Joseph Minish

PolitickerNJ.com was deeply saddened by the death of Dr. David Rebovich, a prominent, popular and powerful political science professor at Rider University, and the Director of the Rider University Institute for New Jersey Politics, on October 12 . He was among the very best that New Jersey had to offer and it was our considerable honor to run his weekly column for the last six years. We miss him.

Among the favorites of the New Jersey political community who passed away in 2007: Fort Lee Mayor Jack Alter; former State Senator Byron Baer; former Assemblyman Neil Duffy; former Senate President Wesley Lance; former Burlington County Democratic Chairman George Lee; former State Sen. Alexander Menza, a candidate for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in 1978; former Bergen County Executive William McDowell; former Plainfield Mayor Albert McWilliams; former Rep. Joseph Minish; former Assemblywoman Angela Perun; Central New Jersey radio personality and former NJSEA spokesman for Bernard Spigner; political strategist Greg Stevens, who served as Chief of Staff to Gov. Thomas Kean former Public Advocate Stanley Van Ness; former Assemblyman Harold Pareti; former State Senator Richard Van Wagner; former Wayne Mayor/Superior Court Judge David Waks; and George Warrington, the former Executive Director of New Jersey Transit and the former President of Amtrak.

Joseph Minish, who passed away on Saturday at age 91, may be one of the top vote-getters in Essex County history.  He won eleven races for Congress without ever falling below 58% in a district that was potentially competitive for Republicans. 

When Minish first won in 1962, the eleventh district included the Central and West Wards of Newark and suburban (sometimes Republican-leaning) Essex town.  By 1972, Newark was entirely out of his district, and his district included working class (and politically competitive) towns like Belleville, Bloomfield, West Orange, Montclair Hillside, North Arlington and Little Falls, Republican strongholds like the Maplewood and the Caldwells.

Republican presidential candidates carried the eleventh district in four successive elections: Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter by a 50%-40% margin in 1980, Gerald Ford carried it 54%-46% in 1976, Richard Nixon won it 60%-40% over George McGovern in 1972 and by 166 votes over Hubert Humphrey in 1968.  But Reagan, Ford and Nixon had no coattails for Minish’s GOP opponents.

The death of Joseph Minish on Saturday leaves New Jersey with eighteen living former U.S. Congressmen:

*Peter Frelinghuysen, the 91-year-old father of Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen, who won an open seat in 1952 and served until his retirement in 1973. He lives in Morristown.  He is New Jersey's oldest living former Congressman.

Two longtime members of the New Jersey Congressional delegations will celebrate birthdays on September 1: Joseph Minish, an Essex County Democrat who served in Congress from 1963 to 1985, will celebrate his 90th birthday, while Matthew Rinaldo, a Union County Republican who was a Congressman from 1973 to 1993, turns 75.

When seven-term incumbent Hugh Addonizio gave up his House seat to run for Mayor of Newark in 1962, Essex Democrats picked Minish, the 46-year-old Executive Secretary of the Essex-West Hudson AFL-CIO, to replace him. Minish defeated Republican David Wiener, the Essex County Surrogate, by a wide margin, and spent 22 years in Washington.

Minish won re-election ten times by comfortable margins. His toughest races came in 1970, when he faced millionaire developer James Shue (the father of actors Elizabeth and Andrew Shue), and against State Senator Milton Walder in 1972. He lost his seat in 1984, after a panel of Federal Judges overturned the '82 redistricting map and put Minish in a disrict that included most of Morris County. He was defeated by Dean Gallo, the Assembly Minority Leader.

Rinaldo went to Congress in 1972 when Republican Florence Dwyer retired after sixteen years in office. (She had defeated incumbent Harrison Williams in 1956; Williams ran for the U.S. Senate in 1958 and defeated Robert Kean, a Republican Congressman from Essex County and the grandfather of the current U.S. Senate candidate.) Rinaldo, a 41-year-old State Senator and former Union County Freeholder, narrowly edged out State Senator (and former gubernatorial candidate) Frank McDermott and Assemblyman Charles Irwin for the GOP nomination, and then defeated former State Senator Jerry English (who later served in Governor Brendan Byrne's cabinet) in the General Election. Rinaldo dropped his bid for re-election to an eleventh term in September 1992, presumably to take advantage of a law that allowed federal candidates to personally keep unsused campaign funds if they retired by the end of 1992. Rinaldo walked away with over $900,000.

Rinaldo's only tough re-election campaign came in 1982, when Adam Levin, the son of a wealthy real estate developer and the state Consumer Affairs Director in the Byrne Administration, spent more than $2.3 million to defeat him. Those were the days when the Legislature (controlled by Democrats) drew congressional districts, and Levin gave a huge amount of money to Democratic legislative candidates in the 1981 election. The new district, shaped like a fish hook, went from Union County down through Middlesex County and picked up some Democratic towns in northern Monmouth County.

Minish splits his time between New Jersey and Florida. Sadly, Rinaldo has been in poor health for the last few years and lives in a nursing home in West Caldwell.

New Jersey's oldest living former Congressman is Peter Frelinghuysen, who turned 90 in January. The father of Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen, he represented New Jersey in the House from 1953 to 1975.