The Confession

by James E. McGreevey

  Donald DiFrancesco, the congenial state senate president, filled in as acting governor for her remaining few months. But he wasn’t satisfied serving as acting governor and soon threw his hat in the ring for the Republican primary. He ran a relatively decent campaign against Bret Schundler, a self-made Wall Street millionaire whom even state GOP leaders found impossibly right wing. Schundler was progun, antichoice, and out of step with New Jersey’s traditionally moderate brand of Republicanism. He ran a brutal primary campaign, tearing DiFrancesco limb from limb. It won him the nomination handily, but his performance was so unseemly that few Republican loyalists had the stomach to campaign with him.

  I couldn’t have asked for an easier target. All the way through August I had a sizable lead, even grabbing 14 percent of Republicans in independent polls.

  If my luck was cresting, my old pal Joe Suliga’s was a tidal wave. Poll after poll showed he was on his way to becoming senator from the 20th Legislative District. His Republican opponent, a former Olympic gold medalist, was twenty points in the dust. Every time I bumped into him along the campaign trail, an awesome pride showed on that large face of his. Joe was about to land the job of his dreams. So was I. And I was thrilled for both of us.

  ON THE CRYSTALLINE BLUE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, I GOT up early as usual and worked out at The Club at Woodbridge before beginning a long day of campaigning. After a quick meeting at headquarters at eight o’clock, we raced down to Ocean County to talk to a group of senior citizens about tax relief. Driver Joe Massimino Jr., my “body man,” Jason Kirin (whose job was to stand at my side, take notes when needed, get me in and out of buildings on time, etc.), and I had already reached the banquet facility when somebody told me that a plane had gone into the World Trade Center. I pictured a little Cessna flying off course, a tragedy on a relatively small scale. But when we got word that a second airplane had hit the buildings, the horror of the attack sank in. We found a television set and watched as both towers burned. Reporters announced that people were jumping to their deaths, a thought too awful to bear. A third plane had hit the Pentagon and a fourth was headed for the White House, at least according to early reports.

  Everything changed in that moment. A distant dispute had reached our shores. Anyone could see the storm clouds of a protracted war gathering on the horizon. Whoever did this must be made to pay, I thought. America can not let these deaths go unanswered.

  I also knew that among the dead would be a disproportionate number of New Jerseyans, ambitious and innocent men and women who boarded the morning train or ferry in Hoboken, Weehawken, and Atlantic Highlands for finance jobs in the Towers. In the final count, nearly seven hundred from my state perished in the attacks. One town, Middletown, lost fifty sons and daughters that morning, men and women just like the kids I grew up with in Carteret, whose only involvement in global affairs was to work hard to improve their lot in life. The majority were employed by one investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald.

  The rest of the day unfolded as if in a surreal dream, muffled and terrifying. We turned the Buick around and raced back to Woodbridge, to our families and responsibilities at home. From the Parkway we could see the two columns of smoke rising over Manhattan; an easterly wind bent them toward Brooklyn. My first call was to Dina, who was shaken but fine; my parents were also okay.

  As mayor, I rolled out our own disaster plan. We prepared the police to respond in case of local attacks, which seemed less likely by midmorning as the skies overhead filled with American fighter jets. According to our emergency management policies, we provided security to local corporations, oil tanks, rail lines, and chemical plants and mobilized officers along the Turnpike, Parkway, and interstate. I raced to the campaign office, in one of Woodbridge’s tallest buildings, where the burning towers were visible, about ten miles away. On the way, I stopped at St. James Church for a private prayer. Monsignor Cashman, my longtime spiritual adviser, gave me Holy Communion.

  We weren’t able to establish communication with New York City, so the television news and the bird’s-eye view from the windows became our main sources of information. We dispatched ambulances and emergency service trucks to the city, but they were turned back at the tunnels—there were no survivors yet to tend, increasing our sense of helplessness. Our firefighters got through, though, and worked at putting out the blazes. And then we heard the terrible noise of the first tower collapsing. We ran to the top floor of our campaign headquarters, which had an unobstructed view of the unimaginable horror. My mind couldn’t comprehend the losses; the truth was too awful to contemplate. When the 110-story-high second tower slammed to the ground, a chorus of cries rose up over Woodbridge’s rooftops, crowded with stunned observers.

  GOLAN CIPEL WAS PACING BACK AND FORTH, ARMS CROSSED OVER his chest. “The Middle East war has arrived to America,” he was saying, even before we had any idea who was behind the attack. “Everything has changed. It is a new paradigm.”

  It was unclear what would happen to the elections, but I knew we had to suspend campaigning. I called Schundler and he agreed. We were both briefed about ongoing efforts to secure the state’s airspace and harbors. We heard about National Guard deployments, coordination with the Defense Department, mobilizations at Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base, and intelligence briefings from the FBI in Newark. Until this moment I had never realized how colossal and complex the state’s security systems were, or how imperfectly coordinated they were with New York’s. National defense hadn’t been even a remote part of our campaign to date. There was so much to learn.

  The next several days were excruciating. Scores of Woodbridge families were searching frantically for their loved ones, but no answers came. They prayed for a miracle, that a husband or wife was alive in an air pocket in the rubble pile or wandering through the city in a daze. They photocopied “missing” posters, with heartbreaking photographs and descriptions of the clothing they wore that morning, and went to Manhattan to tape them to every building, streetlamp, and fencepost. I helped organize first responders at Liberty State Park, where the state police had set up an emergency management headquarters in view of the smoldering embers, then volunteered to help fill ferries with water and food to ship to the rescue workers.

  On the second day, Jason Kirin, Kevin Hagan, and I hitched a ferry ride with Jersey City firemen to lower Manhattan. The scene was indescribably grisly: fire trucks twisted and flattened by falling debris, the grimy firefighters with specially trained dogs lowering listening devices into crevices, hoping against hope. At one point the rescue workers thought they’d heard a noise and frantically dug through the debris. For several hours we helped out, standing on a bucket brigade and moving an endless stream of stones and mortar from left to right, hoping in vain that someone’s life had been spared. That night, we held a prayer vigil in Woodbridge. More than a thousand people came.

  On the morning of the third day, I ran into Cynthia, a woman I knew from a local Baptist church where I occasionally attended services—we held our annual Martin Luther King Jr. services there. Cynthia’s daughter was among the missing, and she was heading into the city in search of information, a dire and heartbreaking mission. She was all alone and desperate for information about her daughter, but she found a tremendous strength in her faith. “I know my girl’s lost in the city,” she said firmly. “I know she’ll be okay, but I have to find her first. I have to find my baby.”

  “I’m coming with you,” I said, taking her by the hand. We arrived at the family relief center Mayor Rudy Giuliani had set up at the Chelsea Piers on the Hudson River. Inside was a scene of chaotic despair. Ministers, rabbis, and priests had written their affiliations on masking tape across their chests for easy identification, so the bereft could find them quickly in their darkest hours. Muted televisions replayed footage of exhausted rescue workers, empty-handed and crying. I watched a young woman tearily handing over toothbrushes and razor blades for eventual DNA typing.

  Having seen Cynthia get through that day,
I am sure she’s the bravest person I have ever met. Steadily, and with hope, she filled out the paperwork she believed would lead to her daughter’s rescue. From her purse she pulled a photograph—I recognized the woman, just a few years younger than I was—and affixed it to her form. We prayed together over her family Bible that the girl was still alive. Alas, she was not.

  I ATTENDED DOZENS OF FUNERALS IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED. Many of our Port Authority workers perished in the attack. James Lynch, a Port Authority cop from Woodbridge, was among the first confirmed dead. I had known him and his family well. At his wake I learned he was off duty that day, but when he saw the towers burning he raced to help his fellow officers—an American hero. These were working-class guys who loved their families, their communities, and most of all their country. In one day we lost Christopher Amoroso, a former football star at North Bergen High School; Kenneth Tietjin, who, after saving people from Tower One, grabbed a pack, waved to his partner, and went into Tower Two; Thomas Gorman, a Port Authority emergency services unit cop who’d taken his wife boating on the Jersey coastline to celebrate her birthday just days before; Richard Rodriquez, whose Puerto Rican heritage didn’t keep him from playing in the Emerald Society Pipes and Drums wearing a tartan kilt; and Fred Morrone, superintendent of the 1,300-member Port Authority police force and a daily communicant at a Catholic church near his home in Lakewood. I didn’t know Fred well, but throughout all the ceremonies his wife, Linda, was a towering figure of strength.

  For New Jerseyans, as our grief expanded, the terror didn’t recede. On September 18, a nationwide anthrax scare began after five letters containing the deadly bacterial spores were dropped at the post office in Trenton, destined for reporters at ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Post, and the National Enquirer. Two more anthrax letters were postmarked in Trenton, addressed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, causing a shutdown of the Senate as well as post office branches across New Jersey. The toxin was also found in curbside mailboxes in Princeton. In all, twenty-two people were infected and five died; five years later, the case remains a mystery.

  The scare gave our local Woodbridge police force cause for alarm, and we met frequently to try to plan for the arrival of terrorism in the township. How would we coordinate response to an airliner attack? Quarantining after an anthrax contamination? God forbid, a nuclear event?

  With all this going on, Dina was enduring troubles of her own. By this point we were expecting a child, but it was turning out to be a difficult pregnancy. She went into preterm labor on November 2, twelve weeks premature. She was ordered into bed for the duration and moved into inpatient care, first to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, then to Saint Peter’s University Hospital under the specialized care of Dr. William Scorza. On many days, it looked like we were going to lose the fight. Scorza began administering steroids, hoping to promote lung development in the baby in the case of an extremely premature birth. Simultaneously, he put Dina on a regimen to stop contractions and dilation.

  That’s when Scorza noticed that the baby’s heart rate was fluctuating precipitously. Worse yet, ultrasound revealed that the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. Throughout this, Dina’s courage was tremendous. I remember her lying on her back on a gurney fighting those early contractions. If our baby were born then and lived, Scorza told us, there was some chance that she might suffer lifelong complications. It was the only time I saw Dina lose her composure, but she regained it quickly.

  I don’t think I ever returned to the campaign trail. On November 7, 2001, I won the election for governor of New Jersey by fourteen points. What’s more, my coattails proved long. Democrats retook a majority in the assembly and now tied Republicans in the Senate, twenty-to-twenty. It was a huge victory for the party, ending almost a decade of exile. I remember thanking my supporters at the Hilton and letting the state troopers drive me over to Dina’s bedside so I could give her the news myself. She was so uncomfortable and worried for our baby that it was hard to find a minute to celebrate. I sat by her side, holding her hand, as I would every night for the next month, until our precious daughter Jacqueline was born by emergency C-section on December 7, still premature but healthy.

  Friends and supporters overwhelmed the hospital with flowers for Dina—so many that they filled her room and several nearby. Then some idiot phoned in an anthrax scare, which the hospital administrators took to be aimed at Dina and me. Teams of hazard specialists removed the flowers immediately. It was just a prank, but after we’d worried so much about losing Jacqueline, the scare did little to elevate our moods.

  AN INTENSE AND ABSOLUTELY INEVITABLE THING HAPPENS AFTER you win a big election. The jostling for power is wild. Republicans had controlled the governor’s mansion for sixteen of the past twenty years, and now we were overwhelmed by pressure to bring Democrats and their supporters in from the cold. Democratic law firms, developers, investors, suppliers, vendors, and consultants of all stripes were vying for my attention. So were arts groups, women’s groups, civil rights groups—advocacy agencies that hadn’t had an ear in Trenton.

  And there were all my many financial contributors vying for payback. I’d worked my whole life to get to this point, banking on the calculated risks of political fundraising, not to mention the winks and nudges that stand in for promises, and suddenly it all came to a head. I felt the accumulated burden of all this acutely. Kant’s formula for morality was no use to me now. I had done A and attained X—only to face a much more formidable moral quandary: how would I slake the tremendous demands of those who helped me along the way? Moral certainty had never felt more elusive.

  Because so much power is in the hands of New Jersey’s chief executive, most significant state employees are washed out with each new administration. We had eight to nine thousand state jobs to fill, two thousand appointments to make even before taking office. Everybody wanted a piece of the action. As the single elected statewide official, I was a huge bull’s-eye to special interests.

  My first concern was to take care of the people who’d given day and night to running my campaigns for the past six years, tireless warriors who shared my new vision for New Jersey. At the time, I felt it was prudent to promote people I knew and trusted. What I didn’t yet realize is that the people who run a campaign aren’t the best people to run a government. They come with too many strings attached. They’ve just spent a year or more in the trenches horse trading for enormous financial donations. As soon as they land in government, everybody they dealt with comes looking for a reward, some payoff for their “investments.” If I had to do it over again, many of my initial appointments would be very different, not because the people I chose were unqualified, but because they were vulnerable to temptation.

  Gary Taffet, my chief of staff on the campaign trail, seemed an obvious choice for chief of staff in Trenton. I’d relied on his judgment and cool head for fourteen years; in politics, he was my closest friend. As chief counsel I chose Paul Levinsohn, a charismatic and hard-working lawyer. I’d met Paul years ago, when he was a law school student at Duke researching a paper on centrist Democrats. Over the years I’d come to trust his instincts and advice and had hired him away from the politically connected law firm Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer, to be my campaign’s finance chair. Gary, Paul, and I worked as an Iron Triangle. Gary saw to the care and feeding of the state’s political players; Paul raised the money; and I did the retail campaigning.

  Unfortunately, I later learned that both men were compromised. Partly that was because of the campaign roles they served on their way to state government. They were my horse traders, doing and saying what was necessary to bring in votes and money. I don’t believe either of them made overt promises to any of my donors for appointments or contracts, but I know they were lobbied aggressively, as was I, and they replied with encouragements: “I’ll try,” or “You’d be a perfect candidate.” It hadn’t occurred to me how untenable it was to bring them inside. As soon as they arrived, they were slammed by p
eople coming to collect on the promises they thought they’d heard. The pressure on them, and indirectly on me, was tremendous.

  For several key appointments, I reached for candidates with broad executive experience, regardless of party affiliation. David Samson, a respected Republican, agreed to serve as attorney general. I appointed Dr. Clifton Lacy, the brilliant chief medical officer of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, to run the Department of Health and Senior Services and Cherry Hill mayor Susan Bass Levin to lead the Department of Community Affairs. Bradley Campbell, a former Clinton administration environmental adviser, took over our Department of Environmental Protection, and Dr. William Librera, the respected superintendent of the Allamuchy Elementary School District, brought his unparalleled leadership in early childhood education to become commissioner of the Department of Education. Al Kroll, general counsel of the state AFL-CIO, was appointed labor commissioner, with Kevin McCabe as deputy commissioner. In the words of AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, we had the strongest prolabor administration in the nation.

  But for a number of significant jobs, I kept my inner circle close. Regena Thomas was my choice for secretary of state, charged with overseeing programs in arts, minority culture, volunteerism, and historic preservation. Jim Davy, who had provided exemplary service as Woodbridge business administrator for almost a decade before taking over as campaign manager, was my choice for chief of operations, responsible for making the trains run on time. (He later became commissioner of Human Services at a time when that department needed fundamental structural reform.)

  My old friend Roger Chugh—a Delhi native who was my campaign liaison to the Asian community—became the assistant secretary of state, an important symbolic gesture at a time when U.S. troops were preparing to invade Afghanistan. I also made Kevin Hagan deputy chief of staff; at twenty-six, he was perhaps the youngest in the history of the state, but certainly among the most able.