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Reid's ‘Good Fight' one great read
By DOUG McMURDO - Associate Editor
Saturday, May 3, 2008 12:00 AM PDT
The ramshackle home in Searchlight in which Sen. Harry Reid was born in 1939. (Courtesy)
ELKO - Democrats won't be the only readers who will appreciate Sen. Harry Reid's new book, “The Good Fight - Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington.”
First of all, this is not your father's senator's memoir. Absent are the self-congratulatory boasts of legislation they pushed through - as if they did it single-handedly - that are all too common when a politician, or any famous person for that matter, writes his or her autobiography.
Instead, Reid offers a remarkably candid and fascinating story that is very personal, sometimes painfully so.
Whenever Reid appears in Nevada, veteran reporters often make bets as to if and when the old “I come from Searchlight” story will come out.
While Reid does indeed routinely refer to his humble roots in the long-busted southern Nevada mining town, never before has he expounded on his childhood with such vivid color.
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From his hard-working, stubborn, alcoholic father - a tough man who sometimes abused Reid's mother, Inez, but never touched his children in anger - to learning how to swim at one of the local brothel's swimming pools, Reid pulls no punches.
The book goes from past to present chapter by chapter, yet flows seamlessly. Perhaps it is because I know Reid's voice and vernacular so well after covering his career for two decades, but reading this book is a fun read. Like sitting around the campfire in the company of a great storyteller.
In one chapter you'll find yourself laughing as Reid goes on his first date with wife Landra in a car that needed a downhill run to get the motor started. The next chapter you're brought into the White House and find yourself intrigued as Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plead with President Bush to rethink his Iraq war strategy.
Reid also brings an insider's view on how Republican senators almost backed Democrats on issues ranging from the war to Social Security - only to remain faithful to their party rather than remaining true to their consciences.
The Senate majority leader also explains in convincing fashion his poorly-worded “Mr. President, this war is lost” comment that provided a huge pasture's worth of political hay to Republican and conservative pundits.
He regrets how he said it, but makes no apologies for having said it.
Unlike many political memoirs, Reid does not disparage the other party - at least not in a mean, shrill or indefensible way. He speaks kindly of many Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, and George Bush the Elder.
The battle minority Democrats put up against Bush's ill-fated attempt to privatize Social Security provides readers with keen insight on how partisan politics - particularly in modern times - can paralyze a nation.
Reid's stories on being a young lawyer after attending law school in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a Capitol Hill police officer to feed his young family, are full of humanity and help explain the idealism that led him to politics and the Democratic party.
And while the D.C. stories provide an education for skeptics and cynics alike, it is Reid's intensely personal accounts of life outside of the Beltway that make “The Good Fight” such a good read.
In a brief interview with the Free Press Wednesday, Reid admitted some of the material dealing with his personal life was indeed difficult to divulge. “It was painful to recount,” he said, but Nevada has grown by more than two million people since I came to Washington and I realized most of them might know who I am, what I look like, but they don't know the real me.
“That's why I wrote the book (co-written by Mark Warren) … I wanted the people from the state I love to get to know the real Harry Reid.”
Nuggets readers will discover include:
Reid never knew religion until he hitch-hiked from Searchlight to Henderson to attend Basic High School. There he discovered classmates who introduced him to Mormonism. Years later, both Reid and his wife would adopt the faith.
His wife Landra was born into a prominent Jewish family and she and Harry eloped - but not until the senator and Landra's devoutly religious father duked it out when he came to pick her up for a date. The relationship grew into one of deep love and mutual respect.
Former Gov. Mike O'Callaghan was a father figure to Reid, mentoring him from high school, where he was a teacher through law school, when he pulled strings to let Reid take the bar exam early to keep his young family fed.
Reid was a boxer and a football player.
Like many teenagers, he was consumed by sports - and girls.
More than anything, Reid's story dismisses the popular notion that only the rich and privileged, the silver spooners, the scions of the wealthy have a chance to make it big in politics.
His is a story that proves even the son of a dirt-poor miner born in a home without indoor plumbing can achieve great things - and that it can be done with integrity and dignity.
It matters not where one's political sympathies lie. “The Good Fight” isn't a manifesto for the Democratic Party's philosophy. Those who like Reid will love him after reading this book. Those who don't like him will at least understand what makes him tick and come to respect his positions, however begrudgingly, whether they agree with them or not.
All proceeds from the book will go to charity.
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