Harrison A. Williams, Jr., the last United States Senator from New Jersey to go to prison, was a World War II veteran. His brother, Lamson Paul Williams, was killed in combat in action in Korea at age 23.
Lamson Williams was a Marine private when he was killed in hostile shell fragments at Changwa Dong on May 28, 1952. His death exposed a hole in a New Jersey law that permitted soldiers to execute unwitnessed, handwritten wills while at war; his will was rejected by a judge who ruled that the state law affecting soldiers during wartime didn’t apply to Korean War veterans because it was a police action. Williams’ parents gave their son’s estate to his 21-year-old widow anyway.
Harrison Williams was attending graduate school at Georgetown University and was a Naval reservist when he was called to active duty in 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He became a Navy aviator and flight instructor and served for 47 months.
After his discharge in late 1945, Williams went to Columbia University law school. After unsuccessful
In August 1953, Rep. Clifford Case (R-Rahway) resigned from Congress to take a new job as president of The Fund for the Republic, a 1950s think tank funded by the Ford Foundation formed to protect free speech in the aftermath of McCarthyism.
Gov. Alfred Driscoll decided to hold the special election for Case’s Union County congressional seat on the same day as the 1953 gubernatorial election. There would be no primary; county committee members from both parties selected the nominee.
At that point, New Jersey Turnpike Authority Chairman Paul Troast had a strong lead over Democrat Robert Meyner (D-Phillipsburg), a former State Senate minority leader, and Republicans felt they would hold Case’s seat.
Republicans nominated George Hetfield, a former Plainfield City Council President whose father and brother were both judges in Union County. At the county GOP convention, Hetfield defeated former Westfield Councilman Horace Baker by just ten votes, 143 to 133. Two other potential GOP candidates, former Westfield Mayor Charles Bailey and Shepard, withdrew.
The Democratic nomination went without opposition to Williams, then 33, who had already lost races for the State Assembly in 1951 (by over 20,000 votes) and Plainfield City Council in 1952 (he lost the staunchly Republican Second Ward race to incumbent Allen Tompkins by more than 5,800.)
Meyner beat Troast in Union County by 14,171 after the Republican gubernatorial campaign wound up tanking. That helped Williams, who turned out to be a strong campaigner, beat Hetfield by a narrow 2,075-vote margin, 50.8% to 49.2%. The Democratic National Committee took a pass on funding Williams, saying they didn’t invest in unwinnable races.
Republicans targeted Williams for defeat in 1954, Eisenhower’s mid-term election, but couldn’t settle on a candidate.
Seven Republicans sought the nomination: Shepard, who had just completed a four-year stint in the State Assembly; Baker; Union County GOP Chairman Francis Lowden, a former mayor of Roselle; Guy Gabrielson, Jr., a young attorney and Air Force veteran from Summit whose father had served as Assembly Speaker and, from 1949 to 1952 as Republican National Chairman; former newspaper reporter Robert Walsh; Raymond Matthews, a GOP county committeeman from Summit; and Fred Haley, a parole supervisor from Fanwood.
The GOP primary was divisive – and close.
In an election that went to a recount, Shepard defeated Lowden by just 97 votes, 22.22% to 21.98%.
Gabrielson finished third with 18, followed by Baker (16%), Walsh (12%), Matthews (6%) and Haley (4%).
Case returned to electoral politics in 1954 as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate – GOP incumbent Robert Hendrickson was retiring — and carried Union County by 22,714 votes against Rep. Charles Howell (D-Pennington).
Statewide, Case beat Howell by just 3,370 votes in a contest where conservative Republicans cast 7,025 write-in ballots for conservative former Rep. Fred Hartley (R-Kearny), the sponsor of the Taft-Hartley Act and a congressman from 1929 to 1949.
But Shepard was never able to fully unite Union County Republicans behind his candidacy, and Williams was re-elected by 21,620 votes, 56% to 42%.
In 1956, with popular President Dwight Eisenhower heading the GOP ticket, Republicans were again optimistic about their chances to oust Williams.
But first, they had to get through a Republican primary.
The organization’s choice was Assemblywoman Florence Dwyer (R-Elizabeth), who had won four countywide elections in Union County, including her 1951 victory over Williams.
Former Assemblywoman Irene Griffin (R-Westfield) challenged Dwyer in the Republican primary. It was the first key primary fight between two women candidates in New Jersey history; another like this would not occur until Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) and Linda Greenstein sought another Central Jersey seat in 2014.
Griffin was the first woman to represent Union County in the State Assembly when she won the seat Case gave up in 1944 to run for Congress. In the GOP primary, she placed fourth out of fourteen candidates for four seats.
In 1946, she didn’t run for re-election – until 1949, the State Assembly had one-year terms. Griffin tried to become the first woman in the New Jersey State Senate in 1947 when Herbert Pascoe (R-Elizabeth) stepped down but lost the GOP nod to Kenneth Hand.
Griffin challenged incumbent Assemblywoman Florence Dwyer (R-Elizabeth) in the 1951 GOP primary, but lost.
Dwyer won the congressional primary by a 2-1 margin, 67% to 33%.
Eisenhower carried Union County over Adlai Stevenson by 78,688 votes with plenty of coattails.
Dwyer unseated Williams by 4,399 votes, 50.6% to 48.5%.
She became the second woman — and first Republican woman — to represent New Jersey in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Williams left Congress in January 1957, but he was back two years later as a U.S. Senator.
Meyner had won an unexpectedly big re-election victory in 1957, and H. Alexander Smith, the incumbent U.S. Senator, decided to retire in 1958. In Eisenhower’s second mid-term election, Democrats were bullish about their chances of picking up the seat.
Williams had been campaigning for the Senate before he lost to Dwyer, but there was no shortage of interested candidates.
At the top of the list was Howell, Case’s 1954 opponent and now Meyner’s Commissioner of Banking and Insurance. Reps. Peter Rodino (D-Newark), Hugh Addonizio (D-Newark), and Frank Thompson (D-Trenton) were all interested in running. So were State Sens. John Waddington (D-Salem), James Murray (D-Jersey City)
Also on the list: New Jersey Highway Authority Chair Katharine White; Secretary of State Edward Patten; Attorney General Grover Richman; former State Treasurer Archibald Alexander; Mercer County Democratic Chairman Thorn Lord; New York Stock Exchange President James Kellogg; and industrialist Charles Engelhard.
By March, Democratic county leaders – led by Middlesex Democratic boss David Wilentz – met behind closed doors and agreed on Williams. Only Hudson County didn’t attend the meeting.
In the Democratic primary, he defeated Hoboken Mayor John J. Grogan by 12,808 votes, 43.1% to 39.56%, with former state Commissioner of Conservation and Economic Development (now the Department of Environmental Protection) Joseph McLean finishing third with 17%. (McLean had managed Meyner’s 1953 campaign for governor.)
Grogan carried only Hudson, Camden, Atlantic, and Hunterdon counties.
1958 was a Democratic year nationally – they picked up 15 U.S. Senate seats and 49 House seats – and Williams was part of that wave.
He defeated 10-term Rep. Robert W. Kean (R-Livingston), the father of future Gov. Thomas Kean, by 84,545 votes, 51% to 47%.
Williams was re-elected with 62% against Bernard M. Shanley, who had served as appointments Secretary in Dwight Eisenhower’s White House, and with 54% against Republican State Chairman Nelson Gross in 1970. He won his last term in 1976 with 61% against David Norcross, the former executive director of the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission.
He was serving as chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee in 1980 when he was indicted on federal bribery and conspiracy charges related to the ABSCAM scandal
Undercover FBI agents posed as Arab sheiks in a sting operation that led to the convictions of Williams, six congressmen – including 13-term New Jersey Rep. Frank Thompson, Jr. (D-Trenton) – and others, including State Sen. Angelo Errichetti, the mayor of Camden.
The senator’s friends claimed he got into trouble because his second wife, Jeanette, his former Senate staffer, had lofty ambitions and lavish tastes he could not afford.
In 1981, after nearly 28 hours of deliberation, a jury believed the Justice Department’s allegation that Williams and Alexander Feinberg, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and 1958 Democratic congressional candidate, received an 18% share in a Virginia titanium mine in exchange for the senator’s help in obtaining military contracts. The mine was to be resold with a profit of $12.6 million for Williams.
After his conviction, Williams refused to resign and remained in the Senate for more than ten months; he left in March 1982, only after it became clear that his colleagues were preparing to expel him.
The former U.S. Senator died in 2001 and is buried near his brother, Lamson, in a family plot at the Hillside Cemetery in Scotch Plains.