Nevada Focus: Reid eclipses Key Pittman as Senate powerhouse

Brendan Riley

Friday, Nov. 27, 1998 | 9:59 a.m.

CARSON CITY, Nev. -- Harry Reid may eclipse the late Key Pittman as a U.S. Senate powerbroker when he gets the job of Democratic whip. But he'd be hard-pressed to top Pittman as a subject of wild political tales.

Reid, who barely won a third term on Nov. 3, is expected to get the whip assignment on Tuesday. That'll top Pittman's status as Foreign Relations Committee chairman and Senate president pro tem in the 1930s.

The whip is the No. 2 leadership slot among Senate Democrats, putting Reid right under Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.

That's a better assignment than a committee chairmanship or even the often-thankless job of Senate president, although political historians say Reid will have to prove himself to earn the title of the most powerful Nevadan to serve in the U.S. Senate.

Time will tell whether Reid gets that title. Time already has told Pittman's colorful, even bizarre, story - but now's as good a time as any for a retelling.

Pittman, a dapper, hard-drinking lawyer who had spent time in the Klondike gold fields, made a fortune during the Tonopah-Goldfield mining boom in the early 1900s. He first went to the U.S. Senate from Nevada in 1912, and remained there until his death in 1940, just after winning re-election.

For years, there were tales that Pittman actually died just before the election in 1940, prompting prominent Democrats to put his body in a bathtub full of ice until the balloting was over.

The truth, according to state Archivist Guy Rocha, is just about as strange: Pittman had been on a drinking binge and suffered a massive heart attack the day before the election - but a cover-up kept the news from Nevadans. The next day, voters elected a terminally ill man to the Senate. Five days after the election, he died at age 68.

Pittman handily defeated Republican Sam Platt of Carson City, and that gave Democrats rather than the GOP the right to name a replacement after his death. The then-Democratic governor, Ted Carville, picked Berkeley Bunker, at the time the 34-year-old speaker of the state Assembly.

But wait, there's more:

Rocha says Pittman, part of a U.S. delegation at a monetary conference in London in 1933, shot out street lights with his six-shooter, and "entertained two women of questionable character who were later evicted from his hotel."

On another evening, Lady Nancy Astor gave a big dinner for the American delegation. Male guests heard uncontrolled laughter coming from the drawing room where women guests had gathered, and found the senator tickling Lady Astor.

Others tell of Pittman drinking so much that he got sick, and then a few minutes later delivering a great speech.

If all this sounds like the complete opposite of the methodical, somewhat strait-laced Reid, it's clear they're similar in one important aspect: "insider" politicians closely aligned with their party leaders and well-liked by senators on both sides of the aisle.

Also, both are in the top 10 of Nevada politicians with razor-thin victory margins in statewide general election races. Pittman won his first term by only 89 votes out of nearly 20,000 cast. Reid just won his third term by just 401 votes out of more than 435,000 cast.

Pittman wasn't given to high-flown oratory and was tenacious in pushing Nevada causes. The same holds true for Reid. One of those causes for Pittman was a national park in White Pine County in eastern Nevada. That's exactly where it ended up - after Reid's Great Basin National Park legislation was signed into law in 1986.

There's even a "Key" in both the Pittman and Reid families. Reid named his youngest son after Key Pittman.

"I was campaigning with John Koontz (then Nevada secretary of state) in 1974 and he told me all these great stories about Key Pittman," Reid says. "I loved the name." Key Reid was born later that year.