Foremer US vice president Walter Mondale, a leading liberal Democratic voice of the late 20th century, died on Monday at age 93, his family said.
“Well my time has come. I am eager to rejoin Joan and Eleanor,” Mondale said in a statement to his staff and released to the public after his death, referring to his late wife, Joan, who died in 2014, and daughter, Eleanor, who died in 2011 at age 51. “Before I go, I wanted to let you know how much you mean to me.”
Mondale, the first major US party presidential nominee to pick a woman running mate, believed in an activist government and worked for civil rights, school integration, consumer protection, and farm and labor interests as a US senator and vice president during former US president Jimmy Carter’s troubled one-term presidency from 1977 to 1981.
He also served as US ambassador to Japan from 1993 to 1996 under then US president Bill Clinton.
Mondale had spoken in recent days with Carter, Clinton, US President Joe Biden and US Vice President Kamala Harris, a family spokesperson said.
“It’s with great sadness that [first lady] Jill [Biden] and I learned of the passing of vice president Walter Mondale, but great gratitude that we were able to call one of our nation’s most dedicated patriots and public servants a dear friend and mentor,” Joe Biden said in a statement.
“Walter Mondale was the first presidential nominee of either party to select a woman as his running mate, and I know how pleased he was to be able to see Kamala Harris become vice president,” the statement said.
“Today I mourn the passing of my dear friend Walter Mondale, who I consider the best vice president in our country’s history,” Carter, 96, said in a statement that also praised Mondale’s political skill and integrity. “He was an invaluable partner and an able servant of the people of Minnesota, the United States, and the world.”
Widely known as “Fritz,” Mondale was the Democratic nominee in 1984 against then-US president Ronald Reagan, who had beaten Carter four years earlier, and selected then-US representative Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.
Ferraro died in 2011 at age 75.
However, Mondale suffered one of the worst defeats ever in a US presidential election, losing in 49 of the 50 states and carrying only his native Minnesota as well as Washington.
It was the first of two times that Mondale was sent into political retirement by a crushing defeat.
Eighteen years later, grieving Minnesota Democrats beseeched Mondale, then 74, to run for the US Senate after US senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash 11 days before the 2002 election.
Mondale lost narrowly to Republican Norm Coleman, who depicted him as the graying representative of a bygone era.
During his race against Reagan, Mondale promised Americans that he would raise their taxes, a vow that did little to help his candidacy.
“I mean business. By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds,” Mondale said during his speech in San Francisco accepting the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. “Let’s tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”
The remark helped sink his campaign. Even years later, he expressed no regrets. “I’m really glad I did it,” he told PBS in 2004. “It’s something that I felt good about, and I thought I told the truth.”
Mondale married Joan in 1955. She died in 2014. They had three children, Eleanor, and sons Theodore and William.
Plans for memorials would be announced for Minnesota and Washington, his family said.
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