Walter Mondale, former vice president, dies at 93
Walter Mondale #WalterMondale
Former Vice President Walter Mondale, a close adviser to President Jimmy Carter and a presidential nominee, died Monday. He was 93.
“Today I mourn the passing of my dear friend Walter Mondale, who I consider the best vice president in our country’s history,” former President Jimmy Carter said in a statement Monday night.
Mondale was credited with making the office more relevant. He served as Carter’s vice president from 1977 to 1981. He also served as a U.S. senator from Minnesota.
“During our administration, Fritz used his political skill and personal integrity to transform the vice presidency into a dynamic, policy-driving force that had never been seen before and still exists today,” said Carter, who called him an “invaluable partner.”
He ran as the Democratic nominee against Ronald Reagan in 1984. He lost that race in one of the most lopsided electoral victories in modern American politics, winning only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.
Mondale started his career as an activist in Minnesota’s Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, then by working on the U.S. Senate campaign of Hubert Humphrey in 1948. He graduated from the University of Minnesota law school in 1956 and served as state attorney general from 1960 until his appointment to the Senate in 1964 to finish Humphrey’s term after he became Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president.
Mondale, was elected to the Senate in 1966 and again in 1972.
In a relatively short two-term Senate career, Mondale was at the center of a number of reforms that reshaped how Congress voted, allocated the national budget and sought to protect lower-income and minority Americans. Mondale was the driving force behind the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which outlawed discrimination in housing, and he helped to pass the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which created the Congressional Budget Office. He helped lead the effort to amend the cloture process to make it easier to end filibusters — the 60-vote rule still in effect today.
As chair of the domestic task force of the Church Committee — the special committee led in 1975 by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, to investigate abuses by government agencies like the FBI, the CIA and the IRS — Mondale oversaw investigations of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., building a national profile that propelled him into the discussion about contenders for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination.
Mondale decided against running then because he wasn’t able to gain any traction crisscrossing the country and trying to raise money. But Carter saw Mondale’s heritage as a New Deal Democrat from the North as an important balance for his brand of moderate Southern politics. Mondale’s key role brokering an agreement in a fight over Mississippi’s delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention led to the prohibition of segregated delegations, presaging the reforms that reshaped Democratic presidential politics, an important factor in Carter’s nomination 12 years later.
“Fritz did most of the talking,” Carter said in 2015 about their initial conversations about Mondale’s joining the ticket.
Chosen to be Carter’s running mate in 1976, Mondale was a key advisor as Carter’s No. 2 once elected, particularly in the negotiations between Egyptian President Anwar el-Sādāt and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that resulted in the Camp David Accords.
Mondale was also the first vice president to have an office in the West Wing of the White House, where he became one of the most influential vice presidents to that point in American history and an important liaison to Congress for a president with few national political connections.
Mondale was the point man for the U.S. efforts to resettle hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam after the Vietnam War, and he led the delegation to Beijing that expanded U.S. with China. Carter appointed Mondale to lead the U.S. delegation to meet with South African Prime Minister John Vorster to declare the U.S.’s opposition to apartheid. And he had Mondale’s famous observation that “we told the truth, we obeyed the law and we kept the peace” inscribed on the wall of the Carter Center in Atlanta.
However, the Carter-Mondale ticket was defeated for reelection in 1980 by Reagan.
When Mondale got the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1984, he made history when he chose Rep. Geraldine Ferraro of New York as his running mate, making her the first woman vice-presidential candidate for a major party. However they, too, were defeated by the Reagan ticket.
Mondale practiced law until he was appointed ambassador to Japan in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. In 2002, Paul Wellstone, the Democratic senator from Minnesota died in a plane crash while campaigning, so, the party nominated Mondale to take Wellstone’s place on the ballot, but he lost the election to Norm Coleman.
His wife of 58 years, Joan, died in 2014 at age 83 after a long illness. Mondale also successfully underwent heart surgery in 2014.
In 2010, Mondale published a memoir titled: The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics.
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