“No one should be raised the way I was raised. My parents drank too much, and it made me ashamed. My mother took in laundry from the whorehouses in town. Dad was quiet and strong and worked the mines. Today, he’d be diagnosed as depressed. He fought it as long as he could, but when he couldn’t take it anymore, and his body was broken along with his spirit, he shot himself in the head. He was fifty-nine.”
“The president has squandered my respect. Twice I have called him a liar. Why? Because he has lied, to me and to America. If we can’t say so, then what meaning do words have? In my view you are only as good as your word. And his word is no good.”
Doesn’t sound like a typical politician, does it? Let alone the Senate Majority Leader. But Harry Reid’s voice is flinty, real and passion-filled; his story is a remarkable one of overcoming longer-than-long odds; and he pulls no punches discussing America today. The Good Fight intertwines his own story, particularly his early life of abject poverty in the tiny mining town of Searchlight, Nevada, “a place that boasted of thirteen brothels and no churches,” with the cautionary tale of contemporary Washington, D.C. and, as Reid proclaims, “If I can do nothing greater in this book than explain those two places to each other, then I will have done something important.”
He is inspired by obstacles. He hitchhiked 45 miles across open desert to get to high school. He worked full-time as a Capitol Hill policeman to support himself and his young family through George Washington law school, and when the school refused him financial aid, telling him that maybe he wasn’t cut out for the law, he buckled down, finished early and got out of Washington, D.C. as fast as he could, saying he hated the place and didn’t care if he ever came back. As the chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, he led an unrelenting fight to clean up Las Vegas, despite four years of constant death threats – and much worse. Then he was elected Representative, then Senator, then Senate Minority Leader, then Senate Majority Leader, all the time battling those who would take the country in the wrong direction: “The radical ideologues hate the American government. They said they wanted to shrink it so they could drown it in a bathtub. They degrade our government, so much so that when they are in charge of it, they do not know how to run it.”
And, ultimately, it all comes back to Searchlight, where Reid still makes his home: “Who I am now, and what I am doing now, began in that town, with those people, in those mines.” It is the story of a man who knows what a good fight is, because he has had to fight like hell for everything his whole life. It is populated by the rich and raucous cast of great and failed men, eccentrics, visionaries, gangsters and presidents that make up his life and times. And it is for all those who not only like a good story, but wonder what we do now in America:
“Ours is a time of great political disaffection, and I understand it, because so far in this new century, we have failed the people of this country. We’ve got a lot of damage to repair. There are no magic bullets. Future generations will look back on this period as a very dark one if we fail. But heaven help us if we don’t try.”
From the man who battled the Bush Administration comes “a compelling memoir…at times heartwrenching.”
—Las Vegas Review-Journal
“Vividly describes his contentious relationship with President Bush.”
—Esquire
“Recounts fights with everyone from classmates to the man who would eventually become his father-in-law, preparing him for a senatorial life of battling the Bush White House and Republican filibusters.”
—Washington Post
