Table of Contents
ALSO BY SENATOR HARRY REID
Searchlight: The Camp That Didnt Fail
HARD LESSONS FROM SEARCHLIGHT TO WASHINGTON
I dedicate this book to Marine Private OCallaghan... Air Force Sergeant OCallaghan... Army Sergeant OCallaghan... Governor OCallaghan, and to my friend, Mike, an inspiration to me in his lifes example, and still an inspiration in death.
And to Susan McCue, a talented and dedicated young woman on whom Ive relied for two decades, and from whom the idea for this book came.
PREFACE
THIS STORY begins at the end.
It begins at the end of a presidency that has tested our values, compromised our Constitution, and usurped our rights as Americans.
At the end of an era of crippling partisan rancor, during which the Presidents political opponents were branded as insufficiently patriotic.
At the end of a time in which we suffered a vicious and unprovoked attack on our soil and responded with force, sometimes in a focused and just way, sometimes not.
At the end of a period in our history in which diplomacy was allowed to fail as a first resort in deference to military action, and our intelligence-gathering was politicized to a stunning degree, as was war itself.
At the end of an era in which the White House looked on haplessly as Americans in a great American city cried for help from rooftops and their cries went seemingly unheard and the White House seemed not to understand what to do.
At the end of a period of profligate government spending in a budget of misplaced priorities by a White House that once billed itself as conservative with the peoples money.
This story begins at the end of all of these things. And this list could go on.
MY PURPOSE in this book is to tell you something of who I am, and how I came to be the Senate Majority Leader at such a time in our history. My path to the present was as circuitous and turbulent and unique as it was unlikely. I come from a flyspeck on the map called Searchlight in remote southern Nevada, grew up during the war, and I dont mean this as a boast, but people who come from where I come from generally do not end up in the United States Senate. And in truth, where Ive ended up was the furthest thing from my mind as I was getting started.
The saying goes that to look forward, you must look back. As you read, youll find that the chapters alternate between the past and the present, because I believe that the two can be mutually illuminating. I am immensely proud of my hometown and of my home state. And I am equally proud of the work Ive had the pleasure and privilege of doing in Washington, D.C., for the past twenty-five years. If I can do nothing more here than explain those two placesSearchlight and Washingtonto each other just a little bit, then I will have done something.
Looking back is something Ive not often done, and it doesnt come very naturally or easily to me. Not all is sweetness and light in my past, and there have been more than a few scars, but I suppose that holds true for everyone.
H.R.
Searchlight, Nevada
February 2008
ONE
A MEETING AT THE WHITE HOUSE
I AM NOT A PACIFIST. War is bad in every instance, but sometimes reasonable people are left with no other choice. Such a time came in early 1991, during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the neighboring nation of Kuwait with his massive army and was poised to threaten the entire Arabian peninsula and the largest oil reserves in the world. President Bush had been deliberate in his response to Husseins aggression, properly working all the diplomatic angles, masterfully assembling a vast coalition to oppose Hussein, including the full array of his Middle East neighbors, and making it clear to all that if Hussein did not withdraw his forces back to Iraq, the civilized nations of the world would destroy his army and remove him from Kuwait. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and Marines and troops from dozens of countries had been staging in Saudi Arabia for months. U.S. Navy carriers steamed into the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and the eastern Mediterranean. Hussein would not listen. War seemed inevitable.
On the afternoon of January 12, 1991, during my first term in the Senate, I was in the cloakroom, about to walk onto the Senate floor to give a speech about the coming war, when the phone rang and the clerk who answered it said, Senator, its the President. He wants to talk to you. He was calling to lobby me to support the impending military action. I got on the phone and said, Mr. President, you dont need to waste any time with me. Im about to become the first Democrat to endorse this in the Senate, but youve got to give me your word that youre going to do it. Tell me that youre not going to spend weeks making up your mind.
No, I wont do that, the President said. Im going to do something quickly.
So I went to the floor and gave my speech supporting the President. Not many Democrats took this position, but after I spoke, a number did follow suitRichard Bryan, my colleague from Nevada, Al Gore of Tennessee, Bob Graham from Floridaand there were enough of us to give the President majority support in the Senate. The resolution passed 52 to 47. And President Bush was as good as his word. Three days after he signed the resolution, I was in my car on the way home when the bombing started. It was on the radio.
My point in telling this story is not to adjudicate whether or not the first Gulf War was worthwhileI believe it wasbut rather to establish that I have no natural animus to Presidents named George Bush. I admire the current Presidents father deeply, and believe that he is a very decent man who has lived his life for his country.
I came to the Senate two years before he was elected President. My first briefing on the first President Bush came in the fall of 1988, just after the election. Senator Lloyd Bentsen, who had been the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee that yearon the ticket, with Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, that had just lost to Bushnonetheless pulled me aside one day to reassure me that Bush was a great man and would make a good President. Youll love him, Bentsen told me. Hes the nicest guy, very pragmatic. No ones been better prepared to be President than him. Hes been a member of Congress, head of the Republican National Committee, head of the CIA, ambassador to the United Nations, ambassador to China, Vice President. Bentsen went on and on effusively about what a quality man President-elect Bush was. Then he paused and said, But watch out for his wife; shes a bitch.
I have never had anything against Mrs. Bush, but guided by Bentsens crude advice, Ive always said that our forty-third President is more his mother than his dad. I have made no secret of my antipathy toward the second President Bush, nor have I hidden my opinion of the job he has done. I believe that the current President is an ideologue who has done incalculable damage to the government, reputation, and moral standing of the United States of America. His vaunted CEO presidency has instead been incompetent in the face of grave challenge at home and abroad, when we can least afford incompetence.
It is only fair, I suppose, to say that the feelings may be mutual. Thats almost a certainty if a meeting at the White House in the spring of 2007 is any indication.
