At Stanford, Harris was a protégé of Allard K. Lowenstein, a political organizer and later one-term Democratic congressman from New York. In 1968, Lowenstein's Dump Johnson movement resulted in Johnson's refusal to run for re-election. In March 1980, Lowenstein was shot to death by Harris's onetime friend Dennis Sweeney, another Lowenstein protégé. Two years later, Harris wrote the book "Dreams Die Hard" about his experiences throughout the 1960s and 1970s with Lowenstein and Sweeney and about the events leading up to the shooting. He has written several other books, as well as many articles for the "Rolling Stone", "The New York Times Magazine" and other periodicals.