The awful advent of Tom Harkin

National Review, July 12, 1985 by Richard Brookhiser

IN THE second week of October 1984, Geraldine Ferraro ended a campaign swing through the Midwest with an appearance at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in a basketball coliseum on the campus of Iowa State. Sixteen hundred dining Democrats huddled on the huge floor of that huge building, looking like cheese mites, and every single one of them, it seemed, crept across the podium to say a few words in Mrs. Ferraro's behalf. Among them was five-term congressman Tom Harkin. His rumply features, pleasant rather than comely, were not visible over those vast distances. His remarks, roaring through the concavity, were typical Democratic fare; he got two standing ovations, for a promise to "freeze right now," and a pledge that "Jerry Falwell will not write prayers" for the public schools. His manner was also standard for that campaign season. 1984 was the year of the homely virtues; Mondale and Mrs. Ferraro together cited "family values" as often as the Moral Majority. Harkin's contribution that evening was an anecdote about hearing, while doing duty with the navy at Guantanamo Bay, of the death of his father, a coal miner, from black-lung disease (the moral: More money for Medicare; the message: This veteran is the son of poor folks).

The Democrats, as we know, had slight success with these tactics, at least at the national level. Iowa, however, was a deviation. Reagan carried the state by only 8 per cent; relatively speaking, almost a Mondale landslide. Harkin, making a run for the Senate seat of Roger Jepsen, won. In his first notable act, the freshman senator traveled with another 1984 victor, John Kerry of Massachusetts, to Nicaragua, whence they returned with assurances of the Sandinistas' peacefulness. It made the news, but it was nothing new. Harkin's convictions, and connections, go back a long ways.

Harkin was born in 1939 in Cumming, Iowa, just southwest of Des Moines. He went to Iowa State on an ROTC scholarship, and spent five years--1962 to 1967--in the navy. Just where he spent them later became a matter of controversy. Harkin is fond of identifying himself as a Vietnam veteran, a designation that gives resonance to his pronouncements. BACK IN THE LAND OF WAR was the Washington Post's headline over its piece describing his and Kerry's Nicaraguan jaunt. Five years earlier, Congressman Harkin had had an earnest conversation with David Broder, touching on the moral dilemmas of the combat flyer. "I don't know what I would have done if I had been ordered on bombing missions." He never faced the problem. His Asian service consisted of ferrying planes into Japan and the Philippines, and he acquired no Vietnam service ribbons.

Harkin was in Vietnam for sure, though, in 1970, when, as an aide to Representative Neal Smith (D., Iowa), he accompanied a team of congressmen touring the South. The thirty-year-old Harkin was a key figure in publicizing the so-called "tiger cages." In the deluge of horrors that has overwhelmed Indochina since 1975, the tiger cages have perhaps slipped from the memory, though they were vivid enough at the time. They were former French prison cells on Con Son Island ("inhumane torture cells," Harkin called them) sixty square feet and ten feet high, with barred ceilings under a high roof--though descriptions and photographs (taken by Harkin, looking down from the guards' catwalks) gave the impression of oubliettes. The story, and the ensuing uproar, coincided with, and undercut, efforts by the Nixon Administration to focus worldwide attention on North Vietnam's treatment of American POWs. Over the long run, the tiger cages became yet another illustration of the argument that the South Vietnamese did not deserve their freedom. Harkin sold his pictures to Life magazine for $10,000.

The Farmer's Friend

BACK HOME, he narrowly lost his first race for Congress to the 5th District's Republican incumbent. He incubated for two years as an attorney with a legal-aid society, then came back to win in the post-Watergate election. He won his re-election races with ease.

Politics in Iowa is, first and last, farm politics. Harkin knows it. In 1980, he became chairman of the Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Subcommittee, from which he fought Reagan Administration reductions in milk price supports. In addition to specific acts of attentiveness, he has worked to cast himself in the role of the farmer's defender. In 1983, he got together a House Populist Caucus, and he criticizes government on the grounds that it is "owned lock, stock, and barrel by the big guys." He has also devoted himself to periodic "work days," putting in a day as a truck driver, gas-station attendant, or farm hand. It makes the news, and he uses the film clips come election time.

But Harkin never abandoned his interest in foreign policy. His stands have been in keeping with his public debut. He opposed the MX and backed the nuclear freeze; he urged cutting aid to South Korea, El Salvador, and the Contras. He was a strong enemy of Radio Marti, an issue with a local angle, since one of the stations Castro threatened to jam in retaliation was Des Moines's WHO (Ronald Reagan's old station). But Harkin's rhetoric reflected his larger concerns; he proposed, as one delaying tactic, to rename the authorizing bill the "John Foster Dulles Cold-War Mentality Memorial Radio Broadcasting to Cuba Act." Harkin's partner in his endeavors has been the Institute for Policy Studies. Harkin has endorsed the institute's annual budget proposals, and lectured at the Washington School, an IPS spin-off (its 1984 catalogue carried a Harkin plug: "a refreshing change from traditional policy forums"). At a 1984 party at Stewart Mott's house--a send-off for a report on Central America by another one of IPS's homunculi--Harkin looked forward to November, when "if we're ready . . . not only with the policies, but with the personalities, we can get on in the right place and start to make a change."