Fred Harris, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, a presidential hopeful and a driving force behind the Democratic Party’s tumultuous 1960s, died Saturday. He was 94 years old.
Harris’ wife, Margaret Elliston, confirmed his death to The Associated Press. He had lived in New Mexico since 1976.
“Fred Harris passed away peacefully this morning of natural causes. He was 94 years old. He was a wonderful and beloved man. His memory is a blessing,” Elliston said in a message.
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Harris served eight years in the Senate, first winning in 1964 to fill the seat, and unsuccessfully running for president in 1976.
It fell to Harris, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1969 and 1970, to help heal the party’s wounds from the national violence of 1968 when demonstrators clashed with police in Chicago.
He introduced policy changes that led to more and fewer women as congressmen 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 made the election more legitimate and democratic.”
“The Democratic Party was not democratic, and most of the delegates were controlled by the bosses or – controlled. And in the South, there was bad discrimination against African Americans,” he said.
Harris ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, resigning after a poor showing in the primary contest, including a fourth-place win in New Hampshire. The more moderate Jimmy Carter won the presidency.
Harris moved to New Mexico that year and became a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico. He has written and edited more than a dozen books, mostly on politics and Congress. In 1999 he expanded his repertoire with 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 the young and disadvantaged. Along with his first wife, LaDonna, a Comanche, he was also active in Native American affairs.
“I’ve always considered myself a popular person or a progressive,” Harris said in a 1998 interview. “I am against concentrated power. I don’t want the power of money in politics. I think we should have programs for the middle class and the workers. “
Harris was a member of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, called the Kerner Commission, appointed by then-President Lyndon Johnson to investigate urban violence in the late 1960s.
A radical commission report in 1968 declared, “our country is moving toward two communities, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
Thirty years later, Harris co-authored a report that concluded “the commission’s prophecy has come true.”
“The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the few are suffering 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 “flamboyant celebrity.”
“That’s what people experience … the idea of the common man versus the elite,” Ornstein said. “Fred Harris had a knack for expressing the concerns, especially of the oppressed.”
In 1968, Harris served as co-chairman of the presidential campaign of then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He and others pressured Humphrey to use the convention to withdraw from Johnson on the Vietnam War. But Humphrey waited to do so until late in the campaign, and narrowly lost to Republican Richard Nixon.
“That was the worst year of my life, ’68. We killed Dr. Martin Luther King. “We killed my friend in the Senate Robert Kennedy and then we had this terrible convention,” said Harris in 1996.
“I left the convention – because of the great concern and the way they had been treated and the failure to take a peaceful platform – very disappointed.”
After taking over the leadership of the Democratic Party, Harris appointed commissions that advocated changes in the process of selecting candidates and presidential candidates. While praising greater transparency and diversity, he said it has had an effect: “A lot of it is good. But one result is that the assemblies today are allowing conventions. So it’s hard to make them happy.”
“My opinion is that they should be shortened to a few days. But they should still be, I think, as a way to get a platform, as a kind of pep rally, as a way to gather people in a kind of coalition building,” he said.
Harris was born November 13, 1930, in a two-room farm house near Walters, in southwestern Oklahoma, about 15 miles from the Texas line. The house had no electricity, indoor toilet or running water.
At the age of five he was working on a farm and received ten cents a day to drive a horse in a circle to provide power for a haymaker.
He worked part-time as a janitor and printer’s assistant to support his education at the University of Oklahoma. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1952, majoring in politics and history. He received a law degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1954, then moved to Lawton to teach.
In 1956, he won election to the Oklahoma state Senate and served for eight years. In 1964, he began his political career in the race to replace Sen. Robert S. Kerr, died in January 1963.
Mr. Harris won the Democratic Alliance election in a runoff election against J. Howard Edmondson, who resigned as governor to fill Kerr’s seat until the next election. In the general election, Harris defeated Oklahoma sports champion Charles “Bud” Wilkinson, who had coached OU football for 17 years.
Harris won six terms in 1966 but left the Senate in 1972 when there was doubt that he, as a left-leaning Democrat, could win again.
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 full list of survivors was not immediately available Saturday.