When I followed him out, he invited me for a cup of coffee at the Reo Diner in Woodbridge, a tradition we kept up almost weekly until his death many years later. He was a spiritual and ethical man, one of the really good guys. Our conversations ranged from the philosophy of government to the purpose God had for our lives.
It may even have been Jack’s idea that I run for Alan’s old seat. However it came about, every facet of my campaign had Jack’s fingerprints on it. I loved every minute of it, from strategizing to knocking on doors. I began by making lists of all the people whose rings I needed to kiss. The 19th Legislative District, which sent two assemblymen and one senator to Trenton, covered five towns in Middlesex County: Woodbridge, Sayreville, South Amboy, South River, and Perth Amboy. I needed the support of the political powerhouses there—not just the mayors, but the five local Democratic chairmen as well. Together, they could deliver the winning votes.
I started by focusing on Woodbridge, which accounted for 50 percent of the district, and its colorful mayor, a major political force named Joseph A. “JoJo” DeMarino. JoJo was a classic New Jersey figure. A former marine and Middlesex County Sheriff, he considered himself the Kojak of local politics, right down to shaving his head and keeping an autographed photo of Telly Savalas on his office wall. He made a comfortable income drawn mostly from rents he collected from a small apartment building he owned and other real estate deals he made periodically in the area.
JoJo never went to college. But he was innately bright and an effective mayor, at least by all appearances: heavy-handed when he needed to be, an old-school wheeler dealer with Da Boyz (as he called the contractors and vendors constantly lined up outside his door), and a father figure to his constituents. He personally tended to every problem on every block of his town, from trimming trees to fixing sidewalks and sweeping litter out of alleyways. He used to carry a little notepad around with him and write down his observations of every conversation he ever had. Then, when he got back to his office, he’d send a letter perfectly recapping the issues and sending his regards to each child and even the family pets.
For JoJo, being mayor was everything. “In high school they said I’d never amount to nothing,” he once told me. “I said, ‘I’ll be back as your boss.’”
He was predisposed to backing me because I had supported him over the years. JoJo had been mayor since 1979, but in 1983 he was briefly run out of office by a well-meaning Republican named Phil Cerria. Cerria was a good guy, but unfortunately he’d acquiesced to some of the more harebrained schemes of his staff—like sprinkling a vanilla scent over leaf piles throughout the township to alleviate persistent odors in the area. Jack Fay and I had helped JoJo arrange his comeback in 1987; I worked mostly as a volunteer campaigner, reviewing campaign literature and going door-to-door on his behalf, but I knew he was aware of the energy I had committed.
But the secret to JoJo’s comeback was Jack Fay. Jack was well known and respected in Woodbridge, parts of which he had represented before a redistricting change. He even offered to make a local cable TV commercial for JoJo. When we showed up at the recording studio, Jack was seated by a beat-up desk, with an American flag in the background. The production assistant pointed a fan toward the flag, causing the flag to ripple and Jack to squint. “I’m Jack Fay and I’m here to support Joe DeMarino,” he said. “Joe is a good and decent man and deserves to be our next mayor.” The spot ran almost constantly till JoJo’s victory on election night.
In the two years that followed, I had worked with JoJo on a number of issues, some more successful than others. At one point, Jack and I even drafted an ethics policy plank for him in his reelection campaign. But when we tried getting him to adopt it as an ordinance after he returned to office, he all but threw us out of his office, assigning us to a kindly but secondary counselor named Herb Rosen to review the matter. Herb was a PR person. That’s how JoJo seemed to view ethics—as a campaign shtick for public consumption.
NOW I PAID A FORMAL CALL ON THE MAYOR, WHO RECEIVED ME in the finished basement of his home. I reminded him of my labors on his behalf and asked for his support in my assembly bid, which he delivered in a heartbeat. “You’ve got a lot of ambition, kid,” he told me. “Stick with me. It’ll get you a good distance.” JoJo took credit for launching the career of Senator Bill Bradley, the former NBA star, over a meeting in the same basement. Now he was laying claim to mine.
Even with Woodbridge in the bag, though, I still lacked enough votes to win. My primary opponent was John McCormack, the mayor of Sayreville, who already laid claim to not only his hometown but South Amboy and South River, too. That left only one town up for grabs: Perth Amboy. I’d already spent a lot of time in Perth Amboy, a city of 47,000 near the New York Harbor. The town made history as the place where the first signature was affixed to the Bill of Rights and where the first African American in the United States was allowed to vote, but it had seen better days. Many area residents suffered in poverty, and parts of the region were blighted. One morning, as I stood outside the grocery store there shaking hands, I was interrupted by a commotion.
“McGreevey, get the hell out of here!” a man shouted. “Go home! Get out!”
Looking up, I found Ed Patten, a beloved retired congressman, in the passenger seat of his car. Patten was known for attending every funeral, bar mitzvah, and First Holy Communion he was invited to. His daughter, a wonderful Catholic nun named Sister Catherine, was driving.
“Why, Congressman?”
“Nobody here votes,” he said, stroking his hand dismissively outside the window before speeding off. “Perth Amboy is the asshole of the world!”
Besides my own efforts, Jack Fay did his damnedest on my behalf, attempting to work his charm on the leadership there. “We need Perth Amboy or we’re dead,” he kept telling me. “And for some reason they’re not budging. We’re going to have to go see Otlowski.”
That was Mayor George J. Otlowski, the same local boss whose political dinner I crashed so many years ago. Otlowski and I had become friends—or so I’d thought—and I’d volunteered on many of his pet projects over the years. Why he wasn’t endorsing me was a mystery to me and Jack alike. I’d assumed he’d sign on to my campaign instantly. Now, Jack told me, he wasn’t even returning calls.
“He’s going on vacation,” Jack said. “We’re going to have to go too.”
“Bother him during his vacation?”
It seemed like an imposition, but that’s exactly what Jack had in mind. “You want to be the next assemblyman? Make your reservations.”
Of all places, Otlowski was vacationing in Key West, a challenging destination for a closeted would-be politician. We flew down in early February with Otlowski and his longtime aide, Julius Rogovsky, and sped to our cheap motel—past gay nightclubs and restaurants, bookstores and gift shops, and same-sex couples exchanging kisses or strolling arm in arm to the beach. I tried my best not to notice, but I had never before seen such simple freedoms, not in public.
“George,” Jack began our pitch, “we need your support. Jim’s young, he’s progressive, a reformer. He’s the new face of the Democratic Party in the district. People love him, you told me so yourself. He can win this, George, if we put him on the party line. You know he can.”
But Otlowski was noncommittal. So we made an appointment to lobby him again in the afternoon, and every afternoon until we won him over. Of course, it wasn’t all work. With another Woodbridge couple, we toured the old Hemingway homestead and the Truman Summer White House. We made regular strolls down the beach.
The constant presence of gay men caused some awkwardness, but not for Jack, I was happy to learn. When we were being introduced to the local mayor, someone mentioned that he was the first openly gay mayor in the country. “Jeez,” Jack said, finding the reference unnecessary, “I want to meet him, not dance with him.”
Somehow I don’t think Julius Rogovsky noticed we were in a gay Mecca. After dinner one evening, he got the perverse idea of trying to
drag us all into an adult bookstore. We spent twenty minutes trying to talk him out of it. The windows of the place were brimming with gay S-and-M paraphernalia. But Julius considered himself worldly—evidently he had visited Scranton, Pennsylvania, looking for women during World War II—and he headed inside alone. “I’ve seen it all, McGreevey,” he said over his shoulder. “Nothing can shock me.” He reemerged a few minutes later, looking stricken. “Never seen nothin’ like that in Scranton,” he said.
After talking ourselves silly about the 19th Legislative District for nearly a week, playing our ground game carefully, Jack and I finally asked Otlowski for his endorsement. He laughed. “Go with God,” he said. “We’ll campaign together as Batman and Robin.”
After that, the race was a breeze. I loved retail politics: meeting people, talking to them about their concerns, sharing their celebrations. Teddy Roosevelt called this being “in the arena.” There wasn’t an ethnic fair or house party or religious service I didn’t attend. Every morning and evening, jacket slung over my shoulder, I would knock on doors introducing myself to potential voters. I remember downing shots of vodka at 10:30 in the morning in the basement of the Saints Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church in South River, gorging on kielbasa at the Polish parish luncheon in Sayreville, and stuffing myself with cannolis in Perth Amboy’s shrinking Italian district at night. For a sheltered Irish Catholic, it wasn’t always easy for me to learn new ethnic traditions. I remember one morning when George Otlowski arranged for me to attend a Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church communion breakfast in South Amboy. I had the honor of sitting next to the old Polish pastor, a well-known curmudgeon, and I very politely cut slices of bread from a big loaf in the middle of the table and gave us each a serving. “This is the strangest looking soda bread I’ve ever seen,” I remarked brightly.
He was aghast. “Soda bread? What soda bread? This is babka. ” I had much to learn.
JOE SULIGA WAS ALSO RUNNING FOR ASSEMBLY IN THE ADJOINING district. Watching him hone his own campaigning techniques was instructive for me. He believed that a successful lawmaker had to establish an intimate relationship with the voting public, and he practiced what he preached. After the July Fourth weekend, for instance, he sent handwritten thank-you notes to everyone in his district who displayed Old Glory. People who received them were totally disarmed, even Republicans. People just loved being noticed, and appreciated him for making them feel good. I was in awe of his ability to connect with his base.
I wasn’t quite as solicitous as Joe, but I did develop an ability to recall hundreds of names and faces—and file them away with some memory of their lives, like the names of their children or the health of their parents or grandparents. This came easily for me, the way memorizing the Latin Mass had years ago. At the end of each day I reviewed the “walking notes” I’d jotted down following each encounter, hoping to lay down the information in my long-term memory. Then I would write quick letters complimenting the residents on their yards or gardens and asking after their pets. Before long, I couldn’t set foot in one of these neighborhoods without hearing them call out hellos like we were old family friends. “Hi, Jimmy!” they said. “Say hi to your mom!”
Still, political life seemed to come more naturally to Joe. In the midst of a tight campaign, he still found time to head to the Jersey Shore for those wild weekends of his. One Saturday I passed him near Exit 11 on the Turnpike as he headed south. When I blew the horn, he made a hair-raising illegal turn to say hello.
I looked at him in his floral shirt and sandals, in his red Mustang convertible, with admiration. Clearly, he was on his way to a fun-filled night of partying. I, on the other hand, was returning from talking at a senior center, heading off in my usual suit and tie to a weekend of church basements and diner meetings.
“You know, Joe,” I said, “my dream is to come back in the next life as Joe Suliga.”
He just laughed. “Coming back as Jim McGreevey is my nightmare,” he said, then waved and made another squealing U-turn off to Atlantic City.
MY PARENTS SEEMED TO BE HAVING AS MUCH FUN IN THE CAMPAIGN as I was. My dad’s mission in life was advocating for veterans, and he took me to the local VFW halls around the district every chance he got. There were breakfasts and mixers by the dozens, and I loved showing up there with Dad. But the formidable force in the family was Mom, my secret weapon. She’d come into the campaign office at dawn ready to make phone calls—and work the phones till well after dinner. She was so tireless that some suspected me of using an army of stand-ins posing as my mother. I remember Dad telling me he was driving home from work late one day and saw my mother walking from porch to porch in a distant neighborhood knocking on doors with my campaign literature.
I also turned out to be a natural campaigner. My childhood awkwardness had given way to a confident demeanor. It was as if I’d overcome all the demons of my youth.
During this time I never worried what people would make of my status as a single candidate. I’d been known to date from time to time, but I was still very young, just thirty-two years old. Older women seemed to find me handsome, especially the ladies in St. Joseph’s Nursing Home on Strawberry Hill in Woodbridge, and constantly offered to set me up with their daughters or granddaughters. I played along happily. By now I’d mostly given up on anonymous sexual encounters; I’d sublimated my sexual appetites and refocused all my energy into campaigning. I consciously made a bargain with myself: if I did this well and won a seat on the assembly, the good work I would be able to accomplish would far outweigh any frustration or loneliness my chastity would cause. Priests make similar deals, mostly more effective than mine turned out to be.
But putting my sex drive behind me didn’t erase my history. One day, Otlowski sat me down with a sheath of papers. “Negative research on our Republican legislative opponents,” said one of his aides, pushing toward me various documents—probably details on finances, speeding tickets, and the like. In that moment, I suddenly realized how vulnerable I was. If we could get these things on my opponent, what could he find on me?
That’s when the news hit the papers about my stupidity flashing that old Prosecutors’ Office badge to state troopers. On April 20, 1989, Michelle Sobolewski, my campaign manager, woke me in the morning to break the news. There were two stories sharing the front page that day. The first was the story of the deadly explosion aboard the USS Iowa, which was initially blamed on a gay sailor until an investigation proved it a freak accident. The second story was about me. “Your career and the USS Iowa both exploded on the front page today,” Michelle said.
I went numb. But as she read me the story, I realized it wasn’t the incident I was thinking of, the time I’d been caught looking for sex in the rest stop. This was a different episode, which happened one Sunday afternoon as I was racing through Highland Park to attend a museum opening. When the police pulled me over for speeding, I showed them my license and, once again, my badge. Again, I had hoped it would get me out of a jam, but the cops gave me a ticket anyway and reported my inappropriate representations back to county prosecutor Alan Rockoff, a former judge and dear friend. He had me summoned and took my badge away. “These things are given out to former assistants assuming they’re going to mount them to a plaque,” he said, “not to fix speeding tickets.” I felt like a stupid child.
Hearing Michelle read the story, I was relieved; at least my big secret hadn’t been revealed. Of course, it was my first scandal. But Michelle just laughed it off. “You were speeding,” she said. “Big deal.” Still, it also meant that people were out there digging around in my background. It meant I wasn’t safe.
That night, I made a long list of everything I could recall about every sexual encounter I’d had. I didn’t know anybody’s name, of course, but I tried recalling something to anchor each tryst in history: a snippet of conversation, something about the way he looked, whether he was kind or aloof. It came to more than twenty individuals. Then I made an assessment about each entry. What are the
chances that this one lives in the 19th Legislative District? Would that one be able to find me? If he sees my picture in the paper, would he be likely to reveal our secret? Line after line, I imagined the worst. Is this one a threat? Could that one do me in? Blackmail, I realized, begins well before there is a perpetrator; its possibility is invented by the victim.
I had only one consolation—that anyone who’d been in the places I was worried about would be just as ashamed as I was and just as unlikely to go public.
But I had other concerns. I lived in fear that a videotape would surface from some dingy adult bookstore. I knew there were cameras; you could see them posted over the cash register and at the doors—though not in the back by the booths, where the untoward things happened. I had no way of knowing how long they kept those tapes and knew no one to ask. I did ask my friend Jimmy Kennedy, the mayor of Rahway, obliquely about my brush with the state trooper at the Parkway rest stop: if a police stop didn’t result in a summons, could it still make it into public records somewhere? Politely, Jimmy didn’t ask me why I wanted to know.
Plan your work and work your plan. As Election Day drew near, I found myself dating young women more frequently, including some who were helping out on the campaign, and this got a buzz going in the office about my virility. One woman in particular captured my interest—a bright and competent woman who happened to be on my campaign staff. And one lonely night we crossed a line together. It was foolish and wrong of me to do, and I’m afraid she felt hurt by me when I didn’t want to continue. It was the first time in my life I realized I had power and stature over another individual, and I didn’t handle it very well. I regret causing her any pain. But when word leaked out about my heartlessness, I’ll admit that I found a certain power in it.
The Confession Page 13