Menendez - NY Times - The Menendez Story, With All the Chapters

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Published in the New York Times, Sunday, December 25, 2005 - NJ Section, page 2

NEW JERSEY WEEKLY DESK

POLITICS

The Menendez Story, With All the Chapters

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN (NYT) 971 words

Published: December 25, 2005

In anthropology, it's called the ''charter myth,'' a fantastical beginning that societies invent for themselves to explain their existence or dominance.

And in the case of Representative Robert Menendez, the Hudson County Democrat who was tapped to fill the remainder of Governor-elect Jon S. Corzine's term in the United States Senate a few weeks ago, there is a bit of this mythmaking going on.

If you listen to his supporters, you might think that Mr. Menendez had been a Latino freedom fighter and political reformer since the age of 3.

No doubt, the wonkish congressman with the instincts of a barracuda has a very compelling personal story -- the son of a carpenter and a seamstress who worked his way from a cramped apartment in the barrio of Union City to one of the most rarefied of worlds, the United States Senate.

He did not go to flashy schools, he did not make millions of dollars in private industry, and when he says he has walked in the shoes of average New Jerseyans, he isn't kidding, which in the probable matchup against Thomas H. Kean Jr., heir to fortunes real and political, will mostly likely become the top Menendez selling point.

But there are other points that need clarification.

For example, when Mr. Menendez was crowned senator at his recent coronation in Jersey City and lovingly introduced by Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey and Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, it appeared that the state's top Democrats had been firmly united behind him. Not so.

Despite his insistence that he would rather coach youth basketball than hobnob with Ted Kennedy, Mr. Codey wanted that job. Or at least he wanted to be begged to take that job. But Mr. Corzine, according to people close to the acting governor, never approached him to be senator because he was still sore at Mr. Codey for grumbling about being steamrolled out of the gubernatorial primary.

After Mr. Codey spoke, Mr. Lautenberg gave a stirring speech about how Mr. Menendez will be a ''terrific, terrific fighter.'' But several top Democrats said Mr. Lautenberg had been dreading this moment. Fresh still are the nightmares of trying to work with former Senator Robert G. Torricelli -- whose tongue and elbows are every bit as sharp as Mr. Menendez's -- and the last thing the 81-year-old Mr. Lautenberg wanted was another youngish whippersnapper who would hog the limelight and deny him the deference that a senior senator is due. Mr. Corzine then launched into his version of the immigrant's tale, saying that Mr. Menendez's parents ''came from political exile,'' conjuring up images of fleeing Fidel Castro.

Wrong again. Mario and Evangelina Menendez left Cuba in 1953, before Mr. Castro even hit the mountains. And though they may have been saying farewell to a nasty dictatorship under Fulgencio Batista, Mr. Menendez's parents were not political exiles. They were poor and came mostly for work.

Mr. Menendez's fans like to cast him as a born reformer, standing up for the little guy ever since he was a little guy.

But truth be told, he got his start in politics as an unabashed child of the machine. When he first ran for the school board at age 19, he had the unswerving support of the city's political boss, Mayor William V. Musto. Thanks to Mr. Musto's muscle, he won that race and the mayor's trust and was set up with a number of political jobs.

One of those jobs, school board secretary, landed the young Mr. Menendez in hot water. Union City wasn't called ''10 Percent City'' for nothing, and federal investigators had been sniffing around for years, looking into a number of corrupt deals, some involving skimmed school funds, some involving Mr. Musto.

But it wasn't Mr. Menendez's initiative that brought down the Musto Machine, as some supporters, and detractors, tend to say. He did not go to the feds. The feds came to him.

''He got identified, he got subpoenaed, and he was put in the uncomfortable position of having to testify,'' remembered James Plaisted, a prosecutor on the case. Mr. Menendez ended up testifying about missing checks, which Mr. Plaisted called a ''very gutsy move.''

As a result of that trial, which drove a cleaver right through Union City, Mr. Musto went down and Mr. Menendez went up. He became mayor a few years later and was soon champion of New Jersey's growing Latino community.

The problem was, he still had a lot to learn, especially among Latinos.

A former confidant, Jose Manuel Alvarez, remembered that Mr. Menendez once showed up for a speech on José Martí Day wearing a red-and-black tie.

''I said, 'Bob, you can't do that, people will see that and think of the Cuban flag and think you're pro-Castro,' '' Mr. Alvarez said. ''I had to tell him not to mention the Kennedys and things like that.''

(Mr. Alvarez died last month. Needless to say, Mr. Menendez, who had a nasty public split with Mr. Alvarez a few years ago, was not at the funeral.)

This all said, there are plenty of facts even Mr. Menendez's worst enemies have to concede, like he works incredibly hard and has an impressive grasp of politics and policy.

And although you won't hear it from Mr. Corzine or Mr. Lautenberg (or Douglas Forrester or Michael Bloomberg), at a time when Democrats and Republicans alike are reaching out to wealthy guys to run for office, Mr. Menendez did not buy his power. He built it the old-fashioned way, step by step, and the crucial question now is: will anybody be able to take it from him?

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