Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, a liberal icon who lost the presidential election with the most rogue regions, after unequivocally asking voters to expect a tax increase if he wins, died Monday. He was 93.
The death of the former senator, ambassador and attorney general in Minnesota was announced in a statement from his family. No cause was mentioned.
Mondale followed in the footsteps of his political mentor, Hubert H. Humphrey, from Minnesota politics to the U.S. Senate and vice presidency, who served from 1977 to 1981 under Jimmy Carter.
In a statement Monday night, Carter said he considered Mondale the best vice president in our country’s history. He added: “Fritz Mondale has given us all a model for public services and private conduct.”
Mondale’s own try for the White House, in 1984, was at the height of Ronald Reagan’s popularity. His choice of Rep. Geraldine Ferraro of New York as his running mate made him the first presidential candidate of the biggest party to put a woman on the ticket, but his statement that he would raise taxes helped define the race.
On election day, he carried only his homeland and the District of Columbia. The election vote was 525-13 for Reagan – the biggest landslide in the Electoral College since Franklin defeated Roosevelt in 1936 for Alf Landon. (Sen. George McGovern won 17 votes in his 1972 defeat by winning Massachusetts and Washington, DC)
“I did my best,” Mondale said the day after the election, blaming no one but himself.
“I think you know I’m never really warmed up on television,” he said. “To be honest with television, it never really warmed me up.”
Mondale said years later that his campaign message was the right message.
“History has confirmed to me that we will have to raise taxes,” he said. “It was very unpopular, but it was undeniably correct.”
In 2002, state and national Democrats watched Mondale when Senator Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., Died in a plane crash less than two weeks before election day. Mondale agreed to vote for Wellstone, and early polls showed him with a lead over Republican candidate Norm Coleman.
But the 53-year-old Coleman, who emphasized his youth and vitality, knocked out the then 74-year-old Mondale in an intense six-day campaign. Mondale was also hurt by a partisan memorial service for Wellstone, in which thousands of Democrats attended Republican politicians. One speaker pleaded, “We beg you to help us win this election for Paul Wellstone.”
Polls showed the service deterred independents and cost Mondale votes. Coleman wins by 3 percentage points.
“The praise singers had the most hurt,” Mondale said after the election. “It does not justify it, but we are all making mistakes. Can we not now find it in our hearts to forgive it and move on?”
It was a particularly bitter defeat for Mondale, who even after his loss to Reagan had comfort in his perfect record in Minnesota.
“One of the things I’m most proud of,” he said in 1987, “is that I have never lost an election in Minnesota once in my public career.”
Years after the defeat in 2002, Mondale returned to the Senate to stand alongside Democrat Al Franken in 2009 when he was sworn in to replace Coleman after a protracted narration and court battle.
Mondale began his career in Washington in 1964, when he was appointed to the Senate to replace Humphrey, who resigned as vice president. Mondale was elected in 1966 to a full term of six years with about 54% of the vote, although the Democrats lost the governorship and suffered other setbacks in the election. In 1972, Mondale won another Senate term with nearly 57% of the vote.
His senate career has been marked by advocacy for social issues such as education, housing, migrant workers and child nutrition. Like Humphrey, he was an outspoken advocate of civil rights.
Mondale tested the waters for a presidential bid in 1974, but ultimately decided against it. “I basically found that I did not have the overwhelming desire to be president, which is essential to the kind of campaign that is required,” he said in November 1974.
In 1976, Carter chose Mondale as number 2 on his ticket and left Gerald Ford.
As vice president, Mondale had a close relationship with Carter. He was the first vice president to occupy an office in the White House, rather than in a building across the street. Mondale traveled extensively on behalf of Carter and advised him on domestic and foreign affairs.
While he did not have Humphrey’s charisma, Mondale has a sense of humor.
Leaving the 1976 presidential race, he said, “I do not want to spend the next two years in Holiday Inns.”
Mondale recalled shortly before he was selected as Carter’s running mate, saying: “I checked and found that they were all refurbished, and that they were wonderful places to stay.”
Mondale never returned from his liberal principles.
“I think the country needs more progressive values than ever before,” Mondale said in 1989.
In that year, Democrats tried to persuade him to challenge GOP Senator Rudy Boschwitz in Minnesota, but he decided not to make the race and said it was time to make room for a new generation.
“One of the requirements of a healthy party is that it renews itself,” he said at the time. “You can not keep driving Walter Mondale for everything.”
This paved the way for Wellstone to win the Democratic nomination, and continued to upset Boschwitz. Wellstone was preparing to tackle Mondale in a by-election, but would have been a heavy underdog.
The son of a Methodist pastor and a music teacher, Walter Frederick Mondale, was born on January 5, 1928, in small Ceylon, Minnesota, and grew up in several small towns in southern Minnesota.
He was only twenty when he served as district manager of Congress for Humphrey’s successful Senate campaign in 1948. His education, interrupted by a two-year period in the military, culminated in 1956 in a law degree at the University of Minnesota.
Mondale started a legal practice in Minneapolis and led the successful 1958 gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Orville Freeman, who in 1960 appointed Mondale’s Attorney General. Mondale was elected Attorney General in the fall of 1960 and re-elected in 1962.
As attorney general, Mondale quickly turned to civil rights, antitrust and consumer protection cases. He was the first attorney general in Minnesota to make consumer protection a campaign issue.
After his years in the White House, Mondale served as President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Japan from 1993 to 1996, fighting for American access to markets ranging from cars to cell phones.
He helped prevent a trade war in June 1995 over cars and auto parts, and persuaded Japanese officials to give U.S. automakers more access to Japanese dealers and to suppress Japanese automakers to buy U.S. auto parts.
Mondale maintained its ties with the Clintons. In 2008, he endorsed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as president, and changed his marriage only after Barack Obama clinched the nomination.
When Democrats came to him after Wellstone’s death, Mondale worked for the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney and served on corporate and nonprofit boards. He returned to the firm after the short-lived campaign.
Mondale and his wife, Joan Adams Mondale, were married in 1955. During her vice presidency, she insisted on more government support for the arts and earned the nickname “Joan of Art”. She earned an art degree from college and worked at museums in Boston and Minneapolis.
The couple had two sons, Ted and William, and a daughter, Eleanor. Eleanor Mondale has become a broadcast journalist and TV host, including ‘CBS This Morning’ and programs with E! Entertainment television. Ted Mondale served six years in the Minnesota Senate and made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination as governor in 1998. William Mondale served as assistant attorney general for some time.
Joan Mondale died in 2014 at the age of 83 after a long illness.