Walter Mondale: Apollo 1 Hearings, a West Wing Office, and a 49 State Loss

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Walter Mondale was born in 1928 in Ceylon, Minnesota, the son of a Methodist minister who preached social justice and civil rights through years of family poverty. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1951 he enlisted in the Army during the Korean War, serving at Fort Knox, and used the GI Bill to pay for law school. At 20 he organized a conservative district for Hubert Humphrey's Senate campaign, and in 1960, at 32, he was appointed Minnesota attorney general. When most state attorneys general opposed providing lawyers to poor defendants in Gideon v. Wainwright, he organized a counter brief in support. Appointed to Humphrey's Senate seat in 1964, he helped write the 1968 Fair Housing Act and, after the 1967 Apollo 1 fire, used the leaked Phillips Report to press NASA Administrator James Webb in televised hearings.

As Jimmy Carter's vice president from 1977, Mondale demanded an office in the West Wing, became the first vice president to live at the Naval Observatory, and held a weekly private lunch with Carter built on candid disagreement behind closed doors and loyalty in public. After the 1980 defeat he won the 1984 Democratic nomination, chose Geraldine Ferraro as the first woman on a major party ticket, and told the convention in San Francisco that he would raise taxes. Ronald Reagan won 525 electoral votes, and Mondale carried only Minnesota and Washington, D.C. He later served as ambassador to Japan, stepped in as a late Senate candidate in 2002, and died in 2021 at 93.

• While serving on the Church Committee, he learned that the NSA had kept a surveillance file on him.
• Every administration after Carter's adopted the working vice presidency he designed.
• As ambassador to Japan he handled a 1995 crisis involving U.S. military personnel on Okinawa.
• He replaced Paul Wellstone on the 2002 ballot after Wellstone died in a plane crash 11 days before the election, then narrowly lost to Norm Coleman.
• In his final day he took calls from Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and told his staff to keep up the good fight.