The Confession (9 page)

I never made a better move. Columbia demanded unstinting intellectual rigor and rewarded independent thinking. The core curriculum stressed the Great Books, but encouraged us to try and rip away at them. It was tough going. For a professor like Richard Brilliant, who taught art history, it wasn't enough that your essays shed new light on, say, the great artistic rivalry between Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini; they also had to be lyrically composed. He rejected paper after paper of mine, marking them up as if he were a professor of English composition. I was running at such a deficit that it seemed I might not pass. Finally I made a deal with him. If he would give me the chance, I would rewrite every paper he had given a failing mark until he was satisfied with it. He agreed. And I passed that class with an A—though the poor man sometimes had to read through eight or nine drafts.

Richard Pious's course on the American presidency was dazzling. I got to hear Warner Schilling, one of the world's great experts on military policy, lecture on World War II and the cold war; and Andrew Nathan, author of major works on Chinese political history, on the Cultural Revolution. General Telford Taylor, the key U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg
Trials, gave evening lectures on the principles and primacy of human rights, a field he is credited with pioneering. I worked so hard to keep up that I often developed splitting headaches.

The city campus also introduced me to a new kind of diversity. For the first time in my life, I was studying side by side with Jewish and Protestant students—and, more startling to me, with agnostics and atheists. Still, I drew great strength from my faith. By request I bunked at Ford Hall, a Catholic Campus Ministries house named for the priest who brought Catholicism to Thomas Merton, a Columbia alumnus and one of my great spiritual heroes.

The liberalism of academia, and the challenges of my professors and fellow students—as well as life in the teeming Big Apple—had an unexpected tug on my political leanings. I began reading Merton and Karl Marx. I devoured Kant, Burke, Nietzsche, and Freud, inhaled Weber, Mill, and Locke. With the cold war still in high gear, I read Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao, weighing their flawed but interesting ideas. I came to understand that liberal societies were arguably better equipped to manage dynamic change, respond more acutely to market shifts, and cope with culturally diverse populations, than the totalitarian models those men espoused.

Within Catholicism, I also became aware of exciting social justice movements. Dorothy Day, the reformer who'd founded the Catholic Worker house just downtown, was one inspiration; I used to ride the subway down to help the center distribute food and clothing to the poor. The energy and passion of the Liberation Theologists especially drew me in, inspired as they were by the terrible dictatorial crimes in Latin America. Week after week, I snapped up the newest copy of
National Catholic Reporter
for the intoxicating words of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, where three thousand people were being killed every week by forces attached to the military ruler. The other Salvadoran religious leaders remained silent while Romero railed against the killings and the system that produced such suffering.

Watching Carter navigate these shoals impressed me. While Carter's Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan, was busy painting Central America as Communism's beachhead in the hemisphere, Carter and his team felt there was something else at play there, something fundamentally human—a struggle for freedom, a chance to separate right from wrong. He pulled the
plug on aid to Nicaragua and its strongman leader, Anastasio Somoza, after members of his National Guard assassinated an ABC newsman, Bill Stewart, on live television after making him lie facedown in the middle of a road. Republicans in Congress took out a full-page ad in the
New York Times
warning of another Cuba, and Carter did try to mitigate the leftward swing of the rebels. But he couldn't in good conscience free up a single American dollar knowing there was a good chance it would go to bullets for killing innocent people. I was behind him a hundred percent.

A year later, Carter made a similarly brave moral decision after government troops in El Salvador gunned down four American nuns in the jungle, where they volunteered as teachers. Autopsies showed they'd been raped and mutilated. Carter's disgust was enormous. He'd already lost his reelection bid, and in his last days he yanked all foreign aid from them, too.

When Reagan took over the following month, the White House did a complete turnaround. UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, the architect of Reagan's foreign policy, called the nuns “political activists [in support of the guerrillas],” scolding that “we ought to be a little more clear about this than we usually are.” In a famous interview, she seemed to excuse their killers by casting them as anti-Communist vanguardists. Alexander Haig, the new secretary of state, even alleged, without presenting any evidence, that the nuns may have been killed after running a roadblock, though he never explained how that might have justified their rapes. The political extremism that crept into Washington with Ronald Reagan blinded people to human suffering and to truth.

But for me the last straw was Archbishop Romero's assassination in March 1980. Pro-government death squads stormed his chapel as he stood at the altar. “I do not believe in death without resurrection,” he said at Mass that day, Holy Thursday, minutes before being cut down. “If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.” His death staggered the entire Catholic world. But Washington stayed its course.

During these years I changed my party affiliation and began planning my political future in earnest. It seemed the logical thing to do for a working-class kid from Carteret. I was eager to play whatever small part I could to help the Democratic Party. Perhaps I'd be a mayor, maybe even governor—that was my wild dream, to one day be governor of New Jersey.

Yet I knew even then that I could not be a gay governor of New Jersey. This was the mid-1970s, the start of Anita Bryant's rise to prominence as a cheery campaigner against gay causes. I knew of no openly gay person who had ever faced voters. Now I know that there were two: Nancy Wechsler had been elected to the Ann Arbor City Council in 1972, and Elaine Noble, a lesbian activist, won a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives two years later. And that was it. In a nation where 511,000 public servants held elective office, from town sheriff to county supervisor to congressman and senator, only two were openly gay. By comparison, 3,979 African Americans had been voted into office by that time.

In 1977, Harvey Milk famously raised the bar with a colorful, high-profile campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which he won by a landslide vote. His victory was celebrated by gay people around the nation. “I thank God,” a schoolteacher wrote him, “I have lived long enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human race.” What became of Milk? He was hunted down and assassinated within the year—by a fellow supervisor.

 

EARLY IN MY FIRST SEMESTER AT CATHOLIC, I MET A WOMAN I'LL
call Laura. A girl from “back home” in Hillside, New Jersey, she was a graduate of Mount St. Mary Academy, the sister school to St. Joe's, so we shared a cultural foundation. Aside from that, though, she was everything I was not: wickedly funny, gregarious, a risk taker, clever when needed (or when she could get away with it), socially fluent, always cool, and expansively curious.

She was also beautiful, with bronze skin and a thick curly head of hair. Though she had a full dating schedule and a series of boyfriends, if I ever needed a date Laura was game. We used to tell people that we knew each other from high school, playfully backdating our friendship, and everybody believed us. It explained how inseparable we seemed, and how totally keen we were for one another's company. She was my best friend, and I adored her. Had I been straight, I surely would have fallen in love with her.

Since that dreadful kiss in the sixth grade, I had not given up on girls. Through high school I had accumulated a great number of heterosexual
experiences, mostly with girls I met at the Y, and mostly in the same pool where Brian Fitzgerald and I had fooled around. I can't say I was interested in these girls sexually, but I liked the physical contact, craved it even. I found it easy to perform sexually back then. I seldom had to rely on the silent movies of my imagination that became my crutch in later life. And every conquest became a résumé piece, which I broadcast instantly and thoughtlessly to anyone who would listen.

Once, when I was fourteen, my cad routine backfired on me with nearly disastrous results. My close friendship with a slightly older African American girl turned sexual during one of our weekend sleepaway trips—a fact I never missed a chance to mention the rest of the summer. The romance lasted weeks, an eternity back then. Unfortunately, word reached her younger brother, a contemporary of mine and a really big kid. He was angry with me, and ashamed, I think, that his sister was dating a “younger white guy.” Only by luck did I manage to talk him out of punishing me with his fists.

In college in Washington, Laura became my newest beard, and she seemed not to mind—maybe not even to notice that I was using her this way. We kept seeing each other even after I transferred to New York City. There I told people she was my girlfriend, that I was involved with this woman who lived hours away—which allowed me to maintain the impression that I was both single and demonstrably heterosexual. Laura and I remained “steadies” when I moved back to DC for law school. We even talked about getting engaged, but she was too emotionally wise to let that happen. I don't know if she ever suspected I was gay, but I can tell you this: in all that time, we never even kissed. “Politics is your first mistress,” she said more than once.
First and only,
I thought. When I finally came out, she called and laughed, in that pitch-perfect way of hers, “To think I was almost your wife!”

I SPENT THE YEARS
1979
TO
1981
AT GEORGETOWN LAW SCHOOL
, yet I barely noticed I was in the nation's capital. Though I went every morning to the campus on Judiciary Square, I might as well have been in Kansas. In three years I rarely set foot in a museum; I never climbed the Washington Monument; I hardly ever crossed the great expanse of the National Mall in daylight hours. In that fall of 1979, Allen Ginsberg was the keynote speaker at the first gay pride march on Washington. “The burden of life is love,” Ginsberg told the crowd of seventy thousand. “The weight is too heavy—must give.” Yet his words never reached me; I carried my own burden in oblivious silence, deluged by torts and contract law.

Much is made of the fact that today's Supreme Court draws heavily upon Harvard Law graduates. Georgetown was a different sort of incubator—a practical laboratory in power and justice. The curriculum was challenging; the faculty included future White House counsel Charles Ruff, Watergate prosecutor Samuel Dash, and former congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest whose tenure on the Hill was famously ended after the Vatican ordered all priests to refrain from electoral politics. In such competitive circumstances, it was tough to make friends; now and then I'd run into my old study partner Terry McAuliffe, the future DNC chairman who'd followed me from Catholic to law school, but otherwise I spent most of my time alone with my books.

My interest in law always had more to do with government than with the courtroom, with social justice more than corporate relations. The summer after my first year, when other students undertook internships at
white-shoe law firms, I enrolled for coursework at the London School of Economics through a program with Notre Dame Law School. I spent my classroom hours that summer studying currency policy—these were the early days of the emerging Common Market and European Union, when currency was an exciting subject—and spent what little personal currency I had on curry and rice and cheap beer. The following summer, when most future lawyers sign up for clerkships with judges, I landed a plum position with the Department of Justice, soaking up everything I could learn about federal law enforcement. (When the FBI visited my old neighborhood to conduct their standard background search, they asked my dad if I ever smoked pot. “No,” he answered correctly. “I raised him like my father raised me. A little tough love never hurt anybody.”)

Back at St. Joe's, I'd absorbed the notion that every citizen has an obligation to perform “social action.” As a senior, twice a week I pedaled my bike over to nearby St. Francis Cathedral grammar school, where the kids came from much more challenging backgrounds than I, to teach history and help seniors in the school's office of social concerns. Now, at Georgetown, I volunteered to teach “street law,” a civics-style introduction to law, human rights, and democracy for students at Gonzaga College High, a Jesuit secondary school in the heart of Washington. The city's population is 60 percent African American, and for too many generations it has existed in a disgraceful state of poverty, squalor, and hopelessness. Congress, which supervises the district's affairs, should be ashamed of itself. But at Gonzaga, I also saw the city's future in the kids there, who were quick and bright; if given half a chance, I knew that their potential might one day outstrip their economic limitations.

My parents had made sacrifices to underwrite their kids' college educations, and I picked up where they left off, compressing my undergraduate requirements into three years by taking some credits at Rutgers and Middlesex County College and spending what I had left on my first year of law school. That first year I saved money by attending Georgetown at night, when credits were cheaper; after that I squeaked by on student loans and earnings from part-time jobs at the Department of Justice and the law school library.

In the midst of all this, too, I managed to find time to pursue my new love: politics. In the summer of 1980, I raced back to Carteret to volunteer for Congressman Bernie Dwyer, my hometown representative and a Democrat. Dwyer was part of the great tradition of Irish Americans in New Jersey politics. Governors Hughes, Cahill, Byrne—I was beginning to identify with all of them, the way I once prized the examples of Fathers Lyons, Dolan, and Murphy as powerful forces of good from my own clan. I saw a lot of myself in Bernie Dwyer, I thought then: we were both Irish and Catholic, both good on technical matters, both cranked up by the ins and outs of retail politics—the door-to-door, barbecue-to-barbecue, synagogue-to-church-basement kind of campaign that really teaches you what people want from their representatives and need from their government.

But Dwyer had something I didn't have: a wife and children. Bernie Dwyer was like his voters. You could see how they mirrored one another, identified with one another, and how significant this bond was. Cultural identities and affinities were just as strong in New Jersey in the late 1970s as they were in the 1950s. When the young Irish Catholic electorate in Dwyer's congressional district pulled the lever for him, they were embracing one of their own.

It may seem wrong to call this “identity politics,” a phrase that's been adopted by academics to describe the rise of challenging political movements like feminism, gay liberation, and civil rights in the years after World War II. As anyone from New Jersey will tell you, though, “identity politics” is exactly what's practiced there. Ours is the most diverse state in the country. Indians, Egyptians, Portuguese, Italians, and Polish have all staked out particular neighborhoods as their own, as my parents' generation of Irish Americans did before them. From childhood, I know, I latched onto my parents' working-class Irish-Catholic-American identity so strongly that I couldn't see myself as anything else. It was a birthright I treasured, an idea in which I found value and comfort and a sense of belonging.

And yet, deep down, I knew that this totemic American ideal excluded me. Even in these years, questions about the nature of identity consumed me. The philosopher Charles Taylor uses the term
identity
to describe the merging of our inner voice with a capacity for authenticity; our quest to
establish our unique identity, he says, represents our struggle to be true to ourselves. By this definition, I had no identity whatsoever. In fact, I was going about the enterprise entirely backward. I'd already settled on a way of being: a life in politics in the tight-knit community of my inheritance. It was my
self
that was the variable.

And so I set about trying to find a self that seemed authentic.

 

AFTER SITTING THE BAR EXAM IN 1981, I DASHED TO HARVARD TO
collect a master's degree at the famed Graduate School of Education, which has produced countless college presidents and education secretaries and commissioners. Harvard's Kennedy School of Government might have been a better fit for me, but it was a two-year program and I simply couldn't afford it, and I did have a genuine interest in early childhood education. I never felt luckier than during the time I spent at Harvard, walking those hallowed halls and studying some of the freshest thinking anywhere on education policy, from advances in pre-kindergarten curriculum to new theories of early literacy. All of today's mainstream emphasis on testing and benchmarks was being developed back then, at Harvard's “E-School.”

When Laura visited, we always had a blast. We'd go to hear jazz in Cambridge clubs, haunt bars on the Boston Common, walk the trail where Paul Revere sounded his warnings. Once we even went away for the weekend to Montreal and Quebec City, to tour some of the shrines my grandparents had visited. But no magic ever kindled between us.

As graduation approached, I began thinking more seriously about where I wanted to be when I finally entered the workforce. At the top of my list was the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office back home. For one thing, it was as close to being a cop as a guy like me could safely get. Unlike all those men in my grandfather's generation, I'd never allowed my nose to be flattened in a boxing match, and I couldn't see myself mixing it up physically with the criminal element. But I was dead curious about what went on in criminal court. And I knew even then that my future political career would benefit from a few years in the trenches of law enforcement.

I sent a letter to the Middlesex County prosecutor outlining my
credentials and asking for a job fighting crime. After seven years of higher education, I'd thought I'd amassed a pretty impressive resume: Catholic University, Columbia College, Georgetown, Notre Dame Law School at the London School of Economics, and Harvard, plus stints at the Justice Department. Yet I waited, and waited, and no reply came.

This was perplexing. When I'd circulated my résumé in the private sector I was flooded with invitations for interviews, follow-up phone calls, even offers for jobs paying $42,000 a year, which sounded like a fortune to me. Yet not even a form letter came from the county office. I sent letter after letter after letter, but never got a single response.

Over the phone from Boston one day, I happened to share my frustration with my parents. That weekend my father spotted a local politician, a family friend, at Sunday Mass with his wife. Dad asked him to “help Jimmy out.” Within thirty-six hours I had an appointment to see the county prosecutor, Richard Rebeck. It was my first taste of politics New Jersey style, my first glimpse of just how well-oiled, tribal, and dependent on patronage the machine was. That local politician is a scrupulously honest fellow, and his gesture was nothing more than a simple favor for a friend. Still, in retrospect, my introduction to the slippery slope of New Jersey politics—a culture where the system of favors and friendship had a life of its own—had begun.

I flew back home with a surprising case of nervous anxiety to meet with Rebeck. He was a quiet and decent man with a reputation for directness, and he ran a competent operation—a lot to say for an underfunded, meagerly staffed office that prosecuted thousands of cases a year, a large number of them violent. I don't remember what Rebeck wanted to know about me, other than the fact that I was game. He hired me on the spot, for $21,000, half what the private law firms had offered.

I flew back to Boston to gather my diploma and finally leave academe behind me.

 

I WAS RAISED IN A FAMILY THAT EMBRACED HARD WORK AS THE
staff of life. Every morning of my childhood I watched my father's daily
rituals—rising before dawn, shaving and performing his ablutions, pulling on a starched white shirt, tie, and suit, and heading off to conquer the world. My mom was equally formal about her commitments to work and school, and after my sisters and I were older, she rejoined both. In some ways, her drive was even greater than my dad's.

Too much has been made of the so-called Protestant work ethic. I never saw men and women more tireless, more dedicated to their labors, than my parents and their Irish Catholic friends. In just one generation, they took their community from poverty to the middle class while educating their children for higher rungs, in Carteret and in countless similar parishes across the country. And they did this without greed, always giving back when they could. In service to their family and their community, my dad and mom worked dawn till dusk—still do—without complaint. Catholics of their time haven't yet been given their due.

I loved emulating them. And I loved my new work in the county prosecutor's office. I loved the feeling that I was doing good for my community, solving problems and making the world a better place. I may have been a bit idealistic, but nothing I saw at the prosecutor's office undermined my faith in American justice.

Probably because of my work in early childhood education, Rebeck sent me to work in the Juvenile Division. “Kiddie Court,” as we called it, takes the juice out of a lot of young lawyers. The division was run by one of the most intuitive people I've ever met, a barely reconstructed child of the sixties named Caroline Meuly. I liked her immediately; she, on the other hand, wasn't as quick to take me in. For one thing, Caroline spotted my insecurity at once, though I thought I'd hidden it pretty well. She also saw something much more private—not my sexual identity, but my ambition, especially my naked intention to use this job as a stepping stone to political office. To her, I seemed to be “slumming” in the job. She took me down a notch or two right away. “I'm gonna call you
MOPFE,
” she announced with the disarming smile that was her trademark. “Stands for
Man of the People—Former Elitist.”

I came to love her for saying that. In a line, she unmasked my many poses. I was the geeky kid from Carteret pretending to be a Harvard Ole Boy
pretending to be a streetwise lawman. She caught me every time I tried to shoehorn some Harvardism into my speech, and she mocked me for it mercilessly. Along the way she used a surgeon's skill to remove any last bit of Republican shrapnel in my system, for which I am eternally grateful. Every day, she challenged me to not run away from who I was, to drop the conservative pose I'd hidden behind in my youth and follow my truer political instincts.

Caroline was a huge influence on my sense of myself. What she couldn't touch, of course, couldn't even have known about, was how far away from integration I already was. Part of me thought,
If I can convince people I'm straight, why not affluent?
She beat back the second impulse. The first went unchallenged.

Caroline was a great teacher. When I arrived in her employ, I knew I was a good speaker, a fast study, well organized, a hard worker. But that didn't make me a prosecutor—those skills I had to learn. In one of the first cases I took to trial, I presented what I thought was a water-tight argument for conviction. Just before I was about to rest, Judge Joseph Sadofski called from his bench. “Mr. McGreevey, may I remind you that now would be a good time to introduce any evidence you might have?”