![]() ![]() While serving in this role, he returned to education, graduating from Harvard Law School. Frank thrived, and after a spell as a Congressman’s assistant, he stood for election as a Massachusetts state representative and won. Weisberg paints a picture of a rough-and-ready, sometimes corrupt system, where politicians played hard and dirty. In Boston, Frank cut his political teeth. He left his PhD unfinished to take up a position as the Chief Assistant to the Mayor of Boston. His studies were interrupted twice, first by his father’s death while he was an undergraduate and then again during his PhD by the launching of his political career. He only had relationships with women throughout his school years, afraid to come out for fear of the reaction in his community.įrank’s intellectual aptitude took him to Harvard, where he continued to date only women. Frank tells Weisberg that growing up in Bayonne wasn’t always easy, especially from the age of 13, when Frank realized that he was gay. Retaining his independent streak through adolescence, he changed his given name from “Barnett” to Barney. As a teenager, he worked as a forecourt attendant at the truck stop owned by his father. Frank’s childhood was blue-collar, comfortable but not especially wealthy. He loved baseball and tennis and spent a lot of time in the field and on the court. Weisberg notes that only his mother, Elsie, and his sister, Ann (who would also go on to have a career in politics as a Democratic strategist) could best him in arguments. He was argumentative, refusing to accept that adults knew best. Even as a child, Frank displayed great intellectual aptitude and independence of mind. After an opening chapter setting the scene in Frank’s Congressional office at the height of his career in 2008, Weisberg returns to Frank’s childhood in Bayonne, New Jersey. Weisberg, narrates the life story of Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Congressman first elected in 1981, who rose to become Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman (2009), a political biography by author and political adviser Stuart E. ![]()
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