Senior United States Senator from New Jersey. He was a member of the Democratic Party who served in the US Senate from 1982 to 2001 and following a brief retirement, he was re-elected to the Senate and served since 2003. He is remembered as "the last of the New Deal liberals" and was known for his legislative efforts against drunk driving, and his support of spending for Amtrak and urban public transportation, for stronger environmental regulations, greater consumer protections and investigations of wrongdoing by Wall Street. His parents were impoverished Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, who had arrived in the United States as infants. His father worked in silk mills, sold coal, farmed, and once ran a tavern When he was 19, his father died of cancer and his mother opened a sandwich shop to support the family. He graduated from Nutley High School, Nutley, New Jersey in 1941, after which he enlisted the US Army Signal Corps during World War II and served overseas from 1942 to 1946, attaining the rank of Technician Fifth Grade. After his military tour was completed, he enrolled in Columbia Business School in New York City, New York, and graduated in 1949 with a degree in economics. He worked as a salesman for Prudential Insurance and was the first salesman at Automatic Data Processing, a payroll-management company, and became the company's chairman and chief executive officer in 1975. From 1978 to 1982 he was the executive commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In 1982 he ran for and won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate and went on to defeat the Republican nominee, Millicent Fenwick, in November of that year. During his first term, he pushed legislation for the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which was passed in 1984. In 1988 he defeated Republican candidate Pete Dawkins, a Wall Street executive, former college football star won the 1958 Heisman Trophy for the Army Black Knights, and brigadier general in the US Army. The race was named the 17th-nastiest in American political history by political scientist Kerwin Swint in his book "Mudslingers: The 25 Dirtiest Political Campaigns of All Time." He became a member of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, established in September 1989 to review and report on aviation security policy in light of the sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103 on December 21, 1988. In 1994 he was re-elected again, defeating the Republican candidate New Jersey State Assembly Speaker Chuck Haytaian. In 2000 he announced his retirement and Democratic candidate Jon Corzine was elected to replace him in November of that year. A year after leaving office, he was called upon again to run for the Senate, to replace incumbent Senator Robert Torricelli, who had won nomination for a second term in the June primary elections but was facing federal corruption charges and an uphill climb for re-election against Republican nominee Doug Forrester. When Torricelli dropped out weeks before the election, Lautenberg was drafted and he defeated Forrester in the November 2002 general election. One of the Senate's most liberal members, he was probably best known as the author of the legislation that banned smoking from most commercial airline flights and also authored the Ryan White Care Act, which provides services to AIDS patients. He was pro-choice, supported gun control, introduced many bills increasing penalties for carjacking and car theft, and was critical of the Bush administration on national security issues. Additionally, he became heavily involved in various anti-smoking and airline safety legislation and co-sponsored legislation to increase drunk driving penalties. In 2008 he ran for re-election and defeated the Republican candidate, former Congressman Dick Zimmer. On February 19, 2010, his office announced that he had been diagnosed with a diffuse large b-cell lymphoma, an aggressive but curable blood cancer that appears in organs like the stomach. He had been hospitalized with profuse gastric bleeding following a fall at his home shortly after returning from a Haiti trip with a 12-member Congressional delegation. He underwent chemotherapy treatments for the next four months, continuing his Senate work in between treatments and on June 26, 2010, he announced that he was cancer-free. On February 14, 2013 he announced that he would not seek re-election. During his career as US senator, he served on the Committee on Appropriations, the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and the Committee on Environment and Public Works. He died of viral pneumonia at the age of 89 and at the time of his death he was the oldest serving US senator as well as the last serving veteran of World War II in the United States Senate.