The Confession (32 page)

I felt pretty sure I wasn't going to be able to survive the attention that followed this newest salvo. Looking back, I think there was a part of me that wanted to get caught. Maybe that's too strong. But all my life I'd thought about what would happen if I was caught red-handed, if my secret was emblazoned on billboards for the world to see. I always imagined the fear would go away. But reading that article, interlaced with innuendo, didn't free me.

Many elected officials have had affairs while in office, often with employees. Some of them held a somber press conference about it and moved on with their lives. Even Bill Clinton lived to fight another day. I never considered such a route. Putting aside the fact that I'd made a huge error in judgment in hiring Golan and giving him a high salary and portfolio, I
knew I couldn't face the voters with what I'd done and ask for their continued support. I had never once told a soul I was gay. I simply couldn't imagine surviving it.

I surely lacked the courage to leave Dina and live on at Drumthwacket as an openly gay man. And I knew I didn't have the fortitude to stand before the voters and ask for a second term without my wife—any wife—at my side.

For their part, no one on my staff ever came to me as a friend and said, “Jim, is there anything to all of this?” We treated it all as a scandal to be extinguished. But I don't blame them. I set the tone in the administration, and my fear was too deeply ingrained for me to handle it any other way.

 

SENATOR GORMLEY MADE PLANS FOR A SENATE INVESTIGATION,
threatening to force Golan to testify. My own attorney general began a probe into the circumstances of Golan's hiring and the groundless suggestion that he never did a lick of work. Over and over, we had described his duties: organizing international trade missions, helping to arrange a major security conference at Princeton, and developing a model for the state's New Jersey–Israel Commission; in addition, he advised me on intellectual property issues and federal and state regulatory policy.

But the press made all this sound murky and nefarious. They sent in requests for his daily schedules, his INS applications, even his e-mail. Not wanting to set precedent, I personally rejected these requests as imperiling the governor's rights to counsel and Golan's own right to privacy. I had nothing to fear from revealing them. Like me, he was extremely circumspect in what he wrote down. Even his birthday cards to me were addressed formally. He gave me two gifts during this time, a handsome Brooks Brothers tie I still have and a beautiful oil painting of Old Jerusalem, which, because he signed his name so prominently in the corner, I'd reluctantly disposed of so visitors wouldn't get the wrong idea.

Each new volley of requests under the state's Open Public Records Act made my staff more apoplectic. Finally, under mounting pressure, I called Golan to a meeting at my statehouse office to ask him to leave.

I hadn't seen him in several weeks. The last time, during a weekend meeting in Drumthwacket, things were tense between us. He was too upset about his constant bad press to show me any affection. Almost every day brought a new article poking fun at the “sailor” and “poet” who “served the governor in a variety of positions.”

He blamed me for it. I didn't care who was to blame.

I knew it would end when he left the administration. And frankly, his work was slipping—understandably, given the circumstances. My old friend Bob Sommer talked to me about offering Golan a job in the East Rutherford office of the MWW Group, one of the largest public relations firms in the country. The person who handled Israeli clients for the firm had quit; Golan was an ideal replacement.

I dreaded the moment. Politics meant the world to him. He'd come halfway around the world to see how far his political talents would take him in America—the way an actor goes to Hollywood or a scientist goes to NASA—and I was cutting it all short. I apologized in a million different ways.

“Gole,” I said, “it's about the government, it isn't about individuals. You did nothing wrong. But you can't stay. It isn't tenable.”

“You said you'd give it all up for me,” he threw back at me. I suppose I had that coming. But he misconstrued what I was saying back then.

“Golan, I said I'd give it all up if you were
with
me. I'm not going to give up a career or job when you're not even with me. You've missed the point. If we're together as two individuals in love, that makes sense. But I'm not surrendering government for the sake of
your
job.”

He left without promising to resign. The next time we met, for breakfast, he brought a lawyer. At the time, I couldn't imagine why. I just reiterated the situation: he'd done nothing wrong, but a political backdraft was forcing him out of the administration. Still, he did not resign.

Frustrated, I asked Charlie Kushner to talk to him. I met Kushner's public relations man, Howard Rubenstein, a long-standing friend of Israel, and even asked him to call Golan and recommend stepping down.

Finally Golan agreed. On April 14, I released news to the press.

Just as Golan had predicted, though, it only intensified the fires. A
reporter cornered me and demanded to know exactly what kind of work Golan was walking away from: “What's the nature of the job he quit?”

“Mr. Cipel provided valuable input, critical thinking, and was of assistance,” I said. In the next day's paper, that was translated as:
The Governor continued to stonewall reporters on Cipel's exact duties.
I couldn't win.

 

NOR COULD I FREE MYSELF FROM GOLAN'S INCREASING BITTERNESS
. Almost from the minute he resigned, he began demanding his job back. He felt tricked into quitting, he said, even though he'd done nothing wrong. He found me on my cell phone at all hours, interrupting everything from daybreak trips to the gym to late-night dinners with Drumthwacket staffers. It was after one of these calls that Dina put Jacqueline to bed, then confronted me. She had every reason to demand to know if I was gay—it was being openly inferred in newspapers and radio broadcasts. These ceaseless phone conversations with Golan must have seemed like conclusive proof.

But the more I think about it, the more I'm not even sure if she actually said, “Are you gay?” Maybe she only said it with an angry flash of her eyes. Maybe I only
suspected
that she suspected. Whenever I felt I'd been exposed, whether by the state trooper who busted me at the rest area or the newspaper reporters who pieced it together, a feverlike terror would cloud my perspective and shuffle my memory. I know for certain that the reporters posed those questions to me. They repeatedly revealed this in the aftermath of my resignation, confirming my blurry memories.

With Dina, though, I can't disentangle what she actually said from what I worried she knew, and in the ugliness that has followed us I haven't seen fit to ask.

Frankly, our marriage had taken on the feeling of a business partnership almost from the day we moved into Drumthwacket. She kept her own schedule, throwing herself into official duties and responsibilities with increasing zeal. She genuinely loved serving on the board of the state's March of Dimes, for which she had a tremendous connection because of Jacqueline's complicated birth. She spoke frequently on health care issues and
organized Easter egg rolls and Feasts of the Three Magi for area kids. She never tired of being first lady.

She also lavished attention and love on our baby girl, who was quickly becoming an unusually outgoing and demonstrative child. We both did. In the rare times when the three of us were alone together, Jacqueline was joyously and exclusively our focal point, an irresistible excuse for us to avoid talking about our personal troubles.

If our mounting troubles made Dina sad or angry, I rarely saw any sign of it. She was always intensely private, and in her disappointments she turned only to her family. With each passing month, her relatives spent more and more time on the second floor of Drumthwacket, crowding around the formal dining room table and confiding in one another in Portuguese. If I walked through the room, their banter ceased until I left again. Their silence told me all I needed to know.

YOU DON'T GET A SECOND CHANCE TO MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION.
It's one of the most painful lessons I've learned in my life. The first impression I made for most New Jerseyans was one of scandal. Besides the billboard scandal, the police superintendent's alleged mafia ties, and Golan's mysterious tenure, there was an unfortunate stream of other defining missteps. It turned out that my commerce secretary—the Reverend William Watley of the St. James AME Church in Newark—had stuck with his chief of staff (who happened also to be a trusted member of his church) despite allegations that she'd hired five members of her own family in vague and unspecified positions, an embarrassing revelation that compelled both of them to resign. His well-meaning efforts to do the right thing produced nothing but bad press.

Meanwhile, Roger Chugh, the Woodbridge businessman who coordinated Asian Indian minority voters in my campaign and joined the administration as assistant secretary of state, was running a strange personal website that read like a lonely-hearts ad and misrepresented his position in the administration. He later drew more disturbing allegations: members of his own community said that he'd strong-armed them into making political donations for my campaign, something I can't believe is true.

As the political writers kept pointing out, I appeared to be the newest machine politician off the assembly line, yet another creature of patronage, “pay-to-play” favoritism, obfuscation, secrecy, and machine politics who'd declared a hypocritical show war against “business as usual.” For obvious reasons, I tended to forgive myriad character failings rather than
pass judgment on them. But it really was remarkable how many people in my administration turned out to have totally crazy meltdowns. Surely that makes me a bad judge of character, at the least.

But I realize now that I wasn't managing my staff effectively. Having spent too long isolated from “the weeds” of a campaign, I never fully made the transition to acting as a hands-on chief executive. Too often I left the engine of Trenton to manage itself. As some of my appointees slipped into unreasonable behavior, I didn't even notice. I was almost never in the office; instead I haunted the VFW halls and church pulpits I'd visited over the years, continuing on the hustings of retail politics.

There were a number of reasons for this. I felt I had to take my two consecutive budget cuts directly to the voters, not only for their support but to help make legislators feel safe supporting them. Besides, I felt much more comfortable discussing my policy initiatives with “real people.” They reminded me every moment why I was a politician—to help the people of New Jersey through a difficult passage.

Yet it's also true that campaigning gave me the emotional assurance I craved, which I wouldn't find in the halls of the statehouse. Being permanently on the stump helped remind me that people liked me—that I was likable, despite my differences. Maybe I continually sought proof that I'd buried my differences deeply enough to be liked. There is no question that I needed the kind of affirmation that only campaign-style appearances provided.

In retrospect, I can see that by this point I was fractured and compartmentalized to the point of debilitation. Did I let things in government slide? Absolutely, without question. And too many of my trusted advisers slid into scandal as a result.

By the end of my first year in office, I had a dismal approval rating to show for it—just 37 percent, down from 51 percent in March, sixty days into the administration. By the following July I'd slipped even further, to 35 percent. It seemed there was nothing I could do to mitigate the harsh press. As Governor Byrne once said, “If Jim McGreevey walked on water the newspapers would say McGreevey can't swim.”

On St. Patrick's Day 2003, I had something of an epiphany. I had to
attend a number of functions that day, including the traditional parade down New York's Fifth Avenue as a guest of Governor George Pataki. That was a lot of fun. Not only was it a huge honor to be at the front of America's longest-running annual parade (it began in 1762), but at one point we saw my cousin Kim McGreevey, a sergeant on the Suffolk County police force, marching past in full uniform. She ran over and we kissed—celebrating the fact that our family tradition on the force continued to this day was one of my greatest thrills as governor.

But that same day I also attended the Irish parade in Bayonne, New Jersey. I had looked forward to it as a chance to stand with my own community as their governor. It was not the homecoming I had hoped. Nobody heckled me. But nobody cheered me, either, and there were a lot of folks there who challenged me sharply on the first year of my administration. This shook me terribly. I saw disappointment in the eyes of my own community, and it shamed me.

For me, it was a wake-up call.

Up to this point, I had put the blame for past performances on the inexperienced staff I'd entrusted with the administration. It was wrong to blame them alone. But after their departure, I brought in a topflight team led by Jamie Fox, my new chief of staff, and the difference was like night and day. After our year of turmoil, Jamie was just the master strategist we needed, a total pro. He came with years of experience, most notably as Torricelli's chief of staff. When I first became governor, I appointed him Commissioner of Transportation, where he proved he was a great manager. When I brought him over to the statehouse, I realized just how awkwardly we'd been approaching the business of government. Jamie ran my office—and the State of New Jersey—like a field general. His instincts were always dead-on. He was also openly gay, a fact that increased my admiration for him.

But until this morning at the Bayonne parade, I had not taken any personal responsibility for the scandals and our failures to get traction on a meaningful agenda. I focused on the parts, not the whole—I saw myself as innocent of the scandals, and untouched by them.

I knew the bad press frustrated my father endlessly. Almost every day he mailed me long, handwritten letters offering his commonsense advice
and ethical insights. In the fog of my war, I didn't pay them close attention. Mom was less concerned about the press than about my spiritual well-being. One day she handed me a stack of letters my grandmother had written me. I don't know where she found them, but reading them again was a powerful salve. “Pray to Grandma,” Mom said, “she will guide you.”

My approach to the bad press was to keep campaigning. Shaking hands and meeting people, hearing their thoughts about government, had always brought my numbers up in the past. So I kept in constant motion, I was almost never in the office.

The first thing I realized there in Bayonne was the mistake of this policy. I'd entered politics to enact an aggressive legislative agenda. That's what the voters were waiting for—not more face time with the governor. On a few matters, I'd made some significant progress, especially education. The problem was, with the din of scandal engulfing the statehouse, our victories were barely getting noticed in the press.

 

AT HARVARD, I HAD STUDIED THE SO-CALLED BEST PRACTICES
methods, designed to determine what worked and what didn't in public education. All the studies proved that prekindergarten education and literacy meant the difference between success or failure for disadvantaged kids. If these kids couldn't read, they couldn't compete. In terms of facility with language and socialization, studies showed kids needed to be in academic settings as early as possible.

When I came into office, despite a court ruling mandating access to preschool for all three- and four-year-olds in the state's poorest districts, only about half were enrolled. Whitman's administration had dragged its feet on implementation and cut corners on quality. In 2002, the few affected students were more often than not being taught by day care “aides” who lacked proper training or expertise. I immediately allocated an extra $140 million to pre-K expansion, though I was having to slash spending elsewhere, and hired an early-childhood education expert, Dr. Ellen Frede, to oversee preschools in the state.

I also made sure that preschool teachers were getting the training they
needed to teach our vulnerable kids effectively. I began offering professional development courses, inaugurated the state's first-ever New Jersey Teacher Academy, and set new minimum standards: all aides were to be on their way toward earning bachelor degrees, and all teachers were to have subject-matter proficiency in their fields. If you wanted to teach the wonders of science, you needed a science degree to prove you understood it yourself. New Jersey was one of the first states to require such standards.

What's more, there were no literacy standards for children up through third grade. How can you know how a child is doing if you don't even know what the benchmarks are? In February 2002, I signed an executive order setting third-grade literacy standards, the first in the state. I knew that a child who can't read by third grade is likely never to catch up.

In my second year, I announced a $10 million budget for reading coaches, sending early-literacy experts into the at-risk schools and helping fifty thousand students be better readers. My education counselor, Lucille Davy, and I launched the Governor's Book Club, which distributed books to kindergarteners through third-graders. I wanted to infuse literacy into kids' lives.

Our efforts paid off. By the time I left office, about 80 percent of eligible students were enrolled in preschool—100 percent in some districts. And literacy rates continue to improve. New Jersey's third-grade reading scores are now among the highest in the nation.

 

ANOTHER POLICY INITIATIVE I UNDERTOOK, UNDER NO SMALL
amount of duress, was gay domestic partnership. Early in 2004, I signed into law a measure making New Jersey only the third state in the country to convey a bundle of rights upon same-sex couples. It was in the middle of my own long struggle with the issue. I publicly opposed gay marriage, something I'm not proud of. A gay rights group representing seven couples sued for the right to marry, and my attorney general fought back hard, getting the suit thrown out of court. I criticized the suit as detrimental to New Jersey, and even opposed the first proposal for establishing civil unions, calling it too broad and expensive.

The bill I signed was more modest. It came to me from the legislature, sponsored by Dick Codey and Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg, making it the first domestic partnership measure implemented by lawmakers voluntarily, not ordered by the courts. Under it, unmarried gays (and straights over age sixty-two) living in committed and mutually caring relationships are empowered to make medical decisions for each other, and health insurers in the state are required to offer them the same coverage given to spouses. The law did not give other rights enjoyed by married couples, such as the right to share property acquired during marriage or the right to seek alimony or financial support when the partnership ends. Nor did it allow them to share in a partner's family entitlements in public benefits programs.

Still, it looked for a time as though even this modest bill wouldn't find enough votes for passage in the legislature. Jamie Fox made it his mission to lobby lawmakers one by one. Perhaps his biggest challenge was Senator Ron Rice from Newark, the leader of the Senate's Black Caucus, who had blocked us on other socially progressive undertakings. “Ron, I need this one,” Jamie said. “This one's personal.” Ron gave it to him. Not only did he vote yes, but so did just about every member of the caucus. Even Sharpe James, who besides being Newark's mayor also represented the 29th District in the Senate, surrendered to Jamie's offensive—by abstaining.

Despite being limited in scope, the bill was welcomed by most gay New Jerseyans when I signed the bill in a small ceremony at my office. Many times in my career my signature has been greeted with cheers, but never like the ovation that filled the room this day.

 

THE POLICY AREA WHERE WE MADE THE MOST PROFOUND IMPACT
was also where we got the most push back. Environmentally, we collected more fines and more compensation from polluters in our first year than the prior administration had collected in eight, using laws already on the books. This irritated industry leaders. I joined a bipartisan coalition of states to take the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to court to stop Midwestern power plants from polluting New Jersey's air. Naturally, this involved taking on Christie Todd Whitman, the EPA's director. As I said in my State of the State address, “If the federal government will not provide the leadership to
protect the air we breathe, reduce pollution, and protect New Jersey's coastline, then we will.” In a first, we shut down a power plant in Pennsylvania because its emissions polluted our air downstream.

But it was when we finally took on sprawl that things got really interesting. Environmental regulations already on the books prohibited new construction within three hundred feet of rivers. I proposed expanding those regulations to include tributaries, streams, and creeks, all of which are equally instrumental to the state's supply of drinking water. In the stroke of an executive order, I expanded the protected footprint to include 300,000 more acres of land.

Developers went crazy. I halted scores of planned projects. Conventional wisdom said it was suicide to take on the single richest source of campaign financing in the state. As a result of their financial clout, developers were able to pull strings at every level of government—they literally owned many of the local politicians, including many bosses—and in the ancillary businesses (banking, law, insurance, unions) that make up the state's service economy.

The political establishment joined the outcry—none more than John Lynch, whose consulting firm, Executive Continental, specialized in helping developers with state contracts. Lynch and I hadn't been getting along since I'd arrived in Trenton. Now he turned on me with passion.