Backstory: Requiem for Iron Mike

By Michael Green

We often end up with the leaders we deserve, for good and ill. Nevadans sometimes have been lucky. In Mike O'Callaghan, Nevadans had a leader who was better than we deserved.

Not that he felt that way. He loved Nevada and Nevadans loved him, and mourned him when he died Friday at an early-morning mass at St. Viator's Catholic Church. He was 74, but he packed a lot of living into those 74 years and will live for us all for many years more.

Why O'Callaghan inspired such love from Nevadans isn't hard to figure out. He was everything politicians are supposed to be: intelligent, shrewd, good at glad-handing, principled but smart and good enough to know when to settle for half a loaf. But Nevadans also loved him because he was everything politicians aren't supposed to be--or used to be, and aren't anymore. He could belly up to the bar with them, he didn't mind roaring to make a point, he thought you were entitled to his unvarnished opinions and if it's true he once punched a legislator who didn't vote as promised, well, so much the better.

More than that, he changed our lives as few in Nevada's history have done. As a war hero turned teacher at Basic High School, he took under his wing several future leaders, including a scrawny Searchlight kid named Harry Reid, whom he also coached in boxing at the local boys club.

That work helped lead to a job with juvenile court services, where O'Callaghan took what many here considered the radical step of hiring nonwhites in the late 1950s. He promoted civil rights and inclusiveness more when he became active in the local Democratic Party.

He went to work for the state in 1963 when Gov. Grant Sawyer asked him to reorganize seven offices into the Department of Human Resources. He did it. Then he went to Washington, D.C., to organize Job Corps conservation camps, then returned to the West as regional director of the Office of Emergency Preparedness.

That's a lot of jobs, but they reflected O'Callaghan's belief in public service and that government can do well by doing good. They also reflected his nature: He wanted to get things done and move on to the next thing that needed doing.

In 1970, that something else was Nevada. Sawyer's two terms had changed Nevada drastically for the better by overhauling gaming control and supporting civil rights. Paul Laxalt followed by continuing to modernize the state. O'Callaghan wanted to do more.

He shouldn't have won the primary, but beat a popular Las Vegas newscaster, Hank Thornley. He shouldn't have beaten Lt. Gov. Ed Fike in the general election. It helped that Fike was involved in a suspicious land deal. It helped even more that Hank Greenspun blistered Fike for it on the front page of the Las Vegas Sun. It didn't hurt that O'Callaghan clung to the increasingly unusual notion that if you talk straight to voters and campaign hard, you might win, no matter who has been anointed.

In his eight years as governor, O'Callaghan combined social liberalism with fiscal conservatism to accomplish a record that's exhausting just to describe, much less to have done it--and, old farm boy that he was, he did it by working from before sun-up until after sundown. He won approval of a fair housing law, a big step on the road to ending official discrimination. He expanded and improved education and its funding at all levels, and did much to protect the environment. He brought the Las Vegas area numerous state services that it had been lacking, including mental hospitals, prisons and treatment centers for the young and the disabled--all while streamlining government and avoiding undue tax increases.

True, he had an easier time when the economy did well--but he also accomplished this laundry list during the energy crisis and double-digit inflation. And he did other things not because he had to or found it politically wise, but because he thought they were right: The number of women working in state government radically increased, and he backed the Equal Rights Amendment, which had no chance of winning Nevada's approval.

After he left office, he worked for Hank Greenspun and bought the Henderson and Boulder City weekly newspapers. He handled administrative details, wrote columns that oozed common sense and kept his finger in the political pie. He also involved himself in projects in the Middle East and Central America, promoting peace and democracy.

Others here, especially Geoff Schumacher, knew him far better than I did. I got to know him a bit. He extended me far more kindness than he had a need or a reason to, which has nothing to do with this Nevada historian's judgment: With Sawyer, he will go down as having done more than anyone before or after to bring this state into the modern era.

The strange thing is, for all his accomplishments and faults, one fact about his death was wrong. They said it was a heart attack. No one ever could question Mike O'Callaghan's heart.