Finally another juicy story hit the headlines, but this one—involving Gary Taffet and Paul Levinsohn—offered no relief. Until the buzz around the articles reached me, I had no idea that during the campaign the two had built a sizable company on the side, buying and controlling billboards around central Jersey. They’d built this business around a little known loophole in a town’s ability to pass zoning laws restricting billboards. Apparently, state-owned land was exempt. Every small town had little slivers of state-owned land, either alongside the railroad tracks or inside state parks. Even quaint villages whose planning boards barred billboard development were powerless to close this loophole. Between Election Day and my inauguration, they reached twenty-two lucrative advertising deals with fourteen powerful New Jersey companies, including one controlled by Charlie Kushner.
According to published reports—on the heels of an FBI raid—my friend and benefactor John Lynch was involved as well. Even after I’d moved over to the transition office, Lynch had evidently made phone calls on the guys’ behalf, helping them secure two more licenses just ten days before inauguration day, before selling the whole business as required by law (administration officials can’t have private business interests). Sometime in the two weeks before joining the administration, they sold the business for a staggering $4.4 million for a dozen billboards—a perfectly legal transaction, but an astronomical sum that made the deal look like it involved political favors. I have no idea whether Lynch netted anything from the deal. I only know that the whole thing looked atrocious.
It all unraveled in mid-2002, when Randee Davidson took over as mayor of Washington Township, in South Jersey, after her predecessor began serving a jail sentence for spending township money on a Manhattan apartment, vacation rentals, and a new Chevy Blazer. A Philadelphia Inquirer reporter asked her about the new billboard in town, next to the New Jersey Transit bus terminal. Given the political turmoil she inherited, it’s not surprising that Davidson hadn’t noticed it—even though it stood 160 feet high, the tallest in South Jersey, in a town that had long prohibited the giant signs.
Unable to learn who had built it, or under what authority, she called in the FBI. An investigation led to my senior staff members. Two days after we won the primary, the guys had gone to Washington Township zoning authorities and showed them a letter from New Jersey Transit giving them permission to erect the sign. How’d they get this letter? As the press later reported, John Lynch had called the executive director of the New Jersey Transit office on their behalf.
When I learned about these deals, I was crestfallen. I considered Gary one of my best friends in the world. His mother had served on my campaign staff. I’d entrusted my political career to him and to Paul, who was like a brother to me. A federal investigation ultimately found they’d done nothing illegal. But the public felt that they’d sullied the high office of governor by engaging in this scheme, and the backlash seriously undermined my administration.
Confronting them was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I had them out of the office by the end of the year. As for John Lynch? I never talked to him about this deal. But he immediately became the principal target of the federal probe, in an investigation that continued for years.
SANDY MCCLURE’S ARTICLE ABOUT GOLAN APPEARED ON AUGUST 4, 2002. The product of a “four-month investigation,” it contained no new information, but its tone was staggeringly cruel. She stopped short of calling us homosexuals. But she implied not only that Golan’s résumé and work experience were inflated, but that they were inflated by me.
Quoting from his résumé, she took issue with a statement deep in his description of his job at the Israeli consulate in New York, where he worked for five years, declaring that he was “responsible for portfolios on terrorism.” She located the former consul from that time, who said that Golan “was not involved in anything related to terrorism.” I believe the consul was wrong. As part of his efforts in the communications office, he helped devise ways to sell Israel’s antiterror policies in the press, no small responsibility.
Furthermore, as I pointed out to McClure, this task was listed among many others while he was there. Although she quoted me on this point, she made me sound like I was splitting hairs, which perhaps I was. But I’d chosen Golan as my senior counsel because he was smart, tested in communication policy, experienced in international trade and business protocols, and focused on security issues. And because he never pulled his punches with me.
I released his résumé, his job description, and a sample of the kinds of things he’d been taking care of for the administration. “His job,” I told her, “is to advise the governor as to critical information that may be of value in numerous circumstances, including meeting with chief executive officers of major corporations, setting forth policy areas of concern relating to the business community and economic development and responding on a case-by-case basis to information requests.”
Obviously McClure didn’t hear me—or preferred to continue the whisper campaign about our affair. She wrote the following:
“Who is he? What does he do? Why has he been given special treatment? And why has he been kept from public scrutiny of his credentials?” Answers to these questions, she said, were impossible to ascertain. The implication, once again, was that I’d put an unqualified man on staff because he and I were having an affair. That was only partly true. I never should have hired him. But objectively, his work history as a military officer, Knesset aide, and communications director made him qualified for the multifaceted job I gave him.
I felt pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to survive the attention that followed this newest salvo. Looking back, I think there was a part of me that wanted to get caught. Maybe that’s too strong. But all my life I’d thought about what would happen if I was caught red-handed, if my secret was emblazoned on billboards for the world to see. I always imagined the fear would go away. But reading that article, interlaced with innuendo, didn’t free me.
Many elected officials have had affairs while in office, often with employees. Some of them held a somber press conference about it and moved on with their lives. Even Bill Clinton lived to fight another day. I never considered such a route. Putting aside the fact that I’d made a huge error in judgment in hiring Golan and giving him a high salary and portfolio, I knew I couldn’t face the voters with what I’d done and ask for their continued support. I had never once told a soul I was gay. I simply couldn’t imagine surviving it.
I surely lacked the courage to leave Dina and live on at Drumthwacket as an openly gay man. And I knew I didn’t have the fortitude to stand before the voters and ask for a second term without my wife—any wife—at my side.
For their part, no one on my staff ever came to me as a friend and said, “Jim, is there anything to all of this?” We treated it all as a scandal to be extinguished. But I don’t blame them. I set the tone in the administration, and my fear was too deeply ingrained for me to handle it any other way.
SENATOR GORMLEY MADE PLANS FOR A SENATE INVESTIGATION, threatening to force Golan to testify. My own attorney general began a probe into the circumstances of Golan’s hiring and the groundless suggestion that he never did a lick of work. Over and over, we had described his duties: organizing international trade missions, helping to arrange a major security conference at Princeton, and developing a model for the state’s New Jersey–Israel Commission; in addition, he advised me on intellectual property issues and federal and state regulatory policy.
But the press made all this sound murky and nefarious. They sent in requests for his daily schedules, his INS applications, even his e-mail. Not wanting to set precedent, I personally rejected these requests as imperiling the governor’s rights to counsel and Golan’s own right to privacy. I had nothing to fear from revealing them. Like me, he was extremely circumspect in what he wrote down. Even his birthday cards to me were addressed formally. He gave me two gifts during this time, a handsome Brooks Brothers tie I still have and a be
autiful oil painting of Old Jerusalem, which, because he signed his name so prominently in the corner, I’d reluctantly disposed of so visitors wouldn’t get the wrong idea.
Each new volley of requests under the state’s Open Public Records Act made my staff more apoplectic. Finally, under mounting pressure, I called Golan to a meeting at my statehouse office to ask him to leave.
I hadn’t seen him in several weeks. The last time, during a weekend meeting in Drumthwacket, things were tense between us. He was too upset about his constant bad press to show me any affection. Almost every day brought a new article poking fun at the “sailor” and “poet” who “served the governor in a variety of positions.”
He blamed me for it. I didn’t care who was to blame.
I knew it would end when he left the administration. And frankly, his work was slipping—understandably, given the circumstances. My old friend Bob Sommer talked to me about offering Golan a job in the East Rutherford office of the MWW Group, one of the largest public relations firms in the country. The person who handled Israeli clients for the firm had quit; Golan was an ideal replacement.
I dreaded the moment. Politics meant the world to him. He’d come halfway around the world to see how far his political talents would take him in America—the way an actor goes to Hollywood or a scientist goes to NASA—and I was cutting it all short. I apologized in a million different ways.
“Gole,” I said, “it’s about the government, it isn’t about individuals. You did nothing wrong. But you can’t stay. It isn’t tenable.”
“You said you’d give it all up for me,” he threw back at me. I suppose I had that coming. But he misconstrued what I was saying back then.
“Golan, I said I’d give it all up if you were with me. I’m not going to give up a career or job when you’re not even with me. You’ve missed the point. If we’re together as two individuals in love, that makes sense. But I’m not surrendering government for the sake of your job.”
He left without promising to resign. The next time we met, for breakfast, he brought a lawyer. At the time, I couldn’t imagine why. I just reiterated the situation: he’d done nothing wrong, but a political backdraft was forcing him out of the administration. Still, he did not resign.
Frustrated, I asked Charlie Kushner to talk to him. I met Kushner’s public relations man, Howard Rubenstein, a long-standing friend of Israel, and even asked him to call Golan and recommend stepping down.
Finally Golan agreed. On April 14, I released news to the press.
Just as Golan had predicted, though, it only intensified the fires. A reporter cornered me and demanded to know exactly what kind of work Golan was walking away from: “What’s the nature of the job he quit?”
“Mr. Cipel provided valuable input, critical thinking, and was of assistance,” I said. In the next day’s paper, that was translated as: The Governor continued to stonewall reporters on Cipel’s exact duties. I couldn’t win.
NOR COULD I FREE MYSELF FROM GOLAN’S INCREASING BITTERNESS. Almost from the minute he resigned, he began demanding his job back. He felt tricked into quitting, he said, even though he’d done nothing wrong. He found me on my cell phone at all hours, interrupting everything from daybreak trips to the gym to late-night dinners with Drumthwacket staffers. It was after one of these calls that Dina put Jacqueline to bed, then confronted me. She had every reason to demand to know if I was gay—it was being openly inferred in newspapers and radio broadcasts. These ceaseless phone conversations with Golan must have seemed like conclusive proof.
But the more I think about it, the more I’m not even sure if she actually said, “Are you gay?” Maybe she only said it with an angry flash of her eyes. Maybe I only suspected that she suspected. Whenever I felt I’d been exposed, whether by the state trooper who busted me at the rest area or the newspaper reporters who pieced it together, a feverlike terror would cloud my perspective and shuffle my memory. I know for certain that the reporters posed those questions to me. They repeatedly revealed this in the aftermath of my resignation, confirming my blurry memories.
With Dina, though, I can’t disentangle what she actually said from what I worried she knew, and in the ugliness that has followed us I haven’t seen fit to ask.
Frankly, our marriage had taken on the feeling of a business partnership almost from the day we moved into Drumthwacket. She kept her own schedule, throwing herself into official duties and responsibilities with increasing zeal. She genuinely loved serving on the board of the state’s March of Dimes, for which she had a tremendous connection because of Jacqueline’s complicated birth. She spoke frequently on health care issues and organized Easter egg rolls and Feasts of the Three Magi for area kids. She never tired of being first lady.
She also lavished attention and love on our baby girl, who was quickly becoming an unusually outgoing and demonstrative child. We both did. In the rare times when the three of us were alone together, Jacqueline was joyously and exclusively our focal point, an irresistible excuse for us to avoid talking about our personal troubles.
If our mounting troubles made Dina sad or angry, I rarely saw any sign of it. She was always intensely private, and in her disappointments she turned only to her family. With each passing month, her relatives spent more and more time on the second floor of Drumthwacket, crowding around the formal dining room table and confiding in one another in Portuguese. If I walked through the room, their banter ceased until I left again. Their silence told me all I needed to know.
14.
YOU DON’T GET A SECOND CHANCE TO MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION. It’s one of the most painful lessons I’ve learned in my life. The first impression I made for most New Jerseyans was one of scandal. Besides the billboard scandal, the police superintendent’s alleged mafia ties, and Golan’s mysterious tenure, there was an unfortunate stream of other defining missteps. It turned out that my commerce secretary—the Reverend William Watley of the St. James AME Church in Newark—had stuck with his chief of staff (who happened also to be a trusted member of his church) despite allegations that she’d hired five members of her own family in vague and unspecified positions, an embarrassing revelation that compelled both of them to resign. His well-meaning efforts to do the right thing produced nothing but bad press.
Meanwhile, Roger Chugh, the Woodbridge businessman who coordinated Asian Indian minority voters in my campaign and joined the administration as assistant secretary of state, was running a strange personal website that read like a lonely-hearts ad and misrepresented his position in the administration. He later drew more disturbing allegations: members of his own community said that he’d strong-armed them into making political donations for my campaign, something I can’t believe is true.
As the political writers kept pointing out, I appeared to be the newest machine politician off the assembly line, yet another creature of patronage, “pay-to-play” favoritism, obfuscation, secrecy, and machine politics who’d declared a hypocritical show war against “business as usual.” For obvious reasons, I tended to forgive myriad character failings rather than pass judgment on them. But it really was remarkable how many people in my administration turned out to have totally crazy meltdowns. Surely that makes me a bad judge of character, at the least.
But I realize now that I wasn’t managing my staff effectively. Having spent too long isolated from “the weeds” of a campaign, I never fully made the transition to acting as a hands-on chief executive. Too often I left the engine of Trenton to manage itself. As some of my appointees slipped into unreasonable behavior, I didn’t even notice. I was almost never in the office; instead I haunted the VFW halls and church pulpits I’d visited over the years, continuing on the hustings of retail politics.
There were a number of reasons for this. I felt I had to take my two consecutive budget cuts directly to the voters, not only for their support but to help make legislators feel safe supporting them. Besides, I felt much more comfortable discussing my policy initiatives with “real people.” They reminded
me every moment why I was a politician—to help the people of New Jersey through a difficult passage.
Yet it’s also true that campaigning gave me the emotional assurance I craved, which I wouldn’t find in the halls of the statehouse. Being permanently on the stump helped remind me that people liked me—that I was likable, despite my differences. Maybe I continually sought proof that I’d buried my differences deeply enough to be liked. There is no question that I needed the kind of affirmation that only campaign-style appearances provided.
In retrospect, I can see that by this point I was fractured and compartmentalized to the point of debilitation. Did I let things in government slide? Absolutely, without question. And too many of my trusted advisers slid into scandal as a result.
By the end of my first year in office, I had a dismal approval rating to show for it—just 37 percent, down from 51 percent in March, sixty days into the administration. By the following July I’d slipped even further, to 35 percent. It seemed there was nothing I could do to mitigate the harsh press. As Governor Byrne once said, “If Jim McGreevey walked on water the newspapers would say McGreevey can’t swim.”
On St. Patrick’s Day 2003, I had something of an epiphany. I had to attend a number of functions that day, including the traditional parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue as a guest of Governor George Pataki. That was a lot of fun. Not only was it a huge honor to be at the front of America’s longest-running annual parade (it began in 1762), but at one point we saw my cousin Kim McGreevey, a sergeant on the Suffolk County police force, marching past in full uniform. She ran over and we kissed—celebrating the fact that our family tradition on the force continued to this day was one of my greatest thrills as governor.
The Confession Page 29