What Made Harry Reid So Powerful (And So Divisive)?

The late Senator Harry Reid is undeniably the most powerful political figure to ever come out of Nevada. So I was both thrilled and stunned by the revelations in the advanced copy I got of John Ralston's new biography on the former Senate Majority Leader. He's described as a soft-spoken man from Searchlight who arguably changed U.S. politics forever. Today on CityCast, Las Vegas, we talk with Ralston about his groundbreaking new book out next week and his thoughts on Harry Reid's inconceivable journey to the top. It's Monday, January 12th. I'm David Figgler, and here's what Las Vegas is talking about. John, first of all, congratulations on just a brilliant book. Thanks so much, David. I really appreciate it. Coming from you, who was an author and a critic of writers, it means a lot. It really does. It was a real page turner. And, you know, Harry Reid was clearly a larger-than-life character with a wild ride from literal rags to political riches. What challenges did you face in telling the full story? Well, uh... I guess the biggest challenge I faced for this, it's really the only biography I wanted to do after covering a lot of people for almost 40 years in politics in Nevada. But he didn't want to do it. He and I had a roller coaster of a relationship. He had a hegeographic biography done a few years ago called The Good Fight, but I wanted to go a lot deeper and present a more nuanced picture of him. And so... It took me a long time to get him to agree. And when he finally did agree, it was May of 2021, which was only six months or so before he would pass away. I did manage to get 24 Zoom interviews with him, which were memorable and really... helpful. He was still pretty sharp up until the end. But I couldn't go back and confirm things with him or get him to elaborate on things I would later find out through other interviews or through going through his voluminous archive at UNR, which was talk about revelations. That was a revelation. The other problem I had was some of the people who could have really added some more depth to this. We're not around anymore. Most notably, Michael Callahan, the former governor who was his real mentor and probably the closest person to Harry Reid besides his wife, Landra. Yeah, not just his mentor, but his school teacher at Basic High School just to show how deep those Nevada roots go. You know, John, you mention it. One of my favorite bits in the book, it's in the appendix, was your recounting of how Harry Reid basically got you fired from a very high-profile job at the time. channel three on TV. And then he actually celebrated when the news was delivered to him. Did that sort of past tension come up when you did actually get the chance to do all those Zoom talks with him?

It did a little bit, and basically what he said, David, is that, you know, it was never about what you wrote about me. I didn't care what you wrote about me, but it was my family. And what he meant by that is I had done columns in the past about how he had used his political influence to help his sons, which I thought were legitimate topics of conversation. He did not. And by the way, especially Landra did not. I never fall families for protecting their spouses or their children. No one's going to be rational about that. And so it came up, but he really had gotten past it if he ever needed to get past. And by the way, I should say Landra got past it to the extent that she sat in on most of those Zoom interviews and then consented to do three sit-down interviews with me after he passed away. Nice. Well, I appreciate your delicious inclusion of the actual email where he's celebrating your demise at the time from at least Channel 3. You kind of recovered as well. But, you know, before we get into specifics about the book, and I do want to talk about a lot of different stories, a lot of the insights that you were able to uncover about Harry Reid, let's just set the table a little bit with some adjectives. You know, give me a few that after all your research and interviews. are maybe the most apt in describing Harry Reid. Well, the one I used most often during my time covering him and one that was only reinforced by what I found out afterwards. By the way, David, I thought I knew Harry Reid better than anybody in the media, and I probably did and do. But I learned so much during the research and the interviews for this book. But he is the most ruthless or Machiavellian person that I have known in the political world. He really, really is. But he was incredibly strategic. And what I did not know is he was very, very kind. And that's a word that most people won't associate with Harry Reid. But he had the most loyal staff I have met of anybody I've ever covered. There was a reason for that. There were a lot of private acts of kindness that he administered to his friends, to his family, to his staff, to his colleagues in the Senate that I did not know about. I still go back to the ruthlessness. And that partly explains the rags to riches story that you described. Yeah. Where do you think he acquired those traits and when were they honed, this sort of ruthlessness?

Yeah, it's a great question, David. And I try, even in the book, I think, and you can tell me whether you agree or disagree, but even in hindsight and thinking back on a lot to psychoanalyze Harry Reid. I don't think you can ever completely figure out a human being, especially as complex as him. But I do think, based on my conversations with him and knowing what I know, is that growing up in these horrendous circumstances that you or I cannot imagine. Yeah, abject poverty. Abject poverty. I mean, abject poverty. throwing up in a literal shack that his father had, but, you know, pieced together from essentially thrown away pieces of wood and put them together. I think that he really just... kept pushing forward and was willing to go from point A to point B without really thinking about the consequences or who he might step on or who he might hurt. And I don't think he understood the concept of regret or remorse. He just kept going and going and going. And part of that is in a minor way, in a more benign way, evidenced by him hanging up on people, which he became famous for, only because he didn't have enough time that his time was up. he needed and he was going to move forward to maybe some more stuff that people would think cross the ethical line, the Mitt Romney taxes thing, maybe getting a journalist fired from his job. People can judge from that. And I wasn't the only journalist he got fired as you read in the book. Yeah. And, you know, I think a lot of his critics and maybe even his friends would agree with a lot of those words that you did throw out. I had the pleasure of doing a congressional internship for him and also a senatorial internship. I found him to be remarkably kind. And the degree of his loyalty was inspirational. I mean, like you say in the book, if... You were in his good graces. There is no better advocate for you. But, you know, if at some point you either crossed him or he didn't really have a lot of use for you, you might get abandoned. Like loyalty, what? Loyalty? I mean, there are some who say that he was loyal up until he wasn't, but generally he was very, very loyal to his staff. I tell the story in the book, and it's a very moving story that has been written about elsewhere, but I actually got a few more details of a staffer who was just hired to essentially take down phone numbers for him to return phone calls, and she kept getting the numbers wrong. And she got called into his office, and she thought she was going to get fired. Instead, he said after she told him she was dyslexic, you must have had to work so much harder than most people to get where you are. Just keep trying, essentially, encouraging her. And she is one of the most loyal people to read of all the people that I interviewed. And she's a very, very talented human being. You know, one of the interesting threads of the book is how quickly the poor young man from deeply rural Nevada grew to be.

hated by so much of his fellow rural Nevadans and tagged basically as an elite outsider. What do you think was the the turning point that hastened that sort of view of him? And why did he basically never win most of those folks back? You know, he was very, very frustrated by that. David, and he told the story about how, you know, they used to hang him in effigy in Harry Reid in rural Nevada and put up awful signs about him. And they could have nicknames for him as well. And he is a rural Nevada, right? He is from Searchlight, which you can't get much more rural. His dad was a minor. He continually brought, as we say, the bacon home to Nevada for minors and for, you know, the people in the rules, and yet generally they despised him. I mean, despised is a soft word for how they felt about him. And he used to joke about how Richard Bryan, his longtime colleague and friend, used to still go to rural Nevada and go in the parades, which he gave up doing. And he said, the funny thing is, I used to laugh at Richard. You only get 1% more than I did out there because they hated Democrats. And that's what it was more about, is that Harry Reid, who first ran as independent like Nevada when he ran for the Senate, the first race I covered in 1986. was seen, I think mostly accurately, although not completely, is having abandoned his independent streak to become a very hyper-partisan guy at times to climb the ladder of leadership. in D.C. And that did not sit well with his constituents in rural Nevada, which, as you know, is very, very deeply read. But there's much evidence, and I couldn't even get into all of this in the book, a little bit, I think. But he got a ton of money from Washington flowing to rural Nevada. And they never gave him credit for it. His constituents, although members of county commissions and city councils knew what he did for them. Yeah, I mean, prior to kind of the last run, especially his relationship with President Obama, et cetera, he was viewed, and I think rightfully so, as a very conservative Democrat. I mean, moderate to a fault on a lot of the hot topic issues and yet still rejected by his fellow rural Nevadans. Amazing the way that you tell a lot of those stories in the book. Another story that I was really intrigued by was the lasting love story. between Senator Reid and his wife Landra. Can you give me an example of their relationship that you think best exemplifies that bond that they had over, you know, 62 years and where she might have influenced him?

You know, one of the things I didn't know about, I mean, I knew that Landra was a force behind the scenes, and I knew how much he cared about her. But Landra has had some health issues, and she was in a couple of terrible car crashes. People who witnessed his reaction to that, including Chuck Schumer, who I talked to for the book, said they've never seen the usually stoic taciturn Reed have tears in his eyes talking about my Landra, my poor Landra. These two were virtually inseparable. He didn't go on the cocktail party circuit in D.C. Not that he drank anyhow. Yeah, he wasn't going to disappear on the Appalachian Trail and leave Landra behind. Exactly. But what I didn't know fully was how influential she was on him behind the scenes and how much he relied on her counsel. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that he might have voted for Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court if it hadn't been for Landra. And he changed his mind right at the last minute. I publish excerpts in the book of a speech he was going to give in favor of confirming Clarence Thomas that his his speechwriter sent to him the morning of the final vote. Landre essentially said to him, you didn't watch the hearings. I did. I believed Anita Hill. You should believe her too. You shouldn't vote for him. He changed his mind. very late. But that's just a high profile example. She was in meetings that I didn't know she was in with his political advisors and staff, where he would rely on her. And I'm sure they had a lot of conversations at home before he made major decisions. And she certainly was a factor in him not running again. It's one of the great parts of your book that, you know, some, and I would say just because I am the Nevada news geek, right? And I also love politics a lot. So I had heard a lot, but not all of the stories that are in the book, but not just the depth that you get into them, but also finding those emails, those text messages, those memorandums. I mean, it's a wonderful insight into more context than I believe anyone. has ever even tried with this influential man. I know you had to cut quite a bit from your early drafts because you just had so much. What are some of the things that you loved that maybe wound up on the cutting room floor from the book? Well, I should say that some of that stuff has already made its way into the public domain through a substack I started to try to tease the book. And I'm putting out some of the documents. And I tell the story, my wife was invaluable. My wife, Sarah, and they're helping me research this book up in this archive, which is voluminous. As I said, David, it's a thousand boxes and 12 million digital files. But the folks...

Folks at the UNR Special Collections, whom I give credit to, as you probably saw in the acknowledgements, were fantastic in creating spreadsheets. But I would find documents and emails and memos all the time. And I say, oh, my God, honey, look what I found. And finally, she patted me on the shoulder one day and said, honey? There are two kinds of things you're going to find here, John stuff and book stuff. This is John stuff, meaning that me and David Figgler and about 100 other people might care about this stuff, but for a wider audience, they wouldn't. So I cut a lot of the kind of super inside baseball stuff from the book. I thought it should be 600 to 800 pages. They thought it should be 400 pages. I told you, I thought it should be two parts, like a John Adams biography. Yeah, and I thought the same thing. They really did not appreciate me dropping Robert Carroll's name occasionally during the editing process. Not a bit. I guess my favorite thing that I found was what I found about Adam Laxel, who's the former AG and then ran for governor. And I didn't know how close Harry Reid was to Michelle Laxel, his mother and Paul Laxold's daughter. He ended up being close to Paul Laxel, but really close to Michelle Laxel. And his daughter was a political operative in D.C., so I'm sure they ran into each other quite a bit. very influential political operative in D.C. She was very, very successful. And I found in there a couple of things. One is that clearly, before Adam Lacksalt moved out here in 2011, I believe that's the right date, that Harry Reid. helped him find a job. And there's an email from Adam Laxalt thanking Harry Reid and going through all the people that he's interviewed with and asking him for help and then Reed trying to hook him up with people. And there's also a handwritten congratulatory note from Reed to Adam Laxalt after he graduated from college, wishing him luck and asking him to remember how important his family name is. And you and I can argue about whether or not he actually took that. to hire or not. Yeah, and we could also argue with other family members who got very public about their opposition to Adams' run for public office. Exactly. What do you think Harry's legacy for Las Vegas specifically is? Well, I can tell you that outside of being proud of getting Obamacare through the Senate, he was proudest of his environmental accomplishments.

There's a Harry Reid Environmental Center at UNLV because of that. And I think just some of the national monuments that he got, the public land set asides, and just generally what he did for clean energy. Remember, he had the Clean Energy Summit here every year for a while and essentially forcing NV energy on Nevada Power at the time, I think still, to shut down coal plants. Because he didn't think there was any such thing as clean coal, believe it or not. And actually getting NV energy to sponsor some of those clean energy summits is something that only Harry Reid could have done. But he also was very, very proud. And he hated it when I wrote in columns or asked him in interviews about the pork that he got back for Las Vegas. He hated that word. But... He was the biggest pork getter in the history of Nevada. And there used to be this group that gave out the villains of pork award or whatever. He loved being on that list. He thought it was a badge of honor. Yeah. You know, you mentioned his efforts for the environment. I think Harry Reid might be famously known around these here parts. for his strident opposition to Yucca Mountain. I know that story, but I didn't know his initial, maybe openness to a Yucca Mountain being built. So what was the switch and opinion about Yucca Mountain from Reed on that? You know, it's interesting. I had always heard that, and I kind of experienced it a little bit when I first started covering that Senate race in 86, my first experience with him. But, I mean, there was a smoking gun letter that I talk about in the book that I found in the archives from him when I think it was a UNLV professor sent a very pro-nuclear waste dump. letter to him, and he passed it on to President Reagan saying, I really think you should look at this. And I just think that very shortly thereafter, he saw what public opinion was like. And Richard Bryan, I think, had an influence on him because Brian was rabidly anti-Yucca Mountain almost from the start. But both of them had a little bit of a problem, you know, because of the test site and they were pretty pro-nuclear testing and how you could make the case environmentally or otherwise that it's okay to blow up these bombs either above ground or below ground but not bring nuclear waste was a difficult needle for them to thread. But Brian just brushed right by it. Reed took a little bit longer. Yeah, interesting. Now, do you think that there's ever going to be another Nevada who grows as powerful in politics as Harry Reid or, you know, even a Democrat who will wield power as effectively and, like you say, ruthlessly as Harry Reid did?

I don't think it'll ever be another Harry Reid in terms of just a different kind of character that he brought to politics in the sense that, and I think someone says this in the book, that he was totally secure in who he was. He didn't care really what I wrote about him or what anybody said about him. He was just going to keep doing what he thought was the right thing to do, whether or not you thought, you and I might have thought it was right. going to do it and keep moving forward and using the power that he had to its utmost. You know, I've known a lot of politicians with power as of you, David, who don't always use all that power they have. They use some of it, but not all of it. Harry Reid was never going to let a drop of his power go to waste. And so he was going to use it whether it was in service of Nevada or the Democratic Party or his friends or his family. And he would just keep moving forward. He was a man. who lived without regrets, essentially. Yeah, you know, that falls right into another part of the story that you tell that engrossed me was his deliberate efforts to limit or even vanquish his perceived enemies and potential challengers. Do you have a favorite example? Because there's so many examples where he sees someone on the horizon and he starts acting to limit their impact on his rise. Yeah, the best one is, of course, Brian Sandoval, who was an up-and-coming guy who was in the assembly and he was an attorney general and he was on the Gaming Commission. And Reed saw him as a formidable statewide threat and rightly so. And he admitted it to me in one of those Zoom interviews and the quote is in the book. And Sandoval knew it too. I interviewed Sandoval for the book, but it was when he nominated Sandoval to the federal bench, he, you know, Sandobe wanted to be a judge and he jumped at the chance. And so that took him out of running against Harry Reid. Yeah, you know, one of my favorite parts was the Brian Krolicki story, which you leave for the reader to make up their own mind as to whether or not Reed had any influence in then Attorney General Catherine Cortez Mastow indicting his potential opponent for charges that were ultimately thrown out of court for, you know, basically being baseless. But it did enough damage that Krolyke never did run against Reed. And then when Reed resigned or retired, the first one up, and you said, I think words to the effect, as though it were choreographed, you don't say it was. Catherine Cortez Mastow came in and actually replaced Harry Reid in the Senate. There's a lot of stories like that, aren't there? Yeah, I mean, listen, Harry Reid was pretty good, although not flawless, not infallible, not leaving fingerprints. And when Brian Crowlicky was indicted by Catherine Cortez-Mastow, when she was AG, the first thing Brian Crowlicky did was call a press conference and say all roads in Nevada lead to Harry Reid. Now, she denied it, he denied it. He even...

pretty much, although not quite unequivocally denied it during the Zoom interviews. Now, do I think that Harry Reid would have the gumption to call Catherine Cortez-Mastow and say indict Brian Crowlicky, he could be a real problem for me? No. Do I think Catherine Cortez-Mastow would do that if Harry Reid asked her to? No, I do not. But I do believe that Harry Reid might have had people go to her and say, this stuff looks really bad. You know, it's going to be bad for you if you don't indict him. Could something like that have happened? Maybe. But just the fact that so many people, David, were convinced that he orchestrated that says all you need to know about Harry Reid's influence in the state. So what do you think might be the overarching lessons for... Dems who read the book and worry about their diminishing influence on this country's future. Never give up the fight. Keep fighting. Don't worry about what people think. Listen to smart people and hire smart people. It's another thing people may not know about Harry Reid. He put really, really smart people around him on his staff and outside of his staff on the political side. People who were as good as anybody in any state. or in Washington, D.C. And he listened to them. mostly. They couldn't stop him from saying things he shouldn't say either on my show or when he was doing a gaggle in Washington, D.C. with the reporters. He said a lot of stuff that they wish he could take back. And he didn't care. The famous Harry Reid flubs that you, I think, probably take a little joy in recounting some of your favorite ones in the book. And they're contextualized in a really lovely way, but they're still flubs. Yeah, they're readisms, as I used to call them. And they really were gaffs. And there were a lot of gaffs from Harry Reid. But notice that he didn't suffer really from those gaffes except for his, you know, more, I think, than his partisanship cost him. And it was all of a piece eventually so that when he went into that final race, nobody knew it was his final race at the time. His numbers were abysmal. But because he had put so many smart people around them, because they came up with a fairly brilliant strategy that has been copied many times to essentially choose his general election opponent, he was able to survive. Yeah, and not to mention the Reed machine, which you described very aptly. And yeah, he could have been running against Sue Loudon, but instead he got Sharon Engel and that's exactly what he wanted. You know, John, it's a really great book to read, especially for anyone who has an interest in Nevada history, who's been intrigued by Harry Reid or who really just cares about the current state of politics because it is in a lot of ways a roadmap to how we got to where we are right now for better or worse. And that book is called The Game Changer, how Harry Reid.

remade the rules and showed Democrats how to fight. It's out January 20th, and hopefully people will go to their local Las Vegas bookstore and get a copy. John, thanks again for joining us on CityCats, Las Vegas. Thanks a lot for having me, David. And that's all for today here on CityCast Las Vegas. If you enjoyed the show, go tell a friends. You could also rate our show, leave us a review like I reviewed Ralston's book and subscribe to our morning newsletter. Don't forget, you can support this show and get some great perks by becoming a Citicast, Las Vegas neighbor at membership.citycass.fm. We'll be back tomorrow morning with more news from around the city. Till then, stay lucky.