The Folding of Fred Harris

...In other words, one gets the sense that he depended in some ways on his own con, so that when it looked like the props set up to lure others were falling apart, he fell apart...

...For many, Fred Harris first came into focus out of nowhere, a man without a history, attracting interest not with a well-known name or a flashy image, but with an aggressive platform that put him, unchallenged, at the progressive end of the spectrum of Democratic candidates...

...Stage frigh t A second weakness was irremediable and like most of these infirmities, not in itself fatal...

...Ironically, in the shock of emptiness felt when Harris withdrewthe realization that those issues, ideas, and interests were out of the picture altogether with no one around who was likely to pick up the flag-in that blank, the real value of his candidacy came home with certainty and clarity, I think, to Harris as well as his supporters, for the first time...

...Galbraith, with whom he debated the usefulness of trust-bustingthe problem seems to have been an up and down affair...

...One gets the impression that Harris didn’t fully realize that his campaign would have to be as maverick as it was, and hence didn’t foresee the consequences of being a maverick...

...And they were...

...Double Takes Just living in Washington, it is easy to forget how circumscribed and illusory the world of conventional politics is-an Evans and Novak column conveying a bit of rank gossip appears to make waves...

...At a slower pace, or perhaps with the supportive presence of ample funds, the sense of wrongness would simply have driven him to correct it...

...Though the young faction, to their credit, never betrayed a glimmer of discomfort with this contradiction, they were in fact pressing hard to bring the campaign down to earth...

...The sense that the campaign had been on the upswing, combined with the understanding of commitment, made the withdrawal bewildering, like a plot development in total conflict with the nature of the characters...

...The older faction predictably thought most of these notions were crackpot and amateur and, as they seem to have had control of the scheduling, quietly went on setting up the receptions and arranging for the limos...

...Free of the obsession with the paramount importance of winning the next election, the Harris campaign, rich or poor, could have maintained its uncompromising character without suffering internal deflation upon comparing its status to others, and also kept its sights on the finish line and the range of issues, keen motivation, and perspective that incentive creates...

...So perhaps evaluation of his “chances” was not the only governing factor in their policy towards him...

...Came back the self-congratulatory reply from Ben Bradlee, Executive Editor: “We have planned these candidate interviews to get over the problem you describe, namely the making of a candidate by the press . . . . We left Harris out because, in the opinion of our experts, he never was anything but a non-starter, although we would have done him had he stayed the course through at least one primary...

...Harris met with the editorial board of the Post during his candidacy, and of all the newspaper boards with whom he talked, including The New York Times, the Post people were distinguished for their unconcealed hostility to his platform...

...and the young idealists, recently acquired, longer on dedication than experience, and there because they were committed to Harris’ ideas...

...I am also positive that those were the occasions where he won real support...

...Patch was a troublesome citizen, given, among other things, to threatening to jump from the rocks, down the falls...

...But under the speed and pressure of the campaign which was in itself a process of expansion and development, and in the absence of any security, save inner security, those uncertainties at the inception were destined to become magnified into fatal flaws...

...Others have seen in the subplot material for a terse and poignant parable on the evils of competitive campaign spending and dependence of politicians on the rich for support...

...Behind this was the idea, not to be discredited, that if you spend a lot of money in a way that suggests there’s a lot more coming, if you act like you’re a big cheese, then people will believe the act, making you de facto, a big cheese, someone to put money on...

...He called himself a new (meaning non-racist) populist...

...The brief history is a cameo in which more general themes come into focus, and values often muddied and obscured in the larger picture are clarified...

...The performance wasn’t disturbing because it seemed dishonest, but because it was just bad flimflam, leaving one with the impression that the campaign incorporated the worst of both worlds-inexperience and shallow, tinselly tactics...

...While no huge constituency was released, Harris, like Hughes before him, and unlike any of the other candidates, offered the possibility of creating a new constituency by uniting the disparate factions into a new Democratic majority...

...The Folding of Fred Harris 6 Suzannah Lessard When the tapestry of American political history is finally hung on the wall, the birth and death of Fred Harris’ candidacy for the Democratic nomination of ’72 will be a microscopic detail...

...Logical Developments The financial situation was undeniably serious...

...Harris with his Southern accent, tendency dowards dramatic oratory, and folksy routines, was in real danger of coming off as a crackpot, know-nothing populist...

...The argument for going the conventional route was that Harris had to establish himself as a credible candidate and the way to show he was serious was to travel around the country doing all the things that credible candidates do...

...As Jim Hightower wrote recently in The New Democrat, “As with Bobby Kennedy, the Harris question was not ‘who has he been,’ but rather, ‘who could he be?’ ” He had come to many of his ideas by instinct and in several cases the substance was not developed...

...Harris wavers in the middle...

...It’s a quality that has been sadly lacking on, to put it bluntly, our side...

...He seemed to take personally predictable rejection, and even the failure of particular hurdles...

...On the few occasions that he did go to the streets, he felt he was in his natural medium...

...Vaughn promised to give up his job as head of the Urban Coalition and take on the management of the campaign, and Allen, an immensely wealthy investment banker, promised limited, but substantial, support to get the campaign going...

...Yet as the booze flowed and the staff, just a little too obviously, scrambled to make sure that luggage got to the right place, cars were on time, and all the other qualities of a smooth, luxe, competent organization, were plainly in evidence, the members of the press party were thoroughly catechized in the rather contradictory dogma that the Harris campaign was not your ordinary slick hustle, but founded on the fervor of dedicated amateurs and the certitude that the people were sick of fancy hoopla and ready to listen to a poor man stand up with just plain folks and talk to them honestly about what worries them...

...I’m broke,” he said, and later, “Sometimes the train just grinds to a halt...

...When you look closely at this one for a while, the underlying dynamics slowly emerge and what originally seemed inexplicable turns out to have been prophesied from the start...

...Harris’ aborted foray reminds me of Sam Patch in William Carlos Williams’ Putenon...

...He was like flesh and blood battling out of the flickering world of a movie screen, but not quite able to leave behind the technicolor, cinemascope, and stereophonic sound...

...Admittedly I am a rather small constituency, but people who were going to go for the substance-as opposed to the props-were always his most likely constituency...

...Behind the platform was an intense personality, a man who had come from the obscurity of an Oklahoma dirt farm to the United States Senate at age 34, and at 40 had not lost a sense of straining against the world, of busting out...

...Meanwhile the polls and pundits had continued to give the effort low ratings...

...Generally the focus is clearest on the financial aspect, which ironically brought Harris more notice, headlines, network exposure, and outpourings of sympathy than anything else he did or said during the campaign...

...He got wooden and stuffy, denied it until backed to the wall, and seemed ill-atease in a way that seriously undermined one’s confidence in him...

...Since on other occasions he managed splendidly with equally sophisticated antagonistssuch as J.K...

...Doing so, I think, among other things, exhausted him so that when faced with the prospect of having to bash through in a bashed up vehicle, he simply didn’t have the stamina to face it...

...In view of his subsequent column he obviously meant less serious in terms of chances, not substance, but it would seem to me that to any “serious” commentator in this stage of an unpredictable game, “chances” ought to be the least interesting aspect of any candidacy, particularly when the candidacy raises issues considered vital by the writer, particularly when the act of dismissing chances with the stroke of the pen helps diminish them...

...There was never any question in his or his supporters’ minds that the smallness of the chance to win reflected on the validity of the endeavor...

...On Bill Buckley’s “Firing Line,” for instance, Buckley attacked him on a number of points, one of them that labor unions have contributed their share to monopoly-building and what did he intend to do about that...

...In all fairness, this theory wasn’t without reason...

...Part of this was a problem with television which a little practice could have solved: self-consciousness seemed to grip him like a straight-jacket...

...The issue here is not really the comparative “worthiness” or “appropriateness” of either style, but that Harris seems not to have successfully distinguished between the con and reality, between people’s belief in his credibility and his own belief in it...

...The fact that after repeated exposure not only as a dismal failure, but as a complete fool, Nixon was not in the least daunted by what should have been a crushing sense of the ridiculousness of his running for President, -makes him worthy of the highest medal of flimflamor perseverance...

...Secondly, the range and nature of the issues he raised, unique in the field, meant that no matter how slim his chances at that early point, there was something to work with, at the very least a counterpoint from which those ideas could gain real leverage in an otherwise mushy, uninspiring scene...

...about why, in the face of cutting back and weathering a difficult passage, the center had not held...

...The others, the pros qnd savants, the hacks and power brokers, were certain not to be magnetically attracted to him, so that to court them and then be shaken when they didn’t come through, was to reveal at that early stage, a misconception of his real strength and a split in his purpose...

...The wrongness is not just the misconception of the nature of his candidacy suggested in the choice of the conventional strategy, but in the dependence on props suggested by his resistance to the other strategy...

...Being a politician must add considerably to the hallucinatory powers of the magic glasses...

...If anything, the factory where he would be an unrecognized face would require greater elan...

...One can’t expect the profession to produce raving idealists...

...An awareness of the latter value was definitely part of the campaign...

...Speech had failed him...

...While hardly riding a tidal wave of acclaim, the potential for a groundswell of support was clear...

...A press unwilling to take the risk of hailing someone who doesn’t have big bucks, and hence less of a chance, is equally deserving of indictment...

...The height of the blue chip con was the charter of a DC-9 for a red carpet trip all over the country for members of the national press to a series of events most of which, far from grass-roots populist, couldn’t have been more Grade A campaign honky-tonk...

...His credibility to people like myself came through in spite of the gimcrack trappings, in spite of the soporific vacuity of the more conventional events...

...One tends to forget in the greenhouse that history is made up of those intersections...

...Harris is a growing, changing person by nature, the sort of person who would solidify if he stayed still, and sink like a stone...

...I doubt that anyone needed to persuade John Kennedy or Richard Nixon to run...

...didn’t lucidly foresee and accept beforehand the consequences of being a maverick, blinded possibly by the delusions so easily cultivated in the Washington greenhouse...

...But if it’s absurd to think you can change things, it’s even more absurd to think that it’s foolish and unimportant to try...

...Diffrent Genres Most campaigns consist largely of appearances...

...Conversely, if you are running on principles, and especially if from out of nowhere, then your concentration must be unwavering and your assurance self-sufficient -demands which may not even apply to other contenders...

...He was the only candidate willing to take on race as a major issue, challenging white suburban audiences with his views on that hot potato of a subject, busing...

...But the thinness showed up occasionally and when it did, he would falter badly...

...Harris has served on the Kerner Commission, was the instigator of the convention reforms as Chairman of the Democratic Party, and was co-chairman of the Urban Coalition Commission on the .Cities...

...David Broder, who angrily mourned the disappearnce of the Harris issues from the field, had earlier written a column in which, again briefly, Harris was dismissed as a serious candidate, this time in comparison to Lindsay...

...On those occasions it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d worn a saucepan on his head...

...There’s no mistake in Sam Patch...

...Two Unlikely Models ” The third motif, though located strictly in Harris himself, is most) readily perceived in the kinds of people he drew into the campaign...

...This is an area Harris hasn’t worked out satisfactorily, which is in itself all right...

...Again, on “Meet the Press,” confronted with sophisticated, but not especially thorny questions, he got up-tight, and instead of answering deftly and exactly, threw out canned formulas, not always well-tailored to the queries...

...Sadly, it seems that Harris was groping towards that discovery himself before the financial bombshell blew the campaign apart...

...The soothingly unreal world of ritual and importance puts a balm on whatever raw information that real people out there are cheated, or angry, or dying might penetrate the decorous atmosphere...

...Without question his most powerful appearances were before audiences which were not invited or given drinks while they listened-the far less polite come-who-may group sessions, where in the rough and tumble of unsugared questions he would lose all selfconsciousness and let the substance of what he was about take over...

...If Harris could have learned some thing from Richard Nixon, George Wallace also might have provided a useful model...

...This problem was not clear to me or anyone else while the campaign was in motion: it is discovered here with the advantage of hindsight...

...The fumble was caused, too, by that uncontrollable factor, the intersection in time on an individual’s graph of potential and weakness, assurance and terror...

...By the time he withdrew he had come around to seeing the strategical wrongness and had scheduled for the next few weeks a series of highly original events...

...He then took to traveling around the West jumping, working up to the grandest jump of all, into the Genesee River...

...If you’re running for no clear principle, then appearances are of maximum importance, for there is little else...

...They wanted to do this not to save money but because they thought the style would be not only more compatible with the platform, but more effective in building grass-roots recognition and drawing press interest...

...Then one day two friends, Jack Vaughn and Herb Allen, came to him and convinced him he should do it...

...Gospel According to Wallace The jaded worldliness of newspapermen who, having seen it all, see in the most hopeful, energetic endeavor the irony of ever trying to change anything is a genuine perspective...

...Some weavers, like Time, would pull the stitches out altogether : “Harris’ withdrawal will have little effect on the remaining Democratic hopefuls, other than to reduce the crowding in the field...

...This is why, unlike the editorialists, people close to the campaign were stunned and horrified when Harris abruptly withdrew...

...And in a time when the fervor once surrounding issues of civil rights has gone ominously slack, Harris courageously restates those values and the essential importance of implementing them...

...The cozy world of Capitol Hill, where a politician is known and all the vagaries and struggles are familiar to him is the perfect laboratory for the culture of overblown visions...

...Recalling those discussions, one staffer said that Harris’ resistance was often expressed as a fear that he might appear to be grandstanding, or look self-serving, and secondly, in such concerns as if only a dozen or so people gathered around, as was likely since he was not well known, he would look like a hopeless case...

...but when confronted with it, he wasn’t able to roll with the punches and candidly acknowledge the problem...

...A small, folksy person with pokerstraight black hair, he projects an indomitable energy and gusty warmth, beneath which lie formidable cerebral powers and self-reliance to the point of wilfulness...

...The issues are there, now unspoken for, and so are the people...

...One day when a crowd was gathered for the rigging of a foot bridge, he jumped, plummeting perfectly into the river below, retrieving a wooden roller...

...Harris seems to have met their ideas with interest and hesitation...

...His theory that a new coalition of disenfranchised minorities and the generally shortchanged middle classes would respond to his platform was substantiated by the enthusiastic response of quite varied crowds: blacks, Chicanos, and Indians number among his most avid supporters, initially skeptical student audiences gave him standing ovations, and he did extremely well at several state AFL-CIO conventions...

...The young faction was impatient and uncomfortable with conventional campaigning from the beginning and eager to switch from limousines to public buses, from Democratic Club receptions to the street, from banquet halls to factory lunch rooms...

...The natural self-image of the Harris campaign was not as a conventional entry, but neither was it as a symbolic gesture...

...Wallace (who currently holds much support that Harris might have won) achieved a bifocal perception of goals which definitely focused on the presidencythus spurring his effort to its utmost -but also saw the value of building a movement around the push...

...But when he faced survival only as a candidate who could not conceive of his goals primarily in terms of the ’72 blue ribbon, he couldn’t sustain the will to go on...

...A spectre of George Wallace flitting around the campaign could not have been easily exorcised, and it’s only with the advantage of hindsight that one can confidently say that Harris had it exactly backwards...

...If his faith somehow faltered, if his eye wandered from the ball to less central concerns causing the fatality, that is not becuase he was less steady than other men, but engaging in an endeavor so different from the ordinary that ordinary standards don’t even apply...

...The lesson is that had it been discovered earlier, the financial bombshell need not have blown it apart, not just because the populist campaign would have been cheaper, but because the combination of strains which wore Harris down, makingit appear impossible to go on, would have been considerably lighter...

...In dissecting Harris’ dependence on appearances, one might give the impression that he was unusually enslaved, but that would be misleading...

...Though Harris identified finances as the main reason for his withdrawal, and while that in itself is a cruel and central commentary on the democratic process, there is more to be said about this tale than that a poor man is licked from the start...

...He struck the water on his side and disappeared...

...There are a number of things just a little off in the way Fred Harris jumped, too, indications that he didn’t feel all there, certain of what he was about as he took off...

...The cold blast of indifference, scorn, and outright antagonism Harris met with beyond the protective confines of the Hill shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise and a blow as it seems to have been...

...Fred Harris tried to break through that phantasmagoria to daylight, where real people live, to name what was of real import...

...He had thought about it for a long time and then concluded that ’72 was not the time and embarked on an uphill campaign for reelection to the Senate...

...But some others who enthusiastically embraced the ideas also systematically dismissed Tom Wicker wrote a warmly favorable column, and then a few weeks later, commenting on the general Democratic scene, briefly dismissed Harris as a nice guy but a hopeless cause...

...But there was something just a little wrong about the speech, and instead of falling straight down, his body wavered in the air...

...The insidious system which guarantees us, in Broder’s words, “literally the best government money can buy,” is not just that which forces candidates to depend on big money...

...But even if I’m right in believing that the populist style would have been much more effective in the purely strategic sense of attracting press coverage and a credible image, as long as Harris was unable to sever his faith in his mission from considerations of appearance, as long as finding out on one occasion or another that he had looked foolish made him quail inside, then the populist technique wouldn’t have worked any better than the other...

...But the performances also betrayed, I thought, a worrisome insecurity, of which, after all, self-consciousness is a symptom...

...The editorial post-mortems that smugly claimed Harris’ withdrawal was without significance for my money missed the point...

...most campaigners judge their credibility almost entirely by the reflection of themselves in the eyes of the world and carefully tailor themselves to improve it...

...The hope invested in the Harris effort was not just that it might finally succeed-the chances were undeniably small-but that its very existence could change the picture by directing the Democratic focus away from palliatives and towards the critical issues which also happen to be the common concern of that latent constituency...

...Whether it was practical or not in this case, there is nothing essentially wrong with this kind of con...

...Harris was running not-as Life has said of Muskie-on his good character, or on style, or on tasteful ambiguity, but strictly and unequivocally on issues: breaking up the monopolies, drastically redistributing income through stringent tax reform, establishing a guaranteed minimum income of $3,600 and a national health care program, and fundamentally revising the principles of American foreign policy...

...Taking stock of one’s success, rejecting techniques that produce poor results and so forth is an entirely different matter, clearly essential if one is to run a successful campaign...

...While there was no question that money problems had blown the campaign out of the water, there were a lot of questions about why money problems had had this sudden, fatal effect...

...Since that sort of attention is a key ingredient for attracting the money he didn’t get, this sudden interest in spilt milk is a galling twist, particularly when so many of those now expressing anguish contributed to the debacle by suavely Suzannah Lessard is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...At the bottom of the uncertainty that threw the Harris campaign off was a confusion about the function of that ultimate faith in the presidential horse show: whether your main objective is to win the ’72 election, in the sense that deprived of this objective your efforts are meaningless, or whether running for President on a particular platform has value in itself as a step toward building a movement, articulating and focusing the concerns of a constituency, and instigating the beginning of something that would by its existence change the nature of the race...

...This wavering, this hesitancy to follow his instinct, betrays that slight wrongness one finds in other facets of the campaign...

...the best causes would never get off the ground if their advocates weren’t willing to play the Flim-Flam Man, able, with nothing to support them but something in their heads, to swell out their chests, smile the warm confident smile of a winner, and say “step right up...

...Nevertheless, if your whole life has been a series of experiences, clicking in and leading up to this consummate effort, and then someone asks you the question and you can’t answer it spontaneously, then you would have to be vain indeed not to be shaken...

...There’s a double whammy here: while he thought the only way to make people believe in him was to act like something he was not, he also thought that if he played the role he felt most comfortable with, the part closest to this message, he would look phony, self-serving, flimsy...

...On the other hand, there was no question either that he was serious in his aspirations, no danger that if all of a sudden the campaign took off into the big time, he would have to drastically revise his idea of what he was about...

...Flim- flam confidence-slightly different kinds-would have to be employed at both the factory lunch and the champagne dinner...

...The resolve had to be absolutely in tact-especially for someone like Fred Harris, unarmed with fame or money-if the inevitable shock of meeting with the obstacles was not to shatter the will to go on...

...The Harris casualty has probably gratified many habitues of the political wonderland and reinforced their peculiar form of “realism...

...In other men and other campaigns inner soundness wouldn’t have made a smidgen of difference, but like Sam Patch, there’s no mistake in Fred Harris...

...The other side of this coin is that by his own admission he felt far more comfortable on the subway than in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac...

...He was confused...

...The word had been drained of its meaning...

...An absence of inner sureness, worrying about your costume as you leap for the trapeze, will badly jeopardize the connection...

...Perhaps in a way, too, a lack of the humor and tolerance that comes with the perspective was one of the faults in the Harris campaign...

...Richard Nixon rivals the Flim-Flam Man for defying the laws of appearances...

...When the press didn’t hail him as an important candidate and the rich didn’t put money on him as a worthy cause and likely prospect, he doubted his own importance, worthiness and validity...

...Thinking back on those episodes after the withdrawal, they seemed a rather important piece in the puzzle, indicating again that Harris’ faith in himself wasn’t as sound as it should have been...

...An eloquent, often stirring speaker, he presented his propositions as dictated not by pious considerations, but by common sense and the manifest, but hitherto violated, interest of the ordinary person...

...the apparent absence of a certain, innerdirected, thoroughly-arrived-at decision indicates something askew right there...

...not being able to laugh at yourself as you mount your nag and charge the world, but grimly worrying about the figure you cut to the crowd and whether they’ve noticed your nag’s weak ankles, is no help in bringing the charge home...

...On one level, this is simply a question of strategy and to say one was right and the other wrong is no more than Monday-morning quarterbacking...

...The Post did not print Bethell’s letter to the editor...

...Getting It Backwards The division within the staff, echoing that in Harris himself, caused a rather schizoid presentation which possibly caused the failure of the strategy...

...People traveled far to watch and before he jumped he made a short speech to the crowd, as was his habit...

...The campaign was $40,000 in debt, credit cards had been cut off, a large sum in unpaid taxes on staff salaries was owed to the Internal Revenue Service, fundraising had been chillingly unsuccessful, and no more money was forthcoming from the big backers...

...The most tangible prophecy of the debacle is that Harris did not come to the decision fully on his own to run...

...T. N. Bethel1 recently wrote an angry letter to The Washington Post asking them what possible rationale allowed them to give Scoop Jackson a blazing frontpage spread in the “Outlook” section the Sunday after he announced, when they had hardly given Harris a nod of recognition...

...It came through because of what he was saying, the consistency with which he said it, regardless of the bias of particular audiences, and the way he said it...

...then there is no way you can distinguish between how you look and what you are about, because there is none, except in the Nixonesque sense of personal ambition...

...There’s no mistake in Sam Patch...

...dismissing Harris as a credible candidate...

...My impression is that Harris muddled the two, didn’t have the essential confidence that even if he was a total flop, it had no bearing on the essential worthiness of what he was doing...

...The success of the Flim-Flam Man was that he never allowed his resolve to be affected by the state of his hustle and hence was able to keep going in the face of total disintegration of appearances-when the stolen car he was driving, having crashed into inumerable police vehicles, hood flapping, exploded every two feet on the raucous passage through the cornfield, he kept his composure, in no way allowing the chaos to compromise his credibility to himself, nor, certainly, to deter him...

...Without implying that things were black and white, there were two factions in the Harris staff-the old trusties from Oklahoma days, pros, given to caution, there because of loyalty to Harr i s , whatever he might do...

...Harris just didn’t find them, or himself, in time...

...As in the Stanislavski theory of acting, the minute you worry about how you look to your audience, you’ve blown it...

...That was partly because he didn’t clearly perceive what he was doing...

...But while no one denied that expenditures would have to be drastically cut-in fact, plans were afoot to switch to a truly populist style, a technique many staffers thought would be more effective anywaythe underlying feeling prevailed among people close to the campaign that a $40,000 debt was not a sufficient reason to pack up altogether...

...That didn’t really matter, as the direction was the important thing, and the energy with which he pursued it...

...In a way, the bad combination of gimcrackery and his natural, robust style conjured up the image of a phony Wallace far more readily than the plain, uncosmetic presentation would have...

...If only because we demand that our plays be consistent, it’s hard to let baffling events, especially those that involve disappointment, go unsolved...

...Short of total victory, he knew he would get a lot of votes, and, as he said, his people would be around and would have to be reckoned with...

...you believe a Mansfield amendment is going to have a real effect and perceive the Pentagon Papers as an atom bomb which is going to explode a destructive foreign policy...

...Without that ultimate faith, the world would be a far worse place...