It would be shocking if E.W. Jackson didn’t know about Barney Frank long before you did, since Jackson graduated from UMASS-Boston in 1975 and from Harvard Law School in 1978, and stayed in the Boston area to practice law. Barney Frank was a state representative from a Newton district from 1973 until he was elected to Congress in 1980, taught part-time at UMASS-Boston in the early-to-mid 1970s, and was one of the best known liberals in Massachusetts state government throughout the ‘70s. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Jackson’s “crisis of conscience” during the late 1970s was spurred at least in part to seeing how someone with views such as Barney Frank’s was able to rise to power.
BTW, I don’t doubt for a second that, had Frank lost in 1982 to Republican Congresswoman Margaret Heckler and had become a footnote in political history instead of a liberal icon, E.W. Jackson would have mentioned a different 1970s liberal as the poster child of why he switched to the GOP. But I have no reason not to take Jackson at his word when he says that Frank’s issue positions were a big part of his “cricis of conscience” during the 1970s.