Road To The White House -- Iowa's Tom Harkin Rolls Up Sleeves, Enters The Race

Tom Harkin discarded his jacket and tossed out a challenge to President Bush that had his audience of autoworkers cheering wildly.

"Ol' George," he said recently, smiling broadly. "He's never met anybody like me. We're going to have some fun."

Fun is not a notion ordinarily associated with Harkin, who announced yesterday in Winterset, Iowa, that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination. Lean and intense, the Iowa senator and would-be president has been a political lightning rod since his days as a brash young congressional aide 20 years ago.

Through 10 years in the U.S. House and two winning campaigns for the Senate, he's won the grudging respect and admiration of friends and foes alike. His political toughness is legend in the state.

Now Harkin, 51, one of the Senate's most outspoken liberals, wants to bring those traits to bear in the White House. He's running for president hoping to turn the nation's attention from events abroad to its problems at home.

"I think it's time to start investing in America, quit spending so much money abroad, quit wasting our money," he said today in Manchester, N.H., the state that will host the first presidential primary.

Yesterday, he assaulted those he refers to as "gluttons of privilege." Under a blazing late summer sun and before an audience on bales of straw, he called his troops to battle against "George Herbert Walker Bush and J. Danforth Quayle."

Harkin recalled his boyhood in Cumming, population 151, "a town where we used to leave the milk money on the porch . . . at night and we knew it would be there in the morning."

He spoke of "hard work, being frugal, because we didn't have much money, individual responsibility, taking care of your family, faith in God, love of country and care and concern for those less fortunate than ourselves. . . .

"Those are my values, those are your values, those are the values of hard-working Americans all across this land."

Harkin is an unrepentant liberal at a time when that philosophy is out of political fashion. Earlier this month, he staunchly defended 1972 Democratic nominee George McGovern, the antiwar prairie populist who lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide.

"If they want me to repudiate George McGovern, if they want me to repudiate what he stood for all his life in politics . . . why, they can just go straight to hell," Harkin said.

Says former Iowa Democratic Chairman Ed Campbell: "He's tough, he's hard-hitting, he's smart, he's a street-fighter."

Says Iowa Republican Chairman Richard Schwarm: "Tenacity is certainly one of his strengths."

Harkin himself offers a succinct description of his chosen career.

"Politics," he says, "is a contact sport. Never defend, always attack."

But he also says, "I'm really a very gentle person and a lot of the causes I've worked for have been gentle causes."

A longtime champion of the disabled, Harkin looks on passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act last year as one of his greatest legislative accomplishments.

During final consideration, Harkin delivered a portion of his floor speech in sign language: a message to his brother Frank, who is deaf. "I told him that today Congress opens the doors to all Americans with disabilities - that today we say no to ignorance, no to fear, no to prejudice."

The law extends broad civil-rights protections to an estimated 43 million Americans with mental and physical disabilities.

Harkin is a product of southern Iowa coal country.

He grew up in a two-bedroom home, one of six children born to a mother who died during his childhood and left a coal miner father who was fatally ill with black lung disease.

Schoolmates remember a quiet youngster from the wrong side of the tracks, taken under the wings of family friends and shipped to Catholic schools in Des Moines.

Kathie Lyman, a high school girlfriend, said: "In Des Moines, there's a side of town that's considered more elite. None of us had that. It tends to develop your character."

Jim Harkin, a cousin who still lives in Cumming, said: "He was poorer than a church mouse. Tom ain't never had anyone give him anything. I think he's the workingman's boy."

Harkin doesn't spend much time thinking about the why of it.

"I'm not a real introspective person," he said. "I don't sit down, perhaps like Mario Cuomo, and try to examine why I believe this, and what is the meaning of this or that. I'm not really that introspective. I understand on my gut level."

Whatever the genesis, the result is a Midwestern populism that traces its lineage to people such as William Jennings Bryan. It's expressed in white-hot, earthy rhetoric about those who have and those who don't.

Harkin is a frequent and vocal critic of Bush-administration policies, particularly on agriculture and foreign affairs. Earlier this year he pushed a reluctant Senate into voting on whether to authorize the use of military force in the Persian Gulf - something he opposed. He advocates deep cuts in defense spending and shifting the money to domestic needs.

From high school on, Harkin's path was a straight line: Iowa State University on an ROTC scholarship, eight years as a Navy pilot, then on to the staff of Iowa's U.S. Rep. Neal Smith, and his first brush with controversy.

Twenty years ago a delegation of lawmakers was visiting Con Son prison in South Vietnam. They had assurances from Vietnamese authorities and the Nixon administration that the inmates were being well treated.

But Harkin had a map drawn by a former prisoner. He led the congressmen to a door the camp commander claimed was never used. Behind it they found hundreds of men and women locked in tiny stone cells with bars over the tops. Harkin took pictures.

When the committee attempted to bury the "tiger cages" discovery deep in its report and to suppress the pictures, an outraged Harkin went public. He turned the pictures over to the media. The evidence of South Vietnamese brutality triggered a wave of revulsion and strengthened the anti-war movement in the United States.

The uproar ended his career as a staffer.

During that stretch, Harkin and his wife, Ruth, were finishing law degrees at Catholic University's night school. They returned to Iowa, where she was elected a county prosecutor and he went to work as a Legal Aid lawyer.

Ruth Harkin, now with a high-powered Washington law and lobbying firm, may be her husband's most trusted political adviser. On the day he decided to run for president, she was the last person he spoke with before making up his mind.

Mindful of his own childhood, largely without parents, and of the rigors of a campaign, Harkin withdrew on a family vacation before deciding whether to enter the race. Daughters Amy, 15, and Jennifer, 9, won't be a fixture on the campaign trail, he said.

The tiger-cage flap that cost Harkin his congressional job also served to launch his political career.

In 1972, he opened an upstart bid against veteran GOP Rep. Bill Scherle in an overwhelmingly Republican rural district. He lost soundly.

But Harkin ousted Scherle on his next try.

After 10 years in the House, he ran against incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Jepsen in 1984 and knocked him off easily, thanks to another piece of political luck. A few months before the election, it was disclosed that Jepsen had visited a sex club.

After fighting off a 1990 challenge from Republican Rep. Tom Tauke, Harkin turned to a bigger stage. He began traveling the country, in his words, "to see how it resonates, both the message and the messenger."

And now he thinks he knows.

It is time, Harkin said yesterday, to measure Republicans by their own yardsticks. Asking his supporters if they were better off today than four years ago, the crowd roared: "Nooooooo."

Harkin then quoted Harry S. Truman to make his point that voters should no longer blame Democrats for their problems.

"How many times do you have to get hit on the head," he asked, "before you figure out what's hitting you on the head?"

-- Material from the Los Angeles Times, Congressional Quarterly and The Washington Post is included in this article. --------------------------------------------------------------- '92 Presidential hopefuls ------------------------- Democrat Tom Harkin

Born: Nov. 19, 1939, in Cumming, Iowa (pop. 151); fourth-generation Iowan; Harkin's father was a coal miner, mother an immigrant from Yugoslavia.

1962: B.S. in government and economics from Iowa State University.

1962-67: Jet pilot with U.S. Navy; served in Vietnam.

1972: Law degree from Catholic University law school; worked as attorney with Polk County Legal Aid Society in Des Moines, Iowa, 1973-74.

1974: Elected to U.S. House.

1984: Elected to Senate; has served as chairman of Senate Appropriations subcommittee on labor, health and human services and education; deputy whip; chairs Senate Labor and Human Resources subcommittee on disability policy.

Married: to Ruth Raduenz Harkin, an attorney; they have two daughters - Amy, 15, and Jennifer, 9.

SOURCE: Sen. Harkin's press office. --------------------------------------------------------------- Knight-Ridder Newspapers