There was also the constant fear of contracting HIV. Although I was extremely careful, I dreaded the disease. I knew only one person who came down with it, a friend of mine and Laura’s from Catholic University. He never told anybody what he had, and died, tragically, in 1987. When we learned what had killed him, I was stunned. I guess I thought AIDS would never strike so close to home. Surely, I thought, his life can’t have been any wilder than mine. So a week or so later I forced myself to take the test, anonymously, in a crowded STD clinic on the west side of Manhattan. It was a degrading and terrifying experience, though fortunately the news was good.
I tried to stop. Just as I had as a teenager, I desperately resumed my efforts to shift my sexual drive toward women, reading from books by psychologists and psychiatrists who have since been discredited as quacks. I put tight controls on my sexual fantasies. I redoubled my prayers, adding new saints and rituals with each passing year. I meditated on the primary and secondary benefits of heterosexuality, as I saw them, and even put down on paper the future I could expect as a gay American (isolation, loss of family) versus my expectations as a straight American (boundless success, happiness, extended family). I stared at Playboy centerfolds as instructed, hoping for a breakthrough. Never mind that real women aren’t airbrushed, depilated, and siliconed like those models. The prevailing theories held that such images could “correct” sexual drives that had been arrested in childhood and redirect them to the “proper” object. Today, the American Psychiatric Association concedes that “aversion therapy” and “conversion therapy” of this sort can do only damage. At the time, though, all I knew was that my behavior was getting crazier and crazier. With each new encounter, I was getting nearer and nearer to being caught—which surely would have generated headlines, especially after I became executive director of the New Jersey Parole Board.
I know how it happens that a man like Roy Cohn, the powerful lawyer and closeted aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, builds a sex life around male prostitutes—or an entertainer like George Michael is one day dragged out of a public toilet in handcuffs. When you repress your simple expressions of love, other, less wholesome, forms emerge to take their place. I will always remember a particular line I read in a biography of Rock Hudson, who denied being gay until days before he died of AIDS in 1985. In the 1960s, at the height of his fame, Hudson was given the chance to make love with a man in Hollywood. “I’ll put it this way,” the man said later, “he was hungry.” The closet starves a man, and when he gets a chance he gorges till it sickens him.
But he doesn’t give up pretenses, and that’s the story of my adult life. In public, I became as avid a womanizer as anybody else on the New Jersey political scene. My unconsummated “romance” with Laura ran its course; I even asked her to marry me, praying she would know I meant this to be an arrangement, and breathed a sign of relief when she declined. In her wake came a parade of other women. I went to bed with some of them, even romanced several at later League of Municipalities conferences, making sure people saw us leaving or entering hotel rooms together. I suppose a few of those women might read this book. I’d like them to know that my interest in them was genuine. I appreciated their beauty and enjoyed holding them in my arms, especially in those earlier years. But my attraction was largely artificial, my sexual performance a triumph of mind over matter.
And it never totally did the job it was supposed to do. Rumors about me multiplied no matter what I did. I couldn’t quite put my finger on where they were coming from. I sometimes worried that they were generated in my mind, the way I thought I’d imagined the Cub Scouts ridiculing me. But they were often reported to me by good friends, who were sure they weren’t true but who worried that such talk might derail my career. There was one particularly persistent story that I had been caught being intimate with a man in a car in a cemetery, a story with no foundation in fact. To this day, I am sure there are people who think it was true.
The more the rumors circulated, the more public and brazen I became about my heterosexual conquests. I started checking out the strip clubs in Linden and Carteret with friends. It was amazing to me how often we ran into local political operatives and Wall Street traders in such places, mostly young-men-in-a-hurry types from working-class backgrounds. A great deal of New Jersey’s networking is conducted by men while folding bills into the waistbands of women dancing in their laps at clubs with names like VIP and Cheeques. For aspiring politicians like me, these were our fraternal lodges—relaxed places to see and be seen, to blow off steam, and establish lasting and productive connections.
In our milieu, it wasn’t enough to appear straight; you actually had to prove your mettle in public. I felt I had no choice but to engage the services of the women at the clubs, for show. There were times—scores of times—when I would invite friends to my apartment or hotel room when I knew I’d be in bed with a woman, just so that they’d “accidentally” catch me in the act.
Joe Suliga was one of those friends. Though he was entirely heterosexual, I saw a lot of myself in Joe. He was a gregarious and strappingly handsome kid from a working-class family in Linden, with an outsized drive to make a difference in the political realm. At the age of nineteen, he became the youngest person ever elected to the Linden Board of Education. After college he served on the Linden town council. He planned to run for state senate one day; that was the job of his dreams. Joe was an idealist who believed in public service, and an unflagging optimist about human nature, the political system, and his own role in it. And he loved women as much as they loved him. We used to order beer after beer at Cheeques, watching the dancers twirl on their poles while debating everything from local policy initiatives and tax ratables to the merits of silicone breast enhancement.
On occasion, Joe and I used to go to one of the salty Jersey Shore towns that come to life in summer, searching for female companionship. We looked like total opposites on those outings. Everything about Joe screamed confidence and enthusiasm, from his Hawaiian shirts down to flip-flops; I, on the other hand, wore dark suits and a tie wherever I went. I’m not saying I wasn’t successful at attracting women. I even enjoyed the hunt, despite the pressures to perform sexually. But I never forgot for a minute that I was in Joe’s world, playing by his rules.
It may seem peculiar, but being able to date women that way gave me a feeling of great power. Where most people were stuck being just one thing all their lives, I thought, I’d found a way to overcome those limitations, to become whatever was necessary in the moment. I knew there was a difference between what I wanted and what I was allowed, between my heart and my actions, but it didn’t stop me. I learned to study what moves worked and what didn’t, practicing and perfecting my inauthenticity. Being divided this way was never comfortable, but I found a way to live with it. People actually believed I was straight, even my closest friends—even those women. Not me. I knew in every instance that the sex was a contortion of my desires.
Ironically, as I began to climb the ladder of electoral politics, it was this dividing experience that helped me thrive. Political compromises came easy to me because I’d learned how to keep a part of myself innocent of them. Politics, like dating, involved unhappy accommodations. Throughout it, I kept a steel wall around my moral and sexual instincts—protecting them, I thought, from the threats of the real world. This stand gave me a tremendous advantage in politics, if not in my soul. The more I engaged in doing rather than being, the more alienated I became from my spirituality. My relationship with God was never more remote.
In my longing for intimacy—the gift God gave man—I was marching slowly into hell.
IN 1985, PETER SHAPIRO, A COUNTY EXECUTIVE WITH LITTLE NAME recognition but outstanding bona fides as a reformer, was chosen by the Democratic Party to take on Tom Kean. Shapiro’s support came from the liberal wing of the party; I favored the more moderate John F. Russo, a Notre Dame and Columbia University Law School graduate and the president of the state senate. Russo seemed to understand the st
ate’s identity politics and working-class roots, having come from a family much like my own. He was also charismatic, having pulled together a vast political machine on the strength of his personality alone. Unfortunately, he was unable to raise the money to expand his campaign. The party pulled behind the better-funded candidate, and my man was out of the race.
It almost wouldn’t have mattered. Kean’s popularity was soaring, thanks to a budget surplus and a nationwide economic resurgence attributed—wrongly, in my view—to incumbent politicians. He credited his supply-side policies, though objectively the mid-eighties economic boom affected Democratic and Republican states alike. But New Jersey was undeniably in good shape, as even Kean’s Democratic opponents admitted. More to the point, they were forced to admit that Kean was a good man and a good governor, the kind of centrist Republican that New Jersey is known for. An early environmentalist, Kean had always believed our state had an obligation to fight poverty and support the poor—policies that were anathema in Ronald Reagan’s GOP.
But perhaps most impressive were Kean’s feelings about race. He often spoke in African American churches and clubs, advocating for equal opportunity for all New Jerseyans. It wasn’t just talk. He appointed a record number of blacks and Latinos to high-level state offices, including judgeships, because he believed that government should reflect the demographics of its citizens. No other governor, Democrat or Republican, made bigger strides toward a color-blind New Jersey.
Shapiro was never expected to win, but his campaign turned out to be a disaster. He failed to stake out a single position against Kean. Even some Democratic leaders seemed to favor Kean—but they pressed forward anyway, out of party loyalty. That was my bind exactly. I voted for Shapiro, but I rooted for Kean.
When election night came, the results were atrocious. Many of the state’s labor unions turned out for the Republican, costing us one of our bases. Even worse, more than 60 percent of African Americans crossed party lines as well. Kean’s coattails carried dozens of senators and assemblymen to victory. The Democrats lost the majority in both chambers at the same time. We were trounced.
And although Kean and I got along well, my future in government looked bleak after his victory. As a Democrat, I couldn’t expect to get much higher in Kean’s administration than the Parole Board. Complicating matters, Kean decided not to reappoint my boss, Chris Dietz, replacing him with a former Ocean County Sheriff who shared little of Chris’s progressive vision for inmate rehabilitation. I started looking for another job at once.
Two possibilities seemed open to me: private law practice or a position with Merck & Co., the pharmaceutical giant that was one of the largest employers in the area. As a child I’d been awed by Merck’s huge manicured campus on Lincoln Avenue in Rahway; surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, it struck me as imposingly grand and vibrant, our own Land of Oz. For several years running, Fortune magazine had named Merck America’s most admired corporation. For me it was an easy choice.
I was offered a plum job as a regional manager in public affairs, involved in lobbying and some regulatory oversight. I also assumed Merck wouldn’t mind if I used my work there as a home base for making a run for office, although my boss, a sagacious West Pointer named Dick Trabert, called me “transparently ambitious” in my first supervisory review. When I asked my old friend Jimmy Kennedy, an aspiring politician in town, whether he thought that was an unfair characterization, he just laughed. “Jim, everybody knows you’re going to run for something.”
Little did I expect that my first opportunity would be the assembly seat held by my mentor and friend Alan Karcher. In the 1989 election cycle he was planning to make a play for governor, as I’d already learned from the chart behind his desk, and he told me privately that he intended to leave the assembly seat either way. He encouraged me to make a run for it.
Jim Florio, a powerful and popular former congressman who’d lost his last campaign for governor by just 1,800 votes, had already declared for the Democratic primary. Karcher was facing an uphill battle; the Democrats were already unified behind Florio, including the most powerful party bosses. I’m not entirely sure why Karcher chose to take him on.
Among the bosses, there were three who wielded significant extraterritorial influence, carrying weight over other bosses in their regions the way archbishops prevail upon neighboring bishops. With respect, we called them “the warlords.” They divided the state into thirds. The South Jersey warlord was George Norcross III, from Camden, the epitome of the kind of figures who drive politics in the state. Norcross has never held elective office or expressed interest in running. But he was driven into politics after his dad, a prominent carpenters’ union official with a legendary love for racetracks, expressed interest in an appointment to the New Jersey Racing Commission. The local Republican senator turned him down, even after Norcross repeated the request on his father’s behalf, because it crossed party lines. This struck Norcross as venal and petty.
Norcross ultimately got his revenge. He orchestrated the senator’s quick defeat in the following election, handing the seat to a Democrat for the first time in years.
The Camden party leadership was impressed, rewarding him with the chairmanship of the county operation when he was just thirty-two. Eventually, through party accounts and his own PACs, he was able to fuel countless campaigns throughout the southern counties single-handedly. One year, nearly seventy-five candidates owed their victories to his machine.
Norcross’s strategic mastery was a boon to Democrats. It also increased his own stature. He quickly became a reckoning force in the state. Though he was a college dropout, his intelligence and hard work—plus a vast network of loyal connections—enabled him to build a healthy insurance division for Commerce Bank, where he was a top executive.
In Central Jersey, state senator John Lynch was the most powerful überboss—arguably, the most powerful in the state. When it came to urban planning and redevelopment, Lynch was without a doubt the smartest man in the state, maybe the nation. He orchestrated the resurgence of New Brunswick, an industrial city that had sunk into such despair by the early 1970s that the headquarters for Johnson & Johnson nearly moved out. As senate leader, Lynch championed the principles of smart growth and urban revitalization. As the years went by, we all watched as Lynch developed a taste for the financial gain those around him enjoyed. After his service in the senate, Lynch built a consulting company that worked to help developers win government approval for their projects, a peculiar form of checkbook government, though perfectly legal under the state’s tattered lacework of ethics regulations. He eventually became, as he once said, “the most investigated man in New Jersey.”
North Jersey was controlled by my friend Ray Lesniak, the Union County boss and longtime state senator. Ray’s politically connected law firm dominated state, county, and municipal contract business in regions surrounding his legislative district and helped area developers advance their interests.
If Ray, Lynch, and Norcross agreed on a statewide candidate, nobody else had a chance. Knowing the odds were against him, Karcher tried to launch a reform campaign strong enough to bypass the party machinery. He went out to the left of Florio on most issues, putting together a nonmoneyed coalition of sixties progressives, liberal unionists, African Americans, and liberal Jews, as well as tenants, a potentially powerful bloc. But it didn’t work: after a modest showing in the primary, he gave up the fight and drifted out of politics.
I WANTED TO BE MORE CAREFUL. LUCKILY, I’D MADE A FRIENDSHIP with a man who would become the most important influence on my political life. Jack Fay was a former popular state senator raised in the North Jersey mill town of Elizabeth. A former Navy Seal, he’d worked in a local factory during the day while attending college and graduate school at night to become a teacher at Linden High School. Devoutly liberal and progressive, Jack believed passionately that rather than being neutral, government should instead be an advocate for the public against business interests. He was what we us
ed to call a Dorothy Day liberal, a man who believed that social service was an obligation. In Trenton, where he served from 1968 to 1978, he was regarded as a man of unflappable principles who couldn’t be bought or sold.
Unlike so many other politicians, Jack was demonstrably honest. He lived in the same small home for twenty years, leaving it virtually untouched since the death of his beloved wife, Betty, some fifteen years ago. His only indulgences were a cup of coffee and the New York Times in the morning, and a thick cup of soup for lunch.
There was an old story that Attorney General David T. Wilentz, best known for prosecuting the Lindbergh kidnapping case, claimed credit for launching Jack’s career in the 1960s, when he was still county boss. Years later, Wilentz went to the mat with him over a vote on parochial school financing, which Jack opposed. “Irish Catholics don’t vote against parochial schools,” Wilentz scolded Jack—despite the fact that Wilentz was Jewish. When Jack reminded Wilentz that his son Robert, who later became chief justice of the State Supreme Court, also opposed the bill, Wilentz thundered back, “I don’t care what Robert did!”
He continued, “When I found you, you had chalk all over your jacket and trousers. Now go out there and vote responsibly.” To his credit, Jack never backed down.
Jack and I were introduced at an insane political meeting in a local official’s basement. Among the attendees was the tiara-wearing woman I’d seen at that meeting years before, pelting our new congressman with obscenities. Here, though, she was in her element. As she marched us through an ambitious agenda, I could see why she was so powerful; she was a tireless and agile advocate for the party.
Still, though, she seemed to take the whole process a tad too personally. We were discussing candidates for a local mayoral post when someone made the mistake of calling her favored candidate “perhaps not the best choice.” She lunged at the poor guy, wrapping her fingers around his neck. Jack left the room in disgust.
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