Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) writes about his turbulent relationship with GW in his new memoir, “The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington.” In the early 1960s, Reid was a law school student at GW while working full time as a Capitol Hill police officer and caring for his wife and two children. The school refused him financial aid, and when he sought advice from the dean, he was told to drop out. Reid graduated in 1964, but his resentment at the way he had been treated led to a decades-long estrangement from GW, one that did not end until he gave the Law School commencement address in 2005. Writes Al Eisele, at the Huffington Post:
There’s no question Reid knows how to hold a grudge. Case in point: He tells of delivering the 2005 commencement address at George Washington University Law School, where he won a law degree in 1964 while working the evening shift for three years under a Nevada congressman’s patronage as a Capitol policeman. He never forgot that the school had refused him financial aid when he told the dean he was working fulltime, his wife was pregnant with their second child, his car had broken down and they couldn’t make ends meet. The dean coldly suggested he wasn’t cut out to be a lawyer and should quit.
“It is true that I had been upset for four decades, and in that time could not be stirred to answer an invitation or a piece of fundraising mail from anyone at the university,” Reid writes. “The source of my scorn was simple: Success in my life, given my background, was unlikely enough without being kicked by Dean Potts when I was down. How, if he was trying to clear me out like a weed among the orchids, then he picked the wrong guy.”
But Reid decided he’d held his grudge long enough and it was time to “apologize to the entire faculty, administration, and all of the law students for my pettiness,” which he did, telling his audience, “It’s not how I’ve tried to live my life.”
The lesson for Reid was clear, and it tells a great deal about his style of leadership.
“… It actually felt good to bury the hatchet at GWU,” he writes. “They were very gracious in receiving me. … In any case, I had neither the time nor energy to hold on to past resentments. I guess that forty years was enough. In 2005, there were far too many battles to fight, on far too many fronts.”
In an interview with the Hatchet shortly before his commencement address, Reid acknowledged that he had not been on campus since graduating, despite a number of invitations.
“I’ve been asked to speak in the past,” he said. “I just felt like now it was the right time.”
Reid also said that he had not attended his own law school commencement because he had been “…so anxious to get out of here.”
