LAS VEGAS — Former President Barack Obama commemorated the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Saturday as a man \u201cwho got things done,\u201d as Democratic leaders gathered from around the country to recall Reid \u2014 often laughingly \u2014 as a man whose impatience for pleasantries was part of a drive to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.<\/p>\n
The turnout at Reid\u2019s Las Vegas memorial service testified to Reid\u2019s impact on some of the most consequential legislation of the 21st century, despite coming from a childhood of poverty and deprivation in Nevada. President Joe Biden escorted Reid\u2019s widow, Landra Reid, to her seat at the outset of services, before an honor guard bore a flag-draped casket to the well of a hushed auditorium.<\/p>\n
Reid died Dec. 28 at home in Henderson, Nevada, at 82 of complications from pancreatic cancer.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet there be no doubt. Harry Reid will be considered one of the greatest Senate majority leaders in history,\u201d Biden said, as leaders credited Reid\u2019s work on strengthening health care and on Wall Street reform and economic recovery in the wake of the 2008 recession.<\/p>\n
Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who described Reid to mourners as a \u201ctruly honest and original character,\u201d spoke during an invitation-only memorial. Former President Barack Obama, who credits Reid for his rise to the White House, delivered the eulogy.<\/p>\n
Obama said that when Reid helped pass the Affordable Care Act, \u201che didn\u2019t do it to burnish his own legacy,\u201d recalling how as a boy Reid\u2019s family was so poor that Reid himself pulled out one of his father\u2019s teeth.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe did it for the people back home and families like his, who needed somebody looking out for them, when nobody else did. Harry got things done,\u201d Obama said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thing about Harry, He never gave up. He never gave up. He never gave up on anybody who cared about him,\u201d said Biden, who served for two decades with Reid in the Senate and worked with him for eight years when Biden was vice president.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Harry said he was going to do something, he did it,\u201d Biden added. \u201cYou could bank on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reid\u2019s son, Leif, was one of a series of speakers who recalled his father\u2019s well-known habit of abruptly hanging up on telephone conversations without saying goodbye, sometimes leaving the other person — whether powerful politicians or close family \u2014 chatting away for several minutes before they realized he was no longer there.<\/p>\n
Leif Reid said it was \u201cpart of the narrative\u201d of his father\u2019s life, and tried to explain that the gesture was more about Reid preserving time for family.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen he hung up on you, maybe so quickly, it isn\u2019t as much about him being brusque as it is about him being devoted to my mom,\u201d Leif Reid said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI probably got hung up on the most by Harry Reid, two or three times a day, for 12 years\u201d \u2013 Pelosi told mourners.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes I even called him back and said Harry, \u2019I was singing your praises,\u201d Pelosi said. To which Reid replied: \u201cI don\u2019t want to hear it,\u201d she said, before she\u2019d hear the phone click dead.<\/p>\n
Reid served for 34 years in Washington and led the Senate through a crippling recession and the Republican takeover of the House after the 2010 elections.<\/p>\n
Harry Mason Reid hitchhiked 40 miles (64 kilometers) to high school and was an amateur boxer before he was elected to the Nevada state Assembly at age 28. He had graduated from Utah State University and worked nights as a U.S. Capitol police officer while attending George Washington University Law School in Washington.<\/p>\n
In 1970, at age 30, he was elected state lieutenant governor with Democratic Gov. Mike O\u2019Callaghan. Reid was elected to the House in 1982 and the Senate in 1986.<\/p>\n
He built a political machine in Nevada that for years helped Democrats win key elections. When he retired in 2016 after an exercise accident at home left him blind in one eye, he picked former Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto to replace him.<\/p>\n
Cortez Masto became the first woman from Nevada and the first Latina ever elected to the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n
Those flying to Las Vegas will arrive at the newly renamed Harry Reid International Airport. It was previously named for Pat McCarran, a former Democratic U.S. senator from Nevada who once owned the airfield and whose legacy is clouded by racism and anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n