The Confession (23 page)

We stayed in the village about thirty-six hours before the mechanic told us it would be another week before our car was ready. So we hopped on a train and continued on to Montreal without it. The accommodations there—at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel on Rene Levesque Boulevard—were luxurious, but hardly superior to our twin bed over the bar.

Valentine's Day fell on our second night in the French quarter. After we'd enjoyed another outstanding meal, I reached for the ring in my pocket. “We never made it to Paris,” I said. “We barely even made it to Montreal. It takes a special person to handle the challenges and the difficulties of the career I've chosen. In a way, this trip is almost an allegory for our relationship. Whatever life throws at us, Deen, if we're together we'll be able to handle it.
I'm asking you to share this journey with me, to bear its ups and downs. I'd be blessed if you'll be my wife.”

I slid the ring on Dina's finger, as tears rolled off her cheeks. She never looked more beautiful than she did that night.

 

THREE WEEKS LATER, I HEADED FOR ISRAEL, PART OF A DELEGATION
of 750 elected officials, politicians, and cultural leaders organized by the United Jewish Federation of MetroWest, which covers Essex, Morris, Union, and Sussex counties. I'd been there twice before on political junkets. This trip, called Mission 2000, was billed by the agency as a chance for us to meet donors and open our eyes to Israel's significance in world affairs. Among us were Jon Corzine, at the time making his successful run for the Senate, and his Republican challenger, Jim Treffinger, the Essex County Republican executive, as well as Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen, state Senate President Donald DiFrancesco, and mayors and party loyalists from both sides of the aisle.

Our schedule was full. We visited the Knesset, traveled to the Old City in Jerusalem, met farmers in the Negev Desert, and lunched with officials from then–prime minister Ehud Barak's office. The trip's organizers thoughtfully accommodated Roman Catholics on Ash Wednesday with a side trip to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, built by Constantine the Great in the year 335. We visited the Golan Heights, over which Israel's dominion is contested; Modi'in, a large city where we helped plant cypress trees to symbolize our solidarity; and a West Bank settlement called Ofakim—“New Horizon” in Hebrew—where students performed a musical for us.

The settlements, built on land Israel won in war in 1967, were a topic of conversation and controversy among us. Over lunch one day, I had a chance to talk to Yitzhak Rabin about them. He advocated withdrawing the settlers from the Golan Heights. “It costs forty-five thousand dollars a year to protect each settler,” he told me. “And for what? There's no economic return. It's not an investment. I'd rather be investing in irrigation systems and farms in the Negev, because that's an investment in Israel's future.” I was surprised at
how clear, straightforward, and objective his argument was—in a part of the world defined by centuries of emotion.

One afternoon, we took a bus trip to a local arts center in Rishon Lezion, a sprawling but rather featureless city just five miles outside Tel Aviv. We were greeted there by the mayor, but it was his thirty-two-year-old communications director who caught my eye. That's too casual a way to put it. My attraction to him was immediate and intense, and apparently reciprocated. From the minute I walked into the building, I felt it. Our eyes met over and over before we were introduced. “This is Golan Cipel,” he said. “He is familiar with New Jersey—for a number of years he worked at the Israel embassy in Manhattan.”

We shook hands for a long time. “I followed your campaign very closely,” Golan said. “Twenty-seven thousand votes is a very narrow margin.” He went on to describe my strengths among various constituencies, remarking how well I'd done among white men—a rarity for Democrats, as he well knew.

“You would have won with better outreach to Orthodox Jews,” he added.

I was startled by his knowledge of my campaign. We talked through the length of the reception, and his insights were dead-on. At lunch I made sure to sit next to him. “Democrats take Jews for granted. It's a powerful constituency. With Orthodox, you pick up Jewish Republicans, so actually you pick up two votes instead of one. You have to develop relationships with them,” he said. “You've got a good record on Israel. Your efforts on Holocaust education are strong. More people need to know that. In 1997, you got a good percentage of the overall Jewish vote. But if you'd gotten even a small number of Orthodox votes, and all of the Reform Jews, you would be governor today.”

He had smart ideas about my current campaign, but I admit I was only half listening. Watching this handsome man talk—and show an interest in my political standing—totally mesmerized me. Nobody commits to memory the demographic standings of a politician halfway around the world as an academic exercise. I was flattered beyond anything I'd ever experienced before. From there our conversation moved naturally to the personal, and we talked about our lives and goals and dreams.

I assumed he was straight, but what was happening at this lunch if not flirting? I flirted back, a bit shamelessly. But he matched me compliment for compliment. I can't say I ever had a more electrifying first meeting—so dangerously carried out in a room full of politicians who could ruin us both. I fell hard.

Immediately afterward I went to the junket organizers and requested to be seated next to Golan again at dinner. Years later, one of them was quoted saying he knew exactly what was going on. “They couldn't take their eyes off one another,” he said.

 

RIGHT OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL, GOLAN HAD SERVED FIVE YEARS
with the navy of the Israeli Defense Force, part of his country's compulsory military service, and another ten years in the reserves. That explains a lot about his straight-backed comportment and his black-and-white world view. He was graduated from New York Institute of Technology, where he also earned a master's in communication. He had never married, and at least on our first meetings he didn't mention a girlfriend. He wasn't quick with such personal details. Rather, he spoke with passion about his career in politics. Besides his stint at the consular office in New York, he had clocked some time as an aide in the Knesset, at a job that seemed similar to mine at the assembly, marking up bills and researching issues. He'd landed a big job with the mayor of Rishon Lezion, a city of over 200,000; Meir Nitzan was almost like a father figure to Golan.

But the job was just a stepping stone, he admitted to me at dinner that night. Having seen and experienced so much in his young life, he had a wanderlust he wanted to quench.

Impulsively, I invited him to join my campaign. He said he was thrilled at the chance.

 

BY JUNE 2000, I'D RAISED $9 MILLION, MORE THAN I'D SPENT IN
my first run for governor, and well on the way to my goal of $40 million for the whole campaign. I say that as though this was easy, but the opposite was
true. Unless you're a Clinton or a Bush, $40 million is an obscene amount to pull out of pockets. By way of comparison, that's two-thirds the annual budget for Woodbridge, a bustling middle-class city of 100,000 tax-paying citizens. I was having to attend six and seven fundraising events every single day. Most of the time I had no idea where I was or who I was talking to. In the car between events, staff members would brief me hurriedly on the attendees, their histories and connections—just enough for me to parrot a few lines of familiarity on my way through the room before dashing on to the next event.

We decided against setting up a finance committee with a powerful chairman. Given the enormous egos in New Jersey, anyone we anointed would surely offend a powerful segment of potential funders. So instead we set up numerous finance committees, each one organized around a policy area: infrastructure, development, business, and so on. When we invited people to take part, we asked for maximum allowable contributions. “These are investments,” we said, “in a very sound political calculus.” We were that sure we would win.

By now, I knew that you can't take large sums of money from people without making them specific and personal promises in return. In our campaign, people weren't shy about saying what they expected for their “investments.” An unusually large number wanted powerful postings—board appointments to the Sports Authority or the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, for example, which were coveted not just for their prestige but because they offered control over tremendously potent economic engines, with discretionary budgets in the tens of millions. The plum was the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; directors there controlled a multi-billion-dollar budget and helped direct development projects that determined the geographic landscape of the East Coast. It was amazing to me how many people openly and aggressively lobbied for this job.

I tried to stay as naïve about this horse trading as possible. I allowed my staff to intimate things to donors, and I know John Lynch and the other bosses were doing the same thing. It would be a felony for any of us to promise a posting in exchange for a contribution. But we'd long since learned to walk this side of a dangerous line.

Often I'd be called in to seal a deal before a check was written. Invariably, the contributor would tell me how much it would mean for him to be appointed to the Port Authority.

“I know New Jersey would benefit from your public service, wherever you give it,” I might reply. If pressed, I would add, “What is your vision for the Port Authority?”

Too often their answers said more about their quest for power than concern for our state's future. Sometimes they spoke of having achieved financial security in their lives, freeing them to pursue a new passion or challenge.

“Thank you for letting us consider you,” I'd say.

For an influential executive who was about to hand over $100,000, that often wasn't enough. “Will you consider me for the Port Authority?” he was likely to push.

My standard reply was, “You'd be great in a number of positions.”

“Will Port Authority be one of them?”

This is the daredevil's dance every politician faces, from the biggest campaigns to the least significant. It is why fundraising is so corrosive and why campaign finance reform is so necessary. There has to be a better way to further democracy without exposing the naked ambitions of politicians to the power-lust and greed of political donors, a volatile combination. Any politician who wants high office as urgently as I did is the weaker partner in this negotiation.

My responses were always governed by a trio of concerns, all in constant tension with one another: legal, ethical, and financial. The law was always my bottom line; what I said was always determined by what could be done legally. Remembering Governor Byrne's warnings about body wires, I consciously avoided saying anything that might be construed as an illegal quid pro quo.

But in order to get the money I needed I gave myself a lot more leeway when it came to ethics. I made a threshold decision to stay out of the weeds of fundraising, and let others cut deals on my behalf. I didn't monitor things closely enough. Part of me—the purely ambitious part of me—didn't care enough.

I was running for office for all the right reasons. I wanted to help bring about decency, justice, and compassion for working families and those who had no voice in the halls of Trenton. But I couldn't do any of that without getting elected; at least that's what I told myself. That doesn't exonerate me for my shortcuts. I was becoming too adept and too clever at making these accommodations. Increasingly, this James E. McGreevey, this political construct, was looking like a stranger to me.

 

I DIDN'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT A DIVISIVE PRIMARY THIS TIME
out. The whole state Democratic machine was in my camp. For safety's sake, Ray Lesniak organized a dinner of the warlords at a loft he kept in New York's Tribeca. Senators Jon Corzine and Bob Torricelli, the state's ranking Democrats, were both there, and both pledged their support. I'd secretly worried that Torricelli wanted to run for the job himself—he'd hinted at it in past campaigns, and if our party regained power in Trenton that fall, the work of a Democratic chief executive could be very rewarding. So I was relieved to hear him say he had no ambitions for the job.

On June 28, we held our most successful fundraiser ever, at the same East Brunswick Hilton where I'd waited for results in 1997. In one night we raised $3.2 million, a statewide record and a display of my increasing strength. In a gesture of confidence and magnanimity, I had the checks written to the State Democratic Committee, not to my campaign. The Committee could give the money to the candidate of its choosing for any significant race in the state. Ray Lesniak counseled against doing this so early in the race, afraid that someone would come out of the woodwork to declare against me, using my own money to buy ammunition. But I wasn't worried. The Committee director was Tommy Giblin, the Essex County boss. I'd put him there myself after 1997, as I promised I would. New Jersey politics might have the nastiest ground rules in the country, but it still follows an old-world ethos. Rule number one is, Don't double-cross your friends.

I assumed I'd get half of that money back in grants from Giblin, with most of the rest going to get-out-the-vote efforts in the twenty-one counties. That would amount to much more money than if I had gone out to raise
funds directly. State campaign finance laws at the time limited contributions for individual campaigns to $1,800 a person per election cycle, but they allowed each donor to give up to $30,000 in so-called soft money. It was worth the small risk I was taking.

Besides, my campaign was nearly on automatic pilot. I was still working the retail side tirelessly, running myself ragged with eighteen-hour days on the trail. Two-thirds of the bosses had given me the line. I was the 800-pound gorilla.