Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (22 page)

But while I was depressed to the point of disfunctionality, and resolved not to run for reelection the following year, I refused without a second thought all calls to resign. I did this for one unshakable reason. As badly as I had acted, I was completely inaccurately being accused of much worse, and there was only one forum in which I could prove that—the House Ethics Committee. That body had jurisdiction only over sitting members. If I had quit, their inquiry would have ended—which of course is why many other members facing accusations do resign, precisely to stop any further investigation and judgment.

To this point in my narrative, I have tried my best to be wholly forthcoming about my weaknesses and failings. Given all the emotions involved, I do not know if I can fully meet that standard in addressing this set of events. Instead of trying myself to refute the more sensational, inaccurate accusations, I refer readers to the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct’s report—which rebuts them, while recommending that I be reprimanded for what I did do.

After an intensive, lengthy investigation, in which Gobie and I both testified under oath, the panel found two specific grounds for rebuking me. One, I had used my congressional privileges to cancel parking tickets that I thought Gobie had received while using my car to do errands for me, though in fact he’d been using it for his personal purposes. Two, in a memo I had written to an attorney discussing Gobie’s probation status, I had lied about how I had met him—this was part of a pattern of concealing my sexual orientation. I had sent the memo to an attorney in private practice, seeking his advice. But without my knowing it, he had passed it along to a prosecutor who would be making a recommendation on Gobie’s probation. In the committee’s judgment, this was negligence on my part, because I “should have known” that the memo might be passed on.

The House dispenses three main forms of punishment: expulsion; censure, which results in the loss of any chairmanship; and reprimand, which carries no further sanction. When the committee presented its report and proposed reprimand to the full House, one of the most rightwing, explicitly homophobic members, William Dannemeyer of California, moved to substitute expulsion. He lost by a vote of 38 to 390. More serious was the effort by Newt Gingrich, newly installed as Republican whip, to toughen the penalty to censure. He had done that successfully in 1983 in the case involving my Massachusetts colleague Gerry Studds and a House page.

Ethics Committee chair Julian Dixon vigorously and cogently defended the committee’s position—labeling Dannemeyer’s presentation “garbage”—and Gingrich’s motion failed. With the Democratic leadership urging support for the committee position, all but twelve of my party members voted against Gingrich. Because of my own profound guilt over my irresponsible behavior, and the political damage I had done my fellow Democrats, liberal causes, and especially LGBT equality, I refrained from asking anyone to vote against censure. Indeed, I urged several Democratic colleagues who held contested seats in conservative areas to vote for it. I did not want my conscience further burdened by responsibility for their defeat. I recall one response I received for its extraordinary generosity. Congresswoman Liz Patterson of South Carolina gently chided me for suggesting that she put electoral concerns ahead of being fair to someone she considered a friend. In the final vote, a much larger than expected Republican minority voted against censure: 46 to 129. In the end, I benefited from a widespread view in both parties that Gingrich’s effort to politicize the process was inappropriate.

I believe I also benefited from my decision to be totally honest about what had happened from the moment I was publicly confronted. When Gobie first leveled his accusations, the well-meaning advice I received from friends and advisers was to say little if anything in response. In particular, I was counseled to admit nothing and let the accusers carry the burden of proving their case. This is generally good advice if you are facing criminal prosecution. But I was not. At no point did any prosecutor even suggest such an action. It was my political career and my reputation that were at stake. My goals were to salvage my career and confine any personal damage to what was justified by the facts.

Given these objectives, I knew I had to tell not just the truth, but the whole truth, and do so immediately. After all, there was no way I could deny Gobie’s most demeaning—and wholly false—accusations without acknowledging those parts of his story that were true. Years later, when one of my colleagues was accused of both an extramarital affair and the commission of a terrible crime that was possibly related to it, he denied neither, though he was guilty only of the first. When I asked him why he had not made his innocence of the crime clear, he explained that he did not want to own up to what he had done. Even though I knew I could only partly discredit the lurid falsities spoken about me, letting them go unchallenged would have further harmed my reputation, especially among those closest to me whose continued approbation I sought.

If a transgressor has not seriously harmed other people, a full, credibly contrite confession is more often than not enough to preserve his job (the use of the male pronoun here is an accurate representation of reality), although it is equally often a bar to further advancement. People may hope for perfection in elected officials, but they do not have a high expectation of its prevalence. But such a confesson must be believable. An acknowledgment of past misdeeds that is promptly followed by new revelations renders any promise to behave better in the future unpersuasive. The fact that no second shoe dropped as the committee pursued its intensive inquiry was also a major factor in my survival.

As the Ethics Committee went forward, I reconsidered my initial decision to leave office at the end of my term. I’d made that decision when I was depressed and convinced that people would believe the worst about me. My sister Ann, who has always been a great source of strength, did me the service of passing along people’s unvarnished reactions to my case, and what I heard was not encouraging.

But I soon became confident that the committee would separate damaging facts from poisonous fictions. For example, I knew that my landlady had written a letter stating that she had observed none of the illicit activity Gobie claimed to have presided over in my basement apartment. (She lived upstairs.) I was also receiving more support than I felt I deserved from my constituents. Journalists who traveled to my district to sample opinions were disappointed to encounter an unexpectedly strong tolerance for human frailty. I experienced that myself when I marched in a parade in Fall River, along with Herb and members of my family. In this largely blue-collar community, in 1989 as in 1987, most people said they were much more interested in what I was doing to improve their lives than in anything I was doing to my own.

At first it seemed as if the campaign might be tough. A moderate Republican with an appealing family decided to run. But he turned out to have political defects. There were serious inconsistencies in his policy positions, and he was accused of trying to exploit the fact that his wife was Jewish, prompting a messy debate. Facing more criticism than he found bearable, he soon dropped out of the race. First-time candidates often expect running for office to be easier than it turns out to be.

That left one other Republican, a very conservative man with a penchant for saying outrageous things. On one occasion, he assumed I was younger than I really was and denounced me for dodging the draft during the Vietnam War, even though I’d been too old to qualify for universal conscription. This gave me the chance to welcome him to the ranks of those who believe that gay people should be allowed to serve in the military. He also took an AIDS test, and when he passed, demanded that I do the same. I congratulated him, noting that passing tests was probably not a common occurrence in his life. Widespread revulsion at his attempt to politicize that terrible plague further eroded his appeal.

There was some slight slippage in my own support. I received 66 percent of the vote—my smallest total between 1982 and my tough reelection fight in 2010. Even so, I was able to return to the House with my political standing nearly intact. That standing was enhanced when Leon Panetta invited me to join the House Budget Committee that he chaired. Membership on that committee is a mark of leadership confidence, and I accepted gratefully.

On Panetta’s committee, I was able to work hard on a cause that remained of the utmost importance: maximizing spending on AIDS. There were still no effective courses of treatment for this killer in 1991. As a result, I faced the most agonizing choice I’ve ever had to make in politics. Was it more important to fund the search for a cure or to fund the gallant organizations that provided aid to those who were sick? To me, this called for a tough but morally correct decision to choose our heads over our hearts. We should do everything we could to reduce the number of people who’d die from this plague in the future even if it meant limiting the comfort we could provide to those already dying.

Of course, the real issue was not research versus care but the insufficient funds available for both, and indeed for other AIDS-related needs, such as housing. An adequate response to the AIDS crisis required higher taxes and a sharp reduction in military spending, reflecting the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reduced threat we currently faced.

Unfortunately, not only was the AIDS coalition absent from our push for more resources for domestic spending, but also much of their rhetoric made that job harder, particularly regarding taxation. Their frustration with the lack of resources for their emotionally draining, morally compelling work was understandable. But, regrettably, it led them not to an insistence on increasing the funds available to the federal government to meet our societal needs but to blame those in office for that inadequacy. Rather than point to society’s unwillingness to commit the necessary resources, they sharply denounced the government for callous neglect and thus added to the antigovernment sentiment that was the real problem. In fairness to those fighting AIDS, I acknowledge that they were hardly the only group seeking greater federal support who ignored the need for a larger pie. But of all the constituencies whose real interest lay in enhancing progovernment attitudes, they were by far the most vehement in demonizing the institution.

At the time, militant groups like ACT UP did bravely and effectively press pharmaceutical companies to undertake AIDS research and assist patients. Challenging the private sector made sense. Corporations are not accustomed to angry words and well-publicized campaigns of civil disobedience. Their instinctive response to controversy is to end it. But those same militant tactics are not successful in the political arena. Public corporations find it upsetting when 40 percent of the public thinks ill of them. For us, getting 60 percent support is deeply comforting.

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My presence on the Budget Committee also allowed me to launch a surprise attack on what would become a critical target—the military’s gay ban. In the 1980s, leaders in the community had begun a campaign to win over public opinion on the issue. Current and former service members played a crucial role. One articulate victim of the policy, Leonard Matlovich, neatly conveyed its moral bankruptcy when he said, “When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”

My neighbor, friend, and sole openly gay colleague, Gerry Studds, played an important role in furthering the debate. In 1989, he received a leaked internal Defense Department report that was critical of the ban, and he released it. I stayed out of the public discussion at first, fearing that my foolish behavior would make me a liability. But after my comfortable reelection and appointment to the Budget Committee, I felt sufficiently rehabilitated to join in.

The opportunity came when Defense Secretary Dick Cheney appeared before the Budget Committee in 1991. As a very junior member of the committee, I would be one of the last to speak. By the time I could ask Cheney a question, all of the most pertinent defense-spending matters would have been covered. So I decided to ask him about the military ban.

At that time, the Eisenhower executive order decreeing LGBT people too untrustworthy for a security clearance was still in effect, and its animus obviously lent support to our exclusion from the armed services. I knew that Cheney would have great difficulty invoking that order to defend the military’s policy. He had appointed as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs—the Pentagon’s chief press officer—his former congressional aide and fellow Wyoming resident, Pete Williams.

Williams was ideal for the job. He was good at it, and he had Cheney’s complete confidence. But there was one problem—he was gay. Williams has since come out and is a respected NBC correspondent, but he was then a closeted gay man who in the course of his job was privy to the most sensitive national security information.

I knew that he was gay. Cheney knew that I knew. And in a phrase that I am glad I am writing, because only Danny Kaye could have spoken it, I knew that Cheney knew that I knew. This gave me the chance to ask one of the two most effective questions I ever asked in forty years of trying to trap witnesses. (For the second, wait for Clinton’s impeachment.) “Is it the contention of the Defense Department that because somebody is a homosexual, he or she is inherently a security risk?”

Cheney responded by saying, “I think there have been times in the past when [the policy] has been generated on the notion that somehow there was a security risk involved, although I must say I think that is a bit of an old chestnut.” Of course, if Cheney had said yes, he would have had to explain why he had put a putative security risk in such a sensitive position. Such a glaring violation of government policy would have stripped Williams of the cover of the press’s no-outing rule.

In fairness to Cheney—a phrase I have rarely felt motivated to use—the fact that he had put Williams in that job reflected his own lack of anti-LGBT prejudice. This became clear in his very significant answer. He could have simply responded that the military ban was based on other considerations. But he did not. Under the annoying but necessary rule that a committee member has no more than five minutes to question a witness, I was not able to press Cheney further. But I was more than satisfied with the exchange. In six words, Cheney had weakened one of the government’s two most damaging homophobic policies, and explicitly repudiated the other.