Fred Harris, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, presidential candidate and populist who championed Democratic Party reform in the turbulent 1960s, died Saturday. He was 94.
Harris’ wife, Margaret Elliston, confirmed his death to The Associated Press. It was not immediately clear where he died, but he had lived in New Mexico since 1976 and was living in Corrales at the time of his death.
“Fred Harris passed away peacefully early this morning from natural causes. He was 94. He was a wonderful and beloved man. His memory is a blessing,” Elliston said in a text message.
Harris served eight years in the Senate, first winning in 1964 to fill a vacancy, and made an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1976.
It fell to Harris, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1969 and 1970, to help heal the party’s wounds after the tumultuous 1968 national convention, when protesters and police clashed in Chicago.
He ushered in rule changes that led to more women and minorities as congressional delegates and in leadership positions.
“I think it worked wonderfully,” Harris recalled in 2004, when he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Boston. “It has made the selection much more legitimate and democratic.”
“The Democratic Party was not democratic, and many of the delegations were largely boss-controlled or dominated. And in the South there was terrible discrimination against African Americans,” he said.
Harris ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976 and dropped out after poor performances in early contests, including a fourth-place victory in New Hampshire. The more moderate Jimmy Carter went on to win the presidency.
Harris moved to New Mexico that year and became a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico. He wrote and edited more than a dozen books, mainly on politics and Congress. In 1999, he expanded his writings to include a mystery set in Depression-era Oklahoma.
Throughout his political career, Harris was a leading liberal voice for civil rights and anti-poverty programs to help minorities and the disadvantaged.
“Democrats everywhere will remember Fred for his unparalleled integrity and as a pioneer in establishing progressive core values of equality and opportunity for prosperity as core tenets of our party,” the Democratic Party of New Mexico said in a statement.
Together with his first wife, LaDonna, a Comanche, he was also active in Native American issues.
“I’ve always called myself a populist or progressive,” Harris said in a 1998 interview. “I’m against concentrated power. I don’t like the power of money in politics. I think we need to have programs for the middle class and the working class.”
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham praised his work for their shared state and the nation.
“In addition to being a very talented politician and professor, he was a decent, honorable man who treated everyone with warmth, generosity and good humor,” she said in a statement. “Sen. Harris was a lesson in leadership that public officials should emulate now and forever.”
Harris served on the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the so-called Kerner Commission, which was appointed by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the urban riots of the late 1960s.
The commission’s landmark 1968 report declared: “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white – separate and unequal.”
Thirty years later, Harris co-wrote a report concluding that the commission’s “prophecy has come true.”
“The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and minorities suffer disproportionately,” said the report by Harris and Lynn A. Curtis, president of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, which continued the commission’s work.
Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said Harris rose to prominence in Congress as a “fiery populist.”
“That resonates with people … the idea of the average person versus the elite,” Ornstein said. “Fred Harris had a real ability to articulate these concerns, especially those of the oppressed.”
In 1968, Harris co-chaired then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. He and others urged Humphrey to use the convention to break with Johnson in the Vietnam War. But Humphrey waited until late in the campaign and narrowly lost to Republican Richard Nixon.
‘That was the worst year of my life, ’68. We have Dr. Have Martin Luther King assassinated. We had my Senate colleague Robert Kennedy assassinated and then we had this terrible convention,” Harris said in 1996.
“I left the convention – because of the terrible disturbances and the way they were handled and the inability to adopt a new peace platform – really dejected.”
After assuming the leadership role of the Democratic Party, Harris appointed committees that recommended reforms in the procedures for selecting delegates and presidential candidates. While he praised the greater openness and diversity, he said there had been a side effect: “It’s a lot for the better. But the only consequence of this is that today’s treaties ratify treaties. So it’s difficult to make them interesting.”
‘My own opinion is that they should be shortened to a few days. But I think they’re still worth having, as a way to adopt a platform, as a kind of pep rally, as a way to bring people together in some kind of coalition building,” he said.
Harris was born on November 13, 1930, in a two-room farmhouse near Walters, in southwestern Oklahoma, about 15 miles from the Texas line. The house had no electricity, an indoor toilet or running water.
At age 5, he worked on the farm and was paid 10 cents a day to ride a horse in circles to power a haystack.
He worked part-time as a janitor and printing assistant to assist with his education at the University of Oklahoma. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1952, majoring in political science and history. He received a law degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1954 and then moved to Lawton to practice.
In 1956, he won election to the Oklahoma Senate and served for eight years. In 1964, he launched his career in national politics in the race to replace Senator Robert S. Kerr, who died in January 1963.
Harris won the Democratic nomination in a runoff election against J. Howard Edmondson, who left the governorship to fill Kerr’s vacancy until the next election. In the general election, Harris defeated an Oklahoma sports legend: Charles “Bud” Wilkinson, who had coached OU football for 17 years.
Harris won a six-year term in 1966 but left the Senate in 1972 when there were doubts whether he, as a left-leaning Democrat, could win reelection.
Harris married his high school sweetheart, LaDonna Vita Crawford, in 1949 and had three children, Kathryn, Byron and Laura. After the couple divorced, Harris married Margaret Elliston in 1983. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available Saturday.
