Memories of Barney Frank

I met the late Barney Frank in the spring of 1966, when my older brother Bob visited me near the end of my freshman year at Harvard. They had met at something called the National Student Congress, later the National Student Association, in 1961. My brother was then living in London and Barney was a grad student in government, writing his dissertation, as he told me, on the conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats in Congress. Like everyone else, I was immediately struck by his rapid-fire wit, and we always had a brief conversation when we ran into each other on campus. My two best memories of him involve his humor, and I would like to share them now.In the summer of 1968, I had stayed in Cambridge for the first time, and was hanging out with some friends at the newly formed Institute of Politics on Mount Auburn Street, whose living room had a television. I found myself there on the August evening when Richard Nixon accepted the Republican nomination for President,…