Walter Frederick Mondale (January 5, 1928 – April 19, 2021) was an American politician who served as the 42nd vice president of the United States from 1977 to 1981 under President Jimmy Carter. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented Minnesota in the United States Senate from 1964 to 1976, and was the Democratic nominee in the 1984 presidential election.

Mondale was born in the small municipality of Ceylon, Minnesota, and graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1951 after attending Macalester College. He then served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War before earning a law degree in 1956. He married Joan Mondale, who was the former Joan Adams, in 1955. Working as a lawyer in Minneapolis, Mondale was appointed Minnesota Attorney General in 1960 by Governor Orville Freeman and was elected to a full term as attorney general in 1962 with 60% of the vote. He was appointed to the U.S. Senate by Governor Karl Rolvaag upon the resignation of U.S. senator Hubert Humphrey following Humphrey's election as vice president in 1964. Mondale was elected to a full Senate term in 1966 and reelected in 1972, resigning in 1976 as he prepared to succeed to the vice presidency in 1977. While in the Senate, he supported consumer protection, fair housing, tax reform, and the desegregation of schools; he served on the Church Committee.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter, the Democratic presidential nominee, chose Mondale as his vice-presidential running mate. The Carter–Mondale ticket narrowly defeated the Republican ticket of incumbent president Gerald Ford and his running mate Bob Dole from Kansas. The economy worsened during Carter and Mondale's time in office, and they lost the 1980 presidential election in a landslide to Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. In 1984, Mondale won the Democratic presidential nomination and campaigned for a nuclear freeze, the Equal Rights Amendment, an increase in taxes, and a reduction of U.S. public debt. His vice presidential nominee, U.S. representative Geraldine Ferraro from New York, was the first female vice-presidential nominee of any major party in U.S. history. Mondale and Ferraro lost the election to the incumbents Reagan and Bush, with Reagan winning 49 states and Mondale carrying only his home state of Minnesota and the Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia).

After his defeat, Mondale joined the Minnesota-based law firm Dorsey & Whitney and the National Democratic Institute (1986–1993). President Bill Clinton appointed Mondale United States ambassador to Japan in 1993; he retired from that post in 1996. In 2002, Mondale became the last-minute choice of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party to run for Senate after Democratic U.S. Senate member Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash less than two weeks before the election. Mondale narrowly lost the race to mayor of Saint Paul, Minnesota Norm Coleman. He then returned to working at Dorsey & Whitney and remained active in the Democratic Party. Mondale later took up a part-time teaching position at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He died in 2021 from natural causes.

Walter Frederick Mondale was born on January 5, 1928, in Ceylon, Minnesota, to Theodore Sigvaard Mondale, a Methodist minister, and his second wife Claribel Hope (née Cowan), a part-time music teacher. Mondale had two full brothers, Clarence, (known as Pete) and William (known as Mort). Their half-brother Lester Mondale became a Unitarian minister. The brothers' paternal grandparents were Norwegian immigrants, with some distant German ancestry, and their paternal grandfather Frederik Mundal had emigrated from Norway with his family in 1856, eventually settling in the southern part of Minnesota in 1864. The surname "Mondale" was Americanized from that of Mundal, a valley and village in the Fjærland region of Norway. His mother was born in Iowa, the daughter of an immigrant father, Robert Cowan, who was born in Seaforth, Ontario; she was of Scottish and English descent.

In his youth, Mondale's family thought the names "Walter" and "Frederick" were too stilted for a boy, so they called him "Fritz", a common German and Scandinavian diminutive form of Friedrich or Frederick. Due to the Great Depression, Mondale grew up in poverty. His family moved from Ceylon to Heron Lake in 1934, and to Elmore in 1937. Throughout his youth, Mondale was influenced heavily by his father's religious beliefs, including support for the civil rights movement. In 1948, his father died of a stroke. Mondale attended public schools and then Macalester College for two years before transferring to the University of Minnesota, from which he graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1951.

As Mondale could not afford to attend law school, he enlisted in the United States Army in 1951, shortly after graduating. He served with the 3rd Armored Division Artillery at Fort Knox, Kentucky, during the Korean War, first as an armored reconnaissance vehicle crewman, and later as an education programs specialist and associate editor of the unit's newsletter, Tanker's Dust. He attained the rank of corporal and was discharged in 1953. Mondale enrolled at the University of Minnesota Law School, aided by the G.I. Bill, and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Laws in 1956. In law school, he served on the Minnesota Law Review and as a law clerk for Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Thomas F. Gallagher. In 1955, Mondale married Joan Adams, whom he met on a blind date. He then practiced law in Minneapolis for four years before entering politics.

Mondale became involved in national politics in the 1940s. At age 20, he was visible in Minnesota politics by helping organize Hubert Humphrey's successful Senate campaign in 1948. Humphrey's campaign assigned Mondale to cover the staunchly Republican 2nd district. Mondale, who had grown up in the region, was able to win the district for Humphrey by a comfortable margin. After working with Humphrey, Mondale went on to work on several campaigns for Orville Freeman. Mondale worked on Freeman's unsuccessful 1952 campaign for the governorship as well as his successful campaign in 1954 and his 1958 reelection campaign. In 1960, Freeman appointed Mondale Minnesota Attorney General following the resignation of Miles Lord. At the time he was appointed, Mondale was 32 years old and had been practicing law for four years. He was elected to the post in his own right in 1962.