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 "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 U.S. 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 U.S. senator
and vice president during Carter's troubled
one-term presidency from 1977 to 1981.
He also served as U.S. ambassador to Japan from
1993 to 1996 under Bill Clinton.
Mondale had spoken in recent days with Carter,
Clinton, President Joe Biden and Vice President
Kamala Harris, a family spokesperson said.
"It's with great sadness that Jill 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,"
President Biden and First Lady Jill 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," Biden's statement added.
"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 Reagan, a
popular incumbent Republican who had beaten
Carter four years earlier, and selected New York
Democratic U.S. congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro
as his vice presidential running mate. Ferraro
died in 2011 at age 75.
Despite the historic selection of a woman,
Mondale suffered one of the worst defeats ever
in a U.S. presidential election, losing in 49 of
the 50 states and carrying only his native
Minnesota as well as Washington, D.C.
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 Senate after 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 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."
Earlier that year, Mondale made a memorable
political quip when, during a primary debate, he
tried to depict Gary Hart, a rival for his
party's presidential nomination, as all style
and no substance by asking: "Where's the beef?"
The line, borrowed from a humorous hamburger
commercial popular at the time, hurt Hart's
campaign.
Mondale was a protege of fellow Minnesota
liberal Hubert Humphrey, also a senator and vice
president, who lost the 1968 presidential
election to Republican Richard Nixon.
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 Mondale served in the Senate
from 1964 until he was elected as vice president
in Carter's 1976 victory over incumbent
Republican Gerald Ford, who had become president
after Nixon resigned in 1974 due to the
Watergate corruption scandal.
Mondale became a more engaged vice president
than many who preceded him. He played a key role
in buttressing the sometimes frayed relationship
between Carter's White House and the
Democratic-controlled Congress.
'CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE'
He did not always agree with Carter, as when he
privately opposed Carter's preachy 1979 speech
in which the president told Americans, besieged
by a bad economy, that they were suffering from
a "crisis of confidence." Mondale even
considered resigning over the speech.
Carter increasingly looked like a weak president
as he struggled with a hostage crisis in Iran, a
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and tough
economic times at home. The
Carter-Mondale ticket lost in 1980 against
Reagan and his running mate, George H.W. Bush.
Mondale, still associated in voters' minds with
Carter, faced the daunting task of trying to
defeat a popular incumbent amid economic
prosperity in 1984.
The contest between Mondale and Reagan presented
Americans with a clear choice between liberal
and conservative candidates and doctrines.
Mondale was seen as the victor in their first
debate, with the older Reagan coming across to
some as out of touch and uncertain.
Reagan rebounded in the second debate. He
allayed concerns about his age with his response
to a question as to whether, at age 73, he was
too old to be seeking four more years as
president.
"I will not make age
an issue of this campaign. I am not going to
exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's
youth and inexperience," Reagan joked, provoking
laughter in the audience at the debate, and even
from Mondale.
"I think the public wanted to vote for Reagan,"
Mondale said later. He said that after the
second debate, "I was almost certain the
campaign was over. And it was."
Mondale's loss and a similar thrashing of fellow
liberal Michael Dukakis in 1988 opened the way
for more centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton to
assert themselves in the party.
Born in Ceylon, Minnesota, on Jan. 5, 1928,
Walter Frederick Mondale was the sixth of seven
children. His father was a Methodist minister,
his mother a music teacher.
Minnesota was dominated by farming and mining,
and it had a tradition of liberal, populist
politics, with many Scandinavian-American
residents like the Norwegian Mondales.
After serving in the U.S. Army, he earned a law
degree at the University of Minnesota. His
political life started with his work on the
re-election campaign of Humphrey, then mayor of
Minneapolis.
When Humphrey became vice president in 1964,
Mondale succeeded him in the Senate, coming to
Washington during Democratic President Lyndon
Johnson's "Great Society," a time of great hope
and excitement for liberals, though their
optimism was crushed by the Vietnam War.
Mondale married wife Joan in 1955. She died in
2014. They had three children, Eleanor and sons
Theodore and William.
Plans for memorials will be announced later for
both Minnesota and Washington D.C., Mondale
family said.
(Reporting by Will Dunham, Steve Holland and
Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington and Arshad
Mohammed in St, Paul, Minnesota; additional
reporting by Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru,
Editing by Diane Craft, Peter Cooney and Michael
Perry)
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