A few weeks before Barney Frank died, I spoke with him by phone from Ogunquit, Maine, where he was in hospice care for congestive heart failure. At one point, I asked him what aspect of his legacy he was proudest of.
He took a deep breath and replied: “The thing I’m proudest of is that I have learned through experience with the media and elsewhere not to answer that question. So if the stuff I’ve done doesn’t speak for itself, then too bad.”
Aha, I thought, here comes Frank’s famous irascibility with the press. I braced myself for Frank to end the interview.
But instead, he kept talking.
Frank has long had a reputation for being prickly with the press. A recent opinion piece by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, focuses on a November 2011 interview Frank did with Savannah Guthrie of The Today Show, who asked if Frank was retiring because he didn’t think Democrats could win back control of the House in 2012. Frank responded, “I wish we could talk substance sometimes in the media. I know that’s against kind of apparently against the rules. And I’d like to talk about public policy; I regret that we can’t.” After Guthrie asked her fourth question, Frank stated: “Well, congratulations; you’re four for four in managing to find a negative approach.”
But the interview doesn’t necessarily make the case Milbank thinks it does. Frank doesn’t descend into verbal abuse or ad hominem attacks, but offers pointed media criticism in real time. It stands out because few public figures choose to do so.
In wake of Frank’s death this week at age 86, I spoke to some of my colleagues in the press corps to find out whether Frank’s reputation for being prickly with the press held up, or whether it was a bit overstated.
It’s true that sometimes, Frank could be kind of a jerk to the press. Victoria McGrane, deputy director for audience at the Boston Globe, spoke to Frank on an almost daily basis in the late 2000s. She was working for Politico and then for Dow Jones Newswires; Frank and his colleagues on the House Financial Services Committee were working to craft the legislative response to the 2008 financial crisis that ultimately became the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
“He could be really acerbic. He could be really harsh,” McGrane said. “You know, very frequently [he’d] be like, ‘That’s the dumbest question I’ve ever heard.’”
But calling a question stupid is better than avoiding the media altogether. And according to McGrane, as Dodd-Frank took shape, Frank would routinely emerge from the House chamber to take every single question the assembled reporters had about the legislation’s progress.
“He was incredibly accessible … He was very forthcoming in sharing what he could and would about where things stood on negotiations,” McGrane said. “My job was to cover every twist and turn of the screw of this major legislation that was being built, so I always got the information. It just wasn’t always a pleasant experience.”
And yet, McGrane added, “Covering Frank at times was so much fun. He was such a witty, sharp-tongued master of the legislative process … Barney both was so smart and could explain [financial legislation] in a way that regular people could understand.”
Sometimes, Frank’s treatment of the media could shift in a matter of seconds. Back in the 2000s, Greg Reibman was editor-in-chief of the TAB newspapers, a chain of publications that served Newton — Frank’s hometown at the time — as well as Cambridge, Brookline, and other suburbs. Reibman, now head of the Charles River Regional Chamber, recalls inviting Frank to an editorial roundtable that initially seemed poised to go off the rails.
“When Frank came, I walked out into the lobby, he was sitting there by himself, and I asked him where his [handlers] were — and he said, ‘Why should I bring them? They’re busy. They have stuff to do,'” Reibman recalled. “And so we went into the conference room where my reporters were waiting, and he sits there with his arms folded over his chest. Doesn’t say a word; didn’t walk around the room and shake hands like every other politician would. And then, finally, he says: So what do you want to know?”
At this point, Rebiman said, the assembled reporters started lobbing questions at Frank. Instantly, everything changed.
“As soon as we asked him questions, he became animated and funny and interesting,” Reibman said. “He could answer anything, and there was nothing off the table. It was just a really kind of surreal experience to see this guy in action.”
At times, Frank’s tendency toward combativeness with the media could vanish altogether. My GBH News colleague Henry Santoro interviewed Frank in mid-1980s for the now-defunct alternative rock station WFNX, and had what he describes as an almost tranquil experience.
“He had a condo on Beacon Street in the Back Bay, and I finagled my way in to interview him, and he said “just come over the house,” Santoro said recently. “And so I took my tape recorder and … I went in and I spent the better part of two or three hours with him. And we just hung out in his living room … [I] asked him everything I would ever want to ask a guy like him. And he was very gracious, he was very polite, and not once did he raise his voice at me.”
McGrane says there was another significant way in which Frank did the press and the public a favor: he insisted that the grueling conference committee process that reconciled the House and Senate versions of Dodd-Frank be open to the press and streamed on C-SPAN.
“Typically, even in the U.S. Congress — which is far more transparent than our Legislature here in Massachusetts — the conference committees happen behind closed doors,” McGrane said. “Frank insisted that it be open, and that is such an admirable thing for the public, for the Fourth Estate, for trust in government … This huge, important piece of legislation, and he insisted on it that everyone be able to see it. And that is just so rare in politics.”
Frank’s tendency to dismiss some questions as stupid was certainly off-putting, especially if you were the target. Yet there was a key difference between Frank’s approach and another prominent politician who’s frequently critical of the media: President Donald Trump.
Namely, Frank didn’t call the basic legitimacy of the press into question. While Frank wasn’t exactly nice to the press, he never came close to Trump’s stance.
Maybe Frank’s death is a time to reconsider the idea of Frank as an anti-media bully. I’d describe him more as a politician who engaged in media criticism in real-time, while giving the press the accessibility and transparency needed for us to do our jobs, and for democracy to function.
