YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Harkin

lines on the record
75
first
2016-06-06
most recent
2016-06-06
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Hatfield. Oh, one of my idols, Hatfield. My gosh, Mark Hat They're gone and they're replaced by hard right people and it's made it very difficult to get things done. I always say that in the past you've lost a bunch of”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Changed. What's changed is just what you said, the camaraderie. And here's the way I put it a lot of times. I've thought a lot about this, David. In those days, you had a Republican Party that had conservatives, moderates, and liberals. You had a Democratic Party that had conservatives, mostly from the South, and moderates and liberals. And in that blend, you could get things done. Today, the Republican Party has cleaned out all of there are no liberals at all in the Congress, the Republican. Maybe a few moderates, but it's all gone severely right. You think about some of the senators where when I came, I mean, the Chuck Percy's, the Mac Matthias even later Jack Danforth, Dave Durenberger, Well, you”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, first of all, let me say this about Abner Mikfa. If Jimmy Carter had been reelected president, he would have been on the US Supreme Court, right? Without any doubt, in anybody's mind.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “But these tiger cages were just a real, and that was a turning point in my life, too. That's when I really made the decision that after all that I said. The way Congress is operating, the way they're blinded by this war. That's when I first started thinking really seriously about running for Congress.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “They're already. I think he realized later that Vietnam was a big mistake. But you're right. I got fired from my job and in fact was told I wasn't told another congressman who wanted to hire me was told no, you can hire him because Harkin will never work again in the U.S. Congress.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It was because All in all, I like the guy, and he was a good congressman, but he was just closed on his mind on this Vietnam War. Of course, he'd been a World War II vet. And Purple Heart veteran and everything, and he just fell into this support, the war and support Johnson and all that kind of stuff. And I think later on, and Neil is still alive. I think he's 97 years old now. I think later on he...”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, I got elected from Iowa. First time you ever spoke to me since that time. And we got to be friends later on and we got an understanding of that.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I don't know where. In any case, your pay I say I quit, and they say they fired me before I quit, so I don't know. But I got fired. I commentary.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “and photographed him with my camera and my film. They were published in Life Magazine and then they just went all around the world.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Catholic priest went over there a year before I did. To find these, they were told they don't exist. And they even took them out to Khansan Island. You can look wherever you want. I know tiger cases, nothing like that out here. So they came back empty-handed. And a year later, I went over and uncovered them. There they were.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “These were prison cells built by the French on an island just like Devil's Island off of South America. They built these prisons on Conson Island, and they called them tiger cages because they're like tiger pits. I don't know where they got that over, but it's not a cell that you look into. It's the one you look down on. So people are down below these grates. And the cells were about fourteen feet by maybe eight feet and then down from the bars down maybe I don't know fifteen feet something like that and there have been a lot of stories about these tiger cages and some congressional committees had gone over there to look for them before but the Vietnamese government”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I said, we just dropped these bombs and stuff on innocent people. And he said, it had been going on for some time. He said, finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I went to my commanding officer and I said, I'm not dropping any more bom Said, I'll fly reconnaissance, I'll fly something else, but I'm not dropping any more bombs. Commanding officer put him on the next cod as we call it off the carrier to QB Point and back to the States in about twenty four hours. When that happened to me, I got to thinking, you know, I know there's got to be a lot more people feel like that, but they're doing their job. They don't want to ruin their careers and that kind of thing, but he did. He later became a pilot for United Airlines. Is that right?”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And then I had an encounter one time at the Cubi Point Officers Club. This is in the Philippines. I was down there. I was flying a plane out of there and I went to the, remember I went out by the swimming pool. And there was a friend of mine that I had known for some time, and I knew he was in an A-4 squadron. This is a small, that's the same kind of plane that John McCain flew, an A-4, and they were bombers. They did bombing. I saw him by the pool. And there's more to this story, but I'll cut it to the chase. I ask him, I said, oh, you hear a little R&R? And he said, no, he said, I'm headed back to the States. Really, what's going? He said. And he said, look, he said, I was out on a bombing mission. We couldn't get on target. We came back. And my flight leader said, hey, is that village on there? We'll get rid of our ordinance”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “You've heard of that place. And so I stationed there and Castro shut the water off and all that kind of stuff. And then I started reading. You know who first turned my mind on that was Bernard Fall, was a Frenchman wrote a book. He called it. He had two books. One was The Two Vietnams and the other one was called Street Without Joy. I read those and I thought, hmm. It's interesting. I had never had that view of it. And then when I was sent overseas, I began to see more and more of my fellow pilots who were actually flying in Vietnam. I wasn't. And what they were going through and then”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I had when I first went in the Navy, of course, I became a fighter pilot and all that, and you're just gung-ho and everything, but then I was stationed in Guantanamo, Cuba, of all places for a year and a half. I've heard of that.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “We never funded it enough. We just never did. We just dropped the ball on the funding of the great society. But even with that, we persevered. I mean, Pellegrants enable poor kids to go to college, that creates a welfare state?”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “But that was the Greek society. That was not a welfare state type thing. And keep in mind Robert Kennedy was a very conservative person, in many, many ways. Plus that was a personality thing with Lyndon Johnson and all that kind of stuff. But no, I mean, if you look at the Great Society, what it did, that's where we got our job training programs. That's where we got all of the things in that enable people, if they lose a job, to get better education, to have that kind of job retraining. It's not a welfare state. That's just something the conservative has pandered off onto the American people. No, if there was one failure of the great society, It's what my good friend and mentor John Culver used to say.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And if you go back, if you remember, if you go in there and you walk down around, there's this room called the Great Society. You start reading all those little plaques there. I mean Elementary and secondary education act, the higher education act, of course Medicare, civil rights, Pell grants, it just goes on and on and on. You think, you know, when I hear people say we got to repeal or do repeal the great society, I say, well, which one of those you want to repeal? Go out there and campaign on that one.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think Lyndon Johnson, when you rank presidents, of course you'd rank Abraham Lincoln and George Washington FDR, and I'd put Lyndon Johnson right there. Okay, did I disagree with his workforce? I disagreed with the war in Vietnam. I lost too many of my friends there. But beyond that, beyond that, my gosh, what he did for this country in making our society more fair and more just. You know, I always say I make a pilgrimage every once in a while to the LBJ library”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “We didn't much care about that either, but we had to do it. So I remember David coming home from the military, and it's 1965, and I was just getting ready to go overseas. And I came home, and my dad showed me something. He showed it. He was so proud of me. He had his Medicare card. Now he could go get health care and not have to pay for it. I mean, that was a big deal. And that was done by the Democrats. That was done by Lyndon Johnson.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, I think that's right. I mean, well, yeah, sure. My father worked all his life, but he was able to work a few years during the war years. To pay into Social Security. So imagine I'm 10 years old, almost 10, and my father's already just starting to draw Social Security. And he had no money. He had no savings, he had nothing, nothing, zero. And I remember. That, and how much that meant. But I remember more distinctly than anything. I was in the military and I came home and my father got sick all the time, that lung stuff. Every winter he'd come down to pneumonia. Drive him to the hospital in Des Moines, Mercy Hospital, Catholic Hospital, nuns would take care of him. They never build us, you know, just charity work. And he always felt bad about that.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “My mother passed away when I was just turning 10. And my dad was really old. See, my dad didn't get married until my dad was 54 when I was born. So he got married late in life. So he was 54. So by the time when my mother died, she was... She was 44. She was 44 when I was born. So I got just under the wire, as you can imagine. So my dad was already 64, almost 65, in very bad health. He had that black lung disease, and he'd been banged up a lot in his life. Plus, he drank a lot and he smoked a lot. And so I was sent to Wyoming to live with one of my sisters. So I taken from that small town. I'd never been anywhere. and sent by myself on a train. To Rock Springs, Wyoming. live with my sister that was tough that was tough”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “My folks raised six kids in a two bedroom house that had less than 1,000 square feet. Six kids. I don't know how the hell they did it.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Very modest, I mean, very modest. I mean, we had. We had, yeah, my dad was a coal miner most of his life, had a sixth grade education. My mother was an immigrant, didn't have some education. But no, we grew up. My folks raised”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “David, first of all, thanks for having him here at the Institute. It's been wonderful. You know, I was a kid growing up. My most vivid memories are all my cousins coming home from World War II. Older than I was, and the Korean War. And growing up, I always thought I'd just be in the military. And all I ever wanted to do is fly airplanes. All I wanted to do. I wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to fly airplanes. I never got into an airplane until I was 19 years old. But that's all I want to do. I got to do it, but that was all I thought about when I was a kid. I never knew a politician, never saw one.”

    2016-06-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 56 - Tom Harkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source