Land of Hard Knocks

Inez Reid was a redhead with few and eventually no teeth. As a teenager, Harry Reid 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?"

Asked if it's ever painful to recall his 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. "I just don't think about it that much. The stuff you don't like, you just" -- he waves his hand across his face.

Reid hitchhiked 40 miles to attend Basic High School in Henderson. There, he met his future wife, Landra Gould, the daughter of a chiropractor who disapproved of Reid instantly. (Reid and his future father-in-law fought bitterly, including once with their fists.) Reid also met a history teacher, Mike O'Callaghan, who would go on to become the governor of Nevada. O'Callaghan coached Reid in boxing at the Henderson Boys' Club and arranged for local businessmen to pay for Reid to attend college at Southern Utah State. Reid boxed in exhibition bouts as an amateur middleweight during college, occasionally sparring with professionals. "You could knock him down but he didn't stay down," O'Callaghan said in a 2001 interview with Salon.com (he died last year). Reid boasts that he never got his nose bloodied.

Reid gave up boxing when he began law school at George Washington University, working nights as a Capitol Police officer. He returned home and was elected to the Nevada Assembly at 28. Two years later, in 1970, he became the state's youngest lieutenant governor. In 1977, O'Callaghan appointed Reid chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, a job that pitted him frequently against the mob.

Reid vowed that he would "not play games with undesirables," shutting out reputed gangsters and closing casinos. A security guard moved into the Reid home after several telephoned death threats. The Reids covered their windows with sheets. Landra once discovered a bomb under the hood of their car, which was filled with their kids at the time. Reid then took to starting his car with a remote control device. This all has a way of putting the rough-and-tumble of a confirmation fight in perspective, Reid says.

Rising to the Top

One of Reid's favorite themes is how utterly amazed he is to find himself in the Senate, let alone the ranking Democrat.

"I just never planned this," Reid says, a lot. He would have you believe that he didn't think about running to be Democratic leader until last November, on election night. His friend, then-Minority Leader Tom Daschle, was in a close race for reelection in South Dakota. Reid believed Daschle would pull through, until Daschle called him at 1 a.m. Las Vegas time to tell him otherwise.

"Well, I guess we're it," Reid said in his suite at the Rio hotel, belting forth a dark laugh. He ordered a fruit plate from room service.

Reid, who was then the Democratic whip, had long been adept at the hand-holding and favor-brokering that lubricate so much Senate business. Some senators are known for their constituency work, some for their campaign skills, some for their media savvy. Reid, who was first elected to the Senate in 1986, is a floor-and-cloakroom guy.

"The floor is Harry's turf," Daschle says. "His confidence level is as high as anything he does in life on that floor."

As whip, Reid spent hours on leadership scut work -- deciding on orders of amendments, keeping things on schedule, making sure senators got their two minutes of speaking time. "Almost daily, someone would come in to make a case to him about why we had to make a vote or what we had to accommodate somebody for this and that reason," Daschle says. "And rarely did he ever say no."

But Reid is also capable of holding grudges. Michael Green tells an old political joke dating to the tenure of Nevada's exuberant former Sen. Richard Bryan: "Bryan wakes up in the morning wondering how many hands he can shake that day," Green says. "Reid wakes up wondering what enemies he needs to screw today."