Frelinghuysen, New Jersey's oldest living Congresman, turns 92 today

Peter Frelinghuysen served in Congress from 1953 to 1975Peter H.B. Frelinghuysen, who represented New Jersey in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1953 to 1975, celebrates his 92nd birthday today. He is New Jersey’s oldest living former Congressman, and the tenth oldest in the nation. He is one of just ten living members of the House freshman Class of 1952 – which included current U.S. Senator Robert Byrd; there is no living Member of Congress whose service predates Frelinghuysen’s.

Helped by Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, Democrats picked up 36 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, giving them more than two-thirds of the House seats. After that election, a group of moderates challenged challenged conservatives for the top two House Republican leadership posts. Minority Leader Charles Halleck, 64, a sixteen-term Indiana conservative, lost to moderate Gerald Ford, a nine-term moderate from Michigan.

Ford then backed a fellow moderate for Minority Whip against the conservative incumbent, Leslie Arends: Frelinghusyen, then a 48-year-old seven-termer. Arends, who first went to Congress in 1935, beat Frelinghuysen in a 70-59 vote. Arends then used his clout to deny a seat on the House Appropriations Committee to a fellow Illinois Congressman who had been the chief strategist of the Ford/Frelinghuysen campaign: Donald Rumsfeld, then 32 and about to begin his second term in Congress.

Frelinghuysen is the father of Rodney Frelinghuysen, who has served in Congress since 1995. He is the great-grandson of Frederick T. Frelinghuysen, who served as a U.S. Senator in the 1860’s and 1870’s and was Chester Arthur’s Secretary of State, and the great-great-great-grandson of Frederick Frelinghuysen, a member of the Continental Congress and a U.S. Senator from 1793 to 1796.

From the PolitickerNJ.com archives:  Brian Murphy talked to Peter Frelinghuysen on June 17, 2002 -- the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in:

"He was a goner."

That was how former Rep. Rep. Peter H.B. Frelinghuysen (R-Morristown), described Richard M. Nixon on the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in -- a scandal that rocked the nation and led to the resignation of the President.

Several former New Jersey elected officials of that era recalled the effect of Watergate on politics in this state and across the nation.  The scandal helped New Jersey Democrats easily win the race for Governor, pick up fourteen State Senate seats and 25 Assembly seats in the 1973 election.  Four Republican Congressmen lost their seats in 1974

Had impeachment articles been presented to the House for a vote, Frelinghuysen would have supported them, he said on Monday. "It seemed a very minor haphazard, casual and amateurish kind of move," the 86-year-old Frelinghuysen said of the Watergate Hotel break-in. "It didn't ruffle the surface that something major had happened."

"There was no awareness that anything consequential happened with the break-in," said Frelinghuysen, who served in Congress from 1953 to 1975,  "but it didn't turn out that way, and could have been avoided if Nixon and his people had just fessed up and said what they were up to."

Frelinghuysen, the father of Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, said that Nixon's impeachment was a sure thing.  "There is no question that we would have impeached him," Frelinghuysen said. "It wasn't just Barry Goldwater saying that it was obvious that was the only appropriate action to take, no alternative, no matter how loyal we were to party or to him. His actions were hopelessly damaging and unnecessary, and it mystifies me why people get into those positions and fail."

"His resignation was imminent by 1974. Impeachment would have been worse. If only he realized what he was doing or not doing he could have saved himself. Nixon's move to China was daring, yet he threw his legacy and his place in history away. He was obviously lying and covering up, trying to protect own flanks and putting himself in an impossible position," Frelinghuysen continued. "I've been reading Theodore Rex now, about how Teddy Roosevelt was a strong president, and I've been telling Rodney he should read it," said the former Congressman, now 86.

The former Congressman says he was never impressed by Nixon.  Frelinghuysen described a meeting in 1968 at the Republican National Convention in Miami. "I was on the platform committee and working on what a plank should say about Vietnam," he said.  "Nixon came to the delegation and was slapping us on the back, and I said to somebody that I thought he was nothing but a second-rater, he was slapping everybody and shaking hands and you could tell he didn't mean any of it."

"I voted against Spiro Agnew to be the vice-presidential nominee, even though it was a foregone conclusion, and afterward Agnew came up to me and asked me why I voted against him and I told him I could think of more appropriate nominees. Then we all learned that he really was second-rate." The former Congressman also said that Hubert Humphrey was one of the brightest public servants he had encountered, even though "he never stopped talking."

Additionally (history buffs take note) Frelinghuysen's family occupies a unique, perhaps unparalleled, role in presidential battles with the legislative branch. Rodney Frelinghuysen voted to impeach President Bill Clinton, Peter Frelinghuysen, nearly voted to impeach Richard Nixon. Peter's great-grandfather voted for a Congressional censure of President Andrew Johnson; his father voted to censure President Andrew Jackson.  And "General Fred" Frelinghuysen fought at the battles of Princeton and Trenton during the Revolution, led troops to the Whiskey Rebellion, and served in the provincial congress, the Continental Congress, and represented New Jersey in the United States Senate when the national capitol was still located in New York City.

This, not to mention that Peter attended law school alongside Gerald Ford, while his father graduated from Columbia Law School with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Despite this remarkable and well-documented legacy, Peter said with a laugh, "I suspect the women in the family were more interesting. They just didn't leave any records behind."

Just as Peter Frelinghuysen was leaving the House of Representatives, future Governor Jim Florio was entering the Congress.

"I was in the Watergate baby class that went to Congress," Florio said, recalling his 1974 election. "I lost a race two years earlier, but my opponent, [four-term Rep.] John Hunt, said in August of 1974 that Watergate was the work of overzealous patriots."

Florio said that Hunt's remark carried a "minor degree of insensitivity" to the severity of Nixon's role in Watergate. "In 1972, the break-in was a small article in the back pages of the newspaper, and [Democratic presidential candidate] George McGovern tried to make something of it but didn't," said Florio, who served in the House from 1975 until he resigned to become Governor in 1990.

Despite Nixon's resignation, Florio said, it wasn't clear that "it would be a Democratic year. I could tell something was happening and it turned out to be one of the biggest victories the party ever had."

"I won the 1st Congressional District after it had been Republican for 102 years," Florio recalled, "and I won by a good margin."

Monmouth County Republican Chairman Bill Dowd was less sanguine about the results of the Watergate break-in. A former Nixon White House aide, he ran for Congress in 1970 and 1972, losing narrowly, but didn't bother running in 1974.

"This was a painful thing for all Republicans," Dowd said. "The more one learned about Nixon as the years went on the less attractive he was. Nixon dug his own hole and fell into it. He got caught, and there was indeed some paranoia about him. It was sort of like finding out that a close member of family you always liked and respected was indicted for a horrible crime. The evidence was clear and you had to adjust to it."

Dowd downplayed his own importance in the Nixon White House.  "I was a glorified gopher" in the White House from 1969 to 1970, Dowd said. "I worked on minor things like Thanksgiving messages, with Len Garment, who later went to jail."

"When the break-in happened, I was running against Jim Howard for Congress and Nixon had come up to campaign for me.  There was one day I had been campaigning all day and was at a beach club in Sea Bright, when my campaign manager called me with news of the break-in. He said, 'I have three words for you: Nixon did it' and we laughed uproariously, never imagining it was true."

Dowd said he believes "there was little Nixon was accused of doing that was not done by other presidents, but there was a double standard among Democrats and the elites."

Still, Dowd concedes, "once they found the tapes and the missing 18 minutes it was a smoking gun and too much to survive."

Dowd last saw his former boss, Nixon, "about ten years ago at a meeting of the New York Economic Club."

"I was the guest of a bank trying to do business in Monmouth County, and they threw a party before the dinner. I was waiting in an elevator bank when Nixon came out of an elevator alongside me. He looked at me, and said, 'Bill! How's everything in Spring Lake?' and put his arm around me and walked for a few minutes."

"I had a glow on me for twenty days," Dowd said.

Anne Clark Martindell, who was working on the McGovern campaign in 1972, recalled on Monday that, "we thought Nixon was behind it, but how could we prove it?" Martindell was elected to the New Jersey State Senate in 1973, unseating Republican incumbent Bill Schluter, and later served as Jimmy Carter's Ambassador to New Zealand.

Martindell attributed her election to the Watergate scandal.  "It was clearly because of the firing of Archibald Cox," she said, referring to the famous Saturday Night Massacre when Nixon fired the special prosecutor investigating Watergate.

"People were coming up to me, saying they hadn't voted Democratic before, but that they'd vote for me."

Martindell said the post-Watergate era was a time of great change.  "When I was elected there were only thirty-seven women serving in State Senates across the nation.  so many advances have been made."

Former Democratic State Chairman Richard J. Coffee, who served in the State Senate from 1968 to 1972 and briefly sought the 1973 Democratic nomination for Governor, recalled being Mercer County's Democratic chairman in 1972. "I thought we were heading down a long path," Coffee said, recalling the break-in. "I told somebody I thought it was the beginning of something large."