Lifelong public servant Barney Frank tells Street Roots that after more than 50 years in politics, he still has work to do
When Grace Badik answered the phone at the Street Roots front desk, the caller wasted no time with pleasantries.
“Barney Frank.”
Nothing more. Nothing less. With that voice, you almost don’t need the name.
The former congressman from Massachusetts has adopted the habit of omitting small talk such as “hello” and “goodbye” from his phone conversations. He got the idea when he read a biography about Sherman Adams. The chief of White House staff to President Dwight D. Eisenhower estimated that eliminating small talk saved him an hour or two every day.
Known less for his social prowess than for his quick wit, sharp tongue and characteristic mumble, Frank served as one of Congress’ most prominent members for 32 years, retiring in 2013.
Depending on whether your political views lean toward the left or the right, Frank is either an outspoken champion for civil rights and social programs, or a scoundrel who promotes big government and contributed to the housing bubble burst of the late 2000s by promoting affordable housing policies.
But behind the public figure who authored sweeping financial reforms and tirelessly pushed for gay equality and increased housing for low-income Americans, is the story of a man who purposefully put his political career before his own personal happiness for many years.
Frank will be at Powell’s City of Books on Saturday, March 28, at 4 p.m. to discuss and sign copies of his new book, “Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage.”
He sums up his book by calling it “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.”
Emily Green: Your book chronicles your career in politics as it spanned from working on Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign in 1956 to serving as a member of the U.S House of Representatives until 2013. I got the sense from reading it that you have a deep understanding of — and respect for — the rules involved in playing the political game that takes place in Washington D.C. In what ways, for better or for worse have you seen the rules of that game change since the early 1980s when you first became a U.S. representative?
Barney Frank: There are no political leaders now the way there were, even 35 years ago, as an influence. Members of Congress have become much more individual entrepreneurs. Secondly — and this is by far the most important change — when I got to Congress in 1981, we still had the situation where the South, was A) Conservative and B) Democratic, although it was shifting. By 1981 the majority of the members of the House of Representatives and the Senate from the South were Democrats, even though they voted significantly with the Republicans. There were also a smaller number of Republicans, mostly on the East and some on the West Coast, who were more on the liberal side. That is while the Democrats were more liberal and Republicans were more conservative, there were 10 or 15, even 20 percent, split between the two parties.
But now that is simply not the case. I don’t think there is a single Republican member who is to the left of any Democratic member; the parties have become much more ideologically coherent.
The next big change was — and this started in the 80s, but was given an enormous boost by this right-wing Supreme Court majority — is the role of money. Money plays a much greater role now in elections to the detriment of democracy.
Democrats have become more on the liberal side and Republicans on the conservative side. The Republicans have taken that a step further and moved even further to the right. So the most important change that affects the current situation is that, beginning in 2009, the Republicans moved to a more unified, conservative position, which really changed. Speed up to warp speed and now you have a Republican party that is an angry, antigovernment, very extreme conservative party.
E.G.: While you say money has played a role in changing politics, you wrote in your book that the widely held belief that campaign finances have more power over Congress than constituents do is simply not true. Can you explain this and also how constituents can most effectively wield the power they have?
B.F.: Constituents can wield the power by talking to their members of Congress. On the day-to-day affairs, it is true that big money influence is greater because the people with a lot of money are monitoring things on a regular basis, and the voters are not paying a lot of attention. But in those cases when the voters care, and they get engaged, for example, they helped us get more in financial reform than we thought we were going to get. The big banks really lost badly in that one.
The whole effort to make it harder for people to access music and other things on the Internet, there was an effort to largely end the intellectual property laws. That got defeated. Net neutrality clearly is opposed by the most important financial interests, but it’s going to happen.
It’s true that members of Congress, out of human nature, will listen to the money. But members of Congress, most of us, didn’t get elected without having a pretty good sense of what people in our district want, and knowing in particular what it is that’s important to them. It would get you into political difficulty if you denied them. I wish constituents would speak out more, but even when they don’t speak out, there is an ongoing understanding by members of Congress of what the constituents will accept. There is an ongoing understanding of the need to keep the constituents happy, and even more importantly, the need to not anger them, that is a factor.
Money is more influential? There’s more truth to that than there used to be. I don’t think money has as much an influence on the decisions that are made once members are elected. The real negative power of money is in who gets elected. The people with all the money, they know who to support. In many cases, they don’t have to lobby these people once they’ve helped them get elected.
E.G.: You also wrote that working on affordable housing took up more of your time than anything else in your public life. As income inequality continues to grow in the United States, why do you think there is push by some presidential candidates to abolish The department of Housing and Urban Development, and what do you think the next president should do for affordable housing?
B.F.: When we talk about affordable housing or subsidized housing, generally, we’re talking about rental housing. I have always believed, for a variety of reasons, most very low-income people are going to be renters, not homeowners. And we have neglected rental. And the problem is, when you talk about rental housing, people still conjure up in their heads these terrible, anti-social, large towers that we built. We don’t do that anymore. We haven’t for a long time. We know how to build and how to fund decent affordable housing, and that’s what I have most worked on.
The objection we’ve had, is there’s still this picture in people’s heads, this cultural lag, that rental housing built with public assistance somehow is going to be this terrible drab and dangerous tower — but the poor didn’t build those, society built those because they thought it was the cheapest way to house people, and we’ve learned that does more harm than good.
Part of the problem is a continuation of what I said earlier: the Republican Party is more far to the right. When I was in the Massachusetts Legislature working on housing, one of the people I worked most closely with was a Republican senator, Edward Brooke. He was a great supporter of affordable rental housing. When I got to Congress, when Republicans took over in the mid-90s, they tried to undo legislation called the Brooke Amendment, to help low-income tenants, and then Brooke even supported it. I called him and said, “Can you help on this?” And he said, “Barney, I wish I could, it’s not my party anymore. These people have just moved away from me.”
The problem is you have these ideologues who run the Republican Party today, and who are very attuned to that group of regulatory foes and the extremists of the Fox network and elsewhere, who really don’t think the government has a positive role in our society. And there’s very little they let the government do besides defense and law enforcement: This is a manifestation of their ideology.
E.G.: You are one of few members of Congress to speak out against our country’s defense spending. What cuts can be made, without compromising national security, that would equal the amount of money needed to properly fund social programs like affordable rental housing?
B.F.: Oh that’s the best question of all, because that’s my major goal going forward. I think a lot of the programs individually are popular, and the fact people are angry with the government is not because we’ve been doing too much in these areas, but too little. And then people blame the government for not doing enough, and then they get angry and vote for people who make the government worse.
First of all, we do not need to have three ways to destroy the Soviet Union in a thermonuclear war. There is no more Soviet Union, there is Russia, a very unpleasant place, you may agree. Putin is one of the great threats to democracy, but he does not remotely have the kind of capacity that we have. When the Soviet Union collapsed, George H. W. Bush began to cut things back. We have three ways of dropping thermonuclear weapons on the Soviet Union, by missiles, by airplanes and by submarines. Keep two. Give up one. Save billions of dollars.
We don’t need to have troops in Western Europe. The Western European nations and the European Union collectively have a larger gross domestic product and they have a larger population. Now, I get it. Putin is a problem for Ukraine, but the answer to that is not the American army, no one thinks it is, and they should be doing more there themselves.
Most importantly in the near term, the president was right to withdraw from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately he’s committed a little too much to the pressure to go back.
I believe it’s good that we’ve engaged in the bombing of those murderous fanatics that call themselves the Islamic State, and it’s had some impact, but the notion that America has to go back in and bring about stability in Iraq, in Afghanistan and maybe even in Syria, which is what you hear from many of the Republicans, is just wrong. We cannot do that. Our military is a great military. Militaries are very good at stopping bad things from happening. They cannot make good things happen. We’re spending $51 billion in the president’s budget in the coming year for the wars in the Middle East. That should be cut way down, probably to $10 billion. It won’t happen right away, you have to phase these things out.
So we can stop protecting Western Europe, we can stop these wars, which are very expensive – and trying to impose order there, we can scale back the thermonuclear deterrent, and we can stop these very expensive new weapons systems.
Yes, I want to have more weapons in America and at a greater capacity than China, but we have an enormous advantage over them already, and we increase it every year. I do not know why we need to build an increasingly large number of nuclear submarines. Unfortunately, nuclear submarines do not defeat terrorists. If they did, it’d be over, we have a lot of nuclear submarines, and they don’t have any. We have the kind of weaponry we needed for the Cold War.
I want America to be the strongest nation in the world, and we can be the strongest nation in the world at about 80 percent of what we’re now spending.
E.G.: Why do you think so few members of Congress are speaking out against our massive defense spending?
B.F.: We were getting somewhere, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were starting to scale it back, and then what happened was Dick Cheney and other neocons, very intelligently from their standpoint, managed to persuade people that terrorism was as big a threat as Communism and the Nazis.
What the Conservatives did was persuade people for a while that these terrorists were equal in the amount of threat they presented. And they never were. They are terrible people, and I am happy when some of them are killed, but they are not of the order of the magnitude of the Soviet or Nazi — a threat to our very existence — and don’t require a similar level of spending. And I think that the public understands that, but it’s too bad that George W. Bush started building things up. Because it’s just been a build-up of the military and it was, unfortunately, accompanied with tax cuts.
For the first time in American history we were fighting these wars while cutting taxes, which is a major factor in the explosion of the deficit, and the recession made it worse.
And then for a few years now, we’re thinking, “OK we’ve got to go to war against these people at the same level of spending as we needed behind the Cold War.” The American people now understand that it’s not the case, and you know an example of that is the fact that the Republicans — John McCain, Lindsey Graham — the ones that want to go back to into Afghanistan, back into combat, aren’t pushing for that in Congress.
It’s interesting, they’re telling the president, “You go do that without us.” These are the people, the Republicans, who are screaming at the president because he’s not going to deport the mother of a 5-year-old who was born here on the grounds that he’s doing it without Congressional authority. But when it comes to ordering American troops into battle, they want him to do that without Congressional authority, because they’re afraid to vote on it. Because they know the public finally understands that terrorists are terrible people, but we can combat ISIL by air. Having America take responsibility for them having a stable and coherent government in Iraq or Afghanistan, and maybe even in Syria, makes no sense.
E.G.: The Employment Non-Discrimination Act was a long-held effort of yours. And now we’re approaching a Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. What do you think needs to happen in Congress before gay rights will finally be fully realized?
B.F.: We need a Democratic president, House and Senate. I wish that weren’t the case. People say, “Oh, you’re being partisan.” I’m being realistic.
The Republican Party has seriously lagged the country. In 1976, 40 years ago, the country was just beginning to get a little better on LGBT rights. I filed the first gay rights bill in 1972, and almost no one voted for it, and we’ve been building ever since.
What’s happened since the late 70s is that there have been three trend lines in America on LGBT rights: The country is always getting better, the Democrats have gotten better, and at a faster pace than the country, and the Republicans have gotten worse in many ways. So as long as you have Republican control of the presidency or the House or the Senate – if the Republicans control any one of those branches — nothing good will happen.
There is now a broad recognition on the Democratic side of the importance of this issue and there’s a public acceptance of it, so we’ll get marriage equity from the Supreme Court.
The Non-Discrimination Act is only going to come when you get a Democratic president, House and Senate. The next time we get that, I think we will win it, but the problem is we’ve only had that situation of a Democratic president, House and Senate for four years since Jimmy Carter was in office. We had two years when Bill Clinton was in office and two years under Barack Obama. The last time we had a four years of a Democratic president and both houses of Congress Democratic was with Jimmy Carter, and the country wasn’t ready for that yet. We were pushing, but we didn’t have the votes, so we are now at the point where that could win, but only if you have a Democratic president, House and Senate. I’m not being partisan. The Republicans were the ones that made this an issue and continue to oppose it.
E.G.: When you started in politics, you didn’t think you would ever be able to come out, which meant you decided early on to put your career above your own private life. It wasn’t until many years later that the political climate changed, and you were able to come out without sacrificing your career. Looking back, was this choice of self-sacrifice, to put your political career above your personal happiness, for so long, ultimately worth it?
B.F.: Yeah, because it worked out well for me, but I wouldn’t advise people to do it – well, I guess I’m glad that it’s not a choice people have to make anymore.
The notion you can make a very satisfactory public life a substitute for a healthy emotional private life, in my experience, is just wrong. That’s just in my experience. I can’t compare my experience to others.
It worked out well for me – I lived long enough – I spent 15 years in elected office in the closet, and if that had been my whole electoral career, no, it wouldn’t have been worth it. But the way things worked out, I had 25 years after to make up for it, and I am able to feel good about both my job and my personal life.
Barney Frank timeline
Notable moments in Frank’s career and personal life, with excerpts from his book, “Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage.”
- 1940: Barney Frank is born in Bayonne, N.J., to a truck stop operator and a housewife. He writes, “My parents were not involved in politics, but 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.”
- 1954: At age 14, Frank realizes his sexual orientation and desire to be a politician do not mix. He decides to keep his sexual orientation a “secret forever,” he writes.
- 1955: Emmett Till, an African American 14-year-old, is brutally murdered in Mississippi after allegedly flirting with a white woman. Frank learns Till’s killers will go unpunished because Southern senators had successfully filibustered anti-lynching laws. This angers and motivates him. He decides he wants to change the laws protecting Till’s killers. He writes that the event instills his long-held belief in “the need for a strong federal government.” He notes, “After Till’s murder, I also wanted to make America conform more closely to my ideals.”
- 1962: Frank graduates from Harvard College. (He later attends Harvard Law School while serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.)
- 1966: While running the Visiting Fellows Program at Harvard, Frank took part in inviting Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to Cambridge to speak – at a time when the anti-war movement was growing. McNamara was confronted by a mob of angry students. The debacle left Frank doubtful about his abilities.
- 1968: Frank becomes chief assistant to Boston Mayor Kevin White.
- 1971: Frank is hired as an aide for U.S. Rep. Michael Harrington (D-Mass.).
- 1972: Frank rides in car at Boston’s second Gay Pride Parade during his first campaign. “It was my first step into the world of gay politics,” he writes. His platform this year includes “the legalization of marijuana, gay rights, strong environmental laws, and the cause of the United Farm Workers.”
- 1972: He wins the election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he serves for eight years. He credits his “safe district,” where he was consistently reelected by a high margin, for allowing him to be “one of the few white politicians who still loudly advocated traditional liberalism in the late 1970s.”
- 1973: Frank introduces Massachusetts’ first two gay-rights bills.
- 1979: He is admitted to the Massachusetts bar.
- 1980: Frank runs for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and wins, succeeding Father Robert Drinan. In his book, Frank credits his career in Congress, “not solely to my talent or driving ambition,” but also to Pope John Paul II’s call for all priests to withdraw from political positions. Without that call for withdrawal, Drinan’s seat wouldn’t have been open for the taking.
- 1983: Frank becomes chairman of the Manpower and Housing subcommittee, and changes its name to Employment and Housing.
- 1986: Frank bargains, agreeing to vote for the Tax Reform Act in exchange for a beefed-up tax credit for affordable housing. “I was happy to sacrifice my ideological purity to improve legislation that was going to become law with or without me,” he writes.
- 1987: Frank becomes the first member of Congress to voluntarily announce he is gay.
- 1990: Despite a highly publicized scandal resulting from his dealings with a prostitute, Frank is reelected with 66 percent of the vote.
- 1993: Frank speaks at the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation – a demonstration attended by more than 700,000 people. Frank writes, “It was an opportunity to alleviate the deep regret I felt over letting my fear of exposure keep me away from the first march in 1979.”
- 1994: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is instituted in the place of the military ban on LGBT people. Frank writes, “It differed sharply from the provision I had advocated. Under the new proposal, LGBT service members would face dismissal if they were discovered in any activity that exposed their sexual orientation or gender identity, even if it had no connection to their military duties.”
- 1994: First introduces the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would protect employees from discrimination based on their sexual orientation. The bill has been introduced in almost every session of Congress since.
- 1994: At Frank’s request, President Bill Clinton urges Janet Reno to release an order granting refugee status to people persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity.
- 1995: President Bill Clinton revokes the 40-year-old prohibition on security clearances for LGBT people after urging from Frank.
- 1998: Frank leads fight against GOP efforts to impeach President Bill Clinton.
- 2006: Frank is named chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
- 2007: Frank begins dating Jim Ready. Frank writes, “By that summer, I was deeply in love, experiencing at 67 more profound feelings than ever before.”
- 2010: President Barack Obama signs a bill written by Frank and Christopher Dodd. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act created a bureau to protect consumers from fraud and installed oversight of financial derivatives. Frank writes, “We had passed the most important financial reform bill since the Great Depression.”
- 2010: Frank takes the House floor to urge fellow liberals to vote yes on the defense bill. “I explicitly noted that in doing so, they would be participating in a deal that would end the last explicitly anti-LGBT law on American Books,” Frank writes.
- 2011: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is repealed.
- 2012: Frank marries longtime partner Jim Ready, becoming the first member of Congress to be in a same-sex marriage.
- 2013: Leaves office, becoming a private citizen, but then seeks temporary appointment to U.S. Senate. He is not selected.
- 2013-present: As a continuation of his political goals, Frank continues to speak, write and campaign for personal freedoms, support for social service programs like affordable rental housing and a reduction in defense spending.
