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Barney Frank

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2016-09-26

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2016-09-26

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1. “And I picture that I had taken with him a punchlight of an old joke from the catchgills of a name dropper, and he shows up at the Pope and people say, who's that with Gobert? So the poster was, who's that guy with Barney Frank? And it was me and McGovern. And I had the great pleasure a couple years ago in my last year in office at a retirement party honoring George just before he died, of giving it to him and having my picture taken with it. But the neatness is and everything. Look, I knew I figured I better embrace my unconventionality, especially when I was gay. I ate a lot because of stress. I was overweight. And I've been in a lifelong war with things.”

   2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “The other end of which I'm very proud of, I did have a poster, I should have mentioned that I got elected in 1972, my first election was to a seat that had always been held by Republicans, although there was a moderate seat, but a major reason for my success was it was 1972. And I was representing a district which had thousands of students in it who would never voted from BU and MIT, so I'm one of the few politicians who benefited from George McGovern's coattails.”

   2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Bleakness of my private life made it worse and worse. You know, there's that old song Saturday night, there's the loneliest night of the week. It's the contrast. I would go to parties celebrating the progress we were starting to make on gay rights and everybody was thanking me and I went home alone. So the fact of the public job made it worse, not alleviated it”

   2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I did, and I would say a couple of things. First of all, I did own what this made a gum me in a little trouble many years later, but I couldn't be totally celibate, so I had to seek the kind of physical satisfaction, but without the emotional side, and that got you into trouble. The other thing is I would advise people, there is this argument, I don't know, maybe don't say it as much because there aren't as many causative people, but I would hear people say, oh, he's so committed to her job that she doesn't need a private life. That would be used about people generally they were given. And the answer is, uh-uh. I don't know anybody who doesn't need a private life. There are needs you have, emotional and physical, that no job satisfies. And what I found as I went forward, the disparity between what was an increasingly successful public career in art of prominence, and the total...”

   2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “I remember when it was just F. So G was Gay was an improvement over FAG. But we have the gay rights, but would you support it? And I said, yes. And then they also said, would you introduce it? I said, sure. I assumed, however, that being a freshman, I wouldn't be the one to introduce. Not a lot of other takers.”

   2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Decided then that I would be fully supportive of gay rights. So what happened was this was 1972, just after Stonewall, for the first time organizations of gays and lesbians in Massachusetts organize, and they circulated a letter to everybody running for the state legislature. The child met them and was working with them, but still contacted it personally. Actually, my sister Anne Lewis, as I mentioned, had become a co-chair of the National Women's Political Caucus, Massachusetts branch, along with a lesbian named Elaine Noble, and she introduced me to people. They sent our question asking, would you support a bill to support gay rights? At that point, it was, I know it's now, we've gotten a lot more initials, but if somebody said, oh, I remember when it was just G.”

   2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Well, I did. By the way, that also was another principle that I decided in my discussion about how to be ethical and practical, beginning then, because being gay was illegal, gay sex is illegal. And I then decided that the way for me to be an honest politician and I kept that for all those years, I promised that I would always obey every law that I voted for. I thought that's about as good as you can get as a politician.”

   2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “You really can't do much and not be revealed. So I decided that I would make that sacrifice of a personal life to have a chance at not a lifetime political career, but a stint in politics. But I also at that point made one very important decision that I'm glad I made and that I've stuck to, and that is I would not tell people I was gay, but I would not in any way support anything anti-gay publicly. I made the decision at that point that I would be fully supportive of. And in fact, you introduced...”

   2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Oh, absolutely all the time. And yes, I said, okay, here's the deal, my internal conversation. I really want to be an elected officer. I think I'll be good at it. On the other hand, it's not going to be a long-time career because I can't see anything beyond the state legislature. And I so much want to do this that I'll stay in the closet. But for me staying in the closet didn't just mean not telling people. It meant a kind of oppression of my personal life, because particularly if you're somewhat prominent.”

   2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Nature of the job, and I did a lot of media stuff. So I had gone back, I had decided to abandon my PhD studies and go to work in politics for other people. And I went to work for Liberal congressman named Michael Harrington from the North Shore of Massachusetts. And I was working for him for a year in friends called to say, you know what, the state representative from the downtown Boston district, Back Bay and Beacon Hill, was returning. He was a liberal Republican of a sort that no longer can be sustained. And I had gotten to be very known in that area. That was the one area in Boston I could have won in because it was full of people who were not also born in Boston. And I figured, you know what? This is probably the only job I can get, but let's see if I can win it. And that's why I ran.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “In a comment that made fun of Cohn's homosexuality, Cohn had asked him in a mocking way to say, well, what does a pixie mean or McCarthy ask him? And looking at Cohn, Wells said, oh, a Pixie is a relative of a fairy. People knew insiders at Cone was gay. I'm 14. I'm cheering for a guy who's making any gay remark because it just never occurred to me there was any other possibility. So I never thought I could win because to be elected office, you got to be popular. Nothing could be less popular than being gay. So I went to work for the mayor and I said, okay, here's the deal. I can probably go back and forth as a, I was going to go back and finish my PhD thesis. I'll be an aide. I'll be active in politics, but I won't be that public. But on the other hand, as White's assistant, I had gotten very public. It was just.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “No, no, absolutely right. I had been interested in politics for my teenage years, but in my teenage, even before I got to college, it became clear to me that I could never get elected to anything because I knew then that I was gay. I realized that when I was 13. And being gay then was just despised. I mean, there wasn't even any discussion about gay race. It was just, you accepted the fact that you were one of the most hated people. I mentioned in my book. Joseph Welsh was a great liberal hero and lawyer who took on Joe McCarthy. One of the things that made him a hero among liberals was when he deflated Roy Cohn, McCarthy's evil aid and a former lawyer for Donald Trump.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “He was an early environmentalist. We did things like we boycotted grapes for C ⁇ sar Chavez, the city hospital in the prison, because unfortunately the people who pour the bund. So, yeah, I went to work for him, but he was also a very skillful politician. And that was a good continuation of what I had tried to do in 1964. Actually, I was a little frustrated, just to go back briefly to 64, that movement, the Freedom Democratic Party movement, did kind of fracture some when people went to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City and had a debate about how much to accept. I wasn't there, by the way, because I was still theoretically a candidate for a PhD So I went back to take my generals, which I. Took and passed to no apparent purpose because I never got a degree.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Interesting note. I get a call. You got to come down. Dr. King was murdered and they had to go get the mayor. The mayor was in the movies. He was watching Atlanta burn literally. When he got that news. And what paid off was that the work we had done in those first three months was helpful Boston was one of the cities where there were no violence and racism. He was a big liberal. He not only integrated the community, one of the things we did that I'm very proud of is we were one of the first cities in the country, at least tied for first, to say, no, you're not building a highway through here. You're not going to disrupt people with more highway construction. We want public transportation instead.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Stop bus saying. You know where I stand And he beat her more narrowly than people expected. And I would tell you there was some element in that then of what people are now feeling about the Trump Clinic. Oh my God, that woman can get elected. And that led to a useful mobilization that I hope is going to be a forerunner. But he was the first mayor in the city of Boston to integrate the African American population into the administration. He hired Blackbeard. He worked with him. And then three months into his presidency. Martin Luther King was murdered.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “No question. I got involved with Kevin White because he was running in 1967 against a woman named Louise D. Hicks. It's a racist.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “And so I was aware of that. When I got to Mississippi, this was what I then really focused on was, yeah, there is a distinction we were all very passionate about the cause, but many were, I thought, unrealistic in how to do it. And that helped reinforce my view that the key job for me was to find a way to fuse pragmatism and zealotry, which do not temperamentally go well together.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Well, it was continuous. I mean, I gave my political education began at Harvard in this sense. I was big liberal and still am, and proud to say so. I got to Harvard and found for the first time that there were people to my left. In some cases, a small number of people who were communists, but people whose temperament was a radicalism that I think Found more satisfaction in demonstrative and emotive politics than in dealing with frustration or trying to get things done.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “But I was there and one night we were asked to go do guard duty at one of the Freedom Houses in one of the areas because there was a rumored threat on it. And I said, fine, look, I said I would sign on. But on the other hand, since we are committed to nonviolence, I do not understand what being a guard would consist of. Interesting for me, though, and it was very helpful in terms of dealing with the kind of attitude you get. Honestly, as Jesse Jackson himself said years ago, he said, yeah, I understand, people. If I'm walking in a dark street at night and I see four or five black teenagers, I get all nervous, and so you get that because of the racial hostilities in the country. And pretty soon when I was in Jackson you realized if you were one of the people on the Freedom Summer and you were walking and you heard voices at night sort of young male voices, you sure hoped they were black.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Able to be both an ethical and an effective politician is you tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but if they want the whole truth, they got to dig for it. And he didn't dig for it, so he never got it. But I did work, we did some traveling at one point. I was on a run to deliver some pamphlets to... Greenwood, Mississippi, with a volunteer and Richard Bamer, who is the male lead in the movie of Westside Shore.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “That's right. She would have thought of this, and that presented the delegation to the National Convention. So my job was to help organize that. And I worked obviously with our own people. I did some encounter with, I had to go to the registrar or some sector, state official in Jackson. And somehow he got the impression that I was there to register a party for George Wallace. I never said that, but I did not correct him. Actually, I learned then, I think one of the ways that you are...”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “And there was just very good I could do to talk to people who would understand me. So I was put in the office. I did do some traveling to other places, but I was basically in the office. My job was to, we had a, there was a registration process in Mississippi for political party, and we were going to create the Freedom Democratic Party and register people in it successfully to show that tens and tens of thousands of factors were.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “On the way down we heard that they were missing and obviously we had no hope that they were going to be found. So yeah, I was terrified. Actually, I did not actually myself register many voters. Originally, I was going to go down and work with NACB Charles Everetts, the brother of the murdered medical Evevers. Loenstein had been very involved and he had a strategic dispute with some of the African American leaders kind of his aid and so the administrative role he had asked me to take on just disappeared so I said well I'm here and I'll just be a volunteer like anybody else but I wasn't going to registering voters as people listening to this podcast will understand I was not intelligible to most Mississippian white or black I mean I got used to Black Mississippians, believing that my name was Benjamin Franklin.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “I was terrified. Absolutely. I was absolutely terrified. And in case there was any doubt about it, we went down, we trained in a place in Ohio. And we went down in two groups. I was in the second group and we left on a Sunday. The first group had left the Sunday before. The first group had included Andrew Goodman, who met up with two Mississippi, an African-American named James Cheney and a white guy named Michael Schwinner, New Yorker. And as people now know, they were killed. The day Goodman got there. They were arrested and brutally murdered. This was the week before.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “It got out of attention. So thinking about that, Loenstein and others, Dr. King was much involved in the joint leadership at that point. They got SNCC and the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Under League all worked together. And they set up this organization beginning in early 64 that became the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and they consciously recruited white people, some blacks obviously as well, but white people from all over the country to go to Mississippi to demonstrate that the problem in Mississippi was not black of interest, but white physical oppression. And I joined that in part at Loman Seed Request.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Charismatic reputation, he had taught at both Stanford and Yale, so he got Stanford and Yale students in the fall of sixty three, the summer of 63, Mississippi as an off-year gubernatorial election was in 63. He got a bunch of Yale and Stanford students to go to Mississippi. And the purpose was actually just to physically provide some help. But what happened was they were mistreated, in some cases assaulted and jailed just as if they'd been black Mississippians. And what then occurred was it turned out that when white racists in Mississippi beat up and bullied and jailed black Mississippians, it didn't get a lot of attention. But when they were doing this to white kids from the north, from Yale and Stanford, it was in their back in their papers.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “One of those Duck Dynasty fools who said, Oh, yeah, well, back then everything was good. They were satisfied. So Lohenstein was friendly with a man named Aaron Henry, who was the head of the NAACP in Mississippi. And Doc Henry, they called him, he was a pharmacist. So he was somewhat immune from the pressures because he was a pharmacist who sold to black people, so they couldn't cut him off. And he decided to run for governor of Mississippi in 1963. And what they wanted to do was to show that no black people would like to vote. They're just being prevented from doing so. Woenstein had kind of a...”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Gilles on the issues with a good hard-headed pragmatism. And the reason I mentioned was that he's the one he had really come up with the idea in 1963 of sending white students into Mississippi. What you had was this. Black people in Mississippi really were not much better off than blacks in South Africa. It was really appalling. And there were, I think, less than 50 black voters in Mississippi estate with a couple of million black people. And what happened was when black people tried to vote, they were a physically prevented. They just said, I'm not registering you, tough. And if they persisted, they were assaulted. They lost their jobs right away. They lost their business. They lost their sharecropping rights. But in some cases, they were killed. Well, the argument the whites used was, well, they don't want to vote. They're perfectly happy. You know, we just heard that again.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Yeah, actually that was during my graduate days. Undergraduate, I became active in politics at Harvard. Both the young Democrats and student government, I just went to a fiftieth wedding anniversary party for Cochie and Steve Roberts, a cokey, she was in Koki Barger, a group of us who got to know each other during the National Student Association days, and there was a very charismatic frigate in Maule Loenstein, who was really a brilliant organizer, and to me the model of a guy who could combine”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “To get in there. But he did serve, and that is, of course, another reason why I was six, neither he nor my mother ever wanted to get actively involved in politics.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “His brother Harry had an automobile dealership, and Harry bribed the commissioners of the city of Bayonne to buy his cars. My father was the intermediary in Harry the cash. And what happened was that the Republicans who ran the state at that time, the prosecutors in New Jersey were maybe still appointed by the governor, not locally elected. So it was a Republican prosecutor who wanted my father testify against the city commissioners. He didn't want to do that, so he was actually jailed for contempt for a while. So I remember on my sixth birthday, we sneaked into New York. He was hiding out. We sneaked in to New York to see Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest with Erl Flynn. My mother kind of took two different buses.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Absolutely. In fact, look, we had this problem and we've gotten over it. But one of the problems we had with turnout, and there was this conflict, and somebody should do some academic work on it. One of the reasons you did not have larger black turnout was they increasingly became populous in cities. And Dick Daly didn't want to know about people voting in Chicago. Other incumbents didn't want to expand the voting base. That's one of the things about politics. It's gotten better. You know, people forget sometimes in some areas we do make some big improvements. But yeah, they like the control. They knew who was voting and that's the way they wanted it.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “With Perconquin's presecretary, she was precocious and in 1952, which was 14, she became a big Stevenson campaigner, and she's the one who got me involved. So we were active. But I got some sense of this, by the way, in 1956, when I was 16. I joined the volunteers for Stevenson, and I went to the headquarters, and I soon realized that the head of it was a political organization who had been put there to make sure that these volunteers didn't get too interested in a political career beyond a kind of a presidential thing. But we were fascinated by it. We had dinner table conversation about it, absolutely.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Yeah, and you had people like Murray Kempton and William Shannon, James Waxon himself, they were really Max Lerner. They were very, very much liberals. But the notion of getting involved in politics, my father ran a truck stop, so there was a certain inevitability where he had to interact with the politicians. But politics was just, it wasn't only that it wasn't respectable. There was just no honest way to do it. So we were very interested. My older sister, and Lewis.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “And he told me in December that he wanted me to be his chief of staff. And I called my mother very excited to say very happily that I was going to be chief of staff to the mayor. And she said, with no irony, she wasn't trying to be cute, but it just reflects the question you ask. She said, that's wonderful because she knew this was something I wanted to do. But she said, you understand, I'm not going to tell anyone. We're not going to put that in the Bay on Times because in Bayonne, where I grew up or in Jersey City, To be the chief assistant to a mayo was pretty much a criminal under person.”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “I am the law, he said, when he banned the CIO, he was a Democrat, but a very conservative one. He banned the CIO from operating in Jersey City, and then when he was told that was illegal, he said, I am the law. So it was a corrupt political machine that was deeply entangled with two other then very corrupt organizations. The Teamsters Union, I take three. The Teamsters Union, the Longshoremen's Union, the East Coast branch had been mafia-run, and the Mafia. And it was very much that in fact so deeply corrupt was that in 1967 to go to school, my father had died. I was involved in Kevin White's campaign from A. He was running against a terrible racist. And I got involved because I didn't like her, but I came to admire him. And he and I had all”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “It was a machine and a very corrupt one. People who have seen on the waterfront get a sense that that was said in Hudson County, New Jersey and the city of Hoboken. You had one of the great bosses, Frank Hag”

    2016-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 82 - Barney Frank · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source