Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (3 page)

Fiction and reality were in complete accord. Following Eisenhower’s example, the Kennedy administration took its own explicit anti-gay steps. The civil service director John Macy stated that homosexuals were not welcome in federal jobs. And the administration took rapid action to avert the possibility that foreign homosexuals might be allowed into the country.

The prevailing immigration laws excluded several categories of people from even visiting as tourists because of their undesirability. Since the word “homosexual” was too shocking to use when the laws were adopted, the phrase used for our exclusion was “afflicted with a psychopathic personality.” Everyone knew that meant us. Even so, this linguistic delicacy suggested an opportunity to a Canadian citizen, Clive Michael Boutilier. After having lived legally in the United States, he was denied citizenship. He challenged the ruling, claiming that the exclusionary language simply did not apply to him. He acknowledged that he was homosexual but denied that this made him a psychopath.

Federal immigration officials feared that the Supreme Court would agree with Boutilier and invalidate the antihomosexual clause. This was the famously liberal Warren Court that included Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and William Brennan, and would include Abe Fortas by the time the case reached it in 1967. To forestall the terrible possibility of LGBT people coming freely to the United States, Congress, with the support of the Kennedy and later Johnson administrations, moved successfully to replace the sixty-year-old language with a more explicit ban on “aliens afflicted … with sexual deviation.” Their fears turned out to have been unjustified: The most liberal Supreme Court in U.S. history ended up ruling that excluding people like me under a denigrating, nonspecific rubric was perfectly acceptable.

In the familiar legal expression, those determined to exclude us wound up with both a belt and suspenders—the new “sexual deviation” language was also included in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This vaunted legislation was strongly supported by every liberal group in the country. When, more than twenty years later, I succeeded in repealing the exclusion outright, I checked to see if anyone in Congress had opposed it at the time. Nobody had said a word.

It is important to stress that this renewed assault on gay people began in one activist, liberal administration and was carried out by its successor. My sexual orientation remained highly unpopular even while government as a force for societal improvement was at a high point in its approval ratings. It was in this frame of mind that I enrolled in graduate school in Harvard’s Government Department. In the prevailing circumstances, I believed an advanced degree would give me the best chance to pursue the kind of career I wanted.

I would later discover a flaw in this plan: I was good at every aspect of scholarship except writing it down. But in the early years that was not a problem. I started teaching undergraduates and was gratified to find that I enjoyed it. Besides teaching, I stepped up my political activity. I participated in Harvard’s understated student government and became an active member of the Young Democrats.

It was through my student government work that I met Allard Lowenstein, who would become an essential figure in my political development. Lowenstein was eleven years older; by his late twenties he had already become an activist for all seasons. With the powerful support of Eleanor Roosevelt, the moral leader of post–World War II liberalism, he was engaged in practical agitation on behalf of a number of causes, including racial justice in the United States and South Africa. We met in 1959 when he came to Cambridge calling for an end to South Africa’s brutality toward what was then Southwest Africa (now Namibia). I spent time with him as his appointed driver—the Harvard Student Council was his sponsor—and I found his blend of passionate advocacy and strategic savvy immensely appealing.

I apparently succeeded in convincing him that I was a kindred spirit, and we stayed in touch. In the summer of 1960, I saw him at a National Student Association congress. As a past president of that organization, he remained an inspiration for reform-minded students. In late 1963, during my second year in graduate school, he asked me to take a leadership role in what was to be the Mississippi Summer project of 1964. The prototype for that effort was a campaign to help Aaron Henry, the NAACP’s state president, run for governor. At that time—nearly one hundred years after the adoption of the post–Civil War amendments—the great majority of African Americans in Mississippi were disenfranchised. They were kept from the polls by the law and, when necessary, by force.

Violence against black people seeking to register or vote was not news, but assaults on white Yale and Stanford students were. The publicity generated by the Henry campaign inspired Lowenstein and black leaders to try again in 1964 on a larger scale. Since there was no gubernatorial election that year, the effort would have a broader focus: It would contest the near-total disenfranchisement of black Mississippians by challenging the state’s delegation to the upcoming Democratic presidential convention, which would be chosen by an all-white electorate.

When Lowenstein withdrew from the campaign after a dispute with more radical activists, my leadership role disappeared, but I was happy to go anyway as a volunteer. My group left our training center in Ohio for Mississippi on the same Sunday that three fellow Freedom Summer participants—local CORE field-workers James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, and volunteer Andrew Goodman—were murdered by a mob that included the local sheriff. When we arrived in Mississippi, we heard that the three had disappeared, and we assumed, correctly, that they were dead.

In order to replace Mississippi’s all-white convention delegation with an integrated slate, we planned to create a new organization—the Freedom Democratic Party. I went to obtain the official forms for starting a new party and was pleasantly surprised when the white official I encountered smiled when I said I was working on a third party, and said Governor George Wallace would do well. I felt no need to correct his assumption that I was there to help the Alabama racist who had challenged Lyndon Johnson in some primaries, with distressingly good results.

My work that summer consisted mostly of organizing the presentation of our case. When we feared a local office might be attacked, I spent the night there, although our pledge of nonviolent resistance made me wonder what good we could do. I also made a run to northern Mississippi with another volunteer—Richard Beymer, who played Tony in the movie
West Side Story
—to deliver leaflets. But my direct organizing of Mississippi voters was limited by the fact that my accent (to this day more New Jersey than New England), my poor diction, and my rapid speech, especially when I got excited, rendered me largely incomprehensible to rural Mississippians of both races.

Harking back to my Pete Seeger reaction, I sharply disagreed with much of the Freedom Summer leadership on the larger purpose of our enterprise. They were critics of what they saw as a materialistic, mind-numbing middle-class America. Their goal was not for African Americans to live in ticky-tacky little boxes but to guide them into new forms of economic and social organization, where cooperation replaced competitiveness, and creativity was freed from the deadening bourgeois mind-set. In friendly debates—the threat of violence bound us together—I argued that most black Mississippians wanted to be like most white Americans, though without the vicious racial prejudice. William McCord, who wrote
Mississippi: The Long, Hot Summer
about our experiences, accurately summarized—and quoted—my view:

While he worked hard for the Negro cause in Mississippi, Frank did not fall prey to utopian illusions: “This ideology of nonviolence is fine, but when it comes to defending my home, I side with those who keep a rifle by the door.” As for the future, he did not believe that Negro progress would usher in a millennium. “As conditions improve—and they will—the Negro will seek his spot in suburbia, drink his beer, and watch TV. That’s fine! Some of these people think that they are going to reform our entire civilization and that the Negro will be the spearhead of this new age. Not me. I’m not here to build a perfect society, just to insure that the Negro gets a chance to live his life in his own way. If these liberals have the same illusions about the Negro that they used to hold about unions, they are bound for the same disappointment they had in the thirties.”

Meanwhile, I was learning the tactical importance of remaining realistic. We hoped to present a vivid contrast between the segregated Mississippi convention delegation and our own integrated one. But that required asking courageous delegates to risk certain ostracism, probable economic retaliation, and possible violence from the Mississippi establishment and its less savory allies—the bodies of our three missing comrades had been found. This was difficult work.

Seeking to gain support from wary politicians, our Washington office boasted prematurely that we would have a dozen or so whites on our integrated slate. Since part of my job was to help secure these people, I knew we would not come close to that number. I urged the Washington contingent not to make promises we could not keep that could then be used to discredit us. “Hold your fire until we hear the ayes of our whites” was my exact message. I was pleased that the boasts stopped.

For all my disagreements, I was impressed by the movement’s discipline. That summer, most of the country was focused on the passage of the great national civil rights bill outlawing segregation in employment and public accommodations. Even so, the Council of Federated Organizations—which included the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and CORE—decided to put the even more fundamental right to vote first. This meant asking black Mississippians to temporarily accept the segregation of restaurants and theaters they had earlier braved violence to enter. Setting aside important goals to pursue others more effectively is hard for emotionally committed advocates to accept. Years later, I would strenuously argue the point with LGBT activists.

With my Ph.D. orals scheduled for that September, I had to return to Cambridge to study. I did not try hard to find a way around this scheduling conflict. I had the strong suspicion—which turned out to be valid—that I would disagree with the Freedom Democrats’ next steps, and I was not emotionally prepared to argue face-to-face with colleagues I admired so greatly.

On my way north, I stopped in Washington, D.C., to meet with Joseph Rauh. One of the heroic figures of postwar liberalism, Rauh combined excellent legal skills with equally good political judgment. As a lawyer for the United Auto Workers and a longtime ally of Senator—and soon to be vice presidential nominee—Hubert Humphrey, he would find himself in a stressful position at the Democratic convention. When I arrived at his office, he asked me if I was a lawyer. I said “no.” He said “good.”

My job was to help Rauh compose a brief on behalf of the Freedom Democrats, drawing on information I’d compiled during the summer. By documenting the Mississippi Democratic Party’s suppression of black voters, we hoped to bolster the Freedom Democrats’ case to be seated at the convention.

Although we had tried to be scrupulously accurate, the ad hoc, underfunded nature of our work, which relied on volunteer fact gatherers who were as unsophisticated as they were brave, made it highly likely that there were some errors. Rauh feared that conservatives, who were strongly entrenched in the organized bar, would go over his brief in great detail, and if they found
any
inaccuracy, exaggeration, or distortion of the facts, would pursue disciplinary proceedings against him. Since the brief was being submitted to the Democratic Party and not to a legal tribunal, no criminal penalties could attach, which meant that a nonlawyer—me—was safe from retribution. Rauh’s submission identified me in a footnote as a major source for the information it contained. There are few documents I’ve ever been prouder to appear in.

The logistical arrangements for my one-day stopover in Washington also brought me into contact with a national political leader whom I had read about and admired but never met. Through my work with the National Student Association, I had become very friendly with two sisters, Barbara and Cokie Boggs (later Barbara Sigmund, mayor of Princeton, and Cokie Roberts of journalistic repute). I knew their family home was a large one in the D.C. suburbs, and I asked if I could spend the night there.

Cokie showed me to a very comfortable room in the basement. The next morning, I went upstairs to the dining room, where her father, Congressman Hale Boggs, was having breakfast. Boggs was an important leader in the House and a close ally of Lyndon Johnson. He was in a potentially dangerous situation because Johnson’s embrace of civil rights was not popular in his New Orleans district. His district was also adjacent to Mississippi, and our delegation was seeking to unseat his colleagues there. That fall, his wife, Lindy, would be Lady Bird Johnson’s traveling companion on a whistle-stop tour through the South that was intended to counteract the appeal of Barry Goldwater and his vote against the civil rights bill.

I soon realized that Cokie and Barbara had not warned their father I would be visiting. As he later told them, when I came up from the basement, blinking in the light, he assumed at first that I was the exterminator or some other such workman, and he was taken aback when I sat down and poured myself a cup of coffee. After I explained to him who I was and what I was doing there, he asked me, with the graciousness of a Southern gentleman and the concern of a liberal Southern politician, if the accommodations had been comfortable, if the coffee was good, if I needed anything else, and in general if his family’s hospitality had been satisfactory. When I enthusiastically answered yes to each question, he said, “Son, in that case I’m going to ask you a favor. Please don’t ever tell anybody that you were here.”

After I left, Cokie later told me, her father remonstrated with her. Didn’t she think he was in enough trouble for seeming too liberal for Louisiana without his daughters turning his house into a stop on the Underground Railroad? To his enormous credit, in 1965 he became one of the first white Southerners to support a civil rights bill. And with my discretion a minor contributing factor, he became House majority leader a few years later. He would have been the Speaker of the House had he not been lost in a 1972 plane crash in Alaska, where he was campaigning for another member.