An interview with Tom Harkin.

• Author: Lounsbury, Jud
• Position: Interview

When I think of Tom Harkin, I'm reminded of the scene in True Grit when Rooster Cogburn is surrounded by four bad guys. The odds have finally caught up with him. The main bad guy, Ned, asks Cogburn if he's ready to accept his fate. Cogburn responds: "Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!" as he charges the gang, guns blazing.

For forty years, that scene pretty much summed up Tom Harkin's interactions with the Republicans. No matter what they threw at him, time and again, he came out on top. In fact, Harkin has the record for defeating the most members of Congress--five--over the course of his career.

I worked for Senator Harkin in the mid-1990s and was around for his '96 campaign against one of those popular members of Congress: Jim Ross Lightfoot. Harkin had me doing all kinds of crazy things, including a number of tongue-in-cheek endorsements, such as dressing up like a cigarette, "Little Smoky," and appearing at his opponent's events to let people know that Little Smoky and the rest of big tobacco were firmly behind Lightfoot. The Sunday before the election, many of the pundits were saying that Harkin had finally run out of luck, but Harkin never wavered in his belief that he'd win. And he did end up winning--by five percentage points.

It wasn't just the grit he showed on the electoral battlefield, though. Harkin repeatedly used his toughness to try to keep us out of real battlefields. Before his election to Congress, he risked his political career when, as a Congressional aide, he took the now famous "tiger cages" photos depicting the abuse of Vietnamese prisoners. Their 1970 publication in Life magazine changed public attitudes about the war and paved the way toward getting the United States out of Vietnam.

He used his street cred as a Vietnam-era Navy pilot to stand up to President Reagan when Reagan was determined to get the United States into another Vietnam-like quagmire in Nicaragua. He also stood up to President Bush I and tried to keep the United States from entering the Gulf War, accurately predicting at the time that misguided U.S. policy in the region would only lead to more conflict.

The list of Harkin's legislative accomplishments is long and impressive, but his work on behalf of people with disabilities is most noteworthy. If there was a Mount Rushmore for authors of America's great civil rights laws, Tom Harkin would be on it for passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act--legislation that was monumental not only for bringing millions of Americans out of society's shadows, but also because it was signed by a Republican President and passed by overwhelming majorities in both the House and the Senate. It also had global ramifications, since several other industrialized nations followed the lead of the United States.

While Harkin recently retired from the U.S. Senate, he has remained politically active as a leader of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group of progressives from Iowa and New Hampshire that seeks to nominate a true progressive Presidential candidate. Harkin and the rest of the group recently sent a well-publicized open letter to Hillary Clinton and other potential 2016 Democratic Presidential candidates that urges them to stand up for "big, bold economic populist ideas," including "breaking up the 'too-big-to-fail' Wall Street banks," "establishing a national goal of debt-free college," "creating millions of clean energy jobs," "expanding Social Security," and "reducing big-money influence in politics."

On an unseasonably warm March afternoon, I caught up with Harkin by phone. He called me from his car as he was dodging rush-hour traffic in Washington...