Frank Joseph Guarini Jr. spent more than a century building things: a legal career, a political legacy, institutions that will outlast him by generations, and a reputation for quiet, principled service that outlasted his time in office by more than three decades. He died on June 20, 2026, in Jersey City, New Jersey, at the age of 101, the oldest living former member of the United States Congress.

Guarini was born on August 20, 1924, in Jersey City, a city he never left and never stopped serving. His father had served in the New Jersey State Assembly, and public life was woven into the fabric of the household. After graduating from Lincoln High School in 1942, Guarini enlisted in the U.S. Navy and went to war. He served as a lieutenant aboard the USS Mount McKinley, flagship of the Pacific Amphibious Fleet, earning the Naval Commendation Medal and three Battle Stars for his service in the Pacific Theater. He was nineteen years old when he first saw combat.

When the war ended, Guarini returned to his education with singular focus. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College in 1947, then a Juris Doctor and a Master of Laws from the New York University School of Law, completing the latter in 1955. He pursued additional graduate study at The Hague Academy of International Law, was admitted to the New Jersey bar in 1951, and founded the law firm Guarini and Guarini in Jersey City. A career in international law and real estate development followed, as did a growing engagement with the political life of Hudson County.

He entered the New Jersey State Senate in 1966, representing Hudson County for two terms. In that role, he chaired the newly created Senate Air and Water Pollution and Public Health Committee and played a central part in the negotiations that brought the New York Giants to New Jersey, helping to make the Meadowlands stadium complex a reality. In 1970 he challenged incumbent U.S. Senator Harrison A. Williams Jr. in the Democratic primary, losing by a wide margin statewide but carrying Hudson County by a comfortable one.

Guarini won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978, capturing 82 percent of the Democratic primary vote and 64 percent of the general election. He would go on to serve seven consecutive terms, representing New Jersey's 14th congressional district until 1993. Almost immediately, he distinguished himself: as a freshman member, he received a rare appointment to the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, where he would spend much of his congressional career shaping tax, trade, and education policy. According to NJ Biz, he played a significant role in the 1986 revision of the Internal Revenue Code and worked systematically to modernize U.S. trade and tariff laws at a moment of significant economic transition.

His reach extended well beyond domestic policy. Guarini served as a NATO delegate and participated in the first U.S. congressional trade mission to China. He met with Deng Xiaoping and Boris Yeltsin, witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and nominated Polish solidarity leader Lech Walesa for the Nobel Peace Prize. At home, he led the fight against the proposed Westway highway project in Manhattan and spearheaded the legal effort that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court returning approximately 90 percent of Ellis Island's landmass to New Jersey, a defining victory for the state and a lasting piece of his congressional record. As the New Jersey Globe reported, flags were ordered to fly at half-staff across Hudson County in his honor upon his passing.

After leaving Congress in 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Guarini as the U.S. Representative to the United Nations General Assembly, at the rank of Ambassador. He returned to private life in New Jersey with the same energy he had brought to Washington, continuing his law practice and real estate work, and increasingly directing his resources toward the institutions he cared about most.

Guarini's philanthropy was sustained and deliberate. He gave $10 million to Saint Peter's University in 2019, resulting in the renaming of its school of business in his honor. The following year he gave $5 million to New Jersey City University to establish the Guarini Institute for International Education and Economic Mobility, and he donated the land for the Honorable Frank J. Guarini Justice Complex in Jersey City. At Dartmouth, where he had studied more than seven decades earlier, he endowed the Guarini Institute for International Education and funded the Italian Language Study Abroad program in Rome. The Congressman Frank J. Guarini Library at New Jersey City University, the Frank J. Guarini School of Business at Saint Peter's University, educational facilities at John Cabot University in Rome, and a post office in Jersey City all carry his name. Two weeks before his death, at 101 years old, he attended the ribbon-cutting for the Guarini Justice Complex.

A lifelong bachelor, Guarini was devoted to his Italian-American heritage throughout his life. He served as president and chairman of the National Italian American Foundation and received Italy's Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic from President Giorgio Napolitano. Hudson County Executive Craig Guy, ordering flags flown at half-staff in his memory, said he was "a true fighter for his district and a dedicated public servant who led with conviction, integrity, and purpose."

What distinguished Frank Guarini, across a century of American life, was not any single achievement but the consistency of his attention to the community that raised him. He built a law firm, helped build a stadium, changed tax law, reshaped trade policy, returned Ellis Island to his state, and then spent his final decades turning his accumulated resources into schools and libraries and institutes that would open doors for people who never had them. New Jersey City University President Andrés Acebo said it plainly: his legacy lives not in the buildings that bear his name, but in the ambitions he inspired and the opportunities he created. Frank Guarini gave a century to that work, and the record speaks.