The Game Changer
by Jon Ralston, 2026, Simon & Schuster, 387 pages, $30.00
If you’re flying to G2E this fall, you’ll most likely arrive at Harry Reid International Airport (LAS). That terminal used to be named for Nevada Senator Pat McCarran. This book will help you understand why they adopted the new name five years ago.
But probably the best reason to read this new book is sitting right there on the jacket flap: “How did the son of a laundress for local brothels end up one of America’s most powerful politicians and the Senate’s most bare-knuckled Democrat?”
For our readers, you need to realize that in addition to being a powerful Senate Majority leader, he was also a major player in the casino gaming world. Reid chaired the Nevada Gaming Commission (1977–1981), helped run the mob out of the casino business, played a key role in shaping the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), and went to the mat for the industry when the banks turned their backs on it during hard times. The American Gaming Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2001.
Reno Gazette photo of Reid as Nevada Gaming Commission Chairman
Reid himself was famously soft-spoken. The people who loved him (and especially the ones who couldn’t stand him) were anything but. I can vouch for that as a longtime Nevadan: say his name out loud in Reno, Las Vegas, or especially in any of the rural counties, and stand back.
I reported on Reid’s career for years back when I was a Reno newsman. Based on that, I can testify that author Jon Ralston has pulled off a genuinely balanced portrait here. He gives full weight to both Reid’s many accomplishments and his very real stumbles. That’s no small feat, considering Reid once took real pleasure in getting the author fired (more on that shortly).
If you reduced Reid’s life to bullet points based on what’s in this book, you’d swear you were reading about someone who never had a chance at becoming the most powerful man in Washington:
• Raised in the (true) middle of nowhere: Searchlight, NV
• Father was an alcoholic who died by suicide
• Grew up in a shack with no indoor toilet, hot water, or phone
• Boxed as an amateur
Despite amateur boxing experience, Reid’s career was TKO’d by an elastic exercise band that slipped from his hand (or broke) on New Year’s Day 2015. It knocked him down resulting in broken ribs, blindness in his right eye and a very bruised jaw. He never ran for re-election after that.
• Ran 15 full marathons, plus assorted halves
• Worked nights as a Capitol cop to pay for law school
• Served as a city attorney
• Got offered mob bribes and turned them down
• Got investigated by the FBI for bribery (cleared)
• Made a fortune in real estate
• Was played by folk singer and comedian Dick Smothers in the movie Casino (not in the book, I threw that one in)
• Had a bomb wired to his family’s station wagon
• Was a devout Mormon representing a state infamous for gambling, booze and prostitution
• Mobsters called him “Mr. Cleanface”
• Got praised by environmentalists for protecting Lake Tahoe and creating wilderness areas, and blasted by the same crowd for backing almost every mining venture
• Single-handedly blocked a powerful bipartisan push to make Nevada the nation’s nuclear waste dump
• Was the main reason Obama’s Affordable Care Act became law
• Pushed for serious government UFO investigations long before it was fashionable
He was also, by any honest account, a world-class flip-flopper:
• Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination — backed it, then voted no
• Gun control — a staunch Second Amendment man who still pushed a three-day waiting period on gun purchases
• Birthright citizenship — tried to gut it (Trump-style), before reversing course entirely (after realizing it applied to his wife!)
• Native American gaming — sided with Nevada casino owners against expansion, then championed it once those same owners spotted an opportunity there for themselves
• The Iraq War — voted for it, then became one of its loudest critics
Just from that list alone, you can see why this book is worth your time.
Since I was long-time Nevadan, I could closely relate to all of it. Therefore, I found it to be a page turner from cover-to-cover. However, other non-residents may find the pace sags a little when Ralston occasionally wades into the weeds of lesser-known Vegas and Reno political players. But that’s a minor complaint about an otherwise terrific book.
What Ralston has put together is a meticulous portrait of a man who sat at the center of nearly every major fight in this country from the 1970s until his death from pancreatic cancer in December 2021. He drew from late-life interviews with Reid himself, emails, handwritten notes, and testimony from friends and enemies alike (much of it reported here for the first time).
Jon Ralston – Photo: Simon & Schuster
For anyone who doesn’t already know him, Jon Ralston is Nevada’s most prominent political commentator, full stop. He’s appeared on MSNBC and Meet the Press and built his reputation through years as a reporter at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Las Vegas Sun, and the Reno Gazette-Journal before moving to television with Ralston Reports and Ralston Live.
In 2017, he launched The Nevada Independent¹, a reader-supported, nonprofit digital newsroom dedicated to covering the state’s biggest issues.
The Independent also puts out great casino gaming journalism, period. Ralston covers some of that ground himself, but I consider their beat reporter, Howard Stutz, to be the best in our business. CDC Gaming reprints his work regularly, and for good reason.
Reid, for his part, spent years trying to get Ralston fired for his reporting on the Senator. He finally succeeded by leaning on the owner of Las Vegas’s NBC affiliate (KSNV Channel 3) to cancel Ralston Reports outright.
So, it surprised plenty of people when Reid later agreed to let Ralston write this book. “Clearly there were people close to him who didn’t think that he should do the biography,” Ralston told me in an interview last week, “but he was eventually persuaded that I was the right person to do the book.”
“He stiff-armed me for many, many years in my efforts to do it. And then after he was out of office in early 2021, he summoned me to his new office at the Bellagio (where else) and said that he would. He was ready and said that I’m the right guy to do it. He knew that he wouldn’t like everything I wrote, but he knew I’d do a complete job. So, the rest is history.”
It’s history you shouldn’t skip. The Game Changer is in most bookstores and all the usual corners of the internet. List price is $30, but I found copies for under $22 if you shop around.
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1 – You can read The Nevada Independent online for free, but because their casino gaming coverage is superb, consider helping their cause. Donations fall in the 501(c)3 class, so they are tax free. They deserve our support.
