Searching for Harry Reid

Progressive, The, March, 2005 by Stephen Elliott

An hour down the interstate, fifty-four miles southeast of Las Vegas on a new four-lane highway, sits the old mining town of Searchlight. It's much in the news these days as the birthplace and home of the new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. In this sparse and rugged spot, with a population hovering around 800, the houses are modest, many of them trailer homes. It's a place not unlike the America that elected George Bush. Rural and spacious. A place that appreciates small government and smaller taxes, though it doesn't mind taking a handout once in a while.

I arrive in Searchlight on a cold afternoon in early January, two months after the Presidential election, the Democratic Party in disarray and on the defensive. At thirty-five degrees, it's about as cold as it gets in this part of the state. I stand in front of the town's only casino, staring west across the valley to where the crabgrass and cedar roll up into the mountain range separating the town from the city on the other side. It's easy to see why the Senator loves Searchlight. He loves it so much that he mentions it every time he gives a speech, telling anyone who is willing to listen that his father was a hard-rock miner and his mother took in laundry. And though their house "didn't have hot water or an inside toilet, it was truly a family home to me and my three brothers." Reid continues to live here. He even wrote a scholarly book about the town, Searchlight: The Camp That Didn't Fail, published by the University of Nevada Press.

There are pictures of the house the Senator was born in. A wooden shack with a stovepipe chimney, surrounded by empty desert, two phone poles off in the distance. There's another picture, a young Harry Reid, six or seven, in front of a larger wooden house built from railroad ties. Still another picture, undated, shows his father, Harry Reid Sr., standing against a series of vertical slats, a mop of dark hair rising from his head as if on fire, undershirt tucked into his pants, long thin arms in his pockets, a dog at his feet. Harry Reid's father would commit suicide just as his son, the politician, was in the early days of his career.

There was no high school in Searchlight, so Harry had to hitchhike to Basic High in nearby Henderson. There he met his wife, Landra Gould, and his mentor, a teacher named Mike O'Callaghan. His high school picture shows a clean-cut and serious young man with a shiny forehead, hair combed carefully up along the sides with a wave across the front.

Reid returned to Henderson years later with a law degree from George Washington University and served as the city attorney. In 1968, he was elected to the Nevada Assembly at the age of twenty-eight and two years later became the state's youngest lieutenant governor, winning as Mike O'Callaghan's running mate. In 1977, he was appointed chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, a board notoriously dominated by the mob. Reid was unfazed, calling mob representative Joe Agosto a hoodlum. Toward the end of his tenure, Reid narrowly escaped a hit after a bomb was found plugged into the engine of his family car. After that, Harry Reid took to starting his car by remote control.

I meet Jane Overy at the Searchlight Museum, a single room in the community center that also houses a meeting room and the town library. "He doesn't walk around acting important," she tells me. "He's done the dead work. That's what they call it in the mines, the hard work that you do to get the prize." Overy, who oversaw the creation of the museum, explains when the town was founded it was nothing more than a mining claim fourteen miles from the Colorado River. It would have stayed that way if they hadn't discovered a water table a few hundred feet in the ground while digging for oil. She shows me a quote from one of the early miners that possibly explains the name of the town. "If there is gold in this rock," it says, "we'd need a searchlight to find it."

According to the Senator, Searchlight is the kind of place the Democrats are going to have to appeal to if they hope to take back power. He cites an unwillingness by Democrats in the past to reach out. "You can't appeal to rural voters if you don't go to rural voters," he says. "We need as Democrats to not be afraid to go places outside the big cities." He points out that John Kerry lost disastrously in rural Nevada, and had he done better there he could have taken the state. "We don't need to change who we are or what we believe in, we just have to do it better," he adds.

By the time I leave Searchlight to return to the slick neon of Las Vegas, it's gotten late and what's left of the sun is hidden by storm clouds. Coming upon Boulder Ridge, I'm confronted by the headlights spilling over the pass from across the range. With the new road just completed, cutting the commute from Vegas to under an hour, it's only a matter of time before this little town that could is submerged beneath Vegas's endless sprawl. The mining town, like the Democratic Party, is going to have to change.