The Gannett newspaper chain made a big deal about the fact that I’d hired so many campaign workers—62 percent of my hires, by their tabulation. But I defy them to study any governor before or since whose appointments didn’t follow the same pattern. The difference is that my appointees were people a lot like me, intelligent and capable but from working-class backgrounds. There was always a touch of class bias behind these reactions.
Some specific appointments drew quick criticism, almost all of it unwarranted and mean-spirited. Republicans were all over my decision to appoint Charlie Kushner, who with his family and business had by now donated more than $1 million to my campaigns, to the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. (I would later tap him to be chairman.) They complained it was political payback for his financial support, but that’s simply wrong.
Kushner was a hugely successful businessman, a heavyweight who was equally respected throughout New Jersey and in New York political and financial circles. His reputation was unblemished. Ernst & Young, the national accounting firm, had named Charlie Entrepreneur of the Year in the real-estate category. His philanthropic efforts rivaled those of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, and in 2000 the National Conference for Community and Justice named him Humanitarian of the Year. He had great political standing among my Jewish voters, and international clout.
This was a crucial time for the Port Authority, which was jointly administered by New York and New Jersey. The World Trade Center, which had stood on land owned by the Port, was being rebuilt. The agency needed a developer with Kushner’s experience. I also needed somebody who could work seamlessly with Michael Bloomberg, New York’s new mayor, and Governor George Pataki in Albany. I had strong working relationships and growing friendships with both men. But I knew I needed a smart, tough negotiator to make sure New Jersey got its fair share of the federal Homeland Security monies being allocated for the Port. Kushner could do this ably.
To the critics who couldn’t see beyond the money Kushner raised for me, I pointed to New York’s choice for port commissioner: a top fundraiser for Pataki and other Republicans named Charlie Gargano. An executive with a major development company, Gargano was an adroit administrator who, when push came to shove, favored Albany’s interest over Trenton’s. Kushner was a necessary and able counterpoint.
At the time, I thought he was totally above reproach.
But he refused my appointment three times. Eventually he accepted because he thought it was important for America. By doing so, he voluntarily stepped out of competition for any of the development dollars that would flow as a result.
DINA AND JACQUELINE REMAINED IN THE HOSPTIAL FOR SEVERAL weeks after the delivery. Between November 7 and my inauguration on January 15, whenever I wasn’t visiting them or doting on them once they came home, I worked on almost nothing besides appointments.
There were a number of people I wasn’t finding quick fits for, chief among them Golan Cipel. He had performed admirably in the campaign, but in a limited role. Now he made it plain that he wanted a significant portfolio in Trenton, but there was no obvious post for him. I weighed putting him in the Port Authority or the Commerce Department, places where his facility with the press and familiarity with diplomatic protocol might come in handy.
This upset Golan, who wanted a “front-office job” working more directly with me. Several times a day he demanded meetings to discuss his future. I found his insistence both boyishly charming and unbelievably churlish. My staff saw only the churlish side. He moved himself into the transition office, bragging that he had a “personal relationship” with me that gave him unassailable insights into my likes and dislikes. He actually demanded to look at office assignment charts and even redrafted my inaugural speech, all without my authority. Finally, when I’d had enough, I went to his apartment to talk to him about diplomacy and office politics. It was a fastidious place, with a fluffy cat I was surprised to learn he’d named Jimmy.
“Gole,” I said. “Why do you have to fight with everybody? You’ve got to learn to get along, to be part of the team.”
“My only team is you,” he said.
But as the transition efforts progressed, I found myself increasingly relying on his advice and candor. Here was a guy who never varnished his words when talking to me, who wasn’t afraid to tell me when he felt I was dead wrong.
His main interest was fighting terrorism; he was consumed by the subject. One night he made me drive with him to the foot of the George Washington Bridge to watch the police screening large trucks there, in a method he considered inadequate. Commercial trucking was then permitted to cross the bridge only a few hours each night, when inspection stations were manned. Trucking companies accommodated this rule by dropping off trailers on the Jersey side of the bridge throughout the day, so the driver didn’t have to wait; another tractor would arrive once the trailer was cleared to cross.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Any one of those parked trucks could blow up the bridge.”
He had a point. Nothing about my education so far had prepared me to think that way. But Golan had grown up under the threat of terror and spent fifteen years fighting it in one way or another. He dragged me down to Cape May and along the Delaware River to Philadelphia, to study how the Delaware River Port Authority was interacting with the Coast Guard. “There is no interoperability,” he said. “Their radios aren’t even on the same frequency.”
Talking to him, I realized that New Jersey needed an office of counter-terrorism to think about security and anticipate trouble. After 9/11, acting Governor Donald Di Francesco had relied on an interagency coordinating body called the Domestic Security Task Force, chaired by the attorney general. I planned to keep that in place, but add our own intelligence-gathering wing affiliated with the state police, headed by an experienced crime fighter who could interface with state and federal counterparts.
I took to heart Golan’s advice, borrowed from a Coast Guard admiral: “Crisis by definition is an intelligence failure.” He must have said that ten thousand times. He gave me books to read on security strategy and arranged for a briefing with ranking Israeli generals.
But on our private stakeouts around the state, something else was happening. A tension was growing between us that excited me. He talked about girlfriends and I talked about Dina, but there was a thick subtext to our conversations that was about the two of us.
Finding Golan a job he considered acceptable was a priority, but there were many other pressing matters demanding my time. When we had our first briefing after winning office I saw what a colossal mess the state’s budget was in—even before the terror assault magnified our budget troubles a hundredfold. My economic advisers were telling me we would have a $3 billion deficit in the first year alone. I’d promised not to levy taxes, so we were already in the middle of negotiating a series of difficult budget cuts: the teachers unions wanted my head on a platter, the arts community was ready to stone me, and I hadn’t even been sworn in yet.
On December 10 or 11, after I rebuffed several requests for meetings, Golan reached me on my cell phone, upset that I’d been out of touch. I invited him over to the condo for a late dinner, to assure him that he had a future in the administration. He arrived in a suit and tie, dressed impeccably as always. I don’t remember what I prepared for us to eat, but it can’t have been very good—the kitchen is as baffling to me as a submarine’s helm. But with Dina still in the hospital with our newborn, I’d been left to my own devices. In fact, I think we ate cold cereal.
He was politely appreciative. We sat at the dining room table talking and half-watching the cable news, our shared addiction. I don’t know at what point it occurred to me that something more was about to happen. But I know how it started. I stretched out on the couch and placed my legs out over his knees, as I’d done previously in the car. I then leaned forward and hugged him, and kissed his neck. His response was immediate and loving, just what I’d fantasized about since the first day we locked ey
es.
It was wrong to do. I wasn’t an ordinary citizen any more. There were state troopers parked outside. My wife was recovering from a difficult pregnancy and C-section in the hospital. And he was my employee. But I took Golan by the hand and led him upstairs to my bed. We undressed and he kissed me. It was the first time in my life that a kiss meant what it was supposed to mean—it sent me through the roof. I was like a man emerging from forty-four years in a cave to taste pure air for the first time, feel direct sunlight on pallid skin, warmth where there had only ever been a bone-chilling numbness. I pulled him to the bed and we made love like I’d always dreamed: a boastful, passionate, whispering, masculine kind of love.
Afterward, I lay on the bed and watched Golan on the pillow next to me as he slept. At around three o’clock in the morning I shook him out of bed for his walk home, not wanting to alert the state troopers to anything amiss. When he was gone, I realized that this might all explode on me one day, but I just didn’t care. I felt invincible then.
V.
The Price of Authenticity
13.
MY CIRCUMSTANCES MADE HAVING AN AFFAIR EXCRUCIATINGLY difficult, but not impossible. I visited Dina and Jacqueline every day in the hospital, and my heart ached to have our baby home, but until they returned I spent as much free time as I could with Golan. I loved our time together, whether talking politics over cups of tea or trying to remember whose T-shirt was whose at the end of the bed. He fiddled with my hair, which I keep slicked back tightly, still unhappy with its propensity to curl. “You should comb it like this,” he said, parting it with his fingers. “It’s less severe.”
He had things to say about my wardrobe, too. For as long as I can remember, I’d worn a standard political uniform; in my closet were a dozen dark blue suits and a hundred white shirts, so many that I dropped them at the laundry once a month, thirty at a time. Golan even counseled me on my intonation. The New Jersey in my voice made him laugh. He was a consummate public relations man. I took his advice seriously (though not enough to change my hair). I ventured into the brown aisle next time I bought a suit, and sometimes added a faint wash of color to my shirt collection.
When Dina finally got home, things changed. Our condo became a scrum of familial activity. Her parents were always around, cooing to the baby in Portuguese. My parents and sisters stopped by a lot too, as did Jimmy and Lori Kennedy; they were all eager to get to know Jacqueline, who was a beautiful fireball even when she was only a few days old. Dina was exhausted from her birthing ordeal, but she took to motherhood instinctively. I loved watching the two of them together.
Knowing how much work I had ahead of me, the crowds at the condo paid little attention to me. I raced out to the gym at dawn and didn’t return on most nights until long after dinner.
Once, after an exhausting day in the transition office, I made secret plans with Golan to see him later, at his apartment. The state troopers, now my constant companions, dropped me at the condo and parked around back. When I was sure they couldn’t see me, I pulled on my running clothes and slipped out the front. Golan’s apartment complex was roughly half a mile away, but difficult to get to on foot. I ran along the sidewalk for a while, then below a railroad underpass before returning to the sidewalk and ducking into his building.
He greeted me in his briefs. “Did anybody see you?” he asked, closing the door quickly. We kissed, hard.
I was totally in love with this man. He loved everything I loved. Politics never bored him. He loved strategy and demographic analyses. He loved power, philosophy, justice. He never stopped thinking about these things, and that’s what gave his life purpose and joy. I didn’t always agree with him, but I always learned something from him. His intelligence and his compassion were equally far-reaching. More than anything, I loved how he viewed our relationship, as a political partnership without limits. Or so I imagined; we never discussed it.
“No, nobody saw me leave the condo,” I answered. “They don’t even let me jog alone. Last time they saw me leave in running clothes, they sent somebody to run with me.”
He led me to his bedroom, past photographs of him and his naval crew and a set of painted toy soldiers, posed in some famous battle formation. Israeli folk music played on the stereo. He undressed quickly and jumped into bed.
To get what I wanted after so many years of denial was almost too much for me. Our first few times together burned so fiercely in my mind I could hardly recall them even as we were still lying together. I’ll never forget the look of trust in his eyes and the dead weight of his vulnerability in my arms. But I was like a kid on his first days of drivers’ ed, too thrilled to be behind the wheel, unfamiliar again with the roadways I’d known all my life.
He was patient and understanding. In fact, I believed his journey was the same as mine, that he had also taken great risks to arrive at this place of happiness, unity, and integration. And love.
When we finished our lovemaking, our thoughts returned to the enormous task we shared, building an administration from scratch in just two months, governing in a post-9/11 world. He was conversant in foreign affairs, diplomacy, and global economics, subjects that still were far from my mind. Once, he discovered that a staffer had received a letter from the Chinese consular office in Toronto and inadvertently sent a reply to the Japanese consulate, a stupid error.
“You can’t let this kind of thing happen,” he said to me. “You’re not the mayor of Woodbridge anymore, worrying about relations between this neighborhood and that one.”
“Golan, it was just a mistake.”
“You can’t tolerate mistakes! The terror attacks show that. New Jersey is part of the world now in a way it never was before.”
I think Golan expected me to end up in the White House. Maybe that’s what he loved about me—my potential to bring him to Washington. If he was using me as the engine driving his own ambition, I didn’t mind. I liked seeing myself reflected in his eyes. And in a way he was my tutor, too. He shook me out of my pedestrian New Jersey parochialism. He helped me think big.
“Gole,” I said, “what do you think about the New Jersey State Department? You’d be working with foreign dignitaries, heads of state.”
That wasn’t what he had in mind. “But I want to work with you, not on the other side of Trenton.”
“How about Commerce? You could work with global trade arrangements.”
“Jimmy, please—can’t I work with you?”
DRUMTHWACKET, THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION IN PRINCETON, IS one of the most fabled and elegant of America’s executive residences. Built in 1835 on land originally owned by William Penn, the house is a classic example of the Greek revival style, surrounded by ornate English gardens that have been celebrated for nearly a century. Charles Smith Olden, a businessman from New Orleans, was the first owner and the man who gave it its name, which means wooded hill in Gaelic.
Active in community and political affairs, Olden was elected governor in 1860 on a platform supporting Abraham Lincoln’s stand against secession. He began the tradition of aristocratic benevolence among chief executives in the state. When the treasury sank precipitously during the Civil War, he reached into his great personal fortune to keep New Jersey solvent. After his death, an industrialist and banker named Moses Taylor Pyne expanded the structure with seven new public rooms downstairs and a dozen private rooms upstairs. A grandchild, Agnes Pyne, sold Drumthwacket in 1941, and twenty-five years later the grounds were sold to New Jersey, to be used as an official residence. Jim Florio, who moved there in 1990, was the first modern governor to use it, and I was only the second; Christie Whitman favored her own family estate, visiting Drumthwacket only during official receptions.
Dina was looking forward to setting up home there, much more than I was. I didn’t really know anybody in Princeton, one of the state’s old-money enclaves. Woodbridge and Carteret, my home for four decades, were forty minutes away. More significantly, Drumthwacket had all the “official residence” accoutrements
, including guards at the door and a staff of cooks, maintenance engineers, and groundskeepers. Surely this would be the death knell to any love affair, much less the unusual one Golan and I were undertaking.
Luckily, we couldn’t move in right away. Although the building had been extensively renovated in the 1980s, it smelled of mold and its decor was badly outdated; as Florio once said, the restrooms were done in “early Turnpike.” Moreover, it was full of lead paint and asbestos, unsuitable for a newborn. Dina and I requested an extensive renovation, and the nonprofit foundation that runs the place agreed, embarking on a $590,000 facelift funded by contributions, including money from Charlie Kushner. To avoid spending taxpayers’ money, friends and family agreed to join me for a “painting party.”
At least until April we would have to stay put in our tiny Woodbridge condo, down the street from Golan.
In public I struggled to maintain a professional relationship with him, but it wasn’t always possible. I remember one day walking from the transition office to the statehouse with Jason Kirin, Gary, and Paul. “Jimmy, I need to talk to you,” Golan whispered in my ear. We fell behind the others, no doubt blushing. I could tell that Jason, my body man, found this strange. Afterward he even said something about it.
“Golan’s pretty free with his hands,” he remarked.
“Israelis are very affectionate people,” I told him.
THERE WAS AN UNUSUALLY MILD BREEZE IN THE AIR ON JANUARY 15, 2002. Dina and I hadn’t slept well the night before, excited about the inaugural events, though the fact that recovery efforts were still ongoing in New York gave the day an appropriately somber tone. Again, costs were covered by private donations. As a favor to me, Golan joined in the planning. It was an impressive lineup. The world famous American Boychoir came to sing the “Hallelujah Chorus,” one of my favorites, followed by the Shiloh Baptist Church Choir, the Southern Regional Select Choir, and the Malcolm X Shabazz High School Marching Band.
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