Furious, I called the Ledger’s city desk on my way out of the restaurant. The switchboard put me on hold for so long that I was already stuck in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike when an editor came to the phone. The story wasn’t running on the weekend, he said, and promised that I’d receive a call from John Hassell, one of the paper’s top reporters.
Hassell called on Monday. “I’m sorry, Senator, but we had to ask these questions,” he said. “The story is all over the place.”
“John, I will take a lie-detector test. Find somebody of your choosing to administer the test and I’ll take it,” I told him. “I don’t want you to ask me about my entire life, I haven’t been an angel, but ask me whether or not I’ve ever met this woman.”
John said he’d heard the Philadelphia Daily News was all over the story. It seemed too late to contain it. I reminded him that this wouldn’t just destroy my career, it would harm my family. “Seems like you have a choice,” he said. “Do you want us to break the story, or do you want an irresponsible paper like, oh, The Trentonian to splash it all over the front page?”
“That’s like asking, Do you want to be killed by a firing squad or cyanide? The results are the same. An innocent man dies.”
At my request, John put me in touch with his editor in chief, Jim Willse, so I could make my case directly. In the end, Willse made the decent call.
WITH THE CLOCK RUNNING OUT, I WAS STILL DESPERATE FOR SUPPORT from the DNC. We called and called. Georgia senator Max Cleland came and spent a day hunting for votes, which I greatly appreciated. So did Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman, good party stalwarts and lovely men. But for some reason we couldn’t get a dime’s worth of financial or strategic support. Finally, I took a train to Washington to put in a personal appeal. Steve Grossman, the national chairman of the Democratic Party, was polite; he gave me a cup of coffee and a couple of cookies, like I was a Cub Scout on a field trip. “I’m the guy who won the Jersey primary—maybe you heard something about it?” I said sarcastically.
“We’re a little bit more worried about Washington,” he said. “Washington is falling apart.” The special prosecutor had locked the Clinton administration into a defensive mode on a number of fronts, all of them meaningless and politically charged. Nobody knew it yet, but the Monica Lewinsky scandal was about to explode.
Soon, Hillary Clinton came and did a women’s event with me—she impressed me immensely. When she arrived she asked to see my polling numbers and demographics analyses, and she had smart things to say about the thrust of our campaign.
Eventually my pleas reached the president’s office. Bill Clinton recognized that mine was a David-and-Goliath campaign, and he personally came to my aid, making two tours with me on the stump. He was wonderful and kind. He asked about my life’s story, where I grew up, and how Kari and I fell in love (when I told him we’d met in Bermuda, he said that he and Hillary had conceived Chelsea there). I was amazed at how easily, in the chaos of a political campaign, he could close everything out except the person he was speaking with; it was an extraordinary talent.
I’ll never forget sitting in the back of a campaign car when our conversation turned to the plight all Democrats were facing. “To get a white guy to vote for a Democrat,” Clinton said, “first you have to strap him down to a gurney, give him every reason in the book, then wheel him into the voting booth yourself—and pray it works. That’s how tough it is.”
White men especially react negatively to a nasty campaign, he said. Neither side had gone negative yet, but there were early warnings that it could go bad. Whitman had filed an official complaint alleging that my leased campaign car was a sweetheart deal—at $335 a month for a stripped-down Mercury, nobody took the complaint seriously.
On my side, John Lynch had hammered the Whitman administration after $344,000 in state money was used to settle a sexual harassment suit against former assembly speaker Chuck Haytaian, a Republican who served as chairman of the state GOP. Whitman fired back that Lynch was “not one to talk,” citing an old report that his wife had called the cops during a fight at Lynch’s condo. Lynch was arrested but his wife dropped the charges and refused to testify against him.
But Clinton advised us to steer clear of such distractions. “Stick to the issues,” he said. “Don’t get sidetracked. Just keep hammering away on taxes and auto insurance. You have to be Luke Skywalker and you have only one chance to lob that torpedo into the Death Star, so you have to be focused and disciplined in your message.” I loved him for saying that.
Everywhere we went together on those two days, he whipped Latinos and African Americans into a patriotic frenzy. They adored him and forgave his political errors. The previous year he had won New Jersey by a seventeen-point margin. I appreciated his generosity in allowing some of his glow to spill over onto me. Just being able to sit with him in the backseat of the sedan as we tooled through our stops made me feel like I had arrived, no matter how the campaign ended up.
“My God,” I found myself thinking. “What if I actually win this thing?”
It was then, as I drove along with the president down the Garden State Parkway, that the illusion of a Parkway sign with my name on it bled into my thoughts. And as I watched the word HOMO take shape on that sign, in towering spray-painted letters, I was haunted by the idea that Clinton might see what was happening, though I was pretty sure it was all in my mind.
THE LAST WEEK OF THE CAMPAIGN WAS A BLUR OF POLLS, RALLIES, photo opportunities, and sleepless nights. We ran through nursing homes and union halls, hospitals and parks. As we trolled from town to town, a loudspeaker affixed to the roof of our campaign vehicle blasted away at our themes. In Jersey City, where I prayed at St. Patrick’s, the church where I was baptized, we played a tape that went like this: “This is Jimmy McGreevey, a native son of New Jersey. He’ll reduce your car insurance by ten percent. He said it. He means it. He’ll do it.”
One of our last visits, arranged by my dad, was with a group of homeless veterans. These guys aren’t a well-known voting bloc, but I went because they represented the problems we were campaigning to fix. They were all races and ages, with credentials from Korea to Desert Storm. Many seemed to be in need of medical and mental-health services. One guy had been living under a bridge, he told me; when the local cops had run him off, he’d lost all of his possessions, including his VA documents. Their stories broke my heart. I prayed that night for victory, so that we could do something positive for these men.
Joel Benenson, a Democratic pollster from Doug Schoen’s office whom we brought aboard for the final months, was starting to get excited about our chances. Whitman was holding on to her eight-point lead in the polls, but even hours before the balloting stations opened, 18 percent were still undecided. “It’s a horse race,” Joel told me. I stuck to my message as the clock ticked down, repeating phrases from my stump speech to anybody who would listen. I was exhausted, sleep-deprived, even a bit delirious at times. My very last reporter interview was with NJN’s Michael Aaron. When the lights snapped on, he asked me how I was enjoying the weather. I was so charged up, I didn’t even hear him. “New Jersey has the highest property taxes and the highest auto insurance rates in the nation, and among the lowest test scores in schools,” I said as he burst out laughing.
On November 5, Election Day, we rented out suites and a large ballroom at the East Brunswick Hilton. I spent the night before with Dina, talking about what might happen if I won. Though it went unmentioned, we both knew we would marry as soon as the divorce was finalized. Still, our relationship wasn’t yet public, and that night she stayed away from our hotel suite to prevent any hint of scandal. My parents and sisters joined me there, along with Ray, John Lynch, George Norcross, and former governors Florio and Byrne. Jack Fay, my mentor for nearly a decade, came to see how these things were unfolding. We turned on the television and watched the thousands of fans and volunteers who’d gathered downstairs, dancing and celebrating in the ballroom. It looked exactly like that party for
Jerry Ford that I’d crashed twenty years ago.
“After this, it’s the White House,” Jack said to me. “You know that, don’t you?”
Because of the way the polls were counted, I was in the lead all day. It wasn’t until 11:37 PM that the horse-country precincts were counted, pushing their native daughter to a maddeningly narrow victory. She pulled it out with just 27,000 votes, beating a young, unknown suburban-town mayor by a mere 1 percent margin. She may have won the race, but as the editorial writers pointed out the next day, her near defeat at the hands of a political unknown had left her political career in tatters.
It was after midnight when I called Whitman to congratulate her. She was gracious in victory. “I wish you well in your political career,” she said. I told her the same.
IT’S SHOCKING HOW QUICKLY YOUR POLITICAL MIGHT WILTS AND withers after a loss. In minutes, the state troopers had withdrawn. All the heavy hitters were out the door, the lights died down, and I was an ordinary citizen again. I looked over to Kevin McCabe. “Well, it’s back to potholes.”
That night a group of the boys headed back to my Woodbridge condo for cigars and brandy: Jimmy Kennedy, Jim Burns, Kevin McCabe, Frank Doyle, and me—the Irish Mafia, we called ourselves. Kevin had planned for us to watch a movie on TV, Michael Collins, about the IRA founder known as the Lion of Ireland.
On the way I ran into Dina in the parking lot. We sat a while in my car talking before heading home.
“It’s been a long night,” I said.
“We have to look to the future,” she said. “It starts again tomorrow.”
I looked over and found she was crying. We hugged. I kissed her. I felt totally loved and supported by her. I knew how much she had put into this campaign, and how exhausted she was, too.
Just then we looked up and saw a familiar reporter. Neither of us wanted the morning’s papers to include a coda about the candidate and his secret girlfriend, so Dina got out of the car and strode purposefully back to the Hilton. Watching her disappear into the building, I thought to myself: You’re at a fork in the road. You could give this up and be yourself. This is your last chance.
12.
OVER THE YEARS, I’VE THOUGHT A LOT ABOUT WHY I MADE THE choices I did after the ’97 defeat. Fundamentally, I think that living in the closet made it almost impossible to do anything differently. I knew many fine gay people by now. My information technology director in Woodbridge, Michael Esolda, was engaging, integrated, and at ease with himself—and accepted in the office. The same was true for my personnel director, Jim Ringwood. I envied them. My Woodbridge hair stylist, Mark Esposito, was also gay, and I looked at his long-term relationship with longing. But by now I was caught up in something I couldn’t control, a lie that had taken on a terrible momentum.
I think I decided that my ambition would give me more pleasure than integration, than true love. I fell for my own mythology.
On Christmas and again over Easter, I flew to Vancouver to be with Kari and Morag, who by now was an impressively intelligent and well-adjusted five-year-old. During one of those visits, Kari and I signed the papers finalizing our divorce. Although I was devastated, I wanted to acknowledge that we were still good friends, perhaps better now than before. I bought her a “divorce ring,” and she slipped it on her finger with a smile.
Later that night, I walked along the icy Fraser River back to my hotel. It was unusually cold, and a light snow was falling. I remember rejoicing in the feeling of being unmarried and totally anonymous, as if a world of possibilities was suddenly available to me. It was freeing to be in a city where nobody knew me, unencumbered by the tethers of Carteret and Woodbridge, my church and my community. Here, I thought, I could be a truer person.
I knew what Kari believed was true, that I’d lost my spiritual course. Part of me didn’t want to return to New Jersey. I had an opportunity to start all over again, to drift away like so many other fast-burning politicians had. But the thought of vanishing like that simultaneously filled me with despair. I couldn’t get beyond one simple fact: I’d lost by a mere 27,000 votes. My political potential was enormous. The thought of another campaign was exhilarating, and the thought of being governor intoxicated me. On election night, a New York Times reporter showed me what the morning’s headline would have been had I won. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
I looked up to the moon through the snowflakes, the same moon that shone over my condo back home. I thought, Why am I able to wrestle with my authenticity here, but not there? Why do I feel so caged there? I was forty, entering middle age, yet still incapable of being myself at home, and incapable of leaving.
I felt compelled to keep running for governor. Coming to this realization made me feel not suicidal, exactly, but morose. I had a deep feeling of anguish. My grandmother would have called it a “heavy Irish melancholy.” It’s hard to describe how it feels to surrender your soul to your ambition.
I was forfeiting any hope of personal happiness—and doing it consciously now, not out of some teenager’s confusion. Standing on the river’s esplanade, I recommitted myself to this split, dishonest life in order to play my hand in politics.
Among other things, I was anxious about marrying Dina. She was a good and compassionate friend. But our romantic life was troubled from the start. I know this disturbed her. It may even have raised questions in her mind about my sexual orientation. But we never discussed this aspect of our relationship. It was not a topic that held any promise of benefit for either of us, so we soldiered on as lovers without addressing it. By this stage in my life, there were no women I felt capable of romancing in traditional ways. I saw marrying her as another step along a road I couldn’t get off.
Sexuality couldn’t be the only thing that mattered to me, I told myself. There must be millions of Americans who sleep beside their wives every night and don’t make love to them. Surely there were thousands of gay men who sleep next to their partners without making love to them, either. Why should I be different?
You may be wondering, Did he give a thought to whether this was unfair to Dina? Of course I did. I believed I was offering her some things she truly coveted: the stability of marriage, the prospect of a loving family, a chance to share a life of public service, political excitement in spades. Of course the list of things I was overlooking was just as long: honesty, intimacy, true romantic love. But all I could do was to try to make it work. That was all I’d ever known how to do.
About a year later, I read a story in Esquire about Congressman Michael Huffington, whose struggles as a gay man in politics were all too familiar. I read the story as though it were about me: “At age thirty-three, Mike Huffington made a resolution; I am straight, I will get married. I will have children. I will never sleep with another man again.” The closet, he admitted, had been his key to political success; the more the door cracked open, the less potential he was seen as having. Stories about him had swirled around in Democratic and Republican circles for years, and it only got worse when his wife, Arianna, left him in 1997, after a failed Senate run. The New Yorker made fun of him for “washing his hands frequently,” a nasty little jab at his masculinity that even George Will, no friend of gay rights, condemned as “ad hominem.” Finally he came out in Esquire, because he had no choice; the gossip mill had turned his closet door to glass.
As I headed home from Vancouver for my second marriage, I hoped my story would play out differently: that living with Dina would help me enforce the boundaries I’d been trying to maintain for years. If I stayed single, with no structural safeguard, there was no telling what sort of volatile situation I might get into.
Instead, with Dina, I would have a partner. I should have known that would be unfair to her, and it was blind of me.
WOODBRIDGE WAS IN PRETTY GOOD SHAPE, AND DIDN’T NEED AS much remedial attention as it had in the early days. So I was free to work on exciting new projects. With the help of a sizable grant from Road Packaging Systems of Keasbey, New Jersey, we put computers in ever
y classroom in each of the township’s twenty-three schools and wired them all to the Internet. The $3 million initiative made our school system unrivaled in telecommunication and access to the information superhighway. We also brought major improvements to Ford Park, the town’s tarnished jewel, and built a $200,000 state-of-the art playground using an army of more than 600 Woodbridge volunteers.
But there were occasional storm clouds over Woodbridge, including a Whitman-sponsored plan to build a $22 million facility in the township for up to three hundred dangerous sex offenders and the criminally insane. Our objections weren’t simple NIMBY complaints. Woodbridge was already home to two large-scale correctional facilities. A third would be a tremendous burden—and an indefensible act of payback from Whitman. We sued and eventually blocked the project.
Our darkest moment came one night in 1999, when racist vandals attacked the First Baptist Church of Woodbridge. Windows were broken, racial slurs spray-painted on walls, garbage cans overturned in the yard. Even the tires of the choir members were slashed. In my lifetime I can’t remember so vile an act of hatred so close to home. Walking through the churchyard, I was nauseated by the damage. Many of the parishioners were friends of mine; I couldn’t stop thinking how frightened they must be. The parish they loved, where I myself had worshiped dozens of times, had been defiled. But Woodbridge showed what it was made of in the aftermath, rallying together as Christians, Jews, and neighbors of all faiths to prove that the hatred of a few couldn’t unravel the loving fabric of our community.
In November 1999, I won reelection as mayor by a landslide, with 86 percent of the vote.
The Confession Page 21