Read an Excerpt
Frank
A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage
By Barney Frank Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 Barney Frank
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71142-9
CHAPTER 1
FROM BAYONNE TO BOSTON
In 1954, I was a fairly normal fourteen-year-old, enjoying sports, unhealthy food, and loud music. But even then I realized that there were two ways in which I was different from the other guys: I was attracted to the idea of serving in government and I was attracted to the other guys.
I also realized that these two attractions would not mix well. At the time, public officials were highly regarded. The president, Dwight Eisenhower, was one of America's most admired and respected military heroes. I was a homosexual, an involuntary member of one of America's most despised groups. I knew that achieving success in any area where popularity was required would be impossible, given the unpopularity of my sexual orientation.
If this were fiction, a spoiler alert would now be appropriate, because the story ends with a dramatic turnabout. When I retired from Congress in January 2013, the divergent reputations of elected officials and homosexuality persisted, but with one major difference: The order was reversed. Legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people were more popular than elected officials as a class. Congress was held in particularly low esteem. While I did not do any polling on the subject myself, I was told that my marriage to my husband, Jim Ready, scored better than my service in the House.
When I first entered public life in 1968, I had to figure out how to keep the public's negative feelings about my sexual orientation from interfering with my political effectiveness. By the time I'd overcome that obstacle, a larger one appeared: the growing unpopularity of government itself, and the consequent diminution of its capacity to assist the unfortunate. My influence over the political system grew even as the system's influence diminished. This was good for my self-esteem but bad for my public policy agenda.
This book is a personal history of two seismic shifts in American life: the sharp drop in prejudice against LGBT people and the equally sharp increase in antigovernment opinion. During my six decades in the public realm, Americans have become more accepting of once-despised minorities but also more resistant to coming together through government to improve the quality of our lives. How did this happen and what can be done to further the victories and reverse the defeats?
The many years I've spent advocating unpopular causes have taught me that it's important to begin with your best case, not in the hope of making instant converts but to persuade your audience that there is room for debate about a subject. Fortunately, when it comes to attitudes toward government, that case is even better than a no-brainer—it is a pro-brainer: the story of the millions of children who have been protected from brain damage by federal rules that were adopted over the vehement objections and dire predictions of affected industries.
Before 1970, lead was a major component of paint and gasoline. Its corrosive effects, which are uncontested today, had their worst impact on the very young, impairing in particular the development of the brain cells known as neuroglia. All young people were exposed to lead, and poorer children were the most exposed, since the paint in their homes was more likely to contain lead and to chip, and because they often lived in crowded urban areas adjacent to heavy traffic flows.
Over the objections of private industry, many public health advocates, especially those focused on children, pressed for action. They were successful. The process began in 1970 with the Clean Air Act, which was followed by the Lead-Based Poisoning Prevention Act a year later. A series of amendments and implementing regulations steadily increased the restrictions, culminating in 1978 with a ban on lead in paint, and a statute enacted in 1990 and effective in 1995 prohibiting lead in gasoline.
Critics of government regulation should heed all of this carefully. As the prohibitions came into effect, the incidence of death and illness from lead ingestion dropped drastically. Between 1975 and 1980 and 2007 and 2008, lead levels in children's blood dropped 90 percent. In 1990, the FDA estimated there were already seventy thousand fewer children with IQs below seventy because of the rules.
The paint and gasoline industries denied that lead was harmful in the amounts present in their products and predicted severe economic harm if they had to remove it. They were never able to explain why banning lead in fact coincided not just with fewer brain-damaged children but also with their own continued prosperity. Lead-damaged brains still exist, sadly, and there is more to be done to reduce the number. But the undeniable fact is that millions of Americans have healthy brains today in large part because, contrary to the old joke, some people from the government did come to help them.
* * *
In 1954, the government was still popular, but homosexuals were held in universal contempt. This had been made explicit the previous year when President Eisenhower issued an executive order decreeing that people like me could never receive security clearances. We were too inherently untrustworthy to help protect our country from its enemies.
I do not remember being specifically aware of the order at the time, but as an avid newspaper reader growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, I must have seen the New York Times headline that referred to us as "perverts," and I was fully aware of what awaited me if my true nature was known. (I say "true nature" for the edification of that dwindling set of bigots who justify mistreating us because we "chose an alternative lifestyle." Being hated is rarely an experience sought by teenagers.)
At fourteen, I decided I would keep my sexual identity a secret forever, although I didn't give much thought to how that was going to work. Terrified by the obloquy that would come with being found out, I regarded total concealment as my only option. The recognition that there could be no role for a "queer" in public life had an additional and deep emotional impact: It is very probably the reason that I later approached every tough election campaign with the assumption I would lose.
A televised Senate hearing first inspired my fascination with government. My father was what we now call an "early adopter." When I was born in 1940, he celebrated by buying a television set—before almost everybody else and before there was much to watch. I have early memories of Western movies, the second Billy Conn–Joe Louis fight, Howdy Doody, and Senator Estes Kefauver's investigation into organized crime. I enjoyed all the programs, but I never wanted to be a cowboy, a boxer, or a puppeteer. I preferred the idea of sitting behind an impressive dais grilling colorful Mafiosi. At ten, I was more intrigued than instructed, but when another set of hearings came on the TV four years later, I was hooked by both the spectacle and the subject matter. This was the Army-McCarthy brawl.
In 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy turned his demagogic attention to the U.S. Army. The army had just finished fighting two Communist regimes in Korea—but this did not stop McCarthy from deeming it soft on communism. The army hired the Boston lawyer Joseph Welch as its lead counsel in the Senate hearings that were held on McCarthy's accusations.
Welch became a hero to Americans in general, and liberals in particular, for the deftness of his anti-McCarthy thrusts. One of the deftest was his sly allusion to the sexual orientation of McCarthy's chief aide, Roy Cohn. A closeted gay man, Cohn would angrily denounce any attempt to "out" him until the day he died of AIDS-related illnesses decades later.
In questioning one of McCarthy's assistants, Welch asked him if he was contending that a certain photograph had come from "a pixie." Unwisely trying to turn Welch's sarcasm against him, McCarthy intervened and asked Welch to define "pixie." Welch pounced. "A pixie," he gleefully explained, "is a close relative of a fairy." This devastating use of anti-gay prejudice to demean Cohn added greatly to Welch's reputation and went wholly unrebuked even by those liberals who rightly considered themselves America's staunchest opponents of bigotry.
I was among the nonrebukers. I was glad to see Welch score heavily against the McCarthy side. I accepted the widespread contempt for homosexuals as an indelible fact of life. It never occurred to me to fault Welch for expressing it. Indeed, those hearings—in which an anti-gay slur played such a highly praised part—made a very favorable impression on me and kindled my interest in public life.
That interest was greatly intensified by the murder of Emmett Till. Till, an African American from Chicago, was about my age. While he was visiting relatives in Mississippi, some men thought he had been disrespectful to a white woman. No one alleged that he had done more than whistle at her, and even that was disputed, but the price he paid was to be brutally murdered. It was clear that local law enforcement knew who had killed him. They had no objection to his death, and certainly no intention of doing anything to the killers. I was outraged. I soon learned that the federal government could do little to prevent such horrors because Southern senators had successfully filibustered antilynching laws passed by the House. I took from this an enduring belief in the need for a strong federal government. After all, Southern racists were able to protect murderers only because their legislators exploited fears of centralized power. Changing this reality would be an important goal for me.
Civil liberties and civil rights were not the only causes that inspired strong convictions. My parents were not involved in politics, but they were staunch liberals. In our very Jewish but largely secular household, the nearest thing we had to a Bible was the then very liberal New York Post. I supported the Franklin Roosevelt–Harry Truman tradition of active government intervention to make our society a fair one. My interests did not become wholly political, but they broadened. By the 1954 midterm elections, I was rooting equally for the Democrats and the Yankees.
I was also thinking more often about how much I would like to take part in governing. The fast-paced verbal combat I'd seen on TV appealed to me. I was good at talking in class, arguing politics and sports with my peers, and making people laugh, often at the expense of my debate adversaries. After the Till murder, I also wanted to make America conform more closely to my ideals.
But I was a Jewish homosexual. While I planned to keep my sexual orientation a secret, it was too late to conceal my Jewishness—I had already outed myself with a bar mitzvah. In 1954, anti-Semitism was still a significant problem facing Jews in our choice of careers. We were rarities in elected office and held congressional seats almost entirely in areas with large Jewish populations—a few neighborhoods in a handful of big cities. The one exception—Senator Richard Neuberger of Oregon—was widely known because he was so unusual. But Jews were not hindered when it came to achieving appointed office—"Jew Deal" was one of the epithets thrown at FDR's administration. Knowing this, I figured that I could work as someone's aide—as long as I kept my sexuality hidden.
* * *
In 1956, I volunteered to work on Adlai Stevenson's second presidential campaign. It wasn't fun, but it was the beginning of my education in political reality. Bayonne is a blue-collar community in New Jersey's Hudson County, very close to New York City. The population was overwhelmingly ethnic—Polish, Irish, and Italian—and Catholic. Politically, it was the domain of one of America's most ruthless and corrupt political machines. (Hoboken, a few miles from Bayonne and very much like it, was accurately portrayed in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront.) I naïvely expected to be a small cog in a well-oiled campaign on behalf of our Democratic nominee. In fact, the Democrats who controlled the county had no great sympathy for Stevenson and even less for the idea of liberals getting involved in politics. The Volunteers for Stevenson effort I joined had been set up by the machine under the leadership of a reliable political lieutenant and was given little to do. It soon dawned on me that not all Democrats shared my passion for advancing the liberal agenda—protecting its fiefdom was far more important for the county organization.
The organization's concerns turned out to be well founded. Across the bay in New York, Stevenson campaign alumni led by Eleanor Roosevelt would stick together and eventually overthrow the Tammany Hall machine. In 1961, Carmine DeSapio, the legendary Tammany Hall boss and Greenwich Village district leader, lost a primary to a leader of the new "reformers." When DeSapio attempted a comeback two years later, he lost to another political newcomer, Edward Koch.
The Hudson County machine proved less vulnerable. But its leaders could see that a cultural chasm was opening between the college-educated progressives who were Stevenson's most devoted fans and the white working-class voters who were their mainstays. After one of Stevenson's eloquent, intellectually sophisticated speeches, a supporter told him he would "get the votes of all the thinking people." "Thank you, madam," he replied, "but I need a majority." As with Joseph Welch, a widely admired and oft-quoted remark was more than a clever quip—it was an expression of a deeper political reality. The condescension in Stevenson's comment did not bother his admirers, but it did not help him with the wider public.
Such tensions would remain submerged for the next few years. In 1960, John F. Kennedy's charisma and ethnoreligious appeal kept them at bay, and in 1964, Barry Goldwater's self-acknowledged conservative extremism rendered them irrelevant. But by 1966, the alienation of the white working class had become a serious problem for Democrats, as it remains. Today, most white men vote for Republican presidential candidates even in races that Democrats win. The only identifiable groups of white men who vote reliably for Democrats are Jews and gays.
In 1956, the same year I worked for Stevenson, the Soviet Union brutally suppressed the revolt against tyranny in Hungary. It confirmed my conviction that America, with all of its faults, was morally superior to the Soviet system, and that helping nations resist Communist domination was a valid objective. At the time, my revulsion did not seem to me controversial. It struck me as entirely consistent with my liberal views—Hungary, after all, was Emmett Till multiplied by tens of thousands. Given its earlier suppression of dissent in East Germany, and its crackdown in Poland, I believed—then and subsequently—that the Soviet Union was indeed the head of an evil empire, and I was never one of the liberals who mocked Ronald Reagan for saying so. It was not until I entered Harvard, in September 1957, that I learned that my judgment was not universally shared by others on the left side of the political divide.
* * *
This was not the only difference between my version of liberalism and the views I encountered in Cambridge. In Bayonne, I saw the political world divided neatly into liberals—mostly Democrats—and conservatives—mostly Republicans, with the large exception of the Southern defenders of racism. Now, for the first time, I encountered people who were to my left—not only in their attitude toward the Soviet Union but also in their view of America's cultural and economic situation.
My relationship to ideologues on my left is well illustrated by my reaction to the folk singer Pete Seeger. Though I disagreed with the political message of his lyrics, like most of my schoolmates, I was appalled when Harvard president Nathan Pusey inexplicably banned him from performing a concert in 1961 because Seeger had refused to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee about any Communist affiliation. This act of censorship struck us as particularly strange because Pusey had come to Harvard from Wisconsin, where he had distinguished himself by standing up to Senator McCarthy at the height of his strength. In the face of the widespread opposition, Pusey compromised, announcing that Seeger would be allowed to sing from a Harvard stage but not make a speech. Since Seeger communicated his views most effectively in his songs, Pusey was alone in thinking that he had saved face, and the concert proceeded with little further controversy.
A year later, when I heard Seeger sing "Little Boxes," I recognized the gulf that divided me from many others on the left. The song was a mockery of the postwar housing that had been built for working-class and lower-middle-class Americans. "Little boxes on the hillside," the lyrics went. "And they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." At one concert I attended at Harvard, most of the audience—filling Harvard's largest venue—appeared to find this a hilariously accurate critique. They were oblivious of the fact that these "little boxes" had been built on a large scale to be affordable by families who would not otherwise have been able to be homeowners. The aesthetic disdain Seeger and many of my fellow students felt for these units was not, I knew, shared by the occupants, most of whom were happy—and proud—to own them. These occupants were, after all, the kinds of people I had grown up with in Bayonne and whom I had dealt with pumping gas at my father's Jersey City truck stop. And I knew they disagreed completely with Seeger's critique. The mass production of homes for working families was an example of our capitalist system's efficiency. But Seeger, and many of his listeners, preferred to think that the capitalist profit-making system was depriving people with limited incomes of the chance to live in large, individually designed houses—which they of course could not afford. When I insisted that the inhabitants of this "ticky-tacky" were very satisfied with their "little boxes," I was often told that they did not have the knowledge—or the sensibility—to know they were being mistreated.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Frank by Barney Frank. Copyright © 2015 Barney Frank. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
