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his story begins, as it must, in Searchlight. ¶ It begins with a boy, born Dec. 2, 1939, in a dusty speck — population 250 — known primarily for its mines and its whores. The boy’s childhood home, made of railroad ties soaked in creosote, has no indoor toilet or hot water. And the town has 13 brothels but not a single church. ¶ The boy’s father is a miner, though the good work dried up decades before. His mother does laundry for the brothels and casinos. Searchlight is, as the boy would describe it many years later, “not a gathering spot for Indian or animal. There is nothing there. Nothing.” ¶ From this town of hard knocks and sunbaked dreams, the boy grows up to be the most politically powerful man in Nevada’s history: Harry Reid.

Sen. Harry Reid leans on a stack of documents pertaining to campaign finance reform during a Capitol Hill news conference.(Associated Press)

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It was at Basic High where Reid found a mentor — the new history teacher. His name was Mike O’Callaghan.

“I can remember the first time I saw him. I was a senior in high school. I felt I was a big shot on campus — student body president, played football — and we’re waiting on the first day of school and here comes this new teacher who walked with a limp,” Reid said. “We thought, ‘We’ll take care of him.’ ”

Soon after, one of the bigger kids beat up a smaller one, and O’Callaghan chal-lenged the big kid to a fight.

“O’Callaghan hit him so hard, once, and he went crashing to the floor,” Reid said. “O’Callaghan admitted later he thought he’d killed him.”

The teacher became the kids’ hero after that, but he would go on to be much more: governor of Nevada.

“He was the most honest man I ever met. He went to Mass every day,” Reid said. “He was a person who was fairly foul-mouthed, if you want the truth, but he was indisputably honest about everything.”

When Reid was about to head off to col-lege in Utah, O’Callaghan arranged for a scholarship for him from Henderson businessmen. During those college years, Reid eloped with his high school sweet-heart, Landra, a quiet force and constant companion (with whom he has enjoyed a 60-year love affair).

When he needed a job while going to law school at George Washington Uni-

versity, O’Callaghan demanded that then-Congressman Walter Baring give Reid a patronage job as a Capitol police officer after Baring had written to Reid saying no such jobs were available.

“O’Callaghan picked up the phone and he laid into him. ‘What is wrong with you? This is one of my prized students ever. You insulted him, you insulted me, and I’m tell-ing you, congressman, he’s coming back here and he better have a job,’” Reid re-called. “So I had a job. I was a policeman.”

That’s when Reid became friends with Jim Bilbray. Like Reid, Bilbray was a law student from Nevada moonlighting as a Capitol policeman, and the two became close, babysitting each other’s children and studying together.

“He was a great studier,” said Bilbray, who would later replace Reid in the House of Representatives after Reid moved up to the Senate. “I never knew anybody who worked as hard as Harry Reid, and that was true when he was in law school just as much as how he is in Congress.”

Reid flew back to Nevada to take the bar exam early, a few months before graduat-ing from law school. Money was tight, and the family couldn’t afford to wait nine months for him to take the exam the fol-lowing year. O’Callaghan showed up at the airport and met him with a $50 bill.

“I’d never seen a $50 bill,” Reid said. “That’s just who he was.”

Upon graduating, Reid moved back to Las Vegas to practice law, taking a num-

ber of big-ticket cases while gambling on smaller ones brought forward by prosti-tutes or drunks no one else would repre-sent. In 1970, he was elected Nevada’s lieu-tenant governor alongside O’Callaghan, the new governor.

Instead of running again in 1974, Reid took a shot at the U.S. Senate. He lost by fewer than 700 votes to former Gov. Paul Laxalt. The next year he ran for mayor of Las Vegas and lost by a bigger margin.

It seemed his luck had run out, until O’Callaghan appointed him chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission in 1977. Reid faced a tumultuous five years trying to clean the mobbed-up casinos, helping the FBI conduct a bribery sting while en-during threats against him and his family — including a failed attempt to blow up their station wagon.

Reid said he thought about calling it quits, but O’Callaghan was there to talk him down. Reid credits the former gover-nor with demonstrating true honesty and loyalty.

“He said, ‘Everything is secondary to loyalty. It doesn’t matter how smart somebody is, what a good résumé they have, what kind of education they have, their experience. The only thing that matters when you have someone work-ing for you is loyalty.’ And I’ve tried to do that,” Reid said.

It’s why he lets his staff take whatever time off is appropriate to juggle their kids’ schedules or even bring them into the of-fice, he said.

Talk to a Reid staffer, former or current, or someone who knows him well, and they’ll note loyalty as one of the qualities he values above all else.

“I think that you’ll find there’s an in-credible loyalty to Sen. Reid because he was such a good boss,” said Stephen Kru-pin, a former Reid staffer and now a se-nior speechwriter for President Barack Obama. “I think that for Reid’s staff this is true across the D.C. office and the state of-fice. Everyone feels like family.”

n n n

When Reid first came to the Hill to work as a Capitol police officer, he didn’t have a particularly striking impression of the building he would later serve in for 34 years.

REID, CONTINUED ON PAGE 18

is political career would span a lifetime, from state assem-blyman in Carson City to Washington, D.C., where he would serve for 30 years as a U.S. senator and as the Democratic leader for the last 12. He would pick fights and make deals. He would speak his mind, softly. He would pass legislation that would shape the future of his state as well as the nation.

¶ But the story begins in Searchlight, and, as Reid acknowledged in a recent farewell speech, “It is a long ways from Searchlight to the United States Senate.” ¶ The town had no high school, so he hitchhiked 40 miles into Henderson and stayed with relatives during the week to attend Basic High School. He didn’t talk about home. ¶ “It was a crummy town. It was a place of prostitutes. Why would I want to talk about that?” Reid said, sitting in his office in the U.S. Capitol. But he added that, as a young man, he heard a speech from “Roots” author Alex Haley that changed his mind. Haley said to be proud of who you are and where you come from. ¶ “It took me awhile to accept Searchlight, but once I did, I did it wholeheartedly,” Reid said. “You can’t run from who you are.”

“It is no exaggeration to say that America wouldn’t have accomplished all we have these past eight years — or the past three decades — without Harry Reid. He is as tough and shrewd as they come, unafraid to do the right thing, and has never stopped fighting for folks who can’t fight for themselves.” — President Barack Obama

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Elected to Nevada State Assembly at age 28, and served until 1970. Reid

quickly built a reputation as a consumer advocate and

introduced the state’s first air-pollution

legislation.

Harry Reid to retire from the

U.S. Senate

Political moment

Personal event

Political setback

Change in position

1972His father, a miner who suffered from untreated depression, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun.

When Congress shut down discussion about stor-ing high-level radioactive waste anywhere but a

desert site just 100 miles outside Las Vegas in 1987, newly elected Sen. Harry Reid and his colleagues in the Nevada Congressional delegation began an earnest, seemingly hopeless battle against Yucca Mountain.

Decades later, Reid and his state appear to have won. As Nevada’s most vocal and powerful op-ponent of the repository plan, Reid displayed the maneuvers and tactics that made him both feared and respected throughout his years in the Senate.

In yellow are key dates in Yucca Mountain history, constructed from news accounts and conversations with key players, with highlights of how Reid fought the proj-ect. The timeline is not intended to be comprehensive, but instructive of Reid’s influence.

Asso

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“It was kind of a big building,” Reid said. “It was all new.”

In 1982, he set aside his two failed bids for public office and set his sights on the House of Repre-sentatives.

“I just figured that people thought they had me buried, and I was going to prove them wrong,” Reid said.

He won that race to represent Nevada’s 1st Congressional Dis-trict, serving two terms before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1986. And, since then, Repub-licans and Democrats agree Reid has been a tireless advocate for the state.

“If you had an epitaph for him, it’d be that everything he has done points to the protection of Ne-vada,” said Democratic Congress-woman Dina Titus, representing the 1st District after defying Reid’s wishes and running for that office in 2012. (Reid had hoped to install Ruben Kihuen, now the represen-tative-elect to the 4th District.)

Nevada’s other senator, Repub-lican Dean Heller, said in a recent speech from the Senate floor that while he and Reid have had their differences, “there is no stronger partner to serve the state of Ne-vada.” They worked together on Nevada-specific issues, like pre-serving Lake Tahoe and oppos-ing Yucca Mountain becoming a repository for nuclear waste. “My hope is that we have sent a mes-sage not only to all Nevadans, but to everyone across this country that two people that you can tell have different opinions can work well together (and) get things done for their constituents when both are willing.”

Yet Heller has called another of Reid’s signature environmen-tal accomplishments in Nevada — getting President Obama to designate Basin and Range Na-tional Monument, a 700,000-acre conservation area — a “disgrace.” Through whatever opposition, Reid has fought to keep public the 87 percent of Nevada’s lands owned by the federal government, and promoted the development of renewable energy.

“The whole environmental piece of his agenda has kind of changed the face of Nevada,” Titus said. “I think there’s a very, very close connection to his soul there.”

Reid’s favorite fight in the Senate? Passing Obamacare. “It was dead. I didn’t have the votes, many times, at least half a dozen times. It was so hard,” Reid said, “but we were able to do it.”

Reid detailed why fighting tooth-and-nail to pass the Affordable Care Act was so personal for him in his farewell speech from the Senate floor. He talked about how his moth-er had been hit in the face with a softball as a young woman in Search-light and gradually lost her teeth, and about working long hours at a service station to save up the $250 to buy her a set of false ones. He also shared that his dad, who struggled with depres-sion, killed himself when Reid was a young man.

“As I learned more about my dad,” Reid said, “I know how important health care would have been for him.”

Starting in the 1990s, Reid and Democratic Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas would annually debate an 1872 mining law that allowed min-ing companies to forego an estimat-ed $100 million to $200 million in annual royalty payments to the fed-eral government. Bumpers would bring up changing the law — once calling it “a license to steal and a co-lossal scam” — while Reid fought to keep it in place.

“I beat him every time, and those were close votes. One time I lost, because Kent Conrad changed his vote, and I went to Kent and said, ‘You can’t do that to me. Do you want me voting against your agri-cultural stuff?’ ” Reid said. “So he changed his vote, and that’s what Bumpers always used to say. ‘I beat you once, you son of a bitch, but you got somebody to switch a vote.’ So that was invigorating.”

Other accomplishments happened

outside of the legislative process. In his farewell speech, Reid touted how in 2009, he called the heads of banks and the leaders of foreign countries to help save the CityCenter project on the Strip. MGM Mirage, a 50 percent partner in the project, was struggling to secure financing at the time. “I in-terceded in that. I did some things that probably a lot of people wouldn’t do, but I did it because I thought it was very important that operation didn’t shut down,” Reid said.

At the time, ethics expert Meredith McGehee told the Associated Press that she didn’t believe the calls broke any ethics rules, but she urged the senator to be transparent to avoid the appearance that he used his in-fluence to unduly sway the banks.

One of Reid’s greatest strengths was in being “a backroom fighter,” said Pete Ernaut, a longtime Re-publican strategist based in Nevada. “His political savvy, his willingness to take anyone on and his ability to move things behind the scenes was unequaled within his own caucus, within his own party,” Ernaut said.

Sometimes that meant making en-emies.

“You don’t play as tough as he did — you don’t win as much as he won — and not make enemies,” Vas-siliadis said. “Harry Reid never did it safe. He didn’t do it to pacify all sorts of people and keep his contributors happy.”

His political calculations some-times landed him in hot water, as in 2012, when Reid took to the Senate floor to claim that then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Rom-ney hadn’t paid any taxes in 10 years. PolitiFact gave the claim a “Pants on Fire” rating, while The Washington Post’s fact-checker gave it “Four Pi-nocchios.”

In an interview with CNN in 2015, Reid was asked to defend that false statement. “Romney didn’t win, did he?” was his response.

“This is what I mean when I talk about him seeing a few moves ahead on the chessboard,” said Krupin, who worked with Reid on his 2012 convention speech. “He was put-ting the ball in other folks’ court. It was for them to defend it. The burden was on them to prove oth-erwise.”

Reid also called President George W. Bush a liar twice, referred to Obama as a “light-skinned” African-American “with

DINA TITUSU.S. representative for Nevada’s 1st Congressional District

“Nobody has served as long or in as powerful of a position, kind of a heartbeat from the president, as Sen. Reid. It will be very hard to fill his shoes, no matter who takes the seat, because he has built up those connections and that power base over a long period of time. So it’ll be hard to do what he’s able to do. I think the biggest challenge for us will be Yucca Mountain. His ability to stop that from the position he was in is something that has been remarkable, so it’s going to take everything we’ve all got together to keep that at bay. ... It’s going to be a big change for Nevada, to go from No. 1 to No. 100. I think people don’t even realize how much he got done.”

JIM BILBRAYFormer U.S. representative for Nevada’s 1st Congressional District, friend of Reid for more than 50 years

“You have to look at what Harry did with Great Basin, with Red Rock, with the environmental areas he covered. Also, what he has done with the universities. I look at UNLV more, but he had always done a lot for UNR. People will not realize how much Harry Reid did for this state. He was not vocal in everything he did. ... People will not realize how effective Harry Reid is until after this; it will all start coming out. ... You’ve got to understand that with Dean Heller and Catherine Cortez Masto, it’s going to take many years for them to achieve the power that Harry Reid had. Harry is the silent guy. He is the hardest-working Congressmen I’ve ever met, he and Leon Panetta. I asked, ‘Harry, why do you want to put yourself through this anymore?’ He said, ‘Because I love it; I love putting in the work and what I’m doing.’ ”

no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” and said New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand was the “hottest” senator. (Reid stands by his “liar” comments and apologized for the re-marks on the president. Gillibrand, for her part, says she wasn’t upset by his comment.)

“I think, over the course of time, he would even say he probably could have sanded off some of the rough edges of his public state-ments,” Vassiliadis said. “He was not a message machine, to say the least. I think among his campaign team and consultants and friends, one of the most common refrains was, ‘He said what?’ ”

Above all, Reid was known for his toughness, something even — or perhaps, especially — his oppo-nents acknowledge.

“It’s clear that Harry and I have very different worldviews, two dif-ferent ways of doing things, and two different sets of legislative pri-orities,” said Senate Majority Lead-er Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, in a floor speech about Reid. “But through the years, we’ve come to understand some things about one another. And we’ve endeavored to keep our dis-agreements professional rather than personal.”

During this year’s election sea-son, Reid called McConnell a “poster boy for Republicans’ spine-lessness” over his decision to not distance himself from then-Repub-lican presidential candidate Donald Trump. But in his farewell speech, Reid called McConnell his friend, saying they were like lawyers on op-posing sides during a trial.

“McConnell and Reid don’t need to be hugging out here every day; we’re advocates for a cause,” Reid said. “I do the very best I can, and he does the very best he can.”

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELLRepublican Party’s highest-ranking senator since 2007

“When Harry first met Landra Gould, the two of them were in high school, and Harry was hardly conflicted about his feelings for her. It wasn’t long before the two of them were heading off on their first date. It started as many dates do — with a movie — and ended with Landra push-starting his car. The Reids have never been strangers to pushing through challenges; they’ve confronted a lot over nearly six decades of marriage. But hand-in-hand, sweat on the brow, they’ve always moved forward together. Through it all, Landra has never stopped smiling and Harry has never stopped counting every lucky star for Landra.” — Excerpt from a speech on the Senate floor

Harry Reid and his wife, Landra, after

his Senate win.(STEVE MARCUS/STAFF)

2010

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No one questions that Reid built the Democratic political machine in Nevada as it stands today. That’s why it’s called the “Reid machine.”

He was responsible for making Nevada an early caucus state in 2008, which helped boost voter registration ahead of his own election in 2010. What has now become a common feature of the last three presidential cycles once seemed a “long shot,” said Darrel Thompson, a former deputy chief of staff for Reid.

The Reid machine also pro-pelled Democrats up and down the ticket in 2016 in Nevada: Hill-ary Clinton won the state, Cath-erine Cortez Masto was elected to replace Reid in the Senate, Ruben Kihuen and Jacky Rosen each won their competitive con-gressional seats, and Democrats took control of both houses of the state Legislature.

“Sen. Reid certainly stands tall in Nevada politics — and nationally — because Nevada did such a good job on election night up and down the ticket, and the Democratic caucus coming back and asking, ‘How did you all do it in Nevada?’ A lot of that goes back to the machine that Sen. Reid put to-gether,” Rep. Dina Titus said. “I think that he, in and of himself,

is a political machine.”But all of that didn’t happen

overnight. Former Nevada Gov. Bob Miller, a Democrat, recalled how he, Sen. Richard Bryan and Reid used to raise funds to-gether.

“It was always Harry that or-ganized it, and he would decide who we were going to go meet and what we were going to request,” Miller said. “He took a strong interest in who was up-and-coming in the party and who he could help along the line.”

The responsibility of running the Democratic machine now falls to Sen. Chuck Schumer, the incoming Senate minority leader.

“Every Democrat in the coun-try looks at Nevada and says, ‘I wish we could’ve done what Harry did in Nevada,’” Schumer said. “He puts in so much work and effort because he cares so much about his state.”

But who will run the machine here? Reid says it has to be one of the Democratic senators or members of Congress.

“The Reid machine, some-body’s going to have to pick it up. I’m not going to, because I’m not in a position to do that,” Reid said. “The Reid machine is a reality, is there. No one can ever take away what I did. But I can’t do it in my new life.”

“When you’re talking to him and you hang up, there’s nothing

there. There is no ‘bye,’ the phone just goes dead,” Darrel Thompson said. “I asked him why he does that and he said, ‘Yeah, I know that’s rude.’ That’s just the way he is.”

Billy Vassiliadis said Reid once called him and said Landra had told him he needed to be more polite and apprecia-tive of his friends.

“If I’ve been abrupt, that’s just my way. Obviously, I appreciate you and all that.’ He didn’t say he was going to try to change, but that was the sense you got,” Vassiliadis said. “And then we went back to ‘click.’ ”

Former Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley put it this way: “It’s not that he’s hanging up. It’s that goodbye is an unnecessary word.”

“Harry Reid is not just going to wan-der off into the wilderness. It’s just not his nature. He’s going to be a very active person and very interested,” Bob Miller said. “I think he will continue to keep things together and encourage people to participate and go from there.”

Chuck Schumer agrees.“He’s going to keep an eye on Nevada.

Anytime you’re in his office for more than 20 minutes, there’s some friend from Nevada who calls,” Schumer said. “He has a huge network of friends over the years — not for political purposes. He’ll stay.”

RICHARD BRYANFormer Nevada gover-nor and U.S. senator, friend of Reid for more than 50 years

“One may not always agree with him, but one could not challenge his dedication to the people of the state of Nevada. No one had greater influence on the legislative process in the Congress. Period.”

STEPHEN KRUPINSenior presidential speechwriter, Reid’s former press secretary and speechwriter

“He was a trial lawyer; he knows how to make an argument. He was always thinking a few moves ahead. ... He’s the most ‘what-you-see-is-what-you-get’ politician that I’ve ever encountered.”

SEN. DEAN HELLERU.S. senator with Reid since 2011 “It is said that it’s better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both. And as me and my colleagues here today and those in the gallery prob-ably agree with me, no individual in American politics embodies that sentiment today more than Harry Mason Reid.”

OSCAR GOODMANFormer mayor of Las Vegas

“Everything we asked him for and asked his office for, he was ame-nable to. ... He really used whatever power he had to ensure high-level nuke waste wasn’t going to be transported through our community and stored 90 miles away.”

BILLY VASSILIADISCEO and principal of R&R Partners, longtime friend of Reid

“He’s a competitive freak. He really is. He’s a fighter. It sounds so trite, but he really is. He’s the skinniest boxer probably in the history of boxing. Sometimes, I got the sense that he loved the fight more than the outcome. Mixing it up was something he never feared. Other candidates would worry about how bad it’s going to be

or bloody it’s going to be, and are they going to win or lose. He just jumped into the fight. He just jumped into the fray and then fought like crazy.

I say this unabashedly and without any hesitation: He’s the single most important and influential person in Ne-

vada’s history. We’ve never had anybody as important, as powerful, who did as much, who accomplished as much, who achieved as much, who climbed as much — ever. You just don’t replace Michael Jordan. It’s going to be tough. Everybody in this state, Republicans and Demo-crats alike, when there was fear, the very first phone call they made was Harry Reid. The very first.

Considering the fact that most people don’t find him to be a good socializer, he had an amazing ability to build relationships with people that counted. He was the first person to identify Barack Obama as a national figure.

Reid had a very clear sense of what he needed to ac-complish, whether it was highway funding for the state, stopping nuclear waste, expanding solar energy, civil rights, voting rights. Those things that he held to be very dear and critical, he fought for. The word is fought. He didn’t appease. He didn’t pacify. He didn’t patronize. He fought. By the way, along the way, he beat a lot of people. And a lot of people didn’t want to be beat by the skinny little guy from Nevada.”

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From left, Republican Sen. Mitch McCon-nell, Reid, House Speaker John Boehner and Vice President Joe Biden participate in a ceremony on Capitol Hill in Wash-ington. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Harry Reid at McCarran International Airport.

DARREL THOMPSON

D.C. consultant and lobbyist, Reid’s former deputy

chief of staff for intergovernmental

and external affairs, talking about the

day in 2012 Reid was taken to the hospital

after a six-vehicle wreck

“These are massive armored SUVs, and the car is totaled.

He goes to the hospital; Landra is with him. ... He

says, ‘Darrel, put the rest of my schedule

back on.’ I said, ‘Senator, what are you doing?’ Landra is like, ‘Harry, come on.’ He was just in a massive accident

— he was hit by an 18-wheeler. He said, ‘No, put my schedule back together, OK?’

... It was a pretty big deal; it shut

down the highway. There are so many moments like that: ‘Let’s keep going; let’s get it on.’ The competitor in him was always there.”

2013

1978