As they approach the end of their lives, Barney Frank and Rudy Giuliani leave very different legacies
The two politicians couldn’t be more different, but, like us all, face the same inescapable fate.
“…Barney Frank’s approach to politics was equally pragmatic. He got things done. He made deals with Republicans. And he thought compromise was a sign of strength, not weakness…He openly worried that Democrats too often undermined their electability by dying on an unpopular hill, branding their opponents as stupid or bigoted rather than acknowledging that when it comes to major cultural changes, change takes time. Some progressives thought he was too squishy, but Frank was unapologetic about the need to get elected in order to accomplish goals….”
By Kevin Cullen, Globe Staff
May 5, 2026
The British politician Enoch Powell once observed that all political careers end in failure.
The prospects facing Barney Frank and Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, are a somber reminder that, whatever our politics, we all share the same mortal reality.
Frank has chosen to spend his final days in hospice in Maine. Giuliani is in critical but stable condition in a Florida hospital.
Their political careers couldn’t be more different.
Frank was the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out and acknowledge he was gay. But even before coming out in 1987, he championed the gay rights movement that slowly, inexorably became mainstream, with same-sex marriage legalized, first in his home state of Massachusetts, later nationwide.
Frank was a good spokesman for that movement – for any movement, really – not because of his liberal politics, but because he spoke with an authentic if sometimes wise-ass common sense that led many who harbored antigay views to reassess them. While he was adamant about the righteousness of his cause, he also argued for patience with those who were not.
Frank acted like the smartest guy in the room because most often he was. He could be arrogant, opinionated in a sort of Larry David way, his accent more Bayonne than Brooklyn. But he was more often wickedly funny, warm, and empathetic, especially toward the poor and marginalized. No one could deny his intellect and, over time, his political wisdom.
He left New Jersey for Harvard, from which he graduated in 1962, and stayed in Massachusetts, volunteering in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964.
He was Mayor Kevin White’s chief aide in the late 1960s, when the White administration presided over a dramatic modernization of Boston, before serving as a state representative, then in Congress, where he spent 32 years.
He even weathered a gay-sex scandal, in which a man living with him ran an escort service out of Frank’s D.C. apartment.
Even the Globe’s editorial board, a longtime admirer of Frank’s dedication to the less privileged, called for Frank to resign in 1989. His constituents had other ideas, returning him to Congress with 66 percent of the vote.
Frank was reprimanded by Congress. In time, many of his supporters, and even some of his detractors, came to see his reckless entanglement with a hustler as a byproduct of being a sexually repressed man stuck in the closet all those years. Of course, the haters never got over it, and their opposition to Frank’s politics was often lightly wrapped in a thin, ugly veneer of homophobia.
Republican efforts to censure and expel Frank from Congress were led by Larry Craig, a congressman from Idaho who was later arrested for trying to hook up with men in an airport restroom. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, hypocrisy isn’t too far behind.
Today, many of those same people who were so repulsed by Frank having sex with men pledge political fealty to a thrice-married conman who bragged about grabbing women by their vaginas, had sex with a porn star around the time his third wife gave birth, and was found civilly liable for sexually abusing a woman.
Two of the greatest, most effective politicians I ever came across were Barney Frank and John Hume, the pacifist statesman from Northern Ireland who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as the architect of the peace process that ended what we knew as The Troubles.
Sitting in his Derry office one day, a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. over his shoulder, Hume told me his approach to politics was shaped by his father, Sam, a shipyard worker who cautioned him not to fall for the siren call of jingoistic patriotism.
“You can’t eat a flag,” Sam Hume told his son.
What Sam Hume meant was, being ideologically rigid on any sort of allegiance might make you feel superior, but it won’t put food on the table and it won’t help you reach a compromise that benefits everyone in your community. When it came to politics, Sam Hume believed it wise to be pragmatic, not dogmatic. So did his son, and the results were historic.
Barney Frank’s approach to politics was equally pragmatic. He got things done. He made deals with Republicans. And he thought compromise was a sign of strength, not weakness.
He openly worried that Democrats too often undermined their electability by dying on an unpopular hill, branding their opponents as stupid or bigoted rather than acknowledging that when it comes to major cultural changes, change takes time. Some progressives thought he was too squishy, but Frank was unapologetic about the need to get elected in order to accomplish goals.
“You can’t do anything,” he told me one day, during the run up to the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004, “if you’re not in power.”
Both Hume and Frank were denounced as sellouts by some who nominally shared their politics. But history will judge them as visionaries who saw the forest when so many of their contemporaries only saw trees.
And then there’s the case of poor Rudy Giuliani, whose blind embrace of the lies of Donald Trump has left him poor on his deathbed.
Giuliani was a competent, aggressive federal prosecutor who did a terrific job emasculating the Mafia in New York City in the 1980s. As mayor of New York in the 1990s, he presided over an unprecedented drop in crime that made New York a much more livable city.
Giuliani really hit his stride in September 2001, when men who believed that you can, in fact, eat a flag, flew airplanes into the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan.
Giuliani won widespread admiration for the way he conducted himself in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Gone was the insecure egotist who fired Boston’s Bill Bratton as police commissioner because Bratton was getting the lion’s share of credit for the precipitous drop in crime. Giuliani was dubbed America’s Mayor for his steady hand leading New York out of its worst day.
But, like poker players who are deep in the hole but believe the next hand will be a flush, Giuliani squandered his legacy by hooking his wagon to Trump’s Make America Great Again bandwagon.
Giuliani was a leading member of the legal team that helped Trump push his blatantly false claim that he won the 2020 election.
The depth of Giuliani’s cultish support of Trump was most comically, and I’d add tragically, on display at two press conferences he held pushing Trump’s Big Lie.
At one, he stood in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a gardening store he thought was the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia when it was booked; at another, his hair dye streaked down his face under the TV lights, leaving him with what some uncharitably described as “the mark of Cain,” a biblical reference to God punishing Cain with exile but sparing his life.
Trump issued a pardon for Giuliani, saving him from federal prosecutions. But Giuliani’s vocal and legal support for Trump,
much of it unmoored from reality, left him in continuous legal trouble, including defamation suits that ruined him financially. His reward for lying for Trump was being disbarred as an attorney.
Maybe the president will stop by Rudy Giuliani’s death bed to thank him for his undying loyalty.
But, then, I wouldn’t bet on it.