Harry Reid the former Senate majority leader and Nevada’s longest-serving member of Congress has died. He was 82.

       Reid died Tuesday, “peacefully” and surrounded by friends “following a courageous, four-year battle with pancreatic cancer,” Landra Reid said of her husband in a statement.

       The combative former boxer-turned-lawyer was widely-acknowledged as one of toughest dealmakers in Congress, a conservative Democrat in an increasingly polarized chamber who vexed lawmakers of both parties with a brusque manner and this motto:

       “I would rather dance than fight, but I know how to fight.”

       Over a 34-year career in Washington, Reid thrived on behind-the-scenes wrangling and kept the Senate controlled by his party through two presidents — Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama — a crippling recession and the Republican takeover of the House after the 2010 elections.

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       He retired in 2016 after an accident left him blind in one eye.

       Reid in May 2018 revealed he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was undergoing treatment.

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       Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price in Las Vegas and Reno Correspondent Scott Sonner contributed to this report.