He admitted and thought there was nothing wrong with it because he wanted to save jobs. He openly admitted that he threatened the head of the huge utility here and the energy to shut down their coal plants because he believed in clean energy and he thought that was part of his job. Which, you know, many people will see as being out of bounds. But he just, he convinced himself in whatever moral infrastructure he had in his mind that this was OK because of the end result.
MC: The book has a ton of fascinating stories. It is called “The Game Changer,” and whether you read it as a hero’s journey or a cautionary tale or both, I think people who are interested in politics and in Harry Reid and kind of the country he helped create will find a lot to be interested in. So, Jon, thank you so much for coming on “Deseret Voices.”
JR: McKay, thanks for taking all the time and thanks for reading the book.