Harry M. Reid commanded two different identities in a career that brought him to the pinnacle of American political power in the decades before his death Tuesday at 82.
Searchlight, a mining town 60 miles south of Nevada’s glitzy casino city, raised and nurtured the future Senate majority leader, who won everyone’s respect and could broker some of the most important legislative compromises of his generation. Las Vegas, the booming city that gave him his political base, launched the swashbuckling pugilist who won attention by insulting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and then-President George W. Bush while making up false claims about Mitt Romney’s personal finances during his 2012 presidential campaign.
Las Vegas Reid had no regrets about those claims that Romney went 10 years without paying any taxes. “I think I had something to do with his not being elected,” Reid boasted to me during a February 2020 interview in his office on the Strip.
But Searchlight Reid used his connections to politically powerful Mormons to plan a meeting with Romney after he retired at the end of 2016 and before Romney’s 2018 campaign for the Senate. “Mitt and I are okay,” Reid said in the same interview, adding that he wrote Romney (R-Utah) a letter after his vote to convict Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial.
The Vegas identity got most of the attention in the national media, particularly when American politics moved into the world of 24/7 cable news energized by a social media...
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