The Harkin difference.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Tom Harkin - Biography - Interview

I'm sorry that Tom Harkin is not going to run for reelection in 2014. I respect his reasons. Time is "fleeting," as the seventy-three-year-old Senator said in announcing his decision. And he will have served forty years in Congress by then, so I acknowledge the validity of his point that other people should get a chance to serve.

But we'll sorely miss him and his courage.

Even before he was elected to Congress, he displayed that courage. As a staffer on the House Select Committee on U.S. Involvement in Southeast Asia, he went with members of that committee to Vietnam in 1970, and he visited the "tiger cages," where our allies in the South Vietnamese government were torturing prisoners. He took pictures and gave them to Life magazine. He wrote about the experience for The Progressive in October 1970 in a piece called "Vietnam Whitewash." He said he couldn't ignore the voices of the prisoners in the tiger cages begging him to tell their stories.

He also said: "One man can stand up and make a difference."

Tom Harkin stood up repeatedly, and repeatedly he made a difference.

He made a difference in the late 1970s, when he denounced U.S. support for Indonesia's invasion of East Timor.

He made a difference in the 1980s, when he opposed U.S. support for the Contras.

He made a huge difference in 1990 when he wrote the Americans with Disabilities Act.

And he kept making a difference: by supporting abortion rights, small farmers, workers' rights, stem cell research, and civil liberties.

He himself was the victim of a crude McCarthyite attack when he was running for reelection in 2008. His Republican opponent, Christopher Reed, called him "the Tokyo Rose of Al Qaeda and Middle East terrorism." Harkin told Reed: "You're a nice young man, and I thought you had a political future ahead of you. But that just ended your political career right there."...