Report from a Last Survivor
Fred Harris is the last surviving member of the Kerner Rights Commission, famously created by President Lyndon Johnson following the terrible riots, disorders, and violent protests that exploded in so many of America’s cities in the “long hot summer” of 1967. He is the last survivor of the 1964 “Four Back Bench US Senators,” which consisted of Walter Mondale of Minnesota, Joseph Tydings of Maryland, Fred Harris of Oklahoma, and Robert Kennedy of New York. He is also the senior surviving former member of the US Senate and one of two “last surviving” Democratic presidential candidates to run in 1976—the other being President Jimmy Carter Jr.
Report from a Last Survivor tells Fred Harris’s many stories: some serious, some funny, and all true. Each story forms a part of this report of a last survivor, a long look back over ninety-three years and counting of a rich life of public service and personal commitment.
“Fred Harris has long practiced politics that really matters (what I call ‘politics with hair on it’), daring to challenge the powers that be on behalf of the powers that ought to be: workaday people who are being knocked down and held down by the privileged few. So meet this guy who’s had the guts, moral stamina, and sense of humor to keep battling the big shots, bastards, and bullshitters for decades, laughing all the way! His memoir is both the tao of Fred and a joyous romp through his lifetime of real politics done right.”—Progressive populist Democrat Jim Hightower
Former US Senator Fred Harris is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of New Mexico as well a director emeritus of the UNM Fred Harris Congressional Internship Program. He has produced twenty nonfiction books on public policy, politics, and government, including the coedited Locked in the Poorhouse: Cities, Race, and Poverty in the United States, as well as three novels.
Acknowledgments
Prologue. A Last Survivor’s Report
Chapter One. Working for a Living
Chapter Two. Keith Cartwright, a Good Guy from Wapanucka
Chapter Three. From Liberalism to Progressive Populism, a National Career Overview
Chapter Four. I Spent a Night with Comedian Dick Gregory
Chapter Five. Civil Rights and Equity—and the Kerner Commission
Chapter Six. Teaming Up with Mayor John Lindsay
Chapter Seven. LBJ, RFK, and HHH
Chapter Eight. Making the Democratic Party Democratic
Chapter Nine. In the Movie The Candidate with Robert Redford
Chapter Ten. Native Americans and the Return of Taos Pueblo’s Sacred Blue Lake
Chapter Eleven. Never Met Harry Truman but I Did Meet Willie Morris
Chapter Twelve. Bill Moyers Was “Outstanding,” Early and Late
Epilogue. Optimism and Action
Index
