When former Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts died on Tuesday at 86, he was already a human version of a historical artifact. Frank was famous in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but like most of our­ politicians, he was mostly forgotten once he voluntarily left Congress, 13 years ago. Then suddenly, late last month, Frank was back in the public eye because of a characteristically brash and courageous decision: He announced that he was about to die.

Obituary writers had a lot to work with when they wrote about Frank’s unconventional life and career. One obvious subject was Frank’s homosexuality, the source of much of the drama in his life. Another obvious topic was Frank’s gift for humor and wisecracks. And most significant was his imposing intellect, which usually made him the smartest man in the room, whatever the room. These were all rare attributes for a member of the modern-day House and Senate, where partisan banality reigns. In his distinctive manner, Barney Frank was a towering figure, although his own figure was usually bulging, and came packaged in wrinkled suits and deeply scuffed shoes.

Here I should pause to explain my relationship with Frank, which goes back to the first year of John F. Kennedy’s presidency: 1961, when I was 18 years old and Frank was 21. We were delegates to a convention of college students—mostly elected officers of student governments, though nobody had elected Frank or me. The event was called the National Student Congress. I quickly realized that Frank was a star of the show. That was partly because of his quick wit and his knowledge of all the issues that the student delegates would debate, but more substantively because of his mastery of Robert’s Rules of Order, which spelled out procedures for a gathering of this kind. Frank understood, then and years later in the House, that mastery of the rules could be very important at crucial moments.

James Kirchick: Barney Frank’s second coming-out

At the student conference, Frank and I spent hours collaborating on a resolution recommending the abolition of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. We laughed a lot. I didn’t realize then that I was more interested in the girls we were working with than he was. That week was the beginning of a friendship that lasted for nearly 65 years.

Journalists befriending politicians is rightly a sensitive subject, and usually a bad idea. But Frank and I became friends two years before I began a career in journalism, and 11 years before he first ran for office. I hope and believe that we avoided the obvious pitfalls of our friendship, but it’s not my role to absolve us now.

After Frank won his seat in the House in 1980, his new colleagues were often intimidated by his intelligence. But his leader in his last decade in office, Nancy Pelosi, loved it. She told The New Yorker in 2009, “It’s brilliance that saves time, because he simplifies the complex for us. He is an enormously valuable intellectual resource for the Congress.”

That resource provided relief for numerous Democratic House members, who, like most Americans, were blindsided by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent financial crisis that rocked Wall Street and the country in 2008. Frank met with many colleagues that fall to reassure them that the economy would recover from the shock, and that he, as chair of the House Financial Services Committee, would help them. He promised to produce tough legislation to reform the financial system and prevent similar crises from happening in the future.

Such promises are not uncommon in modern American politics, but fulfilling them is exceedingly rare. Frank and his Senate counterpart, Chris Dodd, did fulfill their promises. The Dodd-Frank Act was one of the most consequential legislative initiatives of our era.

Frank was proud of his intellect, and of the way he used it, mastering arcane subjects such as financial derivatives and subprime mortgages. He read voraciously. Two weeks before he died, he was asking people he met to recommend books. And in the last year of his life, he wrote a book of his own, his fourth.

Yale University Press has scheduled his lively critique of the progressive activists in the Democratic Party for publication in September. The book is called The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy. Frank finished work on it just months ago and sent the manuscript to several friends, asking for comments and reactions. I was one of those who got the manuscript.

I, too, wrote a number of books during my long career at The Washington Post, but I couldn't imagine writing another one in my 80s, when powers of concentration and memory for details are diminished. I said as much to Frank, and he seemed surprised. His 80s were clearly different from mine.

His book gives no hint of the advanced age of its author. It is energetic, even polemical. Frank was fed up with the lefties who consider Medicare for All and the rights of trans athletes more important than winning elections. He wanted to restore the political power of practical liberal Democrats who believe in using government to improve the lives of non-rich Americans. He feared that the left-wingers in the party only made Democrats less popular with voters. This has been a theme in Frank’s politics since the early 1960s, when he eagerly debated Tom Hayden, a co-founder of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, before campus audiences.

Mentioning Frank’s debates with Hayden creates an opportunity to tell my single favorite Frank anecdote: At one campus appearance to debate Frank, Hayden insisted on sitting with the audience, refusing to set himself apart by using the chair he was offered on the stage. He spoke first, then found a place in the crowd. Frank came to the podium and began his own remarks. “Tom,” he said, nodding toward Hayden’s seat in the crowd, “you are such a grass root, I don’t know whether I should debate you or come down there and water you.”

Frank suffered from congestive heart failure for many years. Last month, his doctors told him they had no way to keep his heart beating after another episode. One might come at any time. Frank decided to enter home hospice care in the slightly scruffy farmhouse in Ogunquit, Maine, that he had shared with his husband of 14 years, Jim Ready.

At that point, Frank picked up his telephone and began calling friends and relations to personally convey the grim news. Nobody said we get to live forever, he liked to say. In fact, Frank and those he called all knew that for a man with chronic heart disease who’d waged a lifelong struggle to control his weight, making it to 86 was quite amazing. Nevertheless, hearing the news from Frank himself was a challenging experience.

From the April 2015 issue: The cross-generational politics of Barney Frank

That phone call was brave, rooted in facts, difficult to make and to receive. It illustrated how different Frank was from so many members of today’s House, wedded to peddling baloney on social media and hoping for a chance to appear on Fox or MS NOW.

The Founding Fathers imagined that they were creating a new republic whose property-owning men would take seriously the obligations of citizenship. The Congress created in Article I of the Constitution was clearly intended to be the dominant branch of the new government. It would, they expected, attract admirable, gifted men who would guide the new nation to a bright future.

Frank’s life and career remind us how much America has changed in the 21st century. Is it conceivable that a new Barney Frank—an unusually intelligent and well-educated independent thinker, no personal fortune, and a funny regional accent—might launch a political career in our time and succeed the way that Barney Frank did? I wish for my three grandchildren and their entire generation that the answer might be yes, but I’d laugh at myself if I claimed that it was.

What would the Founders make of Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, most often seen in public wearing a nervous grin? Neither Johnson nor the overwhelming majority of today’s House and Senate members measure up to the citizen-scholars and philosophers that 18th-century American statesmen dreamed of. Nor does their repeated abandonment of congressional prerogatives and powers fulfill the Founders’ expectations.

But Barney Frank did.