By Andrew W. Griffin

Red Dirt Report, editor

Posted: June 6, 2012

reddirtreporter@gmail.com

OKLAHOMA CITY – Former Democratic U.S. Sen. Fred R. Harris (1964-1973), a native of Walters, Okla. who represented the Sooner State during a tumultuous time in America, is getting a lot of attention in the alternative media following the revelation of a “Bilderberg data dump” and Harris' attendance at a Bilderberg conference in 1966 as reported exclusively by Infowars.com and PrisonPlanet.com.

As reporter Paul Joseph Watson writes: “Leaked documents from the 1966 Bilderberg Group conference exclusively obtained by Infowars betray ho even as far back as five decades ago U.S. Senators were being indoctrinated with the belief that ‘nationalism is dangerous’ by Bilderberg elitists, in addition to top union heads scheming behind their members’ backs with titans of capitalism and industry.”

Regarding Harris’ involvement at the March 1966 Bilderberg confab at the Nassauer Hof hotel in Wiesbaden, West Germany, the leaked files which are marked “personal and strictly confidential” and “not for publication either in whole or in part” include Harris’ handwritten notes.

The Infowars.com piece by Watson notes that the liberal-leaning Harris was personally invited in a December 1965 letter to attend the Spring 1966 Bilderberg conference by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands who, notes Infowars “a Bilderberg founder and member of the German Nazi party.” Infowars host Alex Jones and his colleague Aaron Dykes have been highlighting these revealing documents on his radio show since returning from a protest at the Bilderberg confab in Chantilly, Virginia, an event allegedly secretly attended by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

The notes also highlight Harris’ interest in a certain speaker that year: Walter P. Reuther, a one-time member of the Communist Party and activist union leader. This was the same commie rabble-rouser who was called a “more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do to America.”

During Reuther’s talk, Sen. Harris wrote that “NATO is in trouble because common fears are reduced” and that “nationalism is dangerous.” At the time there was concern that NATO was experiencing declining relevance and the Bilderberg attendees “sought to manufacture a new threat to elevate its importance.”

All the while, Harris and others were “being indoctrinated by Bilderberg elitists that national sovereignty must end and be replaced by a system of global government.”

Fred R. Harris is now 81 and is an attorney in Corrales, New Mexico. He is also listed on the University of New Mexico website as a “visiting professor” and “professor emeritus” in that school’s Political Science department.  

Red Dirt Report placed a call to Harris’ law office in Corrales, near Albuquerque, and the receptionist said she would leave a message for the former senator from Oklahoma. When she inquired about the nature of our call, we explained it was about his attendance at the 1966 Bilderberg Conference and that his personal notes are being discussed in the media today. Interested, she told this reporter that she was going to research it further.

We also sent an email to Harris at his University of New Mexico email address, with a list of questions regarding his attendance at Bilderberg in 1966 and other related Bilderberg questions. We will include his response if we receive one.

Regarding Harris’ political career, upon graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1952 and OU Law School in 1954, Harris served in the Oklahoma State Senate from 1956 until 1964 and also ran, unsuccessfully, for governor of Oklahoma in 1962. Clearly Harris was viewed as a rising political star, which may explain how after he served the late Robert S. Kerr’s unexpired term (Kerr died in office in 1963) he was being groomed for bigger and better things in the political world. He took an interest in the civil rights struggle, and called the Vietnam War “awful,” while gaining a reputation as an Oklahoma populist, often voting his conscience. 

For example, when Sen. Everett M. Dirksen wanted a constitutional amendment allowing school boards to provide for prayers in school, Oklahoma City attorney Pat J. Patterson, who was running against Harris in '66 (the year he attended Bilderberg), rather than scrambling to embrace the prayer in school notion, popular in increasingly conservative Oklahoma, Harris wrote letters to voters saying he believed in the separation of church and state and that prayer and Bible reading "should be voluntary." Harris would beat Patterson that fall.

Harris became a chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1969 and prior to that was seriously considered as Hubert Humphrey’s vice-presidential running mate in 1968, although Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine was Humphrey’s last-minute choice.

Harris, a child of the Great Depression, would run, briefly, for president in 1972 and again in 1976, before retiring from politics to become an academician and novelist in New Mexico. Harris is not the only member of the U.S. legislative branch to be involved in secret activities. Former U.S. Rep. Mickey Edwards, an Oklahoma Republican, was involved with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution, as well as the Aspen Institute, which U.S. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Moore) is involved with. Additionally, former U.S. Sen. David Boren and current OU President was also involved with the CFR.

Harris would tell NewsOn6.com in 2008 that he was a major advocate of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" and that "(r)eally the defining issues of my life have been race and poverty." He preferred being referred to as a "New Populist" that is a "kind of rural liberalism, based on southern culture and moral values."

In 2009, Dick Pryor interviewed the witty and philosophical Harris for OETA. Harris comes across as a principled politician who ran a “camper campaign” in ’76, campaigning while driving an RV across the country. Pryor noted in his OETA piece on Harris that the former senator’s “progressive social and economic philosophy was novel and courageous, but his (1976) campaign generated more interest than votes.”

And it was during his “camper campaign” Harris realized that he couldn’t compete financially. This realization played into Harris’ desire to focus “on the goal of more fairly distributing wealth, income and power in America.” Harris would later say on NewsOn6.com that had he been elected president "(w)e would have had a health care system, a universal health care system which is so drastically need, we'd have had a lot smaller classrooms, better-paid teachers and better education system and we would have made a lot more progress on doing away with poverty and discrimination on the basis of race."

As he told Pryor: “(A) person ought to make enemies, ought to have some opposition.”

If we do hear from Sen. Harris, we will feature an update here.

Copyright 2012 Red Dirt Report