Just before the financial meltdown reared its head, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told biographer Stuart Weisberg that he'd like to be a Cabinet secretary, specifically head of Housing and Urban Development, to cap off his nearly 30-year career in Congress.

"I want at least two years with President Obama and a solidly Democratic Senate so that we can get the federal government back in the housing business," he told Weisberg in 2008. When the writer asked if Frank wouldn't rather have the more glamorous post at the Treasury Department, Weisberg told Politics Daily, "He said he didn't want to spend the rest of his life negotiating T-bill rates."

That is one of hundreds of revelations, both personal and professional, about the outspoken legislator in "Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman," a new biography due out from University of Massachusetts Press on Sept. 29.

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The book examines Frank's life from his sometimes torturous childhood growing up gay in New Jersey to his current post as the powerful chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. The Hill newspaper notes that the biography also examines Frank's battles with his weight and insatiable appetite. "The day I die, I will either be fat or hungry," Frank says in the book.

Weisberg spent more than six years researching and writing the 500-plus page bio, which is culled from more than 30 hours of interviews with Frank, as well as interviews with more than 150 people who know the congressman.

The biographer also had his own knowledge of Frank to rely on. He worked for Frank twice, first as an intern in the office of Rep. Mike Harrington (D-Mass.), where Frank was the chief of staff, and later when Weisberg served as staff director and chief counsel for a House subcommittee that Frank chaired.

Weisberg's fondness for his subject comes through in excerpts from the book -- he refers to the congressman as "Barney" throughout -- but Weisberg does write about the least savory time in Frank's career, when a gay-sex scandal nearly ended his career in the early 1990s. Weisberg also devotes an entire chapter (titled "The Most Hated Man in Gingrichdom") to Frank's battles with a then-Republican Congress.

Looking back on the years he spent on the project, Weisberg said that the hardest part of the process was cutting the text from 850 to 500 pages, and that while he hasn't ruled out writing another book, "I would be happy to be a one-hit wonder and have my picture on the wall next to Debbie Boone."

Even though he knew Frank well before writing the book, Weisberg said he learned more about his old boss through the process. "What surprised me were his days at Harvard . . . how beloved he was by students," he said of Frank's nearly 10 years on the Cambridge campus. Weisberg interviewed Don Graham, the president of the Washington Post Co., who knew Frank when he was an undergraduate at Harvard and Frank was a graduate student. Graham "said Harvard was a very cold place then, and that if a student was having trouble, they had nowhere to turn, but they could turn to Barney. He told me. 'Harvard should have cloned Barney Frank.' "


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