Succeeding in the House
An Interview with Rep. Jane Harman
During her public career, Jane Harman served nine terms in Congress, including four years after 9/11 as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. She recently completed a decade at the nonpartisan Wilson Center as its first female president and CEO, where she is now President Emerita and Distinguished Fellow. Harman is recognized as a national expert at the nexus of security and public policy issues, and has received numerous awards for distinguished service. She has served on advisory boards for the CIA, Director of National Intelligence, and the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and State. Harman is currently a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, the Aspen Strategy Group, the advisory board of the Munich Security Conference, the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission and co-chairs the Homeland Security Experts Group with former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff. Her book “Insanity Defense: Why our Failure to Confront Hard National Security Problems Makes us Less Safe” was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2021.
Anthony Mohr: Thank you very much for joining us. I want to start by asking you: the first time you walked into the Chamber of the House of Representatives as an elected Member of Congress, what went through your mind?
Jane Harman: Oh, it was very exciting. I was elected in a very close election in West Los Angeles; you know a lot about this, Tony, since we've been friends since childhood. My late husband, Sidney Harman, and I flew back to Washington. There was a dinner for new members in the statuary hall outside the House Chamber. We ate dinner, and then we walked onto the House floor where, projected on the wall, were the names of the current members. Seeing my name on the Wall, I was just so emotional. It was an amazing experience and a high honor to serve there.
Mohr: Let’s go back to your campaign. I’ve always heard it said that the best way to get votes is to ask for them. I assume you asked for lots of votes when you were running. How did you feel when you first asked for votes and when you first asked for campaign contributions?
Harman: Let's flip that, because I asked for campaign contributions first. I was living mostly in Washington, DC, before I ran for Congress. I had a bi-coastal life because part of my late husband’s business was based in Northridge, and so we went back and forth to L.A. often. A congressional seat opened up, and an open seat is easier to run for than a seat held by an incumbent, and so I told Sidney that I'd love to run. I think he was astonished. We ended up moving back to L.A. full time. I had to reestablish my residency in California. This was 1992. Every decade there's a new census and the lines are adjusted and what had been a safe Democratic seat became a lean Republican seat. Where I had grown up was no longer in the district. That didn't deter me. We moved into the newly designed district, and held fundraisers to tell people I was running. I also rang doorbells because in 1992, that was the way you won elections. And I put up lawn signs.
My first political speech -- I’ll never forget it. The last office I’d run for was junior high school treasurer, which I lost. But during this political speech, I was looking down at my shoes the entire time. When it was over, I kept thinking, my shoes aren't going to vote for me. I really have to make eye contact with people, and it took a while to gain the confidence to do that. Now I’m pretty shameless and joke that I can raise money from a lamppost, but I had to learn how to do that.
Ringing doorbells was always very awkward. I mean you're intruding in somebody's space, and a number of times, I had people slam doors in my face. A couple of times I even had females say, “Well, I can't talk to you; my husband will tell me how to vote.” That was cringe-worthy. But many times I got to know people. One example I remember distinctly in Manhattan Beach. The person who answered the door was Don Winter, and at that time he worked for TRW, a major aerospace company (since acquired by Northrop Grumman). As a side note, the primary business of my district was aerospace. Over time, Don and I became friends and he was very helpful to me. Segue to later; Don became Secretary of the Navy. And then, a few years later I was asked to christen a navy ship (by the way, whoever christens a ship has to be a woman). My responsibilities were to take a champagne bottle and break it on the bow of the ship. There I was in Mobile, Alabama, and Don was in the audience. By then, he was a former Navy Secretary and said he came to celebrate the occasion and see if I could break the champagne bottle, which is not as easy as you’d think. I’d practiced. I was told the swing is like a tennis backhand and you really have to hit it hard against the ship. So as I swung the champagne bottle across my body, it exploded, and I got totally wet, which is part of the fun of the experience. From ringing his doorbell, Don and I became political friends and personal friends.
Mohr: Did most of your campaign funds in that first election come from your district?
Harman: Probably not. I wouldn't say I self-funded, but I self-started my funding. You can give unlimited amounts to yourself. And so, in order to hire an experienced campaign consultant and get going, I had to have some seed money, which is very hard for new candidates to raise. Most of the funds for my first race came from L.A., but I don't think they came from the district. Parts of West L.A. -- the parts left out of the new district -- were where I had the most friends.
Mohr: Understood.
Harman: I also had a rule that I wasn't going to self-fund. I got myself started, but if people didn't want to invest in me, I shouldn't be there.
Mohr: A political scientist, David Leuthold, wrote half a century ago that the use of family photos was more effective in appeals to Democratic voters than Republican voters. Do you feel that is still the case?
Harman: No. I think people want their politicians and their leaders to be authentic. And a way to show that you're authentic is to share family photos. Frankly, to protect their privacy, I didn't want to send pictures of my kids. I did send some on mailers -- again social media was not big back in the day. But I think doing things with constituents really matters. For example, I was a runner until my knees started to hurt. I would run in 5K and 10K races in my district, wearing an old T shirt and shorts and mixing it up with everybody. I remember one time I was feeling kind of tired and somebody said, “I have an idea,” and poured a bucket of cold water on my head. That was clearly a bad hair day, but it woke me up. Being normal around people is a hugely appealing political trait. It's something that Joe Biden has, and it was a big selling point in his election as President.
Mohr: Leuthold also wrote that experienced candidates give more serious and accurate consideration to the potential effects campaigns have on their own lives. Do you believe that's true, and did you give considerations about that the first time you ran for office? If so, how did your family react?
Harman: It's a brutal occupation, especially if, as in my case, you're working in Washington and your district is in Los Angeles. I remember my first year in Congress, I went back to California forty-four weekends out of fifty-two. And I’m not sure what I did about the other eight. It was exhausting, and a number of us were on the red eye together. We used to make jokes about sleeping together two nights a week. When I was elected in 1992, my younger children were ten and eight. I had two older children, one at Harvard and the other at a high school year abroad program. I did my best to be present, but it took a little while to really understand the toll it takes. I used to say, you can have it all, but not all at once, and you have to rebalance your life every single morning. I did that for many, many years. Now my four kids are responsible and impressive adults and have college degrees. Three have graduate degrees, and all have spouses and families. So obviously, some lessons I tried to teach them stuck. But it's daunting; no one should underestimate that. My youngest child still does not like politics, and I think that had a lot to do with the fact that her mom was away a lot; she also didn't like going to political parties. She still doesn't like them.
Mohr: Turning back to when you first entered Congress, what can a member hope to achieve in the House during that person's first year?
Harman: It helped that I had some background. I hadn't served in Congress, but I had worked for Senator John Tunney for five years in the 1970s as a legislative assistant, then Legislative Director, then Chief Counsel of two different subcommittees that he chaired. And so I knew a lot about how to move legislation. I also had a lot of friends, and nothing happens if you don't have friends in Congress. I also had an instinct to be bipartisan. Sadly, the light is almost out on bipartisanship these days. But I knew a number of Republicans, so I knew how to network in order to push things forward.
I got a piece of legislation through in my first or early in my second term, and I still have the pen and picture from the signing ceremony. Passing legislation as a very junior member was an achievement. Here's what it was. On a patriotic holiday, I don't remember which one, Torrance, a small city in my Congressional district, wanted to fly the POW MIA flag over its City Hall. California is very patriotic, especially my district with all the aerospace companies. A councilman was told this violated federal law, which permitted only the American flag to fly only at post offices on patriotic holidays. That seemed to me to be ridiculous. My law permitted flying the POW MIA flag on municipal or federal buildings on patriotic holidays. It passed overwhelmingly. But it still took the networking skills that I had to get it passed. During my years in Congress, I was author or principal co-author of seven more bills that were signed into law under three presidents. I’m very proud of those and for each, I have the signing page and the pen in a frame.
Mohr: Which were those?
Harman: Well, how much time do you have? They were mostly in the security area. The one I’m proudest of was to reform our intelligence community after two major failures -- one on 9/11 and then the false claim that WMD existed in Iraq. So, in 2004, we reformed our intelligence community, set up a joint command across sixteen agencies headed by the Director of National Intelligence, or DNI. In the end, four of us worked out the compromise between the House and Senate versions. We were called the “Big Four.” One of the Big Four was Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine. She and I always joke that we were the two women of the Big Four, so of course we did 98% of the work. But seriously, it's a good bill, it's a good law, and Susan and I became fast friends after that. We still are.
Mohr: Let's turn to skills members of Congress possess. Charlotte Alter has written a book called The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America. She mentions Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and her mastery of social media. At the moment, how many members of Congress understand social media, if not at AOC’s level, at least to the point where they know how to make use of it? And what are the older members doing, if anything, to learn about social media?
Harman: I think there are still a few flip phones on the hill. I didn't have a flip phone; I actually mastered a modern phone, but the older members are somewhat handicapped. They can't do what AOC can do. In my day, social media wasn't as prevalent or as important as it is now. AOC knocked off Joe Crowley, a popular incumbent who was the head of the New Democrats, which was a group of moderate democrats, and he was very, very well-liked. She beat him using social media. She made some very clever ads. Her message was, “I’m here all the time, I work here, and he's never here.” She didn't invent that message, but she communicated it in a jazzy and appealing way, and Joe Crowley didn't see it coming.
Mohr: I have read criticisms of members of Congress who take junkets, who travel abroad on a lot of alleged fact-finding missions. But I’ve also seen criticisms that go the other way, scorning members of Congress who never travel, don't even have a passport, and have never set foot in the United Nations. Would you comment on that?
Harman: I think we want well-traveled people who have an appetite to see and understand the world, meet its leaders, and figure out where countries are headed. I’d traveled extensively before I ran for Congress. I understand the criticism of so called “CoDels” -- Congressional Delegations -- if they are shopping trips. Today members go on shorter, fact-finding trips -- sometimes spouses come; sometimes they don't -- but they go on trips to serious places. And most members tell their constituents where they're going and how long they're going, and so on. If they're going to Afghanistan, maybe they don't want to announce that in advance, but certainly when they come back. Two things happen on those trips. First, members learn something, and second, members get to know each other. It is astoundingly sad that in the present era, members fly into Washington on Tuesdays, vote Tuesday and Wednesday, and fly out on Thursdays. Some of them literally sleep in their offices, but a lot of them just bunk together and go to fundraisers at night. They don't get to know each other, and it's easy to demonize somebody you don't know. Once you know them, it's much harder to do that. The deep friendships that used to form in Congress are gone. Those deep friendships are what Joe Biden remembers and what used to make the place work well.
Mohr: I remember that Richard Nixon and John Kennedy rode together on an overnight train trip.
Harman: And Joe Biden and John McCain were buddies. I went on many CoDels that McCain led to hotspots around the world, and every year he took a big group to the Munich Security Conference, which I am about to go to for my twenty-first time.
Mohr: There was a member of the California Assembly, who said to some of us judges one time, “When we pass a bill, we don’t worry about whether or not it’s constitutional; we let you folks on the court decide that.” Have you ever heard of that attitude?
Harman: No, and I would never have followed that advice. I worked on issues that were complex. When I was a staffer in the Senate and counsel to the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, in 1975 we extended and expanded the Voting Rights Act. We were quite sure what we did was constitutional. Interestingly, about five years ago the Supreme Court invalidated some portions of what we did. I think that decision was wrong. Congress is now attempting to pass a new law to address efforts of some states to make it harder for people to vote -- and also to ensure that votes are not fraudulent by requiring a voter ID. A Senate effort to invoke cloture recently failed, but the issue is not dead.
Mohr: Any thoughts about gerrymandering?
Harman: It can be pernicious. Back in the day -- let’s pick California -- it was done by one party; whichever one held the governorship and had enough votes in the state legislature. The whole concept is that districts are designed to favor the election either of one person or one party. California has made some significant changes, which I was proud to support by initiative measure. Both political parties opposed them, by the way. One change is to set up citizen commissions to draw lines for congressional districts. And the other is to have what's called a jungle primary, where everybody runs against everybody. The effect of these reforms is more competitive districts. If you're in a jungle primary, you have to appeal to all the voters, which means you can't be far far on the right or far far on the left. You won’t win your primary that way.
Mohr: What are some of the lessons you’ve learned from your time in Congress?
Harman: It's a very human institution. I love that about it. I had very good friends; I still have very good friends there. As I mentioned earlier, to make things happen, you have to have personal relationships. Congress is less bureaucratic than a lot of the federal government departments that I know. It works on relationships. The work is hard. You really have to be passionate about being there. If you're not, if you just want to get your picture in the paper, I don't think you’ll like it. You won't be successful and then you won't get your picture in the paper.
Mohr: And you may not be reelected?
Harman: Well, that's not necessarily true. It depends who you are and where you're from and how much money you have or can raise. But let me close with this. Back in the day, many of the people in Congress put country over party. That was the point: To work together to make the country better. And there are lots of classic bipartisan friendships. One that comes to mind is Lee Hamilton, who headed the Wilson Center before I did and was a vaunted Congressman from Indiana and, for a long time, Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Dick Lugar, Republican Senator from the same state. Hamilton and Lugar got ten times more done because they worked together. And John McCain put country over party, as did a number of others, including Joe Biden. That's gone. Now it's reelection over country. To see Congress become basically a reelection machine is absolutely heartbreaking, and it doesn't serve our country well. To change this, we need fewer gerrymandered districts and single party primaries, which I discussed earlier.
Mohr: If a Harvard student knows at graduation that he or she wants to run for public office, and assuming that that person is not part of a family dynasty, what advice would you give that person?
Harman: Well, I didn't have family connections. I fell in love with politics in high school when I attended the 1960 Democratic National Convention with my then-boyfriend, got onto the floor, and saw John Kennedy nominated for President. I was an usher during his acceptance speech. I met Eleanor Roosevelt. It was a cosmic event, and I’ve loved politics ever since. If you graduate from a Harvard school, you're smart; that's good. I was very lucky. I graduated from Harvard Law School and a few years later was working for a California Senator and then in the Carter White House. I had a bi-coastal life, which helped me make important contacts in Washington and keep relationships where I grew up. It only took me thirty-two years to be elected to Congress, which at the age of fifteen I’d decided was my dream. My advice to recent graduates is to establish roots somewhere. Maybe Cambridge is your home, but it is a highly contested space. But figure out where your base is and then try to earn your stripes. Most people don't run for Congress three days after graduation. See what offices you could run for that you actually could win. Losing isn't necessarily bad, but winning is better. You’ll have the best chance if you volunteer or work for local elected politicians. Run for their seats as they move up, but don't assume that a Harvard diploma equals election to public office.
Mohr: Good advice, Jane. I want to thank you very much for your time.
About the Author:
Anthony J. Mohr is a 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and has over twenty-six years of service within the criminal and civil justice system at the state level. He most recently sat on the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, where he presided over civil and felony trials. Earlier, he was a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court, and in private legal practice. Among his numerous professional affiliations, Anthony served on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court and chaired both the Superior Court’s ethics review and response committee and the statewide Committee on Judicial Ethics of the California Judges Association. He serves on the Regional Board of the Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles Region.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.