58 Facts About Tom Harkin

1.

Thomas Richard Harkin was born on November 19,1939 and is an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as a United States senator from Iowa from 1985 to 2015.

2.

Tom Harkin is the longest-serving senator to spend his whole tenure as a state's junior senator.

3.

Tom Harkin served in the United States Navy as an active-duty jet pilot.

4.

Tom Harkin went on to serve five terms in the House.

5.

Tom Harkin won a race for US Senate in 1984 by a wide margin.

6.

Tom Harkin was an early frontrunner for his party's presidential nomination in 1992, but he dropped out in support of eventual winner Bill Clinton.

7.

Tom Harkin served five Senate terms and at the end of his time in the Senate served as chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

8.

Tom Harkin authored the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and was its chief sponsor in the Senate.

9.

Tom Harkin delivered part of his introduction speech in sign language, saying it was so his deaf brother could understand.

10.

On January 26,2013, Tom Harkin announced that he would not seek reelection in 2014.

11.

Tom Harkin's father, Patrick Francis Harkin, an Irish American, was a coal miner, and his mother, Franciska Frances Valentine, was a Slovene immigrant who died when he was ten.

12.

Tom Harkin has three half-siblings on his mother's side from her first marriage in Iowa to fellow Slovenian Valentine Brelih.

13.

Tom Harkin still maintains his childhood house, where he and his five siblings were raised without hot running water or a furnace.

14.

Tom Harkin attended Dowling Catholic High School which is currently located in West Des Moines, Iowa.

15.

Tom Harkin attended Iowa State University on a Navy ROTC scholarship and became a member of Delta Sigma Phi fraternity.

16.

Tom Harkin graduated with a degree in government and economics in 1962, and served in the United States Navy as an active-duty jet pilot from 1962 to 1967.

17.

Tom Harkin was stationed at Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan, where he ferried aircraft to and from the airbase that had been damaged in the Vietnam War and in operational and training accidents.

18.

Tom Harkin was stationed for a time at Guantanamo Bay, where he flew missions in support of U-2 planes reconnoitering Cuba.

19.

Tom Harkin retired in 1989 with the rank of commander.

20.

In 1969, Tom Harkin moved to Washington, DC, and began work as an aide to Democratic US Congressman Neal Smith.

21.

In 1972, the same year that he graduated from law school, Harkin returned to Iowa and immediately ran against an incumbent Republican Congressman, William J Scherle.

22.

In what was generally a bad year for Republicans due to the Watergate scandal, Tom Harkin defeated Scherle by only 3,500 votes.

23.

Tom Harkin was re-elected four more times from without serious difficulty.

24.

In 1984, Tom Harkin won the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate and defeated freshman Republican Roger Jepsen by a surprisingly wide 11.8-point margin.

25.

Tom Harkin was re-elected in 1990,1996,2002, and 2008.

26.

Tom Harkin served in the Senate longer than any Democrat in Iowa's history.

27.

Tom Harkin came out in favor of the Fairness Doctrine during an interview with Bill Press.

28.

Tom Harkin has been influential in increasing research funding for alternative medicine.

29.

Tom Harkin was instrumental in the creation of the US Office of Alternative Medicine in 1992, which later became the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

30.

Tom Harkin introduced the Americans with Disabilities Act into the Senate.

31.

Tom Harkin delivered part of a speech in sign language so his deaf brother could understand.

32.

Tom Harkin has taken issue with the Supreme Court's handling of a number of cases related to ADA, concerned that the judgments severely limited the scope of the legislation's effectiveness:.

33.

Tom Harkin has opposed most efforts to place legal restrictions on Roe v Wade, including voting against a ban on late term abortion, while supporting contraception and education to reduce teen pregnancy.

34.

Tom Harkin was very critical of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, which places limits on taxpayer-funded abortions in the context of the November 2009 Affordable Health Care for America Act.

35.

Tom Harkin has come out in favor of embryonic stem cell research.

36.

In July 2006, Harkin made a speech from the Senate floor in response to George W Bush's veto of the embryonic stem cell research federal funding bill.

37.

In May 2009, Tom Harkin announced he opposed any effort to overturn an Iowa Supreme Court decision in April 2009 that legalized same-sex marriage in Iowa.

38.

On December 18,2010, Tom Harkin voted in favor of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010.

39.

Tom Harkin has been active in combating the worst forms of child labor.

40.

Tom Harkin supported President Barack Obama's health reform legislation; he voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in December 2009, and he voted for the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

41.

Tom Harkin criticized health reform as being too complex and convoluted.

42.

Tom Harkin believes the new legislation rewards the insurance industry.

43.

Tom Harkin said important reforms such as preventing insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions and keeping young adults on their parents' health insurance plans until age 26 were laudable, but he believed that Democrats should not have settled for a solution he believed was inferior to government-provided health insurance.

44.

Tom Harkin has been a staunch supporter of Israel as a member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, which appropriates about $2 billion annually for military financing for Israel.

45.

In May 2006 Tom Harkin voted in favor of Senate Bill 2611, known as the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act.

46.

Tom Harkin ran for President in 1992 as a populist with labor union support.

47.

Tom Harkin was an early favorite in a small field of five candidates.

48.

Tom Harkin won the Iowa caucus and those in Idaho and Minnesota, but he ran poorly in New Hampshire and other primaries and ultimately lost the Democratic Party nomination to Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas.

49.

Tom Harkin figured in running mate searches multiple times after his 1992 presidential campaign.

50.

In 2000, Tom Harkin was considered by Al Gore before Gore selected Joe Lieberman.

51.

Tom Harkin endorsed Obama's choice of Joe Biden for the nomination, and campaigned for the Obama-Biden ticket.

52.

Ruth Tom Harkin is an attorney and was one of the first women in the United States to be elected as a prosecutor when, in 1972, she was elected to the office of county attorney of Story County, Iowa.

53.

Ruth Tom Harkin left the government and became United Technologies' senior vice president for international affairs and government relations in April 1997, leading their Washington DC office.

54.

Mrs Tom Harkin sat on the Iowa Board of Regents, the body responsible for overseeing the state's public universities.

55.

Senator Harkin made a brief cameo appearance as himself in the political satire Dave, as did his fellow senators Christopher Dodd, Howard Metzenbaum, Paul Simon and Alan K Simpson.

56.

Tom Harkin is a 2004 graduate of Princeton University, and received her master of business administration degree from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2007.

57.

In 2015 New York City held its first Disability Pride Parade, and Tom Harkin was its grand marshal.

58.

Tom Harkin was the grand marshal for the Chicago Disability Pride Parade that same year.