• • •
Reid’s movie would be in black-and-white, and maybe slightly pink to account for his facial coloring. Known as “Pinky” growing up, Harry Mason Reid is slight and tiny-eyed and looks about his age (seventy-three) but could also pass for someone born in the 1800s. He sees all of “that Hollywood stuff” as a great market inefficiency of Washington. Like how Billy Beane, the protagonist of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, strips away all the intangibles of evaluating baseball talent: emotional attachments to players, their “makeup,” and ephemeral notions such as “clutch hitting” and “baseball tradition.” The only thing that matters to Beane is creating better methodologies and blocking out the traditional metrics. To Reid, the obsession in Washington to the show-horse aspects of the game (getting credit, being “seen”) is misspent energy that brings clouded thinking. What matters is maximum efficiency and, ultimately, survival.
“I can get in and out of a fund-raiser in five minutes,” Reid boasted to me. He was once leaving the Capitol in the back of his chauffeured SUV when he spotted my New York Times colleague Carl Hulse, a longtime congressional reporter, walking through the parking lot and wearing a tuxedo. “Where are you going, Carl?” Reid asked through an open window. Carl said he was headed to the annual Congressional Dinner, a big to-do for Hill types being held that year at the Ritz-Carlton, where Reid lives when he is in Washington. Reid offered Carl a ride over. When they arrived, Carl told Reid it would have been convenient for him if he were going to the dinner. “Carl,” Reid assured him as he headed up to his condo, “I wouldn’t go to this thing if it were in my living room.”
In Tim Russert’s final months, Reid’s spokesman at the time, Jim Manley, dragged the majority leader to the sixtieth-anniversary party for Meet the Press. It was held at the Newseum, and partygoers who appeared as guests of Meet the Press were delineated by special blue ribbons on their lapels—a kind of varsity letter. Reid hurried in, not bothering with his ribbon. He walked to the front of the long receiving line, congratulated Tim, and was, by Manley’s guess, in and out in eight minutes.
Reid loves being alone, either with his thoughts or with his wife, Landra, to whom he has been married fifty-three years. He also has a great eye for political loners and bringing them into his fold. He recognized immediately that Barack Obama was an outlier when he came to the Senate in 2005. Obama was a charming and persuasive “natural” of a performer but unreachable in basic ways and not well suited to the chamber. It was Reid who in 2006 encouraged Obama to run for president. This came as a shock to Obama at the time and to the Hillary Clinton camp when this conversation was revealed. Reid, who had repeatedly stated his neutrality in the 2008 presidential race, believed that Obama would never have the patience to hang around the Senate long enough to achieve the impact he craved. It also appealed to Reid, on a level somewhere between mischievous and Darwinian, to watch the two celebrity members of his caucus, Obama and Clinton, kill each other.
As Obama’s presidency unfolded, Reid appealed to a side of him that was fiercely pragmatic and transactional. “Harry has the toughest job in Washington,” Obama said of Reid. “He just grinds it out.” Obama, whose favorite movie is The Godfather and who has something of a Mob fetish, has always been drawn to loyal fixer types like Reid who quietly take care of business. He once drew a favorable parallel between his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, and the consigliere role played by Robert Duvall in The Godfather.
As Democrats had gained a supermajority of sixty votes in the Senate, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, spoke of “putting points on the board”—an early mantra of the new White House that meant doing what was necessary to pass bills. This suited Reid, who became Obama’s key legislative partner, wrenching the administration’s prime accomplishments through a scared Senate: a $787 billion economic stimulus bill in early 2009 and the health-care bill a year later.
Reid and Emanuel became close allies. (As an aside, Emanuel is an observant Jew, and Reid loves Jews. Reid’s wife, Landra, was Jewish before she met “Hank,” as she calls him, and they became Mormons. A mezuzah still hangs in the doorway of the Reid home in Searchlight.) Reid and Emanuel spoke often by phone, usually for a bare minimum of seconds, just long enough to transact.
Both could be crass, especially Rahm. Shortly after Obama took office, he and Emanuel were meeting with Nancy Pelosi, when the chief of staff started cracking his knuckles. When Obama turned and expressed annoyance with the habit, Emanuel held the offending knuckle up to Obama’s left ear and snapped off a few special cracks for his presidential benefit.
Both Emanuel and Reid could be vindictive, especially Reid. Back when Nevada’s other senator was the exuberant Democrat Richard Bryan, a running joke had it that Bryan woke up every morning wondering how many hands he could shake, while Reid woke up wondering how many enemies he needed to screw.
Reid rarely wastes his powers of persuasion on policy arguments or charm offensives. “He goes straight to ‘What do you want?’” said Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican who supported the stimulus bill. Again, despite the pugilistic tendencies of Reid and Emanuel, their philosophy of managing Democratic lawmakers usually came down to accommodation.
Harry Reid understands his customers’ needs: which senators need to be home, if possible, to put their kids to bed, or whose father is ill, or who might need special praise for their forgettable floor speeches. If they are going to Vegas, Reid will help them get dinner reservations or show tickets. He is adept at recognizing people who might feel overlooked. For instance, Susanna Quinn, Jack Quinn’s wife, can sometimes feel like an appendage to her lobbyist husband—like when a cartoon rendering of Susanna with Jack on the wall of the Palm identified her merely as “Mrs. Quinn” (the restaurant later added her full name). “Susanna is really a charmer,” Reid said in a special toast to her at a fund-raiser the Quinns hosted for the senator at their home. “I know I tell everyone that I love them but I REALLY love Susanna,” Reid continued. “Jack has been such a good friend to me, but Susanna makes all of us feel so good about ourselves.” This made Susanna feel good about herself.
It turns out that Susanna Quinn’s grandfather, a Democratic senator from Oklahoma, used to sit at the desk on the floor that now belongs to Reid. Susanna’s then eight-year-old daughter Jocelyn wrote a letter to Reid, and Reid in turn sent her a signed copy of a book he wrote about Searchlight and a kid’s book written by Ted Kennedy in the voice of his dog, Splash. (Reid signed that one too.)
Reid caters with supreme efficiency, no wasted motion. To keep phone calls streamlined, Reid often skips saying good-bye. The other party might keep talking to a dead line for several seconds without realizing it.
I first met Reid in 2005, not long after he had become the Democratic leader. When Jim Manley walked me into his office and introduced me, Reid barely looked up and said to Manley, “Is this the sleazeball you told me about?” He had me at “sleazeball.”
Reid randomly called my desk a few years later to wish me a “happy Jewish holiday.” I don’t remember what Jewish holiday it was, or if I even knew it was a Jewish holiday. Reid then bragged to me that he was a “hero” to the then nine Jews in the Senate because he had adjourned the chamber in time for them to get home for whatever Jewish holiday it was. He reeled off the names of all the Senate Jews: Lieberman, Schumer, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California, etc. He concluded with Ron Wyden of Oregon, and when I expressed surprise that Wyden was Jewish—and mock surprise they even had Jews in Oregon—Reid deadpanned, “Yes, there are two of them in Oregon, and we have one of them.” And he hung up without saying good-bye, or shalom.
When wandering alone, Reid will sometimes break into a slight grin, as if he has just told himself a joke. Reid reminds me sometimes of a child—a peculiar child who has an imaginary friend who he speaks to unfiltered when he is alone, or not alone. Reid was once being wired up for a television interview in Las Vegas and wa
s overcome by the need to tell the technician fastening his microphone that he had “terrible breath.” When an aide asked Reid later why he would possibly say such a thing, Reid calmly explained that it was true.
He has a heightened sense of smell. He once complained about the body odor of summer tourists trekking through the Capitol, taking the occasion of a dedication ceremony for a new Capitol visitor center to make his annoyance public. “In the summertime,” he said, “because of the high humidity and how hot it gets here, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol.”
He is also surprisingly food- and body-obsessed, more evocative of a teenage girl than an earthy old boxer. He will occasionally partake of yoga (in black Lycra stretch pants) with Landra in their Ritz-Carlton apartment. He can be harshly judgmental of fat people and other ill-conditioned creatures. When George W. Bush invited Reid to the Oval Office for coffee as a gesture of goodwill at the end of his presidency, Reid promptly insulted the president’s dog, Barney, who had trotted into their meeting. “Your dog is fat,” Reid told the president.
• • •
Reid often invokes the desert blotch of Searchlight to explain his unfiltered style. He talks interminably about his hometown, even for a member of Congress. Washington politicians love talking about their hometowns, especially when running for reelection. They swoon over how the storied villages embody all that is great about America and how Washington could learn much from the town’s good values. (This is usually around the time their spouse gets an even bigger lobbying job and they buy a new mansion in McLean, Virginia, where they will live out their days.) The hometown can be an especially useful prop if it provides a tableau of personal adversity to overcome. Bonus points if the town name is an evocative noun, like Hope, Arkansas, or Plains, Georgia, or Searchlight.
But Searchlight is especially rich in this regard. Gold was discovered there in 1897, and there have been few highlights since. “The boom peaked in 1907 and quickly faded along with the town,” it says on a plaque in front of the Harry Reid Elementary School. Reid says he plans to be buried in a Searchlight graveyard, next to Landra.
Reid is a master of “that practiced, pale-faced-bumpkin-from-Searchlight act,” says Las Vegas political guru Jon Ralston. This masks a savvy, rough-hewn politician whom Ralston describes as “ruthless” and “Machiavellian.” Still, Reid clearly loves Searchlight, and his hard-bitten story is legitimate. The third of four brothers, Reid grew up in a wooden shack with no hot water or indoor toilet or trees. Only rocks. He tells of leafing through the Sears catalogue, just to browse the items they could never afford at Christmas, and then ripping out pages to deploy later as toilet paper in the outhouse.
“I look at these pictures, I cannot believe how I lived,” Reid told me. He compares the Searchlight of his boyhood to “that place in West Virginia.” There’s a word he’s looking for. Hmm. “You know, where things are so bad? Poor?”
“Appalachia?” I said.
“Yes, Appalachia,” Reid said, and then broke into a curiously big laugh.
Harry Sr. was a hard-rock miner who suffered chronic pain from on-the-job injuries. He battled alcoholism and depression, and spent time in jail. He killed himself in 1972, at fifty-eight. The senator’s mother, Inez Reid, was a redhead with few and eventually no teeth. As a teenager, Harry took a job at a gas station and bought her a false set. “It changed her,” Reid says of his mother’s new teeth. “I mean, you can imagine how good she felt with teeth after all those years.”
When I asked him if it’s ever painful to recall his own youth, Reid shrugs. “The only thing I don’t like is to watch movies about suicide and stuff like that,” Reid says, as close as he comes to publicly contemplating his inner life. But he is capable of pointed moments of empathy. Once, a young communications adviser, Rebecca Kirszner, who had just started working in Reid’s Senate office, kept misreading a phone number that Reid had been trying to dial for a radio interview. In his straight-to-the-point manner, Reid asked her, “Do you have a learning disability?” Embarrassed, she quietly said yes. Reid looked Kirszner in the eye and said, “You must have worked twice as hard to have gotten where you are.” No one had ever said this before to Kirszner, who was taken aback, and moved. “I did,” she whispered.
Reid’s sense of Washington psychology is grounded heavily in seeing—and, in certain cases, exploiting—the past humiliations of others. As with many politicians who grew up in poverty and endured family turmoil and other adversities, Washington has also been a powerful reinvention canvas for Reid. The city is filled with proving grounds that double as sanctuaries, like the Senate floor.
• • •
Sometimes during intense legislative debate and machinations, I sit up in the gallery and watch the floor. No words from below can be deciphered, only the low rumble and occasional laugh echoing up, and a pageant of body language. Senators are constantly engaged in physical contact, particularly the men shaking hands, squeezing shoulders, and bro hugging. It is the ritual power dance of faux fellowship, Capitol version. Michael Maccoby, a Washington psychoanalyst and author of the management and business book Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails, says he is struck by the “homoeroticism of politics.” Not homosexuality per se, but just an abiding sense of love on the Capitol floor, even among adversaries. “There is a sense of people cherishing being together, even at a time when camaraderie supposedly no longer exists,” Maccoby says.
Maccoby speaks of a “pseudo love” that people in politics can derive from the approval of their patrons, the loyalty of their staffs and supporters, and the reflective glory of their marquee friends. Multibillion-dollar industries have been born to foster pseudo love through image-buffing public relations, lobbying, advertising, or political campaigns.
“Washington is both a secretive and intensely scrutinized place and it can breed paranoia,” Maccoby says. It relies on a form of total loyalty that is at once widely available and fleeting in D.C. It self-selects a personality type that gravitates to the high-wire act of the public affirmation game. The floors of Congress provide case studies.
Harry Reid is always careening across the Senate floor. “I always feel like I’m missing something if I’m not there,” Reid says. In his memoir, The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington, Reid writes about how his father was never as happy as when he was down in his workplace, the gold mines. It didn’t matter that the work was sporadic and backbreaking and that the pay was awful. “I truly believe that it was one of the few places he was comfortable in this world,” Reid wrote.
Harry Reid feels similarly about mining votes on the Senate floor. The early Obama years were a bitch. Reid faced a tough reelection race in 2010 in a state where he was hardly loved to begin with. And this was before he engineered passage of an unpopular health-care bill and Republicans had made him their fattest electoral bull’s-eye in the country. Reid’s unfavorable rating in Nevada had risen to 52 percent by the end of 2009. “Reid fatigue,” diagnosed Ralston, the Nevada political couch doctor.
Reid stopped sleeping during the health-care debates of 2009 and early 2010. His caucus was getting harassed at town meetings by a newfangled phenomenon called the Tea Party. The White House kept wanting to know why the deliberations were taking so long. It was becoming clear that Reid was going to have to keep sixty Democratic senators in line to pass a bill; many of them were unreliable, some of them were double-dealers, and two of them were on death’s door. When then ninety-two-year-old Robert Byrd of West Virginia was hospitalized, Reid spoke to the state’s Democratic governor, Joe Manchin III, about replacing Byrd quickly “in the event that he could not carry out his duties.” Before Ted Kennedy died in August, Reid made calls to Massachusetts’s Democratic governor Deval Patrick and state lawmakers urging them to change a state law mandating that the seat stay vacant until a special election was held a few months later; this could cost Democrats a decisiv
e vote. The law was changed and Patrick named Paul G. Kirk Jr. as interim senator.
Until that special election, Reid had become preoccupied with the most basic of political duties: survival—literally, in the case of Byrd, the longest-tenured senator in history. Could the nonagenarian West Virginian hang on long enough—and remain ambulatory enough—to vote for the bill? Byrd’s looming expiration date became an ever-present subtext. It was too delicate to reference in public, except when Republican Tom Coburn declared in a floor speech that “what the American people ought to pray for is that somebody can’t make the vote.” Coburn said he was referring to a snowstorm that had been predicted for D.C., but many people assumed he was talking about Byrd.
Coburn later clarified through a spokesman that he does not wish misfortune on anyone, but you wonder if he might not wish just a little on Harry Reid.
• • •
He hung up on me again,” Coburn was saying, dumbstruck, to an aide after Reid curtly ended another phone call. It’s not clear what this particular call was about, only that Coburn had initiated it and Reid had ended it.
Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, might have been calling to complain that Reid’s office had issued a statement accusing Coburn of not caring about kids eating lethally unsafe food. Or maybe this call was about how Reid might have accused Coburn of being a racist because Coburn wanted to offset funding for the Justice Department to investigate hate crimes. Whatever: he did not take kindly to Reid saying whatever he said, so he called Reid to say so, and Reid hung up, and this cycle tends to repeat periodically between the two men.
For what it’s worth, Reid says he is trying to get better about ending his phone calls with the proper sign-off but allows that it might be futile. (“I can’t do it,” he says, “because I have nothing more to say.”)
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