Hardball, The Real Game

[Annie]

Harkin has gotten out there now for Kerry, so time to put his record out there too:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005497

CAMPAIGN 1992

Candidate Harkin Stretches the Truth
Vietnam isn't the only instance.

BY JAMES M. PERRY
Thursday, August 19, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

(Editor's note: This news article appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 26, 1991.)

WASHINGTON--If running for president is a game of truth or consequences, then a lot of Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin's critics would like to see him face the consequences.

Already in the presidential campaign, the Iowa lawmaker has found himself accused of misleading reporters about the troubles of his deaf brother. In addition, the budgetary mathematics he weaves into his basic stump speech have been challenged on network television. And allegations about Mr. Harkin's truthfulness extend back well before the current campaign, back to his claims that he was a combat pilot in Vietnam.

Republicans complain the loudest. "What galls me most is that Tom Harkin has absolutely no problem in saying something that's not true, and with a straight face," says Tom Synhorst, a political consultant who managed Republican Tom Tauke's losing campaign against Mr. Harkin in 1990.

Mr. Harkin denies he has a habit of stretching the truth. He emphasizes that he has always thought of himself as a "straight shooter," and says he never intended to mislead. In the future, he says, he probably will tell the story about his brother's job experiences more carefully. He stands behind his budget figures.

Even if Mr. Harkin's attitude toward facts seems to some of his critics to be carefree, he has hardly broken new ground. Lyndon Johnson was carefree about the truth almost every day. This year, Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York was a bit carefree in explaining away his suggestion, tape-recorded prior to the outbreak of the war in the Persian Gulf, that Iraq might be tempted to withdraw from Kuwait in return for some land and oil. Richard Nixon said he was not a crook.





In Mr. Harkin's case, the questions that have lingered longest concern his Navy record. Mr. Harkin did serve in the Navy during the Vietnam era, but exactly what he did, and for how long, remain a matter of some dispute.
"After I got out of college," he says in his standard stump speech, "I spent eight years, eight months and eight days as a Navy pilot." His military record, though, shows he served five years on active duty, from Nov. 21, 1962, until Nov. 30, 1967. The senator arrives at the eight-year figure by adding on three years in the ready reserve. Mr. Harkin's military record, acquired by The Wall Street Journal through a Freedom of Information request, shows he remained active in the reserves, ready or not, until Oct. 1, 1989, retiring with the rank of commander.

"I'm right," Mr. Harkin says. "I was a Navy flyer for eight years, eight months and eight days. I have a certificate to prove it."

What he did while on active duty is even more confusing. In 1979, Mr. Harkin, then a congressman, participated in a round-table discussion arranged by the Congressional Vietnam Veterans' Caucus. "I spent five years as a Navy pilot, starting in November of 1962," Mr. Harkin said at that meeting, in words that were later quoted in a book, Changing of the Guard, by Washington Post political writer David Broder. "One year was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaissance support missions. I did no bombing."

That clearly is not an accurate picture of his Navy service. Though Mr. Harkin stresses he is proud of his Navy record--"I put my ass on the line day after day"--he concedes now he never flew combat air patrols in Vietnam.

He was stationed at the U.S. Naval Air Station at Atsugi, Japan. Damaged aircraft were flown into Atsugi for repairs or sometimes flown out of Atsugi to the Philippines for more substantial work. Mr. Harkin says he and three other Navy pilots flew these ferry flights. And, when the planes had been repaired, he and his fellow pilots took them up on test flights. "I had always wanted to be a test pilot," he says. "It was damned demanding work."





How much time did he actually spend in Vietnam? "I wouldn't really know," he says. He estimates that over a period of about 12 months he flew in and out of Vietnam "a dozen times, maybe 10 times."
But what about those combat air patrols and the photo-reconnaissance support missions? He says he did fly combat air patrols, in Cuba, in 1965 and 1966. He was stationed at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. base, "and we were on frigging alert for 18 months, the whole time I was there." He would take off whenever a U-2 American spy plane flew by, in case Cuban dictator Fidel Castro scrambled his fighters to intercept it. And he says he flew photo-reconnaissance missions too, out of Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, D.C., while he was serving in the ready reserve.

In explaining his Vietnam experience at that congressional round-table in 1979, Sen. Harkin says that in retrospect "maybe I didn't say it right."

The round-table wasn't the only time he talked about extensive Vietnam service. In April of 1981, Mr. Harkin told Harold E. Roberts, publisher of the Creston, Iowa, News Advertiser, that in Japan he was assigned to a squadron where "we flew many missions to Vietnam and the Philippines." And in a short April 1, 1980, statement in the Congressional Record attacking the Veterans Administration for the way it was handling claims related to the herbicide Agent Orange, Mr. Harkin said that "as a Vietnam veteran in Congress, I feel particularly responsible for seeing that this issue continues to command our attention." Mr. Harkin says he always refers to himself as a "Vietnam-era veteran," and thinks the statement in the Congressional Record might be a misprint.

Mr. Harkin's Navy record shows his only decoration is the National Defense Service Medal, awarded to everyone on active service during those years. He did not receive either the Vietnam Service medal or the Vietnam Campaign medal, the decorations given to everyone who served in the Southeast Asia theater. "We didn't get them for what we did," Mr. Harkin says. "It's never bothered me."





It was after Mr. Harkin's return to civilian life that he first publicly demonstrated how tough and calculating he could be. He had as a patron Democratic Rep. Neal Smith of Iowa, who eventually gave him a plum assignment as a staff aide for a select House committee about to depart on a fact-finding trip to Vietnam.
While in Vietnam, Mr. Harkin photographed the infamous Con Son Island "tiger cages" used by the South Vietnamese government to house political prisoners. In an October 1970 article in the Progressive magazine, Mr. Harkin wrote that, worried that his incriminating photographs would be seized by pro-war forces opposed to their publication, he gave them to Congressman Smith, who, cautioning him that "publicity never does any good," indicated he would lock the photos in his safe "for six months or so until this blows over."

"I could not believe my ears," Mr. Harkin wrote. "That was the most public-be-damned statement I had ever heard from an elected official in our government."

As soon as he and the members of the committee arrived back in Washington, Mr. Harkin wrote, he urged Mr. Smith to remove the rolls of film from his suitcase so they could be rushed to the congressman's office safe. Then "I reached over, grabbed the film . . . and put the film in my pocket. Smith turned around. 'OK, let's go put them [the rolls of film] in the safe,' he said. 'No,' I replied, 'I am going to keep them. . . . I feel I have a higher obligation to those 500 human beings in the tiger cages." He subsequently sold some of the photos to Life magazine for $10,000, which helped pay his way through law school.

Twenty-one years later, Mr. Smith declines to discuss the tiger-cage episode but says through an aide that he maintains warm relations with Mr. Harkin. He occasionally appears at Mr. Harkin's campaign rallies, where he is introduced as an old and valued friend and tutor.





In his presidential campaign, as in most of his other races, Mr. Harkin frequently refers to his brother Frank, who has been deaf since age nine. At one breakfast meeting with reporters, Mr. Harkin told how Frank had a good job for 23 years in a Des Moines plant, until new owners broke the union. Frank was "busted" too, he said, ending up on a human "trash heap." The only job he could find was cleaning toilets. "That's what's happening in America today," exclaimed Mr. Harkin.
Actually, it turns out, Frank lost his job years ago. Sen. Harkin put Frank back on his feet in the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter was president, by finding him a job as a postal worker under a new program aimed at helping disadvantaged workers. Frank worked there until his retirement with health benefits and a pension.

Mr. Harkin says "the story about my brother is true and factual. What happened to him is happening more and more today." But he adds, "maybe I should add the rest of the story, that a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress passed legislation to reach out and help people like Frank, and that Reagan tried to kill the program."

The most recent flap over Mr. Harkin's facts came during the recent debate among the Democratic candidates televised over NBC. In the debate, moderator Tom Brokaw challenged the senator's stump-speech assertion that for the $850 million cost of a single B-2 bomber, the government could enroll 120,000 more kids in Head Start, immunize two million more children, double the amount of research on Alzheimer's disease and provide maternal and child health care for every low-income woman in America. By NBC's calculations, Mr. Brokaw said, all that would cost, not $850 million, but about $1.8 billion.

Mr. Harkin charges Mr. Brokaw with "unfair press," explaining that the disparity grows out of differing interpretations of the phrase "every low-income woman in America." The senator says he is talking only about an estimated 100,000 women who don't receive any prenatal care at all, and not about the one million mothers from age 16 to 44 who are generally listed as living in poverty.

Even by Mr. Harkin's standard, a Wall Street Journal estimate puts the cost of the senator's list at about $1.1 billion, more than the estimated price of a B-2.