Fred R. Harris, Senator Who Ran for President, Dies at 94
After eight years in the Senate as a moderate Democrat, he took a leftward turn toward “new populism” in a failed shot at the presidency in 1976.
Fred R. Harris, a maverick Oklahoma Democrat who served eight years in the Senate and who lost a race for his party’s 1976 presidential nomination in a populist campaign that challenged politics as usual and proposed radical changes for America, died on Saturday in Albuquerque. He was 94.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Margaret Elliston. He lived in New Mexico.
In a meteoric rise and fall, Mr. Harris was a state legislator who went to Washington in 1964 to fill the unexpired term of Senator Robert S. Kerr, who had died of a heart attack. He supported American involvement in the Vietnam War, was a favorite of President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose Great Society programs he backed, and nearly became Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s running mate for the White House in 1968.
When he left the Senate, he flirted with a run for president in 1972, seemingly destined for greater things.
But in a tumultuous, divisive era, as the nation confronted war, the civil rights movement, urban riots and the assassination of leaders, Mr. Harris underwent a dramatic passage from moderate-conservative to liberal ideas, and then to a “new populism” addressing issues that had been virtually taboo: racial equality, class struggle, the exploitation of workers, and a national redistribution of economic and political power.
He reversed his stand on the Vietnam War, calling for troop reductions and then a withdrawal from military operations in Southeast Asia.