Former Vice President Walter 'Fritz' Mondale died at the age of 93
Former Vice President Walter 'Fritz' Mondale died at the age of 93
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According to family spokesperson Kathy Tunheim, Walter “Fritz” Mondale, who served as vice president under President Jimmy Carter before running for president in 1984, has died. He had died at the age of 93 years.

Tunheim said Mondale died surrounded by family at home in downtown Minneapolis.

The former Democratic vice president, who was born in 1928 to a Methodist minister and a music teacher in southern Minnesota, was a staunch supporter of social justice. He was heavily involved in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party — Minnesota’s wing of the Democratic Party — by the time he graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School.

Beginning in 1960, he served as the state’s attorney general before being appointed to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy left by Hubert Humphrey’s election as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president. Mondale served in the Senate for Minnesota from 1964 to 1976, when he became Carter’s running mate.

Between 1977 and 1981, he was Carter’s No. 2; however, his time as vice president came to an end when Ronald Reagan and his running mate, George H. W. Bush, defeated Carter and Mondale in 1980, a defeat that Democrats would not recover from until 1992 when Bill Clinton helped the party retake the White House.

Former Vice President Walter 'Fritz' Mondale died at the age of 93
Former Vice President Walter ‘Fritz’ Mondale died at the age of 93

Despite this, in 1984, Mondale won the Democratic presidential nomination and made history by naming a woman as his running mate, US Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro of New York, before ultimately losing to Reagan.

During Clinton’s presidency, Mondale served as the US ambassador to Japan and the envoy to Indonesia.

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In 2002, he ran as the DFL Senate candidate in Minnesota, filling the vacancy left by the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died shortly before the election in October of that year. Norm Coleman, a Republican, beat out Mondale in the election.

In 2002, after his election loss, he said, “Power has now peacefully changed hands, and we are so blessed to be Americans when that happens.” “We kept the faith, stayed the course, and fought the good fight, and each of us should be proud of ourselves for that.”

He resumed his legal practise and taught at the University of Minnesota after the loss.

In recent years, Mondale had had a number of serious health problems. In his home state of Minnesota, he had a successful heart surgery in 2014, and the following year, he was hospitalised with influenza.

Joan Mondale, his wife, died in 2014 and was preceded in death by him.