Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (2 page)

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 na
ï
vely 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.

In fact, as I later came to understand, few of those homes were built by the private sector alone. A large number of the occupants were returning World War II veterans, and they were able to afford even moderately priced homes only because of one of the great triumphs of U.S.government social policy—the package of veterans’ benefits enacted after the war. Unfortunately, this positive example of how government can improve the quality of our lives was soon to be ignored, even by many of its beneficiaries. Years later, Tip O’Neill would lament that government policies helped create a solid middle class, only for many members of that class to become the government’s staunchest critics.

During my undergraduate years—1957 to 1962—the existence of people to my left was more interesting to me intellectually than it was relevant politically. Even so, debates with the campus left sharpened my beliefs. Why, I was asked, if I so strongly desired a more equal distribution of wealth, was I not a Socialist?

I knew that embracing socialism—even the most democratic form of it—would end any chance I had for a government position, but I was not prepared to let expediency be my only answer. Fortunately, my academic work came to my rescue. I entered my freshman year ready to concentrate—Harvard’s word for major—in government. Given my interest in public policy, I also enrolled in the basic economics course, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had both an intellectual fascination with the discipline and an affinity for it. If I had not been skeptical of my mathematical skills (justifiably—calculus scared me off), I would probably have switched to that field. As it was, I took as many nonmathematical economics courses as I could fit into my schedule. Those classes made it clear to me that the best system was one where the creation of wealth relied primarily on market mechanisms—with a strong government providing appropriate regulation, lessening inequality without destroying incentives, and playing an active role when necessary to keep the economy functioning at high levels of employment.

My academic work affected more than my political ideology—it also shaped my career plans. During my first two years in college, I’d aspired to become a lawyer. As a solo practitioner, I figured I could readily hide my sexuality, while remaining available for government appointments if any were offered.

But in my junior year, an alternative arose. One of my instructors in the Government Department, Douglas Hobbs, flatteringly told me he thought I should seriously consider pursuing a Ph.D. and becoming a college professor. I hadn’t previously considered this, but the idea had a great deal of appeal. I greatly enjoyed reading, thinking, and talking about politics, and the notion of doing this for a living was very tempting. This was, incidentally, the beginning of a pattern: Until my retirement, all of my major career choices were originally proposed by someone else.

In April 1960, at the end of my junior year, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. I finished the last month of the semester and returned home. Taking a leave from school, I spent much of the ensuing six months helping my mother settle my father’s estate. At the time, my sister Ann was married and beginning to raise her young family, my sister Doris was seventeen and just about to start college, and my brother, David, was ten.

My task was to get a fair price from my father’s old business partner for our share of the truck stop and also for a piece of property they had been developing together. Unfortunately, relations between my father and his partner had soured, and we believed the partner was trying to take advantage of us. As a result, I turned to friends of my father who had Mafia connections to improve our negotiating position. By the fall we were able to work things out. With a little additional help from my father’s friends, we realized enough money from the settlement that I was able to return to college in September, and my siblings were able to continue their educations. We also benefited from the Social Security payments that were available to dependents of an eligible parent who had died. Together these funds helped my family stay solvent until my brother entered high school and my mother was able to return to her work as a legal secretary. She had been an excellent one before her marriage and became a reasonably well-compensated, first-rate legal secretary again.

I returned to Harvard in September 1961. By that time, the Kennedy administration was employing a conspicuous number of the university’s professors. One joke at the time asked, “What is the best way to get to Washington?” The answer was, “Go to Harvard Square and turn left.” Here was the path I hoped to follow. I would become a professor of political science with a serious interest in public policy economics, and would from time to time emulate John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others by taking academic leaves to serve elected officials whom I supported. As to my personal life, the university, with its semi-isolation from the rest of the world and its tolerance for differences, was the closest thing I could find to a cloister where my privacy would be safeguarded. I assumed my forays into the outside world would not last long enough for the discrepancies between my life situation and that of most heterosexuals to become apparent. As I was to learn later, many men went to Washington for temporary service without bringing their families with them. As a result, those of us with no spouse were much less conspicuous there than we would have been in other cities.

If I needed any further evidence that my sexual orientation and elected office were incompatible, I received it from one of the most popular political novels of the time: Allen Drury’s
Advise and Consent
, which I read during my year off from school. It dramatically demonstrated that the six years since 1954 had seen no change in the respective popularity ratings of government and homosexuality. The plot involved an effort by a devious FDR-like figure to press the Senate into confirming his nominee for secretary of state. One target of the administration’s pressure was a bright, conscientious young senator who was highly regarded by his elders. The senator was inclined to vote against the nominee. Then a man came forward who told the president’s people that he and the senator—by now happily married with a young daughter—had had a homosexual encounter during World War II. The man produced a photograph supporting his story. Confronted with a choice between voting for a nominee he strongly distrusted and being exposed, the senator killed himself.

Advise and Consent
was a major bestseller. In 1962 it was made into a movie with Charles Laughton and Walter Pidgeon playing paragons of public virtue. John F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, also appeared as a very appealing senator. The contrast between the movie’s manly ethos of public service and the shame of homosexuality was clear.