There was a time when Bergen County Republicans viewed Henry P. McNamara as a potential all-star, but the Ford dealer from Wyckoff ultimately played a significant role in allowing Democrats to flip control of county government, perhaps forever.
After seventeen years in the New Jersey State Senate, the 67-year-old McNamara was the early front-runner to become county executive in 2002 after Republican Pat Schuber declined to seek a fourth term, and it was a job he wanted badly. He suffered the consequences of over-confidence; he didn’t campaign aggressively, missed fundraising opportunities, and never felt obligated to articulate his own plan to run county government. Frankly, he blew the election.
McNamara’s complacency came at a time when Bergen County Democratic Chairman Joseph Ferriero began to surge. Ferriero raised plenty of money, went up on New York broadcast TV, and cultivated valuable informants within McNamara’s inner circle.
McNamara lost to Democrat Dennis McNerney by 10,259 votes, a 53%-47% margin.
Another big part of McNamara’s legacy: he helped kill a plan to bring the New York Yankees to New Jersey. Gov. Thomas Kean proposed a 45,000-seat baseball stadium in the Meadowlands, but McNamara played a large role in causing voters to reject a $185 million bond issue in the 1987 election.
McNamara entered politics in 1970 as a candidate for the Wyckoff Township Committee. In a solidly Republican town, the real race was in the GOP primary. An off-the-line slate of Republicans, Daniel O’Connell, and Gerald Van Decker, running on “The Organization of Wyckoff Neighborhoods” ticket, beat McNamara and his running mate, William DeGise, by a 2-1 margin.
Later that year, McNamara was given a consolation prize and was appointed to a zoning board seat after William Hogan resigned. In 1972, Gov. William Cahill put McNamara in charge of the Wyckoff motor vehicle agency.
In 1976, McNamara made a second bid for a township committee seat, teaming up with O’Connell. They faced Jacob Van Der Eeems, a former GOP municipal chairman. Van Der Eems, running off the line, was the top vote-getter, running about 100 votes in front of McNamara; O’Connell ran about 250 votes behind McNamara and attributed his loss to a belief that McNamara cut him at the polls to secure the second seat. He won the general election by a 2-1 margin.
In early 1977, he immediately raised his profile with Bergen Republicans when he filed a lawsuit seeking the ouster of Senate President Matthew Feldman (D-Teaneck).
Feldman pleaded guilty in federal court to paying bribes to a restaurant chain employee to obtain an exclusive contract for his wholesale liquor business in 1976. U.S. District Court Judge Frederick Lacey fined him $6,000 on a misdemeanor charge that did not include a prison sentence. (At the same time, Lacey was also mulling a bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.)
Later, the New Jersey Office of Legislative Services issued an opinion that the crime did not involve moral turpitude, allowing Feldman to remain in the Senate. Feldman had insisted that the cash was a rebate, not a payoff, and the Democratic majority in the Senate re-elected him to his leadership post.
McNamara alleged that Feldman was guilty of moral turpitude and should be forced to give up his Senate seat. A Superior Court judge ruled that he didn’t have the jurisdiction to make such a ruling.
He became mayor of Wyckoff in 1979, and later that year faced a challenge in the Republican primary from Bob Yudin, who would later serve as Bergen County GOP chairman. McNamara and Van Der Eems won.
(As a 26-year-old U.S. Navy veteran from Belleville in 1965, Yudin mounted a campaign for a State Assembly seat in an era when Essex County had nine lower house seats elected at-large. With Gov. Richard J. Hughes carrying Essex with 61% of the vote over State Sen. Wayne Dumont, Jr., Democrats swept all nine seats. Four Republican incumbents lost re-election that year, and Yudin finished 16th in a field of 28 candidates with 108,416 votes, just 35 behind Assemblyman William Everett.)
McNamara and Van Der Eems were unopposed in the 1982 GOP primary.
Democrats controlled county government from 1974 to 1980, but lost it when the GOP won two of three seats in 1980; Democrat Doris Mahalick was re-elected despite Ronald Reagan’s 89,000-vote plurality in Bergen County. In 1982, Democrats swept three seats, reducing the GOP majority to 5-4.
With control at stake, McNamara sought one of three seats on the Bergen County Board of Freeholders in 1983.
Incumbent Robert Pallotta was seeking re-election, but another, Archie Hay, declined to seek a second term. Midland Park Councilman Clarence Knyfd, the son-in-law of State Sen. Garrett Hagedorn (R-Midland Park) entered the race, along with Lyndhurst Commissioner Ronald Bogle, Hackensack Mayor (and former freeholder) Fred Cerbo, former Emerson Councilwoman Barbara Hall, Mahwah Mayor Fred Kent, former Paramus Councilwoman Blache Patchett, and Paramus Councilman Theodore D’Uva.
Bergen County GOP Chairman John Inganamort backed Pallotta, Bogle, and McNamara at the party’s convention. Pallotta finished first with 489 votes, followed by McNamara (396) and Bogle (322). Cerbo finished fourth with 259, and D’Uva received 118; the others dropped out.
The stakes became higher in July when Hay died, leaving the freeholder board split at 4-4.
Democrats a special election to fill the final two months of Hays’ term – former Paramus Mayor (and Superior Court Judge) Fred Galda defeated former State Sen. Joseph Woodcock (R-Cliffside Park). Galda and Woodcock were former Bergen County Prosecutors. That gave Democrats control.
And Democrats held their majority after picking up a seat for the full term. Mahalick won by a wide margin, with McNamara – the lone Republican winner – finishing about 1,500 votes ahead of the second Democrat winner, Paramus Councilman Alan Sklar. Pallotta lost his seat by roughly 3,000 votes.
The 74-year-old Hagedorn, a former Senate Minority Leader, died on August 9, 1985, of a stroke while vacationing in Maine, leaving his seat open for the first time since 1967.
A few years before New Jersey ended the practice of free-standing special elections to fill vacancies in place of a system where committee members of the party that last won the seat select a replacement, Hagedorn’s death triggered a November 1985 special election in the heavily 40th Republican district.
McNamara launched his campaign before Hagedorn’s body arrived back in New Jersey.
Other potential candidates included Assemblymen Walter Kern (R-Ridgewood) and Nicholas Felice (R-Fair Lawn), Republican State Committeewoman Eleonore Nissley, Bergen County Superintendent of Elections Joan Steinacker, and Franklin Lakes Mayor Bill Vichiconti. There was some speculation that Kean’s chief counsel, Cary Edwards (R-Oakland), would run, but Kean was a sure bet for re-election, and Edwards knew he would likely be the next attorney general.
At a special convention on August 31, McNamara edged out Kern by three votes, 64-61, on the first ballot, with Felice receiving 47 votes. The second ballot gave McNamara a 100-70 victory.
He coasted to easy general election wins for the duration of his career but faced a couple of primaries.
McNamara frequently fought with another Republican senator from Bergen County, Gerald Cardinale (R-Demarest). The two battled over the Bergen County prosecutor’s seat after Christine Todd Whitman became governor in 1994; McNamara’s candidate, Robert Murray, the brother of Whitman’s campaign manager, wound up not getting the job after Cardinale outwitted his Senate colleague for over a year.
One year after losing the county executive race, McNamara insisted on running again for the Senate, and he never quite got over his defeat. His last four years in the Senate were tired; PoliticsNJ political cartoonist Rob Tornoe depicted McNamara on oxygen being spoon-fed tapioca pudding. That was a win for Cardinale, who preceded McNamara in the Senate by four years and outlasted him by fourteen.
After abruptly announcing his retirement from the Senate in 2007 – two weeks before the filing deadline and after already sending out two mailers — McNamara backed former Bergen County Freeholder Todd Caliguire to replace him.
Six-term Assemblyman Kevin O’Toole (R-Cedar Grove) beat Caliguire by 13 points, even carrying the Bergen County portion of the 40th legislative district while running off-the-line in a race for an open State Senate seat.
He died in 2018 at age 83, and is remembered fondly by some but clearly not by all. Unlike his predecessor, he never had a psychiatric hospital named for him.