The Best Years of Our Lives, a 1946 film that won seven Academy Awards, begins as a trio of World War II combat veterans has hitched a ride to their small hometown on a defanged B-17 Flying Fortress bomber being flown to an airplane junkyard.
Like the men themselves, the propeller-driven plane—having performed its duty admirably but sidelined by jet technology—was being disposed of.
As they near home, the three crowd into the B-17’s nose where the Norden bombsight—the type operated over Europe by one of the three—was once affixed. Now all that’s left is an empty triangular pane of glass.
In their excitement, as the plane nears land, they remark on the sights they have missed during four years of fighting the Germans and the Japanese. Some things are the same—the ballpark, high school, churches, and rows of neat frame homes surrounded by white picket fences.
But some sights are new to them—hot rods cruising the streets, the airport with a runway long enough to accommodate the bomber, and a golf course where men are playing “as if nothing had ever happened.”
They had returned alive to the safety and security of the kind of ordered, predictable and comfortable world in which Richard Bryan, 8 years old when the war ended, grew up—an environment he described as “idyllic.”
“Parents today do not enjoy the luxury of this small-town, bygone era,” Bryan wrote in his 2024 book, My Life in Nevada Politics: The Memoirs of Senator Richard H. Bryan (written with John L. Smith, University of Nevada Press).
An early bloomer
Bryan’s memoirs function as a portrait of both the man and the state. Politics became a factor in Bryan’s life early on. He determined his destiny even before high school. Most of his fellow students at John S. Park Elementary School in Las Vegas—still there today—gave ordinary answers when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. But not the young Bryan.
“My answer never varied,” he wrote. “Not a firefighter or a baseball star, but the governor of Nevada.”
He was elected class president in eighth-grade, when Las Vegas “was no longer a dusty railroad town, but not yet the Entertainment Capital of the World.” From then on, he walked a virtually straight path to the United States Senate; he never stopped climbing.
He held leadership positions through high school, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Hastings Law School in San Francisco (now called University of California College of the Law, San Francisco)—sometimes called “Nevada’s law school,” because the state didn’t have one. Along the way, he acquired a network of friends and acquaintances he would rely on throughout his career, including many of the better-known names from Nevada’s recent history—in both parties.
Advancement in politics, he soon learned, required compromise. “I like to think of myself as a moderate,” Bryan wrote. Like his father, Oscar, he was a Democrat and supported Democrats during his entire political career.
A community of leaders
One year before his son was born in 1937 in Washington, D.C., Oscar, intending to become a lawyer, was hired as a purchasing agent at a New Deal agency. “A picture of FDR always graced our home along with a number of Roosevelt biographies,” Bryan wrote.
The Bryans were relatively well-off. In Las Vegas, as justice of the peace, Oscar held “one of the most highly compensated offices in the United States, due to the number of marriages,” Bryan wrote. Nevada had become famous for the quickie marriage and the quickie divorce.
Oscar Bryan would die at age 52 in 1961 from prostate cancer, and left nothing but “his good name” behind. But that was sufficient to be a big help in the small state of Nevada. Shortly after his father’s death, a university regent who owned an auto dealership gave young Bryan money—$500 (about $5,420 today)—to help him along.
Bryan admitted that “my father’s friendships and contacts would help me many times in my life. Long after he died, his relationships would open and bolster my prospects as I navigated the world.”
As he prepared for law school as an undergraduate, Bryan’s classmates included men who would obtain high positions in the state, including an Alpha Tau Omega fraternity brother, Roland Westergard, who would become head of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources; and Roger Trounday, who would become chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board, which regulates the gambling industry.
After earning an undergraduate degree and heading for law school, Bryan said, “I always felt that others were ahead of me, and I must quicken the pace. Every minute counted. I was the quintessential young man in a hurry.” His comment reflected an ethic of the age in which he lived; lots of young American men felt similarly, and even Hollywood picked up on this trend.
Core beliefs
Bryan’s success in politics was not based solely on a network; his achievements weren’t simply a given.
He had a strong sense of the importance of service to someone other than oneself. The University of Nevada, for example, required men to join the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). Bryan completed this requirement and military service after graduation. This taught him an important lesson.
He wrote: “Today I think the civilian and military ranks miss that perspective. … I believe that an army that includes a broad range of citizens is far less likely to be isolated from the rest of society, and it is far healthier for the rest of us to have a military that understands that. I think we are missing that today with the volunteer army.”
Bryan also became famous for his memory. He knew the names of individual voters, their families and their businesses—and the fates of those businesses—and not just in the two major cities of Las Vegas and Reno; he also could name individuals statewide from Elko to Ely. He did not need an aide to whisper an approaching constituent’s name and issue in his ear. He could name every reporter and their employers.
Explaining this, he liked to use a quote often attributed to the Stoic philosopher Seneca: “Luck favors the prepared.” Stoic beliefs would play a key role in his ability to survive whirling political eddies.
He remembered, for example, that on Feb. 2, 1982, when he announced his candidacy for governor at a press conference, a Reno reporter, Dennis Myers—one of the greatest journalists in Nevada history (and the RN&R’s longtime news editor)—asked him if it was a coincidence that his announcement for his latest campaign happened to come on Groundhog Day.
Myers, said Bryan “could always be counted on to ask an off-the-wall question … but nothing ever appeared in print or in the broadcast media.” It was, he recalled, just “a playful exchange.” Bryan had excellent relations with the press throughout his career because he was thought in media circles to be largely accessible, straightforward and honest.
He credits his mother, Lillie, “a product of the Old South” born in Virginia, with triggering his lifelong interest in history. Bryan, in fact, read nothing but history books throughout his career—another characteristic of his focus, determination and ambition.
Bryan’s wife of 54 years, the former Bonnie Fairchild, died from cancer in 2016. He dedicated his memoirs to her. “I couldn’t have done it without her,” he said. Six years later, he retired after a 59-year career in law and politics.
The major failing of this book is that it does not cite sources or a bibliography. We must rely largely on Bryan’s memory for accuracy, although in acknowledgements at the end of the text, he credits a team of University of Nevada students and a history professor, Michael Green, who “did research for this book.”
A fast-changing state
Bryan’s memoirs portray not just a man, but also a changing state.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the Las Vegas Strip was growing rapidly. Many of the famous casinos were built at that time: Last Frontier, Thunderbird, Flamingo, Sands, Desert Inn and Sahara. Bryant wrote of himself and his high school classmates in the heat of Southern Nevada, “We had to sneak into the pools at the Sands and other hotels and were frequently spotted by the lifeguard and asked to leave.”
“By 1960, Las Vegas had surpassed Reno as the state’s largest city,” he wrote. “An explosive boom had transformed the western part of the city (of Las Vegas) and Paradise Valley from empty desert to major housing developments and commercial infrastructure to support the thousands of new residents who had moved into the community.”
Bryan’s career advanced as the state grew: deputy district attorney, Nevada’s first public defender, state legislator, attorney general, governor and senator. Beginning in 1960, his career would often be paired with that of another young Nevada lawyer, Harry Reid. In their first legislative session in 1969, House Speaker Howard McKissick dubbed them the “gold dust twins.” Their similarities were not difficult to discern; by Bryan’s own admission, “Reid was indefatigable, constantly looking one step ahead and dreaming big.”
While serving in the Nevada Senate, Bryan was a member of the Judiciary Committee in the early 1970s. Also a member was Chic Hecht, a Republican, who would, in 1988, face Bryan’s successful challenge for his U.S. Senate seat. Bryan conceded to me (I was then a Reno newspaper reporter) that it had been one of the “nastiest” political contests he had ever experienced.
Legislative majorities in the Nevada Legislature changed regularly because partisanship was not the determining factor that it has since become on issue positions. In the late 1960s, the governor was Republican Paul Laxalt, who, like Bryan, would go on to the U.S. Senate. Laxalt was a Republican of a different era—he supported more education spending, community colleges and public employee unions, positions that would not earn him a place in the Republican Party of the Trump era.
“As strange as it sounds, given the highly partisan times we live in today, there was virtually no partisanship in the 1969 Nevada Legislature,” Bryan said. “Party lines weren’t etched in stone.”
No discussion of Nevada in the last half of the 20th century would be complete without mentioning the Mafia. In 1946, mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, working with The Hollywood Reporter founder Billy Wilkerson, opened the Flamingo, the first resort-style hotel on the Strip.
According to the late Jeff German—the fairest, best informed and most thorough journalist to come out of Las Vegas in the last half-century—Siegel’s business venture began a “50-year relationship between Las Vegas and traditional organized crime that helped define ‘Sin City’ and turn it into one of the world’s top tourist destinations.”
“In reality, Las Vegas was regarded as an ‘open city’ for more than two dozen Mafia families across the country,” German said. “Many had representatives in Las Vegas for decades, with Chicago being the most dominant.”
Bryan quotes Nevada state archivist Guy Rocha on this issue: “We owe a debt of gratitude to the Mafia for developing Las Vegas, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of. It was the mob that moved (Las Vegas) forward, with the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
In the 1960s, Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general of the United States, tried to end this mob influence, but he failed. It took a businessman to do it.
“Billionaire recluse Howard Hughes did what Kennedy was unable to do,” Bryan wrote. “Hughes changed the face of gaming when he bought the Desert Inn from its mob-connected owners and several other casinos on the Strip. Hughes’ foray into Las Vegas led to corporate America’s push to take control of the casino industry from the mob.”
Hughes’ influence was huge in Nevada; he could “make or break a career,” Bryan recalled.
By the time Bryan was elected state attorney general in 1978, the corporate takeover of Nevada gambling was complete—and remains so today.
Las Vegas has changed a great deal in the years since Bryan launched his political career while he was a high school student in the 1950s. Gambling still produces a significant amount of revenue, but since the 1980s, that revenue (by percentage) has gradually declined, especially in Reno, while tribal casinos and online gambling have expanded across the nation. Visits to Las Vegas fell by 7.5 percent in 2025, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Over the years, Nevada’s elected leaders have understood this change and its impacts on individual Nevadans—some changes better than others. In light of that shift, economic diversification has been pursued vigorously since Bryan served as governor.
“Diversification of Nevada’s economy had been a centerpiece of my gubernatorial campaign, and restructuring the state’s economic diversification programs was my top legislative priority,” Bryan said.
But that diversification should not, in his view, include the storage of spent rods from nuclear power plants around the country for the next 10,000 years, a program initiated by the U.S. Department of Energy at Yucca Mountain in 1983 near the atomic weapons test site. Partisan differences emerged over that proposal, which continue today.
The state has changed markedly in Bryan’s lifetime; it’s no longer the “idyllic” world into which he was born in 1937. But the second half of the 20th century, during which Bryan rose from eighth-grade class president to the United States Senate, were the best years of his life.
Mike Norris is a co-founder of the Nevada Weekly, the newspaper launched in 1993 that two years later became the Reno News & Review. He covered Nevada politics and government in the 1980s and 1990s for Nevada Weekly and the Reno Gazette-Journal. Later, he worked as a political science professor in Texas, and he is now retired in his home state of Maryland.