Walter F Mondale

Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president and champion of liberal politics, activist government and civil rights who ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 1984, losing to President Ronald Reagan in a landslide, died on Monday April 19 2021 at his home in Minneapolis. He was 93. Walter Mondale was a liberal Democrat, active in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He served as state attorney general from 1960-1964. When Hubert Humphrey became vice president in 1964, Mondale was appointed to replace him in the U.S. Senate, where he served until 1977. In 1976 Jimmy Carter chose Mondale to be his vice president. In 1984 Mondale, as the Democratic presidential nominee, became the first major-party candidate to choose a woman, Geraldine Ferraro, as a running mate. After the Mondale-Ferraro ticket lost to the incumbent Ronald Reagan, Mondale continued to be involved in politics, serving as U.S. ambassador to Japan from 1993 to 1996, and stepping in for Paul Wellstone, who died in an airplane accident running for his third Senate term in 2002. Mondale lost the race to Norm Coleman. He attended Macalester College in St. Paul before transferring to the University of Minnesota and graduating cum laude in 1951 with a degree in political science. After graduation came two years in the Army, a return to the University of Minnesota for law school and marriage to Joan Adams, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. They had two sons and a daughter. Their daughter, Eleanor Mondale Poling, a television and radio personality, died of brain cancer in 2011 at age 51. Mr. Mondale’s survivors include his sons, Theodore, who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Minnesota in 1998, and William, a lawyer; four grandchildren; and two step-granddaughters.