Fred Harris, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, a presidential hopeful and populist who championed reforms of the tumultuous 1960s Democratic Party, died Saturday. He was 94 years old.
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 a Corrales resident at the time of his death.
“Fred Harris passed peacefully this morning of natural causes. He was 94 years old. He was a beautiful and lovely person. His memory is a blessing,” Elliston said in a text message.
Harris served eight years in the Senate, first winning to fill a vacancy in 1964 and making an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1976.
As chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1969 and 1970, Harris was tasked with helping to heal the party’s wounds from the tumultuous 1968 national convention, when protesters and police clashed in Chicago.
She initiated rule changes that led to more women and minorities in convention delegates and leadership positions.
“I think it worked very well,” Harris recalled in 2004. Democratic National Convention in Boston. “It made the choice more legitimate and democratic.”
“The Democratic Party was not democratic and most of the delegations were almost boss-controlled or dominated. And in the South, there was terrible discrimination against African Americans,” he said.
Harris made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, resigning after poor showings in early contests, including a fourth-place finish in New Hampshire. More moderate Jimmy Carter nominated for 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 writing 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 minorities and the disadvantaged.
“Democrats everywhere will remember Fred as a pioneer of unparalleled integrity and progressive values of equality and opportunity for prosperity as core principles of our party,” the New Mexico Democratic Party said in a statement.
His first wife LaDonna, a Comanche, was also active in Native American issues.
“I’ve always called myself a populist or a progressive,” Harris said in a 1998 interview. “I am against concentrated power. I don’t like the power of money in politics. I think we should have programs for the middle class and the working class.”
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham praised his work for the state and the nation.
“Besides being a highly accomplished politician and professor, he was a decent, honorable man who treated everyone with sincerity, generosity and good humor,” he said. “You. Harris was a lesson in leadership that public officials would be wise to emulate now and forever.”
Harris was a member of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disturbances, called the Kerner Commission, appointed by then-President Lyndon Johnson to investigate urban unrest in the late 1960s.
In the commission’s groundbreaking 1968 report, “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
Thirty years later, Harris wrote a report that concluded the commission’s “prophecy had come true.”
“The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and minorities suffer disproportionately,” said the report by Harris and Lynn A. Curtis, presidents of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, which continued the commission’s work.
Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said Harris is known as a “fiery populist” in Congress.
“It resonates with people … the notion of the common man versus the elite,” Ornstein said. “Fred Harris had the ability to articulate these concerns, especially the concerns of the oppressed.”
In 1968, Harris served as co-chairman of then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. He and others pushed Humphrey to use the convention to cut ties with Johnson on the Vietnam War. But Humphrey waited until the end of the campaign and narrowly lost to Republican Richard Nixon.
“It was the worst year of my life, 68. We Dr. We killed Martin Luther King. “We killed my fellow senator, Robert F. Kennedy, and then we had this terrible convention,” Harris said in 1996.
“I left the convention — really disappointed because of the terrible riots and the way they were handled and the lack of adoption of a new peace platform.”
After taking over the leadership of the Democratic Party, Harris appointed commissions to recommend reforms in the procedures for choosing representatives and presidential candidates. While he praised greater openness and diversity, he said it had the opposite effect: “It’s very good. But one consequence of this is that today conventions ratify conventions. Therefore, it is difficult to make them interesting.”
“In my opinion, they should be shortened to a few days. But I think 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, I think they’re still worth having,” he said.
Harris was born on November 13, 1930, in a two-room farmhouse near Walters, in southwest Oklahoma, about 15 miles from the Texas line. The house had no electricity, indoor toilets or running water.
At age 5, he worked on a farm and was paid 10 cents a day to drive a horse in circles to provide electricity for the haymaker.
He worked part-time as a janitor and printer’s assistant to help with his studies at the University of Oklahoma. He received a BA in political science and history in 1952. He received his law degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1954 and then moved to Lawton to practice.
In 1956, he won election to the Oklahoma State Senate and served eight years. In 1964, he began his career in national politics by running to replace Senator Robert S. Kerry, who had died in January 1963.
Harris won the Democratic nomination in a runoff election against J. Howard Edmondson, who resigned as governor to fill Kerr’s vacancy until the next election. In the general election, Harris defeated 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 doubts arose about his reelection as a left-leaning Democrat.
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.