But JoJo had left the place in a wreck. As a last-minute election-year gimmick, he had rolled back area property taxes 20 percent, telling newspaper reporters that he’d built up a surplus. Wrong. The town’s $60 million budget was $24.5 million short. Making matters worse, he gave a costly raise to municipal labor unions to placate them, and then underestimated state aid. To cover costs, JoJo had raided surplus accounts.
The bookkeeping was a shambles. In one desk drawer we found $400,000 in uncashed checks made out to the township, some dating back seven years. I looked at John “Mac” McCormac, my chief financial officer. “Well, the good news is, we have no place to go but up,” I joked.
I spoke too soon. On the second day of our administration, two federal agents arrived with warrants to investigate the disappearance of $650,000 in health insurance funds. Next, four of the employees I inherited from JoJo were charged with taking kickbacks from contractors. Woodbridge’s government was an utter disaster.
Financially, we had no room to maneuver. I didn’t want to levy new taxes. The median income in Woodbridge was only $45,000; I knew people were already pinched. But the alternative was to lay off 40 percent of the workforce, which was also unacceptable. That would mean dirtier streets, deeper potholes, and a painful shortage of health department workers, police officers, librarians, and so on.
Mac suggested a clever solution. Several other Jersey towns had shifted from a calendar year for budget purposes to a fiscal year, from July 1 to June 30. A quirk in the process for doing this would allow us to float municipal bonds to cover costs for a half-year transitional period. This way we could borrow about $42 million, enough to bridge the gap and jump-start the local economy.
It was a great solution. We took “Woodbridge Works” as our new slogan, and resolved to make sure every dollar went to services. But first, to get it past the municipal council, I needed a majority of the nine members—five of them Republicans. Jack Fay, who had simply moved into the mayor’s office with me, occasionally peered over his copy of the New York Times to offer suggestions for working over the councilmen. Mac and I followed his advice energetically, but despite our best presentations they weren’t budging.
Finally, Paul Weiner figured out why.
“They want assurances,” he said. “They don’t like the underwriter we’re using. They named two other firms they want included—firms that just happen to be big backers of some of the Republican councilmen.”
This was an eye-opener for me. I had never thought of finance houses as Republicans or Democrats. I expected the selection process to be strictly price-based. It seemed like payola to me to handpick outside firms based on who their executives were supporting—and it seemed like total fiscal irresponsibility to jeopardize Woodbridge’s future in the gamble.
In fact, this was my first lesson in a system known as “pay-to-play,” the financial interplay between politicians and vendors that defines public life in New Jersey. The members of the Woodbridge Municipal Council, like every other municipal official in the state who’s ever had to raise campaign funds, counted among their supporters’ leaders in every field, even this one. And it was understood that they owed them something in return. This would be a huge payday for any outside contractor—the underwriters, consultants, bonders, and finance houses—and an opportunity for payback. It was like a huge virtual chess game.
“What if I say no?” I asked Paul. “What are they going to do, make me lay off everybody and close down the town?”
“Jim, we’re not talking about contracting to shady companies. Both underwriters are respectable firms; they just happen to have some relationship to two Republican councilmen. They just play for the other team.”
“None of these companies are the Little Sisters of the Poor,” Jack piped up, between puffs on a cigarette.
I didn’t really care which corporation was going to handle our bonding. “A pox on all their houses,” I said. “I just want to know this isn’t adding costs.”
“They’ll get a fixed percentage of the total bond issue package,” Paul said. “It’s the same cost no matter who we use. In fact, we can use them all and divide the fee in thirds.”
In my years in politics, this was my first difficult moral crossroad. I thought of all the political biographies I’d read with my dad. What Caesar, Lincoln, and Douglas McArthur had in common was the ability to make political accommodations to reach their goals. The high art of leadership, I knew, was the ability to chart a route to the good through a moral quandary.
I thought back to college, to Kant’s famous formulations on the “Concepts of Good and Evil.” Kant argued that morality couldn’t be reached by judging ends and means alone. Motive, he wrote, is the main measure of whether an action is moral or not. My motive was clear and lacked self-interest. This crisis was exactly the “hypothetical imperative” he parsed: You must do A in order to achieve X. Floating bonds was a legitimate goal; compromising on vendors would surely produce that goal, without committing an egregious moral harm in itself.
Finally I capitulated and let the Republicans pick their two contractors, while keeping the one we’d originally chosen as well. It was a distasteful decision, but I believed it was a moral one, and not unethical. The taxpayers of Woodbridge benefited. Without accommodation, we would have been dead in the water.
But from my personal life I had a keen understanding of the dangers of accommodation. To get where I was, I had already made one major accommodation with the truth. Doing A in that instance might have justified achieving X. But that first compromise invariably led to many others; A became a whole alphabet of lies and half-truths.
I worried very consciously that the same thing might happen with my political career, one little compromise at a time.
IMMANUEL KANT WASN’T MY ONLY LODESTAR. I MODELED MY ADMINISTRATION on the principles showcased by Stephen R. Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a best seller at the time. I had attended several Covey seminars and found his credo, which was a lot like my Dad’s old marine maxim, very useful. It emphasized concentrated work, integrity, and measurable goals. We instructed each department to come up with mission-driven goals for the year, and I met with department heads once a week to review progress toward those goals.
Given our bare-bones operation, I did a lot of the work myself. If I saw a pothole at 7:00 AM, I would have it filled by nightfall—then put in a shift on the public works hot line, making lists of new problems to fix. I would drive around behind the snowplows and make sure they did a decent job. I was maniacal about making the town spotless. Once a month I held an open Town Hall meeting, inviting people to bring their complaints and promising to find a solution. These meetings were by far my favorite part of the job. I’d personally call people who had their lawns too high. I didn’t care if they thought it was overstepping. I cared about community standards in the town.
One delicate challenge came up when I started hearing complaints about the conditions in the Little India section of town. Woodbridge has one of the largest South Asian populations in the United States, and the old-world traditions persisted among some of the newer immigrants, a fact that stirred some local prejudices. We had callers who actually said, “It smells of curry over there.”
I worked to be fair, exacting, and impartial. I understood the importance of shared culture among new immigrant groups, but I also felt we would let the neighborhood’s people down if we didn’t hold them to the same standards as the rest of the town. When there were real violations, I sent in teams to write up tickets, which initially drew charges of racism. But we also invested in the neighborhood, widening the streets and improving the public landscaping. In the end, Indian leaders were pleased to see their area improving along with the rest of Woodbridge. Come India’s Independence Day, August 15, I proudly raised the Indian national flag over Town Hall.
I attended every event I was invited to and most events I wasn’t. A good friend, Mike Seidel, told me recently that I attend
ed services at his synagogue so often he thought I was Jewish. I wanted to become everything anybody in Woodbridge wanted me to be. I taught myself seven words in every language spoken in my district—not always the right ones, but nobody cared. I absolutely adored getting to know Woodbridge. I wanted to make it the best little town in America.
My goal was to make sure everybody was happy in Woodbridge as long as I was there. If anybody had a complaint, Paul would negotiate with them and, if necessary, invite them to hockey matches on Tuesdays or football games on Thursdays—and by the next morning their concerns were resolved. We were an administration working for all the people, because we had all the people working for us.
But with Paul taking care of the backroom stuff, I was able to carry out the parts of the job that really challenged me. I put together a plan to revitalize Main Street, which had gone the way of other cities in the 1980s. The strip was rundown and abandoned; most retailers had moved out to the malls, taking all foot traffic with them. With the help of the town council, we laid brick sidewalks and added new lampposts, benches, and planters through the center of town. Anchoring the effort were plans for a new town hall, a three-story high-tech building, fully wired for the Internet. In addition, we committed new financing to the town’s marina and ramp in the Sewaren section of town, making it among one of the most-used launches in the area; we invested in park rehabilitation and put computers in every school in town. It all worked. Downtown became a destination again.
Our most ambitious undertaking, though, was the Woodbridge Township Community Center, considered one of biggest in the state. Going door-to-door as exhaustively as I had, I realized that we had very few venues for local families to gather for recreation, meetings, and entertainment. In this city of 100,000 people, there was not even a YMCA. So during my tenure we raised $15 million, mostly in corporate and private donations, and built a sprawling center complete with an NHL-sized ice rink, Olympic pool, roller rink, gym, wellness center, arcade, walking track, computer lab, and pro shop. The YMCA and a company called United Skates of America agreed to come and manage the facility.
The other lesson I learned from watching JoJo DeMarino, of course, was how not to get entangled in my own power. “I don’t want you getting too big for your britches,” my spiritual adviser, an Irish sage from Woodbridge named Monsignor Michael Cashman, told me after I took office. “You know what’s going to determine, more than anything else, how many people are at your funeral Mass? The weather.”
Besides, money was never important to me. The job paid a whopping $52,000 a year, more than enough when added to Kari’s salary—she went to work as a librarian at a public school in South Brunswick. We had no trouble making payments on a condominium on Gill Lane whose back windows overlooked the tracks of an active freight rail line. My staff hated the place, finding it a bit too humble, but Kari and I made a lovely home there. Once a month or more we would take a train into New York City for a movie or play—Kari believed in what she called “our traditions,” the little rituals that would become the glue to our marriage. Every December we went to Rockefeller Center to see the huge Christmas tree. Every spring we went to Florida and stayed with our friend John Pedro. Summers, when we could, we headed for a weekend at the shore.
One of our first big events as the first couple of Woodbridge was hosting the town’s 325th anniversary. Kari looked stunning in a black beaded gown with a red silk bodice. The voters seemed genuinely to love her, and her interest in them was profound. Right after dinner she came and whispered in my ear mischievously, “Let’s dance!” I resisted. I’m not much of a dancer, but I let her drag me to the dance floor anyway, put my hand on her waist, and got my feet moving. I’d forgotten how much fun dancing could be. Kari had a way of reminding me that our successes were in our hearts, not just our heads.
“Enjoy this,” she whispered. We kissed. “You have arrived.”
OUR BABY GIRL WAS BORN ON OCTOBER 27, 1992. SHE WAS AS BEAUTIFUL as an angel. We named her Morag, a Gaelic derivative of the name Mary, after Kari’s beloved grandmother. I was thrilled to be a father, and over the moon about having a daughter.
As a surprise for me, my dear friend Joe Vitale, the Woodbridge Democratic Party chairman, planted a giant sign on the town hall lawn: IT’S A GIRL! I drove Morag and her mom past the sign on the way home from the hospital to show them. I was so proud. I had a beautiful wife and a glorious baby girl—what every man in the public eye dreams of. It couldn’t get any better than that.
While Kari was still pregnant, her father had succumbed to lung cancer after a long battle, likely the product of decades working in the Vancouver mines. Our doctors told her not to fly, so Kari couldn’t attend the funeral. I know this was extremely difficult for her and her family. I would have been devastated if I’d been kept from a loved one’s funeral. But for Kari, the funeral was less important than paying respects to the living, which she’d done unfailingly while her dad was still alive.
We were lucky that Kari’s mother, a sturdy Scots émigré named Agnes, found the strength to come to visit her new granddaughter, despite her grief. It was heartwarming for me to see the three generations of women bonding together, celebrating life in the aftermath of a terrible death. Morag was a bright light keeping her mother and grandmother looking forward—as she still is today.
Morag gave me endless pleasure. I loved when she climbed into bed with us, cuddling and practicing her words and songs. She was a quick study, like her mother. One of my favorite things was taking her to work and letting her crawl around the mayor’s office—Kennedy-like, I suppose—as I pushed through my day’s phone calls.
But I sensed that something about motherhood was pulling Kari a little further out of my political world. She never was the kind of woman who could have a dozen meaningless conversations at one political function, then race off to another. When she engaged somebody in conversation, she always had things to say and found things to learn. When the subject of Second Ward chairman Gus Maciolek’s prize-caliber tomatoes came up one day, I remember her telling me how he grew them: he put potassium in the soil. How did she know? I asked. “Well, he explained it to me,” she said.
Kari was totally genuine; superficial encounters irked her. She liked people too much to let them glance off her meaninglessly. Naturally, she tired quickly of the political circuit. After a while it became impossible to drag her around to the events. “How can you deal with some of these people?” she asked more than once. “They don’t care about you, they don’t care about us. They don’t care about anything.” She loved the county committee members and our real friends, especially Jack Fay and his second wife, Carol, and our best friends Jimmy and Lori Kennedy. (The Kennedys were also our doppelgängers in politics, Jimmy as mayor of nearby Rahway and Lori as member of the school board.)
In small ways, I could see Kari’s disappointment in me growing almost from the start. I used to think of her as a canary in the mines of Woodbridge, responding oversensitively but always justifiably to the poisons around us. But the truth was, as much as she hated interacting on the political plane, I loved it. I never missed a ribbon-cutting, chicken dinner, or funeral. Once, when the mother of a local freeholder was being laid to rest in a Byzantine rites service at a neighborhood church, I was heartened at the sight of Congressman Ed Patten, who showed up dramatically late and took the pew in front of Kari and me.
“Hey, Jimmy,” he said too loudly, “wake me up when it’s time for communion.” Whereupon he actually stretched out for a nap and slumbered away.
I woke him up, as requested, and he accompanied Kari and me to the altar and back. His nap seemed to restore his piss and vinegar. During the recessional hymn that followed, as the priest moved toward us escorting the casket, Patten turned to me and Kari again.
“You see that priest?” he nearly shouted over the music.
“Yes, Congressman?”
“He won’t give Mrs. Jacowski Holy Communion, but he’s at the rectory sleeping wi
th the housekeeper every night.”
Kari went crimson with mortification. Patten had a knack for telling the unvarnished truth, but sometimes his timing was a little challenging. A quarter of the congregation had heard Patten, no doubt including the priest. I had no idea who the Jacowskis might be, but I knew I needed to bring the conversation to a quick end.
“Thank you, Congressman,” I answered in a stage whisper, then joined Kari singing the hymn as loudly as I could.
EVERY MAJOR NEW JERSEY POLITICAL DECISION IS MADE IN DINERS, and Morag had been home from the hospital only a few days when I met Jack Fay at the old Woodbridge Diner to talk about the future. Jack had a plan for me, he intimated vaguely. I didn’t know what he had in mind; as a newly elected mayor, I had plenty on my plate as it was. But I agreed to hear him out.
I invited Mac McCormac, the Woodbridge chief financial officer; Gary Taffet, a brilliant strategist and my chief of staff; Kevin McCabe, my aide-de-camp from town hall; Tim Dacey, whom I made director of public works; and Joe Vitale, the Woodbridge Democratic Party chairman, whom I consulted on all my moves. Collectively, these guys had become my Woodbridge cabinet.
Jack circled around his proposal, first laying out the local landscape. The Republican state senator from the 19th Legislative District, a Republican named Randy Corman, was up for reelection. In Jack’s estimation, Corman was vulnerable. I had already beaten him once, when he ran against me for assembly in 1989. On the Democratic side, my only potential primary challenger was a school board lawyer named Carl Palmisano. I knew Carl; he was a nice guy, but he knew little about the ground game it would take to unseat an incumbent senator, especially in 1993, a terrible year for Democrats. Florio was heading toward a tough reelection bid. Voters were livid about the tax increase he’d signed (and I supported)—New Jerseyans already had the highest total tax burden in the nation, and they rightly demanded relief in other areas, which Florio hadn’t found a way to give them. Worse, he’d gone on to sign a state sales tax on everyday items like toiletries, disproportionately affecting the working class, who spend a greater portion of their income on such necessities.
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