Frank Lautenberg was 58 years old and fabulously wealthy when he first ran for the U.S. Senate. Until then, his chief political activity had been bankrolling the campaigns of liberal politicians; his $90,000 donation in 1972 to George McGovern put him on President Richard Nixon’s enemy list. “If I’m willing to support them,” he said as he took up his own campaign in 1982, “why shouldn’t I support myself?” He won and went on to become a consistently liberal voice in the Senate for most of the next 30 years.
Lautenberg “learned to be scrappy in Paterson,” where he was born as the eldest son of poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, said the Bergen County, N.J., Record. He served in Europe with the Army Signal Corps, then graduated from Columbia University on the GI Bill. In the early 1950s, Lautenberg joined a tiny payroll-servicing company started by two brothers from Paterson. “There’s no end to what can be accomplished if you work like the devil,” Lautenberg later said, explaining how ADP grew into a $10 billion company, which he headed as CEO.
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