Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (16 page)

More gently, my brother, David, asked me how I would feel if another prominent liberal from the Newton-Brookline area ran in my seat, and got, say, 47 percent of the vote. My colleague Ed Markey had a more practical but compelling point. “If you run and lose, but get a respectable vote,” he explained, “liberals will feel indebted to you for trying, and when O’Neill retires in a few years”—as he was to do two terms later—“you can move back into his very liberal district and be the favorite.”

Finally, and most persuasively, I took to heart the words of Nick Roussos, a tough, principled, and highly influential leader of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in blue-collar Fall River, the largest city in my new constituency. He bawled me out. “I thought you were a guy who cares about working people,” he barked. “If you really are, you’ll get off your ass and fight for them instead of moping around asking them to feel sorry for you.”

So I ran.

*

I recount these painful conversations to correct certain errors common to political analysis. One is the presumption that political decisions are more rational than they really are. My decisions—first to quit and then to run—were largely emotional. The second, related mistake is imposing a false sense of inevitability on past events. Analysts impress their audiences when they explain why certain results had to happen—not by reporting that chance played a decisive role.

As soon as I began to run, my pollsters confirmed what I already knew: I had very little chance of winning. In our first poll, taken in February 1982, Heckler led by a margin of 52 to 34 percent. More ominously, we were both well-known, and her favorability rating was higher than mine. It’s much better when you are behind because few people know you than when voters know who you are and aren’t very impressed.

Fortunately, I had an opening. Although the passage of Reagan’s tax cuts was not in doubt, the fate of his spending cuts was a closer question—and this posed a big problem for Heckler. Party leaders usually allow considerable leeway to members from swing districts like Heckler’s. But not always. Before any important vote, each party’s whip operation canvasses members to get a good sense of the final tally. When the margin is close, reluctant members are pressured to stick with their party. Afer all, their vote could make the difference between victory and defeat.

In the old days, voting was conducted by an alphabetical oral roll call. When a member’s name was reached, he or she might not know it would be necessary to take one for the team. But electronic voting reduced that uncertainty. Members now register their votes by inserting a personal card into one of dozens of computer terminals throughout the chamber. As they do so, a running total of yeas, nays, and presents—the constitutionally prescribed language—appears on scoreboards at both ends of the room. Representatives who want to vote against their party can postpone voting until the very end of the tally to determine if their votes will matter. In the final moments before the voting ends—an elastic period of time defined by the party in power—the whips can either release the members in question, or call in their pledges to stave off defeat. Interestingly, members who tell the whips that they oppose the party’s position due to personal conviction are generally received less sympathetically than those who express substantive agreement with the bill in question but plead electoral concerns as their reason for dissent. In a partisan politcal system, pleas of political self-interest outrank a claim to know better than one’s party colleagues what is best for the country.

The pressure to vote with the party varies in intensity from issue to issue, according to the political stakes involved. The vote to roll back domestic programs was seen as a make-or-break issue for Reagan’s presidency in its first months. To Republicans across the country, Reagan was leading a crusade that promised to reverse nearly five decades of government expansion. A defeat would have shattered his momentum—and enabled O’Neill to regain the initiative.

And so if Heckler had bucked her party, she would have faced a Republican electorate angry at her apostasy—and very likely a primary opponent in 1982. My contemporary impression was confirmed more than twenty years later when I read Richard Reeves’s biography of Reagan. He notes that although Reagan greatly reduced his workload while convalescing from John Hinckley’s assassination attempt, he did call Heckler to plead for her vote on the spending cuts. According to Reeves, Reagan also told his aides that he sympathized with her over the abuse she was taking from me on the issue.

In the end, Heckler tried to appease both sides, which only hurt her. Heckler backed the Republican–Southern Democratic coalition on an arcane procedural vote, and then voted no on the substantive package of cuts. By citing quotes from Republican leaders, I was able to demonstrate that it was the procedural victory that really decided the outcome. And once it became clear that Heckler’s vote was instrumental in the conservatives’ victory, her support in the blue-collar areas of the district eroded sharply. The AFL-CIO shifted from endorsing her in 1980 to backing me in 1982. Equally important, Heckler’s vote brought me the invaluable support of Mark Sullivan, a larger-than-life character who ran the community action program in Fall River. He combined the ideological zeal of other antipoverty activists with the skills and instincts of the best of the old ward bosses. Fall River and its adjacent towns made up nearly a third of the new district’s population, and his support signaled that the race could become competitive.

Heckler also did me a favor when she voted to cut taxes on the oil industry, which was then at the nadir of its popularity in the Northeast. The spike in oil prices after the OPEC embargo of 1973–1974 had an especiallly strong impact on our oil-deprived area, and the arrogance of many in the oil patch—
LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE IN THE DARK
was a popular Texas-Oklahoma bumper sticker—fueled our anger, if not our homes. I staked out my own position as strongly as I could.

When Texas Republican congressman Jack Fields spoke in favor of the tax cuts, he finished by appealing to the Democrats from his state to join him—“The eyes of Texas are upon us today,” he warned. Happily, I was next to speak. “I do not object to the eyes of Texas being upon me,” I rejoined. “I object to the hands of Texas being in my pockets.”

That year public television had launched a new weekly program on Congress, conducted by two women who were on the verge of becoming leading commentators: Cokie Roberts—my old friend, whose objectivity was uninfluenced by this—and Linda Wertheimer. They featured my dialogue with Fields on their program that week, and for the rest of the year they included the clip in their introduction to the show. I could not have received a better political boost in a race against an opponent who had voted with Fields, nor could he have picked a better exchange to be shown regularly in his native Houston.

As the campaign progressed, I readily took the offensive. For the only time in my career, campaigning was truly fun. Heckler’s early debate performances were hindered by the contrast between her own prior record and the pro-Reagan votes she had cast. In liberal Newton, she legitimately cited her work to help the city secure a large federal housing grant—credit for which belonged in part to the administration’s eagerness to defeat me. I thanked her, but then added that given her vote for a bill that decimated that very program, it would be hard for either of us to replicate her feat.

On the paid media side, Dan Payne’s creative gifts dominated the discussion. One ad asked who supported large tax breaks for the oil industry, and named Heckler, illustrating the point by showing a woman’s arm raised proudly in support. She complained angrily about that one. We also responded aggressively to her campaign’s implicit suggestion that I was an alien elitist, with no appreciation for mainstream American culture. In one ad, I pumped gas while talking about working at my father’s truck stop as a teenager. In another, I was shown sliding headfirst into home plate in a softball game. (It required several takes to get the timing right—I was out on the first couple of tries.)

These ads would not have turned the race around, however, were it not for one overriding development: the national recession. Heckler, like other Republicans, was held responsible—not entirely fairly—for a sharp drop in economic activity. With all of these factors adding up, by the spring of 1982 the race had tightened considerably, and the polls showed that I was in striking distance of winning. Heckler became increasingly frustrated that her impressive political career was in jeopardy and, like others I have engaged with politically, she also found my personality infuriating. So she went on the attack.

At first, she and her supporters were somewhat restrained, but there were hints of what was to come. For example, her husband, John, made a point of telling fund-raisers that he “would now do something Peg’s opponent can’t do: introduce our children.” (My rebuttal was that I knew their names and could in fact introduce them if the occasion arose.) Sometimes the inuendo comically failed. One of my supporters told me about a private meeting with veterans at which Heckler had strangely tried to link me to the Mafia: She had told the group that I “liked the boys in Providence,” which was the headquarters of organized crime in New England. My first response was to wonder if she had uncovered my father’s associations from his truck stop days, but I quickly realized that she had actually said “Provincetown.” Somewhat guiltily, I recognized that my supporter had misheard her because it never occurred to him that I was gay. My residual New Jersey accent, the fifty pounds I had gained eating my way through the campaign, my gas-pumping and softball ads, and what one journalist described as my ill-fitting suits so diverged from the gay stereotype that her subtlety was lost on him. (I answered the journalist’s charge by insisting that my suits were in fact very well fitting, I just didn’t happen to be the one they fit. This did cost me the votes of the couple who owned a store where I had bought some of them.)

As the campaign went on, we decided that we needed to counter this line of attack. Especially worrisome was the claim that I did not share family values, being the unmarried defender of people’s right to view pornography. Fortunately, Dan Payne and my brother, David, came up with an effective antidote. They made an ad that featured an attractive, white-haired seventy-year-old woman sitting comfortably in her apartment assuring her fellow elderly that I would be a staunch defender of their interests. At the end, she asked, “How can I be so sure Barney will do the right thing by us older people?” and beamingly answered her own question: “Because he’s my son.” In addition to the powerful boost it gave me, this ad, which won national awards, launched my mother on a career as one of the most respected and admired elderly activists in the state.

As the polls continued to shift in my favor, Heckler doubled down on the offensive. Her strategic calculation was obvious. I was taking votes away from her in the blue-collar, predominantly Catholic areas that had supported her in past elections by stressing her conservative votes on domestic economic issues. She sought to stem this loss by documenting my radicalism on social issues—homosexuality, pornography, prostitution, marijuana, abortion, and crime.

Her strongest attack came in our final debate. She spoke last, and knowing that I could not respond, she denounced me for the first time that evening as a purveyor of sexual immorality in all of its many forms.

It backfired. She was harshly denounced, most notably by Anthony Lewis, one of America’s most respected journalists, in
The New York Times.
He accused her of engaging in “gutter politics” and said that “the ghost of Joe McCarthy must be grinning.” A widely respected Republican woman I had known in the legislature appeared in a commercial attesting to my moral qualities. The highly educated professionals in what was now the northern part of my district recoiled at Heckler’s approach. And to my surprise and her dismay, the attack did nothing to weaken my support in the southern blue-collar areas.

Most people in greater Fall River felt competent to judge for themselves what they should read, hear, and see. They resented being told what was permissable. Regrettably, Heckler also suffered from a sexist double standard that infused our politics. Even today, women who go on the attack are vulnerable to accusations of shrillness that are rarely leveled at men.

Not only did Heckler fail to gain support in the blue-collar south, but she also lost backing in the more affluent north, and in the end I won by nearly twenty points. On election night, I said that the result might have differed if the national economy had differed. And while those gracious words did not reflect my true feelings, I did brood over a point I have made several times—so much of what happens in politics lies outside the politician’s control. In 1980, I had beaten an inexperienced official of the John Birch Society by a narrow margin of 52 to 48. Two years later, I defeated an experienced, first-rate campaigner with a solid legislative record in a district that was originally hers 60 to 40. I had not by any means gotten that much better.

Of course, the role that good fortune played in my victory did not diminish my enjoyment of it. Returning to Congress, I was optimistic about my personal life, my political situation, and the outlook for public policy. I had survived an election in which the opposition was hinting at my sexuality—and I had done it handsomely. The very fact that Heckler had to so subtly hint at my homosexuality indicated that public attitudes were evolving. Being gay was still not politically acceptable—but neither was gay bashing. We had come at least part of the way from 1959, when
Advise and Consent
told a wholly plausible tale of how the threat of exposure destroyed not just a promising Senate career but the senator himself. In 1982, I believed I could continue to live below the public radar as a gay man, socializing discreetly with other LGBT people. In fact, my first postelection resolution was to pay myself the attention I had deferred over the previous two and a half years. I resolved to lose weight (I had soared to 270 pounds), I got contact lenses, and I began regular attendance at gyms and barber shops, institutions where I had been totally absent or only sporadically present, respectively.