Frank Lautenberg

Frank Lautenberg, senior United States Senator from New Jersey

Frank Raleigh Lautenberg (born January 23, 1924) is the senior United States Senator from New Jersey and a member of the Democratic Party. He first served in the United States Senate from 1982 to 2001; after a brief retirement, he was re-elected to the Senate and has served since 2003. He will retire again at the end of his current term in January 2015. Lautenberg is the oldest current senator and the last serving veteran of World War II in the US Senate.. Before entering politics, he was the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Automatic Data Processing, Inc.

Early life

Frank Lautenberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey, to Mollie (née Bergen) and Sam Lautenberg, impoverished Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, who had arrived in the United States as infants. When Lautenberg was 19, his father, Sam, who worked in silk mills, sold coal, farmed and once ran a tavern, died of cancer. Frank Lautenberg had no formal Jewish education as a child; the family could not afford to join a synagogue and did not live very long in any single place.

Career

Frank Lautenberg served overseas in the United States Army Signal Corps in World War II from 1942-1946 after graduating from Nutley High School in 1941. Then, financed by the GI Bill, he attended and graduated from Columbia Business School in 1949 with a degree in economics. He was the first salesman at successful Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP) and was its chairman and CEO from 1952-82. He was the executive commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey from 1978 to 1982.

Family

From his first marriage to Lois Levenson, which ended in divorce after 31 years, Lautenberg has four children: Ellen, Nan, Lisa, and Joshua. In 2004, he married his companion of nearly 16 years, Bonnie S. Englebardt. He has a summer home on Martha's Vineyard.

Lockerbie bombing

On 12 July 2010, when he wrote his letter about Pan Am Flight 103, Libya and BP to Senators John Kerry (D-Mass) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind), the co-chairmen of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Frank Lautenberg knew he was stirring a very murky pot indeed.

On 24 July 2010, Frank Lautenberg wrote "pleading" with the Scottish government to reconsider its decision not to send officials to a Senate hearing into the release of the "Lockerbie bomber" Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

Lest we forget, Senator Lautenberg was a member of the shadowy President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (PCAST). The PCAST team leader was Ann Korologos, former US Secretary of Labor, and its special adviser was the FBI's Oliver 'Buck' Revell.

When the seven PCAST members met a group of British PA103 relatives at the US Embassy in London on 12 February 1990, one of them whispered to Lockerbie relative Martin Cadman: "Your government and ours know exactly what happened. But they're never going to tell."

Mrs Korologos' Facebook friend Frank Duggan was involved with PCAST and is currently president of the American relatives' group "VPAF103, Inc" (although he is not a Lockerbie relative and knows very little about the disaster - see this video:

Rather than wasting their time navel gazing about Mr Megrahi and BP oil deals with Libya at the behest of Senator Lautenberg, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would be much better employed discussing and investigating the targeting of Bernt Carlsson on Pan Am Flight 103.