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DAN OLSON: Walter Mondale served 13 years in the United States Senate. He was vice president in the Carter administration for four years. He ran for president in 1984 but lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. In the 1990s, Mondale served four years as US ambassador to Japan during the Clinton administration.

WALTER MONDALE: You never have exactly your way around here, and sometimes you're terribly disappointed.

DAN OLSON: When he gave this interview in 1973, Mondale had been a senator for nearly a decade. He had focused on civil rights and child welfare legislation. The war in Vietnam was raging and had sapped the country's spirit. Mondale, first a supporter, had, like many Americans, become an opponent of the war. He said life in the Senate swirled with the ingredients for cynicism and despair. But he said being a senator was too important to succumb to those emotions.

WALTER MONDALE: This is the body, which has something to say about war and peace, about the chances of justice in America, about our environment, about practically every aspect of American life.

DAN OLSON: President Lyndon Johnson's economic strategy of guns and butter, simultaneously paying for a war and an array of domestic social programs, ran up a huge bill. The US economy was teetering. In 1976, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter won the party's nod for Democratic presidential candidate, he selected Mondale for a vice presidential running mate. It signaled a set of firsts. 1976 marked the first ever televised debate between vice presidential candidates.

WALTER MONDALE: We need a government that works, and we need a government that cares. And once again, we have to get back to work on education, on health, on housing, on the environment, on energy. And we need a foreign policy that once again reflects the values and the beliefs of the American people.

DAN OLSON: President Carter gave Vice President Mondale responsibilities beyond those of anyone else who held the office in modern times. Mondale became the president's closest advisor on domestic policy. Human rights ranked high on the Carter-Mondale foreign policy agenda. The Cold War with the former Soviet Union dominated. In a 1979 speech, Vice President Mondale stumped for support of a treaty with the Soviets to reduce the burgeoning stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

WALTER MONDALE: After 20 years of public life, what worries me most above all, about the life our kids and their children will live, I have no trouble telling you what it is, and that is the fear of a nuclear holocaust.

DAN OLSON: President Carter dispatched Mondale to trouble spots around the world. In 1980, South Africa's Nelson Mandela was still in prison. It would be years before South Africa's white-ruled government recognized the civil and political rights of its Black majority. Mondale told the country's white-led government the US would no longer support them. In a 1980 interview, Mondale said African leaders welcomed the US position toward South Africa.

WALTER MONDALE: They understand that we've not only imposed sanctions against military sales, but we went beyond the UN resolution and imposed sanctions against the sale of materials for police and security forces and the rest.

DAN OLSON: As Carter and Mondale prepared their bid for a second term in 1980. Mondale told Democrats at their National Convention in New York City they offered a clear choice to Republicans, who had met a month earlier in Detroit.

WALTER MONDALE: Isolated in a bubble of privilege from the city that hosted it, a comfortable convention composed of America's wealthy told us they symbolized the nation, a malapportioned convention where the cities were denied their share of the delegates told us they symbolized democracy.

DAN OLSON: After losing their bid for a second term to Ronald Reagan and the father of the current president, Carter and Mondale began new careers. Mondale became a private practice attorney who lectured frequently. In his 1984 presidential bid, Mondale put the first woman on a national ticket. He asked Geraldine Ferraro to be his running mate. Once again, President Reagan won in a landslide.

One of Mondale's memorable campaign moments came as he tried to explain to voters the difference between he and Reagan. Mondale said, let's tell the truth. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you, I just did. President Reagan won in a landslide. Once again, Mondale returned to private life, practicing law and lecturing.

While ambassador to Japan, Mondale experienced the affection and the antipathy many countries have towards the United States. He said people in other countries are often of two minds. They at once admire and despise the United States for its wealth and power.

WALTER MONDALE: And so, how we deal with the rest of the world, the good sense and decency that we show toward others, the example we provide of being decent and non-discriminatory and fair, and the rest, is very important to our ability to influence the rest of the world.

DAN OLSON: In 1991, Mondale supported the war against Iraq. In recent public statements, Mondale has condemned Saddam Hussein's regime. A few days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Mondale stood with tens of thousands of other Minnesotans at a rally at the Capitol in Saint Paul. He said the country should hold back from striking in anger and should take time to learn who the enemy was. He recounted the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized dozens of Americans and held them captive for more than a year.

WALTER MONDALE: We spent days thinking about ways that we could punish them for that uncivilized act and get our people home, but we couldn't find a single target that we could use that wouldn't kill thousands of innocent people and risk the lives of our hostages. You can get into fiendish dilemmas here.

DAN OLSON: Walter Mondale describes himself as an old-fashioned New Deal Democrat. He's been away from the center of congressional politics for decades. Even so, political scientist Stephen Smith, director of the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in Saint Louis, said, should he decide to run, and if voters send Mondale back to the Senate, he'd be regarded as an elder statesman. However, Smith says the Senate has changed since Mondale was there 28 years ago. It's much more difficult to assemble coalitions to pass laws, and it's much less collegial than during Mondale's time.

STEPHEN SMITH: Today, many of these people are no more than acquaintances, even if that, so he'd be put at a disadvantage. He's not going to be an immediate bridge builder. He's going to have to learn the Senate anew.

DAN OLSON: If selected by the DFL Central Committee to fill the vacancy on the ballot created by the death of Senator Paul Wellstone, and if elected, Mondale would be the seventh former vice president, including his mentor, Hubert Humphrey, to return to the United States Senate. Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio.