An Oral History Interview FRED HARRIS
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An Oral History Interview With FRED HARRIS (part 2) conducted by Julie Ferdon Albuquerque, New Mexico May 9, 2000 transcribed by Jardee Transcription, Tucson The Morris K. Udall Oral History Project University of Arizona Library, Special Collections ©2000 The University of Arizona Library Arizona Board of Regents All Rights Reserved Fred Harris Fred Harris represented Oklahoma in the United States Senate from 1964-73. In 1976 he sought the Democratic presidential nomination as a populist candidate. Like Morris K. Udall, he was unsuccessful. Following the 1976 campaign Harris joined the faculty of the University of New Mexico where he teaches political science. He is the author of several books, including two mystery novels. JF: Okay, this is Side 2. You mentioned in your 1976 book, Potomac Fever, that by 1974 you had begun seriously thinking about running for president again. At that time, your friend Fritz Mondale was considering running. Did you ever discuss with him your plans to run? FH: No, not in advance. What I did do was to--I wrote a four-page memo, single-spaced, addressed to Mondale about how I thought he ought to run for president in 1976, and how he ought to go about it, in a populist way with populist issues, staying in people's homes and so forth. And by the time I had that finished, he'd already pretty much decided he was not going to run, according to reports, and I had a couple of friends of mine read it, one of whom was Jim Hightower--who was later to become my campaign manager, and then commissioner of Agriculture, now a radio commentator--and he said, "Well, why don't you do that yourself?" And so I reworked the beginning of it and made it, rather than a memo to Mondale, a sort of statement of my own, about how I was thinking about doing it, and began to circulate it and decided then to run for president myself. JF: Did you ever speak with Mondale about that? FH: No, never did. JF: November 23, 1974, Mo announced his candidacy for president. I think that was probably the earliest anybody'd ever announced before. FH: Yes. JF: Had you known that he was considering running? FH: No, that came as a great surprise, and also a great disappointment to me. We--I and my main friends and supporters in Washington and around the country--had already decided that I was going to run and how we were going to do it and so forth, and the field looked pretty good. We thought things looked pretty good for me and my campaign, in the way the field was shaping up. And then, all of a sudden, Mo Udall decided to run, and by then we were already committed to running. But I saw at once that he was the most like me, and would be the most serious competition for a person like me, in the Democratic contest. JF: A couple of weeks later on, I think, December 12, 1974, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter announced that he was going to run. What was your reaction to his announcement? FH: That didn't seem to be of any real significance to me or to anyone I knew. It later did become very important in my mind. Very, very early in Iowa, I began to run onto.... The UAW and a lot of people like that were supporters of mine in Iowa; a lot of labor people, Congressman Tom Harkins' wife was my campaign manager in Des Moines--I believe he was a congressman then. At any rate, I began to run onto people, like I remember in particular the first time I heard this was from UAW people in Iowa, and they'd say, "I went to a coffee and I met this governor from Georgia, whatever his name is." "Carter?" "Yeah, Carter. I don't see how I could support a southerner, but I really liked him." I mean, I just kept hearing this. Carter was running a very personal kind of campaign, as we were. So I said to a group of my staff people very early, "You know, a person that's really in this thing is Carter." And I remember one of my staff people, Jim Monroe, said, "Why do you say that?" and I said, "Well, people just keep tellin' me they like him." And he said, "Yes, but what does that mean?" And I said--this is an exact conversation--I said, "Well, it's better than a kick in the head! If somebody's gonna say somethin' about you, it's a pretty good thing for 'em to say they like ya'! I think this guy's in it." They all said, "Oh, no," because he wasn't even showing at all in the polls. But.... (chuckles) JF: He was! FH: He was in it. JF: A month later, on January 11, 1975, you announced your candidacy in Manchester, New Hampshire. So you were probably about the third announced candidate. So in addition to you and Mo, a number of other liberals announced that year, including Terry Sanford.... FH: Birch Bayh. JF: Birch Bayh, your friend Sargent Shriver. FH: Sargent Shriver, yes. JF: Eventually, Frank Church. FH: Yes, Church was in it after I was out of it. JF: Oh, he was, okay. FH: I'd been in--long before the announcement, I'd been involved. I mean, I was already campaigning, for example, I spent Thanksgiving that year, on purpose, in a borrowed home in Concord, New Hampshire. We were already campaigning, but then the formal announcement came later. JF: Did Mo know that you were running before he announced? You said you didn't know that he was going to run. FH: I doubt it. I doubt it. I don't think so. JF: With so many liberals in the race, I have to ask you, what was it that you thought you had, that these men didn't? FH: Well, for example, a lot of labor people were for me, who were very much opposed to Mo. JF: Why was that? FH: I don't know whether he'd had a vote--I can't remember now--but it seemed like there was a vote for right to work, or at least not against right to work. JF: Arizona's a right-to-work state. FH: Maybe some other stuff, I don't know. But at any rate, some of my strongest support, for example, was from the Service Employees International Union, a union, you know, John Sweeney is from that union. He's now the head of the AFL-CIO. And that is a union that organizes people at the low end of the wage scale: janitors and elevator operators and people like that. They were very strongly for me, and a lot of those kind of people didn't want to be for Udall. That's one of the things that occurs to me now. And then on a number of other kind of populist issues, I and my supporters felt we were a considerable contrast with Udall's more sort of New Deal liberal kind of approach. In retrospect, I don't know that the differences were that great on those issues, but at the time, my supporters felt they were. JF: Did you still consider Mo your primary rival? FH: Yes, yes. And it was increasingly clear, once he got off to a great start in Iowa, that Carter was just for purely tactical political reasons, positioned perfectly, since there were so many of the rest of us over to the left of him. JF: Yes, he was. Let's talk about the style of the Harris campaign. You ran a guerilla-style campaign, using primarily volunteers, living in people's homes, traveling in a camper. Was this primarily a financial decision? FH: It was both. I had written in that four-page memo, all of the details of how to do this, when I was thinking I was writing it for Mondale, and then wrote it for myself. And I thought that the campaign ought not only to be a populist campaign on issues for a fairer distribution of wealth, income, and power, and the specific ways to do that, with tax reform and so forth, but also that it ought to be populist, people-oriented in style, and so that you didn't stay in high-priced hotels and so forth. That was a style adopted by design, but also out of necessity, since we didn't have a lot of money. I wound up--Charles Mohr, M-O-H- R, of The New York Times was later to write that I had the largest and most professional staff of any of the presidential candidates, and I think that's true. At the last, I think we had 131 national staff--none of whom drew a salary. There were a few got stipends and so forth, but like my campaign manager, for example, Jim Hightower, he drew no salary. JF: You don't think it hurt your campaign to have unpaid professionals? FH: It would have been a lot better if we could have done this: I don't know about the salary part, but Carter was able to put into Iowa, for example, and in some other places, but Iowa in particular, paid organizers, very early. A person who's now my very good friend, that lives in New Mexico, Tim Kraft, went in there for Carter in Iowa.