Searching for the Promised Land: An African-American's Optimistic Odyssey.

When you get a telephone call, as I did last August, from Congressman Gary Franks wanting to talk about affirmative action, you pay attention. As one of two black Republicans in the House, Franks is a voice to be listened to on this issue. It did not take me long to figure out that on this occasion, the importance of what Franks had to say went beyond his race and his party.

Franks was angry. Even his high-pitched, almost sweet voice could not disguise his rage. But what was unusual was not his ire, but its target: Newt Gingrich, the leader of Franks's party in the House. "I have been lied to by Newt Gingrich," the Connecticut congressman said, adding that he felt the Speaker did not have "the stomach" for dealing with the issue of affirmative action. Franks was mad that the House Rules Committee, under the control of the GOP leadership, had ruled that Franks could attach an amendment ending minority set-asides only to the Defense Department appropriations bill, thus limiting the amendment's scope to set-aside programs run by the Pentagon. Franks had wanted--and had been promised by Gingrich that he would be able--to tack his amendment onto all appropriations bills, in essence scuttling set-asides throughout the federal government.

I was so stunned that a junior House Republican would so publicly denounce his party's leadership that I first thought some Democratic trickster was trying to put one over on me. I made up some excuse to get Franks off the line, and redialed his office to make sure the person I was talking to was the one he claimed to be. The same voice returned to the line with the same diatribe. "You're not going to see Gary Franks walk out on any tree branch with Newt Gingrich behind him," he said.

Despite the story I wrote in The New York Times based on Franks's remarkable comments, the House leadership held firm. Franks later calmed down and held a press conference where he apologized to Gingrich for his intemperate language.

Remembering the incident, I was surprised at Franks's account of it in his autobiography, Searching for the Promised Land. Gone are his feelings of betrayal by the House leadership. The book contains no reference to the role played by the GOP leadership in scuttling Franks's plans. Instead, he blames the failure of his amendment to reach the floor on the House Democrats! "It was the Democratic leadership that vowed to stand in the way of the Franks Amendment," he writes. "`Gary, you have every right to ask for a vote,' Minority Leader Dick Gephardt told me. `But I guarantee that we'll load it with so many amendments that Congress will be immobilized for weeks."' Franks's version of the fate of his amendment conveniently neglects to mention that, under the rules of the House, the Republican leadership has the power to prevent any Democratic amendments from being considered.

Franks's revisionist account indicates the tenor of this thoroughly disappointing book. It is replete with inaccuracies, provides little introspection, and serves up little more than vacuous political boilerplate. Franks claims credit, for example, for helping to broker a compromise between Congress and the Bush administration that led to the passage of the 1991 Civil Rights Act; he describes himself as shuttling between the White House and the Hill to work out the details. Congressional staffers who were intimately involved in the legislation say Franks played no role in the negotiations that led to its enactment. The final deal was hammered out on the Senate side; House members meekly went along.

Franks's book is a shame, really. As the first black Republican elected to the House since 1935, Franks could tell us a lot. Since his election in 1990, the larger question surrounding Franks is whether he is an aberration or a harbinger. His story, that of an African American who spent a large part of his childhood in overwhelmingly white schools and neighborhoods and who felt accepted by his white friends and classmates, is one that is increasingly common as more blacks join the middle class. The saga of his disenchantment with the Democratic Party, a party to which blacks have given virtually unquestioned loyalty since the mid 1960s, could have been a road map either for the Republicans to make inroads into the black community or for the Democrats to figure out how to hold onto African Americans.

Rather than plunging into the deep pool of ideas and cultural crosscurrents that could be gleaned from Franks's life, a reader who finishes this book will likely feel as if he has crossed an intellectual stream without getting his cuffs damp. Indeed, Franks never gives a well-reasoned answer to the major question of his life and career: Why is he a Republican? Given the fact that he has had no legislative accomplishments since being elected to Congress, Franks's claim to notoriety rests solely on the odd mixture of his race and political affiliation. But beyond serving up a few banal slogans, Franks never gives any real insight as to how this came to be. "Maybe it was those high interest rates, high unemployment and high inflation brought on by the Carter years that pushed me over the brink," he writes of his decision to become a Republican. "But all the blame or the credit should not go to former President Jimmy Carter. The failures of the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson truly deserve acknowledgment as well. The tax-and-spend big government approach of the Democratic Party is simply not appealing to me."

Franks never gives us a clue to the life experiences or intellectual odyssey that led him to these conclusions. What was the epiphany? He has two sisters who are teachers, another who is a guidance counselor at the University of Virginia, and a brother who is a social worker for the state of Connecticut. Yet Franks never tells us how he reconciles his antipathy to "tax and spend" government with his siblings' public sector careers. And beyond decrying welfare, he never spells out just what "failures" of the Great Society he is talking about.

All Franks gives us is that, as a real estate agent in Waterbury in 1983, he walked into the office of Martin and Rowland Insurance to renew his policy, and Republican John Rowland, who would later be elected governor, struck up a conversation.

"`Gary, is it true you're thinking about getting involved in politics?' John asked. "`I guess I've given it some thought,' I said, trying to sound noncommittal. The Waterbury Republicans had just suffered another dismal defeat.... I knew they were looking for new blood." That is virtually the sum total of Franks's explanation as to how he became a Republican. I guess all black Republicans can't be Saul on the road to Damascus.

The book does have a few moments. Franks, who has frequent run-ins with the overwhelmingly Democratic Black Caucus, paints the group as being full of small-minded pols who would rather socially ostracize someone with different ideas than engage him in debate. And Franks's account of how he won his first Republican nomination for Congress at the state party's convention in 1990 is a hoot. It reads like a scene out of Putney Swope, Robert Downey's 1968 classic in which a black is elected chairman of the board of an advertising agency by fellow board members who individually cannot vote for themselves and figure nobody else would vote for a black. In Franks's case, his rivals urged some of their supporters to vote for him in order to ensure one of the other white candidates would end up in last place and not make it to the next round of balloting. Franks kept surviving until only he and a callow 23-year-old political novice were left. The stunned convention then opted for age over color.

"`God did this for us,' my sister Ruthie shouted over the mayhem," Franks writes, completely missing the roles played by racism and inept Machiavellian politics.

But such moments are too few and too devoid of any irony to make this book worthwhile. Perhaps one day Gary Franks will become a serious player on the national scene and write a serious book. So far he has done neither.