The resignation of Robert Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants who rose to the chairmanship of the powerful U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, takes effect at 5 p.m. today, ending a half-century political career that began when he was a teenager and ended in disgrace with his conviction on sixteen counts of federal bribery and conspiracy charges.
Menendez leaves office with job approvals in the single digits; New Jersey voters elected him to the Senate three times, but his indictment last fall caused them to turn on the man now known as “Gold Bar Bob.” Even the name that adorned the Robert Menendez Elementary School in West New York, now PS #3, has been removed.
He is scheduled to be sentenced on October 29 – though sentencing rarely takes place on time – and he has said he plans to appeal his conviction. The 70-year-old senator could spend the remainder of his life in prison, although federal sentencing guidelines will likely and judicial discretion means his actual prison term, if any, remains unknown.
Menendez served as a school board member and mayor in Union City, and represented Hudson County as an assemblyman and state senator. He was elected six times to the U.S. House of Representatives and three times to the U.S. Senate. He’s also a former Hudson County Democratic Chairman.
His 18 years, 7 months, and 4 days in the U.S. Senate makes him the fourth longest-serving senator in New Jersey history.
Menendez will be succeeded by Senator-designate George Helmy, who was chosen by Gov. Phil Murphy as a caretaker until the November election between Democratic Rep. Andy Kim and Republican Curtis Bashaw is certified. Whichever one wins will get to forge their own legacy – but they’ll have to be there for a while to build up the kind of record Menendez has.
While attending St. Peter’s College in 1972, Menendez launched a grassroots organization, Citizens for Community Action, that caused Union City voters to shift from a school board appointed by the mayor to one directly elected by the voters.
Menendez won election to the Union City Board of Education in 1974, taking on incumbent Rev. J. David Muyskens, the pastor of the First Reformed Church of Union City, in a race for a three-year term. He won 4,108 to 2,327, a 64%-36% margin, on a slate backed by State Sen. William Vincent Musto and the local Democratic organization, against one tied to Mayor William Meehan.
The election gave Musto control of the school board and helped him return to the mayoralty a few months later.
Early in his term on the school board, Menendez engineered the firing of the Board of Education secretary, Lawrence Parachini. He assumed the post himself until Musto picked a former city commissioner, John O’Connor, as secretary. Menendez then shifted to a paid post in Musto’s office.
When Musto stood trial on federal racketeering charges in 1982, Menendez turned on his onetime mentor, testified against him – he claims he wore a bulletproof vest to court – and then challenged him in the May non-partisan municipal election.
A judge had ordered Musto removed from the mayor’s office and the State Senate on May 10, the day of his sentencing. One day later, Union City voters re-elected him. The entire five-candidate Musto slate won, and Musto, who ran fourth, outpolled Menendez, who finished eighth, by more than 750 votes.
“This is the real jury,” Musto said of the residents of his hometown.
Four years after that loss, in 1986, Menendez ran again, this time on a unity ticket with Republicans backed by Gov. Tom Kean; also on the ticket were Assemblyman Ronald Dario (R-Union City), Republican Manny Alcobar, Democrat Bruce Walter, and Independent-turned-Democrat-turned-Republican Charles Velli. The GOP ran the campaign and raised most of the money with the understanding that Dario would be mayor if they won.
The Kean-backed slate swept the Union City election, and the triumphant Republicans headed back to Trenton. Dario showed up to be sworn in as mayor on July 1 to find out that Menendez and Walter had convinced Alcobar to support Menendez for Mayor.
Alcobar insisted that the Republicans who ran his campaign never told him that backing Dario for mayor was part of the deal. And the state Republicans who financed the campaign packed up and went home after the May election and never followed up on the commitment to Dario. Dario thought he was going to be mayor and never reconfirmed either.
The next year, now-Mayor Menendez went on to run for the 33rd district Assembly seat that Dario and Assemblyman Jose Arango (R-West New York) had flipped to the GOP in 1985. Alongside Bernard Kenny, Menendez won easily, defeating Arango and new GOP candidate Angelo Valente (Dario ran for the State Senate that year instead) by more than six thousand votes each.
After being re-elected in 1989, Menendez was appointed to the State Senate in 1991 following the death of the late State Sen. Christopher Jacksman (D-West New York) and was easily re-elected for a full term that November. Throughout his legislative career, Menendez also remained the mayor of Union City, since dual officeholding was still more than a decade away from being outlawed.
In 1992, congressional redistricting gave Menendez the chance to move up further. The state’s new map redrew Rep. Frank Guarini (D-Jersey City)’s 13th district to include a substantial number of Hispanic voters in North Hudson that had previously been in a Bergen County-based district, and added parts of Newark, Linden, Elizabeth, Woodbridge and Perth Amboy. Guarini declined to run for re-election rather than face a primary against Menendez, who had been eyeing a run for Congress.
Once Menendez had secured the Democratic organization lines to run in Guarini’s district, his election was likely but not automatic. Henry Martinez, a five-term Newark East Ward city councilman, had mulled a House bid. So did Guarini’s chief of staff, Nidia Davila-Colon, who later wound up as a Hudson County Freeholder, and Brian Connor, an ally of then-Elizabeth Mayor Thomas Dunn.
Menendez ended up facing Robert Haney, a 35-year-old activist and Harvard Law graduate who had won 20% against Guarini in the 1988 Democratic primary.
Against Menendez, Haney scored endorsements from Acting Jersey City Mayor Marilyn Roman and City Councilman Jaime Vasquez, allies of removed Mayor Gerald McCann. Among other things, they opposed Jersey City giving up a House seat.
Menendez crushed Haney in the primary by a 2-1, 12,836-vote margin. He took 66% in Hudson, 79% in Essex, 81% in Union and 66% in Middlesex for an overall win of 68%-32%.
In the general election, Menendez defeated Republican Fred Theemling, Jr. by a 64%-31% margin. Theemling, who had challenged Guarini in 1988 and 1990, later became Hudson County Prosecutor under Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and served as a Superior Court Judge.
Menendez was re-elected to the House six times; in his last race, he defeated a young Marine Corps veteran named Steve Fulop in the Democratic primary with 87% of the vote.
In 2000, House Minority Whip David Bonior publicly suggested that Al Gore pick Menendez, then a four-term congressman, as his vice presidential candidate.
“Mr. Bonior feels Congressman Menendez should be someone considered on the shortlist,” Fred Clark, a spokesman for Bonior, told PoliticsNJ in March 2000, after Bonior met with Gore. “He can do a lot toward winning states like Florida, New Jersey, and California.”
The Menendez-for-VP speculation made waves in Menendez’s home territory, where Miguel Perez, then a Bergen Record columnist, recounted what one elderly Cuban-American told him at a local restaurant.
“Can you imagine Menendez as vice president?” the man asked. “If the American people elected a Cuban vice president, the dictatorship would be over because Fidel would die of a heart attack.”
Menendez never made it past the speculation phase, and Gore ended up choosing Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman. George W. Bush carried Florida by 537 votes that year; if Menendez had been on the ticket, could it have been enough to flip 269 Cuban American votes away from Bush and change the results of the presidential election?
Menendez had won the House Democratic Caucus’s vice chairmanship in 1998 when Barbara Kennelly left to run for governor of Connecticut. And after the 2002 elections, he was ready to move another step up in the ranks of the House leadership, perhaps with a shot at someday becoming Speaker.
With House Democratic Caucus Chair Martin Frost – the third-ranking House Democrat – term-limited out of his post that year, Menendez ran against Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) to succeed him. Menendez ended up winning by just one vote, 104 to 103, and one of Menendez’s supporters didn’t even end up becoming a congressman; Colorado’s Mike Feeley was allowed to cast a vote in the election because his race was still too close to call at the time, but he ultimately lost to Republican Bob Beauprez by 121 votes.
That victory put Menendez on a trajectory to become House Majority Whip when Democrats took control of the House in 2006.
But the election of Jon Corzine as governor in 2005 provided Menendez with another opportunity. Corzine appointed Menendez to fill his own vacant seat in the United States Senate, an event that did not occur without considerable political prowess; Reps. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch), Rush Holt (D-Hopewell), and Rob Andrews (D-Haddon Heights) had all sought the appointment as well.
Menendez went on to face State Sen. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) in the November 2006 election for a full term, a race that proved to be more competitive than may have been expected.
In September, with the race tightening, word leaked that then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie was looking at a rental agreement on a house Menendez owned in Union City to a non-profit agency that received federal funding. Some Democrats said that Christie pushed the probe to help the Republicans – not that the former governor would ever do something like that – and in the end, nothing ever came of it, but it did cast a cloud over Menendez.
A Quinnipiac poll released on October 12, 2006, had Menendez in a statistical dead heat, leading Kean just 49%-45%. George W. Bush, in the sixth year of his presidency, was upside down in New Jersey – 38%-57%.
Menendez won the race by nine points, 53%-44%.
That ended up being the closest Senate general election Menendez ever faced. In 2012, the senator went up against State Sen. Joe Kyrillos (R-Middletown) and won in a 59%-39% landslide, the largest margin for a U.S. Senate seat in New Jersey since Bill Bradley’s 1984 re-election campaign.
In 2015, Menendez was indicted on corruption charges alleging that the senator had done political favors for Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen in exchange for vacations, campaign donations, and other gifts. Menendez insisted on his innocence – and the vast majority of New Jersey Democrats stuck with him, too.
The case dragged on for several years, finally coming to trial in the fall of 2017; at the trial, Menendez’s fellow senators Cory Booker and Lindsey Graham both vouched for his integrity. In November 2017, the case ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked, and prosecutors decided not to retry Menendez.
That resolution theoretically gave Menendez a clean legal bill of health, but his reputation was damaged in the eyes of many New Jersey voters. When he ran for re-election in 2018, he successfully scared off any formidable Democratic primary challengers, but one gadflyish candidate who did run, Lisa McCormick, held him to just a 62%-38% primary win.
After winning the primary, Menendez went on to face Republican Bob Hugin, a businessman who pumped tens of millions of dollars of his own money into the race.
Hugin, who attempted to cast himself as a reasonable moderate and Menendez as a self-serving crook, kept the race competitive, with some national Democrats genuinely worried about whether Menendez would blow up their chances of retaking the Senate. The blue wave year of 2018, though, proved more than enough to buoy Menendez to a 54%-43% win.
In the Senate, meanwhile, Menendez had moved up the ranks. He became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the first time in 2013, and was shifted to ranking member in 2015 when Republicans retook the Senate; he had to give up his spot when he was first indicted thanks to Democratic committee rules, but he took it back in 2018 and became chairman again in 2021.
That all came crashing down, however, when another federal indictment against him was unsealed last fall. Once again, he professed his innocence, but his fellow Democrats abandoned him en masse this time – and the rest is history.