Read Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage Online
Authors: Barney Frank
Medeiros issued the statement five days before the primary, plunging our campaign into a state I had heard of but never fully experienced—total disarray. Fortunately, I had some time to think through our response because the cardinal had spoken on Rosh Hashanah. When asked for a reaction, my campaign replied that I was at temple—which was true—and would answer the next day.
After consulting with each other, Shannon and I calmly reiterated our positions, while expressing more respect for the cardinal than I, at least, genuinely felt. I prepared emotionally for defeat. But as it turned out, the power of Boston’s once mighty cardinal archbishops had waned significantly. Fewer Catholics than anticipated obeyed the cardinal’s instruction, and some Catholics and most Jewish and Protestant voters resented it. Some commenters—I was conspicuously not among them—contrasted the pope’s edict against Drinan with the archbishop’s message to voters. “Is the Church in politics or not?” they asked.
On the Friday before the primary, we held a rally at a country club in Newton, featuring Ted Kennedy. Until the cardinal spoke, he had been formally neutral in my primary, as I expected him to be. But the archbishop’s statement was a direct challenge to the pro-choice Kennedy, and there was the added factor that I had been a strong backer of his unsuccessful presidential effort. He was joined on the dais by another liberal Catholic political figure, Congressman Ed Markey, and together they helped reassure voters that supporting me was consistent with their religious views. To my great relief, I won the primary with 52 percent of the vote against Clark’s 46. After Shannon and I both won, a Massachusetts newspaper ran the headline “Kennedy 2; Cardinal 0.”
Because Shaffer and Mofenson had dropped out so late, their names remained on the ballot. They each drew less than 1 percent in the actual tally, canceling each other out while serving to reflect popular dissatisfaction with the choice between me and Clark. Frankly, I was surprised the dissatisfaction wasn’t greater.
*
On primary night, almost everyone in my campaign was confident that victory in November was a certainty. I was the exception. Conservatism was on the rise, and the primary had given the impression that I was even farther to the left than I was.
The Republican candidate was ideally suited to exploit these advantages. Richard Jones was a recently retired army dentist with an amiable personality. He was extremely conservative—he had been an official of the John Birch Society—but his bland demeanor and lack of a public record put all of the attention on me.
I didn’t bear up very well under it. I became excessively argumentative, even by my previous standards. I was bent on winning every disputed point, even when that meant losing voter support. I was also engaged in an increasingly angry debate with my staff about “negative campaigning.” Jones’s campaign consisted entirely of harsh attacks on my record. He built on my primary opponents’ partial success in portraying me as a radical advocate of immorality, and mixed in some of his own nastiness. When I defended the Chrysler bailout with a reference to the auto industry’s employment of African Americans, he distorted my words to make a blatant racist appeal.
As Election Day approached, I knew that as long as the race was a referendum on my liberalism, I was in trouble. So I decided to go on the offensive. I told my staff that I wanted to use Jones’s work for the John Birch Society in our advertising. Overwhelmingly, they recoiled. This, they insisted, was negative campaigning, which they considered a form of demagoguery. Since they believed my victory was assured, they saw attacking Jones as gratuitous nastiness. But my experiences on the campaign trail were worrying me, and I wanted to tell the truth in my own self-defense.
Our internal debate illustrates a larger theme: As conservatives stepped up their attacks in Massachusetts and elsewhere, too many liberals remained passive. The right understood the public’s anger at government much better than a still complacent left. Fortunately, one of my key campaign workers, media specialist Dan Payne, understood my point. He fashioned a very effective—and accurate—radio ad conjuring up the return of the John Birch Society in the person of Jones. Incredibly, Jones complained bitterly that I was assailing him.
Instead of trying to persuade voters of my virtue, I was now informing them of Jones’s defects. This approach worked just well enough. I won my first congressional election by the narrowest margin of my twenty-term career: 52 percent to 48.
In my very chastened victory speech, I noted the defeat that day of Birch Bayh, Gaylord Nelson, George McGovern, Frank Church, and many other great liberal legislators. I had barely managed to swim upstream against a strong tide, I said. Now I hoped to get to Washington and spawn.
I arrived in Washington, D.C., along with Ronald Reagan and a Senate that would be controlled by Republicans—the first time the party had organized either chamber since 1954. In the House, a narrow Democratic majority included enough Southern conservatives to give the right effective control of the agenda.
My timing was terrible. I had reached a place I never dreamed I would get to, but at the worst time in thirty-five years for doing what I wanted to do there. In 1961 John F. Kennedy had passionately urged citizens to “ask what you can do for your country” and serve the public good. Then came four presidents who left office involuntarily, diminishing the reputation of collective public effort. And then, in his first inaugural, Reagan implicitly repudiated Kennedy’s message by proclaiming that “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government
is
the problem.” I had arrived at the party just when the curfew went into effect.
My ideological unhappiness was alleviated by two factors. Almost unbelievably, I was now a member of the U.S. Congress. And though I worried then about being outed, I was proud that I had made it to Congress despite the political handicap of my sexual orientation.
I have no more vivid memory than that of first walking onto the House floor as a member-elect. During a lame-duck session, I bumped into a man who had been one of my heroes and was now a colleague. “Excuse me,” I said. Morris Udall replied, “Hi, Barney.” My response was silent but profound:
Wow!
Years later, I related this story to Udall’s son Mark when he entered the House. He flatteringly told me that he felt the same about meeting me. I responded that since I would not be having any children, the tradition would end there.
While the thrill of serving in Congress never wore off, I did start getting used to it. As I did, another recognition boosted my spirits: I had traded Speaker Tom McGee (the conservative leader of the Massachusetts House) for Speaker Tip O’Neill. I had a strong relationship with O’Neill. I had been his constituent for twelve years, and when a conservative Democrat had challenged him for not obstructing racially based school busing, I had organized my ward for him. He had campaigned for me after the 1980 primary. At one appearance, when I told a questioner that I hoped to serve on the Banking Committee, which dealt with housing, O’Neill in effect appointed me on the spot, setting me on course to become chairman twenty-six years later.
In my first term, I worked with the House minority—liberal and moderate Democrats—to oppose President Reagan’s rollback of government programs that aided the poor and working class. In stark contrast to today’s congressional practices, O’Neill allowed Reagan’s program to come to the floor, while of course trying hard to defeat it. In his mind, this was a good electoral strategy as well as a requirement of democracy. He believed that Reagan’s approach would be popular until people fully understood its implications, and he also understood that using parliamentary moves to block a newly elected president’s initiatives would undermine confidence in the legitimacy of our system.
But the notion that O’Neill had warm personal feelings for the new president is wrong. In fact, the Speaker deeply resented what he saw as Reagan’s indifference to economic unfairness, and he was also wholly unimpressed with his grasp of the issues. His cooperation came despite his low regard for Reagan as president.
Our effort to slow Reagan’s momentum was largely unsuccessful. Bearing bipartisan names and support, the Gramm-Latta bill severely restrained spending on domestic programs while Hance-Conable sharply reduced taxes.
But we did win some victories, one of which gave me my first opportunity to see if my legislative skills transferred well from the state to the federal level. In addition to serving on the Banking Committee, I served on the Committee on Government Operations, which was a secondary panel in importance. This reflected the normal practice that members sat on one major committee and one nonmajor one—congressional ego ruled out calling any committee “minor.” And I was drafted onto a third one as well: the Committee on the Judiciary. That entity had jurisdiction over the hot buttons: abortion, school busing, school prayer, affirmative action, gun control, and almost all the other wedge issues of the day. Although I usually find political metaphors misleading, “wedge” is an accurate depiction. When the bulk of voters in one party hold a view that is unpopular with the general public, the party on the popular side of the question can drive a wedge between their opponents and that general public.
In those days, the function of the House Judiciary Committee was to protect most Democrats from having to choose between their primary and general election constituents. Those of us who sat on it were chosen because we’d been elected from districts that would support us when we voted to keep the wedge issues off the floor. When O’Neill’s chief policy aide, Ari Weiss, told me the Speaker had designated me as a wedge blocker, I protested, “That’s tough territory. Serving there means pissing off the gun people, the antibusers, the right-to-lifers, and the religious zealots.”
“Yeah,” he replied, irritatingly but irrefutably, “but all those people already hate you, so you’ve got nothing to lose.”
Happily for me, there was a consolation prize. Reagan was on the unpopular side of one issue within the committee’s jurisdiction: the provision of legal services to the poor.
He and Attorney General Ed Meese had scores to settle with the Legal Services Corporation, which provides free legal services to those who cannot afford them. The scores stemmed from Reagan’s (failed) attempt when governor of California to block funding for the LSC and its organizing work for the United Farm Workers. Now Reagan proposed abolishing the agency. I was assigned management of the fight on the House floor to defend it.
This was a twofer—a chance to accomplish something of real societal value while at the same time demonstrating my legislative skills. It was unusual for a freshman to be given a lead role on a significant—albeit not a first-rank—issue. My designation primarily reflected the fact that there were only four Democratic members on the subcommittee in charge of the issue; secondarily, it reflected approval of my early performance on the panel.
Fortunately for me and the poor, Reagan had seriously underestimated legal professionals’ belief in the integrity of our system of justice, as well as their commitment to seeing that it was administered fairly. Senator Warren Rudman, the former Republican attorney general of New Hampshire, took the lead in the Senate in defending the LSC, and we worked well together.
In managing the floor debate in the House, I was able to draw on members from both parties, and we won the vote decisively, 245 to 137, with 59 Republicans joining the majority. This was the first defeat for the Reagan rollback agenda, and one of the few he suffered in that Congress.
As it happened, the legal services fight also included my first national effort on behalf of LGBT rights. Back in 1977, Larry McDonald—a nominal Democrat and fervent right-winger and John Bircher—had sponsored a successful amendment to ban the Legal Services Corporation from taking any cases on behalf of LGBT rights. It passed, 230 to 133. Republicans voted for it heavily, 110 to 17, but even a narrow majority of Democrats supported it, 120 to 116. Back in 1979, I’d arranged for O’Neill to discuss the issue with a delegation of his gay and lesbian constituents—at the time, I was one of those constituents myself. I was careful to pick a delegation conspicuously heavy with Irish names, and I enforced a dress code. To the surprise of many of the attendees—but not to me—O’Neill was wholly sympathetic. He explained that while he and many others thought the ban an unfair manifestation of prejudice, and McDonald a bigot and a fool, there was no way in the existing political climate to stop it. But he encouraged the group to keep up its political work and made the further suggestion—which did surprise me—that the best way to combat prejudice was for all LGBT people to come out—although he did not use the phrase. Referring specifically to the prohibition on security clearances for LGBT people, he said, “If all the homosexuals identified themselves, there wouldn’t be any argument that they were subject to blackmail.” It was at this meeting that I began to realize that O’Neill was not only a confirmed liberal but also a far more sophisticated and insightful one than was conveyed by his public image. A self-described “six-foot-two-inch, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Irishman” (on his thinner days) with a “mop of white hair, a big red nose, and floppy ears,” he was easily caricatured as an old-time meat-and-potatoes pol, and the liberties he regularly took with the English language reinforced the impression.
He was all of that, and he excelled at the singing, storytelling “Hi, how are ya, pal?” persona that went with it. In fact, he likely realized that this very partial view gave him the advantage of being underestimated. He was a very smart man, whose sharp political instincts were guided by considerable analytic ability.
Due to O’Neill’s farsightedness, I could now defend LGBT rights in Congress without worrying about being marginalized. Just as remarkably, my two collaborators in the fight were also gay men. One was Steve Endean, who’d become the head of the newly formed Gay Rights National Lobby. The other was Dan Bradley, president of the Legal Services Corporation. Bradley had taken the position under the Carter administration and was not long for the job in the new regime. He was closeted, but his sexual orientation was well-known to the LGBT community. After leaving his job, he came out in a
New York Times
interview; several months later, he wrote an eloquent explanation of the process in
Harper’s.
His death from AIDS in 1988 was a significant event in the public discussion of that tragedy.