Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,208
By This is the grave of Harrison Williams.
Born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1919, Pete Williams grew up pretty well and went to Oberlin, graduating in 1941. Williams’ father was a Republican, which would not be passed down to the son. His father ran a burial vault company, which as you can see was a choice that was also not passed to young Pete. After Oberlin, he went to Georgetown for training in the foreign service. Of course World War II called. He was already in the Naval Reserve so he was called up and ended up being a lieutenant, working as a naval aviator and flight instructor. After the war, he got a job in the steel industry for little while, giving up on the foreign service. He was just a rank and file guy in this job, figuring out what he wanted to do. He was a good member of the United Steel Worker while he was at it. Eventually, he decided law school was the answer to what he wanted to do. He went to Columbia Law and finished in 1948. He moved to New Hampshire, passed the bar, and started practicing.
But what Williams really wanted was not the law. It was politics. He moved back to New Jersey in 1949 and started practicing there while getting involved in the Democratic Party. He ran for office a couple of times in the early 50s, but did not win. But in 1953, there was a special election for a congressional seat. This time, Williams won and a long political career was born. He won a full term in 1954. He lost his reelection in 1956, but then Alexander Smith decided to not run for a third term in the Senate in 1958. Williams became the Democratic nominee for that position and he defeated Robert Kean in the general. The Keans, that’s a name in Jersey politics that can’t even be killed by a stake to the heart evidently. 1958 was a great year for Democrats, one of 15 pickups that November. Can you imagine Democrats winning 15 Republican seats this fall? With that kind of majority, maybe Chuck would even hold Republicans accountable for their crimes!
New Jersey was still transitioning into become a solid Democratic state, so while Williams won pretty easily in the Democratic blowout year of 1964, he had a reasonably tight run in 1970 before another easy win in 1976. He was a good liberal, for the most part, anticommunist certainly when it came to foreign policy but big on supporting government programs.. He was big into getting money to his home state, especially to build up transportation infrastructure. He said he was “a liberal with both feet on the ground.”
Williams was one of the big senators behind the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, which was a pension reform measure to provide greater accountability over how pension funds were invested. This came out of John McClellan’s rabid anti-unionism and for the most part, he couldn’t find unions abusing pension funds, but of course greater security for this stuff was good and a lot of other senators decided to get behind laws to secure that money, though both unions and business opposed the law because they preferred the investment flexibility as it existed. Williams was also very big behind the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, passed in 1969 and signed by a very reluctant Richard Nixon, which did more to protect coal miners from death, something Nixon didn’t care about. In this case, it was Williams who introduced the bill into the Senate.
Williams lent his name to the Williams Act, a 1968 law that amended the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, requiring regulation of tender offices when companies tried to take over other companies. A lot of was happening through cash offers and the corruption potential there is obvious. So that’s the kind of relatively minor but important law that you want from a decent legislator. In terms of committee work, Williams chaired the Special Committee on Aging from 1967 to 1971. Today that committee is chaired by Rick Scott and you know there’s a man who cares about the fate of older Americans! Williams was a power. He was the first person from New Jersey elected to the Senate for four terms, which is kinda crazy, but true. He was seen as a senator for life from the entire political community.
But by the 70s, Williams was a mess. He had been in office forever and was out of touch. He also had a severe drinking problem. He also got caught up in ABSCAM. Now, this FBI sting operation to catch crooked politicians seems a lot more like entrapment to me than feels comfortable. I mean, it’s one thing if you find evidence that a politician is corrupt, but it’s another for the FBI to just approach people to see what they would do. I guess corruption is corruption and no one made these people say yes, but there’s something unseemingly about the whole thing. Anyway, Williams became the one U.S. senator caught up in the scam.
But hell, Williams….he was on the take. Thanks to the glories of modern videotaping equipment, the FBI was able to get the whole thing on tape. Williams had many meetings with the FBI where he was offered stock in a titanium company, where he would have 18% of the company’s shares put in the name of his lawyer and then he would steer government contracts to the company and look out for the company in Washington. Hard to defend this. He tried to claim this was revenge for his support of Ted Kennedy over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic primary. That wasn’t too convincing. During appeals, he claimed it was all entrapment, and here he had a more solid argument. But it didn’t matter. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. The Senate moved to expel him and he resigned before facing that indignity. He served two years at a federal penitentiary in Newark and the last in a halfway house.
I hope you were all sitting down when reading about corruption in New Jersey politics. I know, it’s hard to imagine.
Later in life, Williams tried to exonerate himself. He also got clean and worked for drug and alcohol rehab companies. They need lobbying help too. He appealed to Bill Clinton for a pardon but that didn’t go anywhere. Williams died in 2001. He was old and had both heart issues and cancer. He was 81 years old.
Pete Williams is buried in Hillside Cemetery, Scotch Plains, New Jersey.
If you would like this series to visit other politicians caught up in ABSCAM, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frank Thompson is in Arlington (I guess being a crook doesn’t disqualify you) and John Murphy is in Staten Island, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.