The Confession (31 page)

Upstairs, in the private quarters, I found even less solace, given my guilt about the affair and a growing knowledge that our marriage had been wrong from the start—a contrivance on both our parts. We rarely made love at Drumthwacket. Sometimes, bumping into one another in the endless corridors up there, we didn't even make eye contact. Bedtime was traumatic. I'd never been much of a sleeper before this, but now a four-hour sleep was a rare hibernation.

I spent most of my nights sitting in the building's main catering kitchen, on a tall stool, eating the split pea soup or turkey chili Cathy Reilly, the chef, prepared specially for me.

I threw more parties at Drumthwacket than all my predecessors combined. It was the way I most enjoyed spending time there. Our parties were legendary. We threw flag-raising events for just about every minority community in the state, drawing thousands of people each night; we helped them coordinate food donations from their community restaurants. We celebrated the Dominican Republic, Ireland, China, India, and Poland. You should have seen the look on my neighbors' faces in Princeton when we hoisted Ghana's flag up the flagpole.

Some of my neighbors actually complained. One of them called Olga Nini, our gracious residence manager, in the middle of a brunch for the Pakistani community, complete with a terrific ethnic band. “Olga,” he snapped, “am I going to have to wake up every Saturday morning to this kind of noise?”

And sometimes the events produced the opposite effect of what I'd hoped. When we raised the Italian flag, I decided to invite Italy's ambassador to America, hoping we might increase trade relations with the country.
A procession of Italian Americans spoke about New Jersey's commitment to textiles, fashion, and design, most of which involved collaborations with Italian companies. The ambassador seemed duly impressed.

Then my last guest took the dais. I'd met Yogi Berra a couple of times, and I was so pleased he'd agreed to attend the event as one of our more prominent first-generation Italian Americans. But for some reason he limited his remarks to one stinging sentence before returning to the hors d'oeuvres table and leaving my honored guests scratching their heads.

“I'm just glad my father made the boat,” he said.

 

ALTHOUGH GOLAN AND I CONTINUED TALKING ON THE PHONE
regularly, we saw each other very few times after that. Yet reporters continued staking us out for evidence of our affair. It was crazy. Every single day, a Gannett reporter showed up at a statehouse reception to request an interview with Golan. He would sit in the lobby, hoping to catch Golan coming or going. Document requests were nearly burying our Open Public Records officer. They wanted résumés, background checks, sign-in sheets from Drumthwacket, phone records, even the 911 transcript from my broken leg.

On two separate occasions reporters asked us directly if we were romantically involved. I was thunderstruck. The first was David Twersky, the editor of New Jersey
Jewish News,
who was friendly with Golan. Golan denied the allegation angrily. He was nearly breathless with anxiety when he called to tell me about it.

“Don't worry,” I said, denying my own panic. “I'm sure he was only fishing.”

But when Twersky came to talk to me about it, he seemed quite confident. “Forgive me for saying so, Governor, but it is obvious to many people that you have a relationship with Golan Cipel that is quite personal, and eventually this threatens to cost you both a great deal.”

I believe he told me this out of compassion; he never wrote about it. But I didn't confirm his beliefs. I didn't deny them, either, for that matter; I just let them hang in the air. Another journalist, Sandy McClure, an unctuous reporter with the Gannett chain, was not as compassionate. She sat across
from me in the governor's office asking a million questions about my administration. Then she ambushed me with this one:

“Some people say you were with Golan when you broke your leg.”

“Absolutely untrue, Sandy,” I said in disgust. “Dina was with me the whole time. She rode with me in the ambulance, for crying out loud.”

“But she could have been flown down to Cape May in the helicopter before the ambulance was called.”

Oh, my God,
I thought,
this has gotten completely out of hand.
One misspoken sentence had turned my private affair into a Monica Lewinsky–style scandal, and everything I'd done since had fed a mushroom cloud of suspicion. Now they'll believe anything about us. I looked at Sandy like she was insane. “All governors are subject to unsubstantiated rumors,” I told her. “You should know that by now.”

“People say you have a homosexual relationship with Golan,” she said.

I rolled my head on my shoulders. “Sandy, that's just absurd,” I said. It wasn't quite a lie: the notion that I would have a gay affair under these conditions was nothing if not absurd.

 

IN THE MOVIE
IMITATION OF LIFE,
A POOR AFRICAN AMERICAN
woman named Annie Johnson agrees to work as a maid for a down-on-her-luck actress named Lora Meredith in exchange for food and lodging for herself and her daughter. As the years go by and the actress finds fame and fortune, their friendship and respect deepens. But despite growing up in increasing luxury, the daughter, Sarah Jane, is humiliated by her mother's history of racial subservience. Ultimately she leaves home to pass as white, cutting off all communication with her kin. In one of the most heartbreaking representations of identity clashes, her mother tracks her down and, painfully posing as the nanny who raised her, professes her love for “Miss Sarah Jane” and promises to never trouble her again.

I was reminded of that scene in June, which is Gay Pride Month in New Jersey. The governor traditionally addresses a statewide gay festival in Asbury Park, our burgeoning gay beachside enclave. I hadn't realized this until a few days before June 2, when I found it posted on my schedule. In light of
my growing scandal, I considered canceling, but I worried that would send out another bucket of chum to the sharks.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. Following Mass, I drove to the shore to make a brief address as Whitman and Florio had before me, trying to bolster my profile as a confident, benevolent, heterosexual-but-supportive governor. To underscore my point, I brought Jacqueline along, hoping my young daughter's presence would deflect any suspicion. I don't remember what I said on the stage that day. But I remember feeling both relieved and torn that I was up there speaking and not down in the throngs—that I was passing, like Sarah Jane.

Could they tell, I wondered? Did they see through my flimsy disguise? Did they pity me for lacking the courage to be true to myself?

All summer, my phone had been ringing nonstop in my pocket. It was Golan. He called me constantly, sometimes up to ten calls a day. For the first time, he was speaking—obliquely—about our affair, which he seemed to want to rekindle.

“Where's this going?” he would ask.

“It's going nowhere, Golan. Please let me get off the phone. I have a state to run. What don't you understand about that?”

I'll be honest. I sometimes thought his desperate sadness was about losing me, about losing our love. But that was just self-flattery. I think he hated losing access to power. The further apart we grew, the more frantic were his phone calls. He called and called and called.

 

NOTHING FASCINATED THE PRESS AS MUCH AS GOLAN. WE
couldn't get a positive news story about any of our many initiatives. Besides solving two enormous budget gaps, I'd rolled out new contracts to bring the long-overdue E-ZPass system to the state, started programs that would eliminate the auto insurance burden, and set aside $28 million to enhance the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, developing a program for addressing the state's record cancer rates—the disease kills 18,000 New Jerseyans each year.

The
New York Times
said that electing me was “like getting two governors for the price of one because his work days and schedules are so densely
packed.” But nobody at the
Record,
the
Star-Ledger,
the local Gannett chain, or the all-news radio stations had a decent thing to say about me.

Finally another juicy story hit the headlines, but this one—involving Gary Taffet and Paul Levinsohn—offered no relief. Until the buzz around the articles reached me, I had no idea that during the campaign the two had built a sizable company on the side, buying and controlling billboards around central Jersey. They'd built this business around a little known loophole in a town's ability to pass zoning laws restricting billboards. Apparently, state-owned land was exempt. Every small town had little slivers of state-owned land, either alongside the railroad tracks or inside state parks. Even quaint villages whose planning boards barred billboard development were powerless to close this loophole. Between Election Day and my inauguration, they reached twenty-two lucrative advertising deals with fourteen powerful New Jersey companies, including one controlled by Charlie Kushner.

According to published reports—on the heels of an FBI raid—my friend and benefactor John Lynch was involved as well. Even after I'd moved over to the transition office, Lynch had evidently made phone calls on the guys' behalf, helping them secure two more licenses just ten days before inauguration day, before selling the whole business as required by law (administration officials can't have private business interests). Sometime in the two weeks before joining the administration, they sold the business for a staggering $4.4 million for a dozen billboards—a perfectly legal transaction, but an astronomical sum that made the deal look like it involved political favors. I have no idea whether Lynch netted anything from the deal. I only know that the whole thing looked atrocious.

It all unraveled in mid-2002, when Randee Davidson took over as mayor of Washington Township, in South Jersey, after her predecessor began serving a jail sentence for spending township money on a Manhattan apartment, vacation rentals, and a new Chevy Blazer. A
Philadelphia Inquirer
reporter asked her about the new billboard in town, next to the New Jersey Transit bus terminal. Given the political turmoil she inherited, it's not surprising that Davidson hadn't noticed it—even though it stood 160 feet high, the tallest in South Jersey, in a town that had long prohibited the giant signs.

Unable to learn who had built it, or under what authority, she called in
the FBI. An investigation led to my senior staff members. Two days after we won the primary, the guys had gone to Washington Township zoning authorities and showed them a letter from New Jersey Transit giving them permission to erect the sign. How'd they get this letter? As the press later reported, John Lynch had called the executive director of the New Jersey Transit office on their behalf.

When I learned about these deals, I was crestfallen. I considered Gary one of my best friends in the world. His mother had served on my campaign staff. I'd entrusted my political career to him and to Paul, who was like a brother to me. A federal investigation ultimately found they'd done nothing illegal. But the public felt that they'd sullied the high office of governor by engaging in this scheme, and the backlash seriously undermined my administration.

Confronting them was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I had them out of the office by the end of the year. As for John Lynch? I never talked to him about this deal. But he immediately became the principal target of the federal probe, in an investigation that continued for years.

 

SANDY MCCLURE'S ARTICLE ABOUT GOLAN APPEARED ON AUGUST
4, 2002. The product of a “four-month investigation,” it contained no new information, but its tone was staggeringly cruel. She stopped short of calling us homosexuals. But she implied not only that Golan's résumé and work experience were inflated, but that they were inflated by me.

Quoting from his résumé, she took issue with a statement deep in his description of his job at the Israeli consulate in New York, where he worked for five years, declaring that he was “responsible for portfolios on terrorism.” She located the former consul from that time, who said that Golan “was not involved in anything related to terrorism.” I believe the consul was wrong. As part of his efforts in the communications office, he helped devise ways to sell Israel's antiterror policies in the press, no small responsibility.

Furthermore, as I pointed out to McClure, this task was listed among many others while he was there. Although she quoted me on this point, she
made me sound like I was splitting hairs, which perhaps I was. But I'd chosen Golan as my senior counsel because he was smart, tested in communication policy, experienced in international trade and business protocols, and focused on security issues. And because he never pulled his punches with me.

I released his résumé, his job description, and a sample of the kinds of things he'd been taking care of for the administration. “His job,” I told her, “is to advise the governor as to critical information that may be of value in numerous circumstances, including meeting with chief executive officers of major corporations, setting forth policy areas of concern relating to the business community and economic development and responding on a case-by-case basis to information requests.”

Obviously McClure didn't hear me—or preferred to continue the whisper campaign about our affair. She wrote the following:

“Who is he? What does he do? Why has he been given special treatment? And why has he been kept from public scrutiny of his credentials?” Answers to these questions, she said, were impossible to ascertain. The implication, once again, was that I'd put an unqualified man on staff because he and I were having an affair. That was only partly true. I never should have hired him. But objectively, his work history as a military officer, Knesset aide, and communications director made him qualified for the multifaceted job I gave him.