Fred Harris, former Oklahoma U.S. senator and presidential hopeful, dies at 94

Fred Harris, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, a presidential hopeful and a reformer of the Democratic Party in the tumultuous 1960s, died Saturday. He was 94 years old.

Harris’ wife, Margaret Elliston, confirmed his death to The Associated Press. He lived in New Mexico since 1976.

“Fred Harris passed peacefully this morning due to natural causes. He was 94 years old. He was a wonderful and lovely 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 making 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 from the chaotic 1968 national convention when protesters and police clashed in Chicago.

He introduced changes in the laws that led to the increase of women and minorities as members of the assembly 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 legitimate and democratic.”

“The Democratic Party was not a democracy, and many delegates were very controlled or very dominated. “Even in the South, there was a lot of racism against African Americans,” she said.

Harris failed to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, resigning after a poor showing in the early contests, including a fourth-place finish 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, 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 liberal voice for civil rights and anti-poverty initiatives to help minorities and the disadvantaged. Along with his first wife, LaDonna, a Comanche, he was also active in Native American affairs.

“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.”

Harris was a member of the National Advisory Commission on Public Problems, a commission called the Kerner Commission, appointed by then-President Lyndon Johnson to investigate urban riots in the late 1960s.

A landmark commission report in 1968 declared, “our nation is headed for 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 getting worse,” said the report by Harris and Lynn A. Curtis, president of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, which spearheaded the commission’s work.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said Harris appeared in Congress as “a fiery figure.”

“That affects people … the perception of the common man versus the elite,” Ornstein said. “Fred Harris had a real ability to articulate those concerns, especially to the oppressed.”

In 1968, Harris served as co-chairman of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. He and others pressured Humphrey to use the convention to break with Johnson over 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, 1968. We killed Dr. Martin Luther King. “We killed my roommate in the Senate, Robert Kennedy, and then we had this terrible meeting,” said Harris in 1996.

“I left the meeting – because of the terrible violence and the way it was handled and the failure to accept a new platform for peace – really disappointed.

After assuming the leadership position of the Democratic Party, Harris appointed commissions recommending changes in the process of selecting delegates and presidential nominees. While he praised the greater openness and diversity, he said it had a negative effect: “It’s great. But one of its consequences is that the conventions today are ratified. So it’s hard to make them likable.”

“My opinion is that they should be shortened to a few days. But it still has to be, I think, as a way to get a platform, as a kind of pep rally, as a way to bring people together to kind of build a coalition,” 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. This home had no electricity, indoor toilet or running water.

When he was 5 years old he worked on a farm and earned 10 cents a day to drive a round horse to power the haymaker.

She worked part-time as a janitor and printer’s assistant to help with her 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, then moved to Lawton to practice.

In 1956, he won election to the Oklahoma state Senate and served for eight years. In 1964, he began his career in national politics in the race to replace Sen. Robert S. Kerr, who 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 position 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 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 complete list of survivors was not immediately available Saturday.