I Am John Galt (25 page)

In 1966 during an aborted attempt to earn a doctoral degree, Frank received his draft notice. He responded with documentation showing he was a graduate student and received a deferment. The draft board, which was run by local New Jersey politicos, then mysteriously lost or misfiled Frank's record. He was never again called up despite having suspending his studies shortly thereafter.
16

Abandoning his doctoral studies, Frank cut his political teeth on Boston Mayor Kevin White's staff as his nonelected, de facto deputy. According to White, Barney, like White himself, is a
power collector
—someone who gloms onto everything he can get his hands on, someone who reaches out for more power to do more things—in contrast to a
power user
, someone who wants only the power necessary to do his job.
17
Boston Globe
reporter Chris Lydon recalled, “Barney was born to be a first-class public man.”
18
As we will see, that description is a contradiction in terms.

Frank seemed to thrive on hardball city politics and quickly became known as Mayor White's political troubleshooter. When demonstrators gathered on the Boston Common to protest the city's midnight curfew, Frank showed up at 3:00 A.M. to coordinate the police bust. Barney frequently testified on behalf of the mayor at city council meetings, often fielding hostile questions from the elected representatives. When White ran for governor, Frank ran the city of Boston, making day-to-day decisions.

In 1971 Congressman Michael Harrington offered Barney a job as administrative assistant in his Capitol Hill office. Figuring it was a golden opportunity to learn the inner workings of an even larger power forum, he accepted. “The only legislation that I ever worked on in terms of trying to get something passed was to make sure we got ‘three deckers' for the city of Lynn,” Barney recalled. “It was a program for one- and two-family houses, a federal loan program. I remember going to a member from Massachusetts on the Banking and Currency Committee, Peggy Heckler, to do it.”
19
It was a succulent taste of using political pull to bestow unearned tax dollars on the undeserving in the name of social progress in housing—a taste that would later never seem to be sated.

When State Representative Moe Frye retired from Massachusetts Ward 5, Frank decided to run for the open seat. At the time he looked at it as a stepping-stone to greater political influence in the vein of Michael Dukakis and an opportunity to advance his social causes while honing his political maneuvering skills. Since 1972 was the first year 18-year-olds were eligible to vote, Barney tapped into the mass of young antiwar Boston University students in his ward, winning the general election with a solid 60 percent of the vote.

Loud and controversial, Frank lost no time backing extreme issues in the Statehouse, generating plenty of public notoriety and name recognition in the process. He sponsored bills to legalize marijuana use, to repeal state obscenity laws, to promote gay rights, and to establish adult entertainment zones with legalized prostitution. All were soundly defeated despite some colorful debate.

“Mr. Speaker,” Barney pronounced on record during a legislative session in characteristic form, “it is true that I have introduced bills relating to pornography, gambling, prostitution, adultery, marijuana, and homosexuality. But I am going to make a commitment to my colleague from New Bedford. I will keep on trying until I find something he likes to do.”
20

Later, reflecting on his terms in the state legislature, he remarked, “There is no question that the Massachusetts House in those days was a complete dictatorship,” adding, “I say benevolent dictatorship, which is the best form of government.”
21
It is an odd attitude for someone from the state that threw tea in the waters to protest King George, and one he would carry forward to the U.S. House of Representatives: that the politically powerful have a better, more expansive view of their subjects from the seat of their throne and that they should make the rules for the rest of us, because we don't know what's in our own collective best interest.

Frank's next step up the political ladder was nearly a matter of divine intervention. In 1980 Pope John Paul II got word that one of his Jesuit priests was active and vocal in support of liberalized abortion laws. The kicker was that the priest, Father Robert Drinan, happened to be a five-term Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. The Pope immediately invoked a heretofore unenforced papal law prohibiting priests from holding secular public office, effectively preventing Drinan from seeking reelection and opening up the seat to all comers.

Bored with the state legislature and facing what a biographer called “a mid-life crisis,”
22
Frank threw his hat into the ring and ran in a crowded field as Drinan's handpicked successor. He won the primary, but it proved to be a tough year for Democrats in the general election. Down-home Jimmy Carter was helpless before powerfully charismatic Ronald Reagan and a tide of conservative voters in the wake of high inflation, gasoline shortages, and rampant unemployment. As doomsday pundits decried the end of American prosperity, Reagan's campaign posters exclaimed, “Let's make America great again.”

Barney explained to voters that the conservative Reagan position was that government takes care of the basics, such a cleaning the streets and providing police, but that beyond that it is up to private charity to help people in need. The Reagan administration's policy, he said, reflected the credo of David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget: “Nobody is entitled to anything.”
23

Frank was right about Reagan's outlook on the role of government—which matched Ayn Rand's. Rand expressed it through Howard Roark, the hero of
The Fountainhead
, who said, “This our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, or renunciation, or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man's right to the pursuit of happiness. . . . Look at the results.”

Frank's outlook? Ask
Atlas Shrugged's
Wesley Mouch: “. . . protect the property of the rich and give a greater share to the poor . . . cut down the burden of your taxes and provide you with more government benefits . . . lower prices and raise wages . . . give more freedom to the individual and strengthen the bonds of collective obligations . . . combine the efficiency of free enterprise with the generosity of a planned economy.”

But Barney Frank was always more interested in such promises than in founding principles. In a 1991 comment about the document he swore to support and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic, he quipped, “There's too much Constitution worship in this country. It is a good document, but separation of powers is a bad idea. Divided government doesn't work.”
24

Frank's demonization of Reagan's individualist ideals must have resonated just enough in a district with constituents seeking free handouts to sneak past the national conservative bulwark. With an overwhelming advantage, including high-profile endorsements and an historically solid Democratic constituency, Frank eked out a narrow victory against his Republican opponent, winning just five of the 23 cities in the district.

By the time Frank came to Washington, he was leading a conflicted personal life, unable to come to terms with a personal reality that nearly derailed his political career—his homosexuality. Convinced it would quash his national political ambitions, Frank suppressed the truth. He came out of the closet to just a few friends and family members. Staggering under the burden of concealing a double life, he was caustic and belligerent to his colleagues and staff. He comforted himself with an almost manic approach to his work, trying to soothe his private inner turmoil with a public ointment of grandiose rhetoric about helping the less fortunate, including statements about how the “hungry three-year-olds in America bother me a great deal.”
25

On August 23, 1989, the truth broke through Frank's walls of denial. The front-page headline of the
Washington Times
proclaimed, “Sex Sold from Congressman's Apartment,” with the subhead, “Frank's Lover Was ‘Call Boy.' ” The article ran on the top right side of the page, next to a color photo of the Capitol Hill basement apartment where Barney lived. It began, “A male prostitute provided homosexual and bisexual prostitution services from the apartment of U.S. Rep. Barney Frank on Capitol Hill on a periodic basis from late 1985 through mid-1987, the
Washington Times
has learned.”
26

In the ensuing ethics investigation, Barney acknowledged that in the spring of 1985 he had answered an ad in the
Washington Blade
, the local gay weekly, and paid for sex several times with a male prostitute whom he identified as Stephen Gobie. Barney admitted that he had written letters on congressional stationery to Gobie's probation officer in Virginia stating that he had hired Gobie as a personal aide. Barney also admitted that he allowed Gobie to use his car and his apartment when he was out of town and affirmed that he had used congressional privilege to fix some parking tickets that Gobie had incurred.
27

Frank acknowledged that he had broken the law by patronizing a prostitute,
28
but maintained that he had not violated any congressional ethics rules.
29
“It turns out that I was being suckered. He was, among other things, a very good con man,” he said in his own defense.
30

The ethics committee concluded that Frank's official memo contained misleading statements in an attempt to reduce Gobie's probation sentence for a previous conviction on cocaine possession and producing child pornography. They also concluded that he improperly used his position for personal purposes to clear Gobie's tickets.
31
The House voted 408 to 18 to accept the ethics panel's recommendation for a reprimand. In the 13 years and seven sessions since Congress established it as an alternative penalty to censure, Frank was just the fifth member of Congress to receive a reprimand from his peers.

While, incredibly, violations of the law do not themselves constitute violations of Congress's ethics code, it's difficult to comprehend how Frank could ever think his conduct reflected creditably on the House, or that he had abided by either the letter or the spirit of the code. In the double-speak world of Barney Frank's relativism, apparently there are no absolutes. The truth is what he wants to believe. It is a theme he'll use again when defending his role in torpedoing the U.S. economy.

Frank's brush with the ethics inquiry did not deter him. As a senior member of the House Banking Committee already rising through the ranks, he wrote a letter to the CEO of Fannie Mae—the giant government-backed housing finance corporation that was under the jurisdiction of his powerful committee for oversight—asking for his help in getting a job for a man named Herb Moses. Moses was subsequently hired by Fannie Mae as a financial analyst.
32

At the time Barney and Herb were dating.
33

Frank's “Noble Experiment” in Housing

Barney Frank's story isn't unusual in Washington, but his timing was impressive. He found himself in power at the exact moment when decades of political and philosophical corruption came to a climax that nearly caused the collapse of the American economy.

Ayn Rand's masterpiece,
Atlas Shrugged
, is set in an economic collapse amid such corruption. There are plenty of corrupt government officials like Frank in
Atlas
, first among them Wesley Mouch, the Top Coordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources, who we'd now call an economic czar. A mere congressman, Frank had to confine himself to coordinating just the U.S. housing and financial industries. But he's a match for Mouch when it comes to the economic devastation wrought by his corruption.

In
Atlas
, the cause of the collapse of the economy is “the strike of the men of the mind” led by John Galt. When one by one, the most able businessmen withdraw from the economy and take sanctuary in Galt's Gulch, the economy slides into disaster. Nothing Mouch and his fellow bureaucrats can do will reverse the decline. Galt's strike succeeds in his goal to “extinguish the lights of the world” because a modern economy can't be run based on Mouch's—and Frank's—rotten philosophy.

The core of this philosophical corruption is altruism—or as Frank calls it, “equality.” Yes, these words connote noble notions of charity. But to be noble, charity must be voluntary, or else it is simply theft. Mouch and Frank are talking about using the police powers of the state to seize the wealth of some people for the benefit of other people, where
they
get to decide who gets his wealth seized and who gets the benefit. As Rand explained, “Whoever claims the ‘right' to ‘redistribute' the wealth produced by others is claiming the ‘right' to treat human beings as chattel.”
34

We know in great detail Rand's views on government-subsidized housing (Frank's altruistic specialty) because the concept is at the center of the climax of her first major novel,
The Fountainhead
. The individualist architect hero Howard Roark volunteers to design a public housing project without compensation, but only because he thinks he will enjoy the engineering challenge. Roark says at the outset, “I don't believe in government housing. I don't want to hear anything about its noble purposes. I don't think they're noble.”

Roark explains,