But that same day I also attended the Irish parade in Bayonne, New Jersey. I had looked forward to it as a chance to stand with my own community as their governor. It was not the homecoming I had hoped. Nobody heckled me. But nobody cheered me, either, and there were a lot of folks there who challenged me sharply on the first year of my administration. This shook me terribly. I saw disappointment in the eyes of my own community, and it shamed me.
For me, it was a wake-up call.
Up to this point, I had put the blame for past performances on the inexperienced staff I’d entrusted with the administration. It was wrong to blame them alone. But after their departure, I brought in a topflight team led by Jamie Fox, my new chief of staff, and the difference was like night and day. After our year of turmoil, Jamie was just the master strategist we needed, a total pro. He came with years of experience, most notably as Torricelli’s chief of staff. When I first became governor, I appointed him Commissioner of Transportation, where he proved he was a great manager. When I brought him over to the statehouse, I realized just how awkwardly we’d been approaching the business of government. Jamie ran my office—and the State of New Jersey—like a field general. His instincts were always dead-on. He was also openly gay, a fact that increased my admiration for him.
But until this morning at the Bayonne parade, I had not taken any personal responsibility for the scandals and our failures to get traction on a meaningful agenda. I focused on the parts, not the whole—I saw myself as innocent of the scandals, and untouched by them.
I knew the bad press frustrated my father endlessly. Almost every day he mailed me long, handwritten letters offering his commonsense advice and ethical insights. In the fog of my war, I didn’t pay them close attention. Mom was less concerned about the press than about my spiritual well-being. One day she handed me a stack of letters my grandmother had written me. I don’t know where she found them, but reading them again was a powerful salve. “Pray to Grandma,” Mom said, “she will guide you.”
My approach to the bad press was to keep campaigning. Shaking hands and meeting people, hearing their thoughts about government, had always brought my numbers up in the past. So I kept in constant motion, I was almost never in the office.
The first thing I realized there in Bayonne was the mistake of this policy. I’d entered politics to enact an aggressive legislative agenda. That’s what the voters were waiting for—not more face time with the governor. On a few matters, I’d made some significant progress, especially education. The problem was, with the din of scandal engulfing the statehouse, our victories were barely getting noticed in the press.
AT HARVARD, I HAD STUDIED THE SO-CALLED BEST PRACTICES methods, designed to determine what worked and what didn’t in public education. All the studies proved that prekindergarten education and literacy meant the difference between success or failure for disadvantaged kids. If these kids couldn’t read, they couldn’t compete. In terms of facility with language and socialization, studies showed kids needed to be in academic settings as early as possible.
When I came into office, despite a court ruling mandating access to preschool for all three- and four-year-olds in the state’s poorest districts, only about half were enrolled. Whitman’s administration had dragged its feet on implementation and cut corners on quality. In 2002, the few affected students were more often than not being taught by day care “aides” who lacked proper training or expertise. I immediately allocated an extra $140 million to pre-K expansion, though I was having to slash spending elsewhere, and hired an early-childhood education expert, Dr. Ellen Frede, to oversee preschools in the state.
I also made sure that preschool teachers were getting the training they needed to teach our vulnerable kids effectively. I began offering professional development courses, inaugurated the state’s first-ever New Jersey Teacher Academy, and set new minimum standards: all aides were to be on their way toward earning bachelor degrees, and all teachers were to have subject-matter proficiency in their fields. If you wanted to teach the wonders of science, you needed a science degree to prove you understood it yourself. New Jersey was one of the first states to require such standards.
What’s more, there were no literacy standards for children up through third grade. How can you know how a child is doing if you don’t even know what the benchmarks are? In February 2002, I signed an executive order setting third-grade literacy standards, the first in the state. I knew that a child who can’t read by third grade is likely never to catch up.
In my second year, I announced a $10 million budget for reading coaches, sending early-literacy experts into the at-risk schools and helping fifty thousand students be better readers. My education counselor, Lucille Davy, and I launched the Governor’s Book Club, which distributed books to kindergarteners through third-graders. I wanted to infuse literacy into kids’ lives.
Our efforts paid off. By the time I left office, about 80 percent of eligible students were enrolled in preschool—100 percent in some districts. And literacy rates continue to improve. New Jersey’s third-grade reading scores are now among the highest in the nation.
ANOTHER POLICY INITIATIVE I UNDERTOOK, UNDER NO SMALL amount of duress, was gay domestic partnership. Early in 2004, I signed into law a measure making New Jersey only the third state in the country to convey a bundle of rights upon same-sex couples. It was in the middle of my own long struggle with the issue. I publicly opposed gay marriage, something I’m not proud of. A gay rights group representing seven couples sued for the right to marry, and my attorney general fought back hard, getting the suit thrown out of court. I criticized the suit as detrimental to New Jersey, and even opposed the first proposal for establishing civil unions, calling it too broad and expensive.
The bill I signed was more modest. It came to me from the legislature, sponsored by Dick Codey and Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg, making it the first domestic partnership measure implemented by lawmakers voluntarily, not ordered by the courts. Under it, unmarried gays (and straights over age sixty-two) living in committed and mutually caring relationships are empowered to make medical decisions for each other, and health insurers in the state are required to offer them the same coverage given to spouses. The law did not give other rights enjoyed by married couples, such as the right to share property acquired during marriage or the right to seek alimony or financial support when the partnership ends. Nor did it allow them to share in a partner’s family entitlements in public benefits programs.
Still, it looked for a time as though even this modest bill wouldn’t find enough votes for passage in the legislature. Jamie Fox made it his mission to lobby lawmakers one by one. Perhaps his biggest challenge was Senator Ron Rice from Newark, the leader of the Senate’s Black Caucus, who had blocked us on other socially progressive undertakings. “Ron, I need this one,” Jamie said. “This one’s personal.” Ron gave it to him. Not only did he vote yes, but so did just about every member of the caucus. Even Sharpe James, who besides being Newark’s mayor also represented the 29th District in the Senate, surrendered to Jamie’s offensive—by abstaining.
Despite being limited in scope, the bill was welcomed by most gay New Jerseyans when I signed the bill in a small ceremony at my office. Many times in my career my signature has been greeted with cheers, but never like the ovation that filled the room this day.
THE POLICY AREA WHERE WE MADE THE MOST PROFOUND IMPACT was also where we got the most push back. Environmentally, we collected more fines and more compensation from polluters in our first year than the prior administration had collected in eight, using laws already on the books. This irritated industry leaders. I joined a bipartisan coalition of states to take the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to court to stop Midwestern power plants from polluting New Jersey’s air. Naturally, this involved taking on Christie Todd Whitman, the EPA’s director. As I said in my State of the State address, “If the federal government will not provide the leadership to protect the air we breathe, reduce pollution, and prote
ct New Jersey’s coastline, then we will.” In a first, we shut down a power plant in Pennsylvania because its emissions polluted our air downstream.
But it was when we finally took on sprawl that things got really interesting. Environmental regulations already on the books prohibited new construction within three hundred feet of rivers. I proposed expanding those regulations to include tributaries, streams, and creeks, all of which are equally instrumental to the state’s supply of drinking water. In the stroke of an executive order, I expanded the protected footprint to include 300,000 more acres of land.
Developers went crazy. I halted scores of planned projects. Conventional wisdom said it was suicide to take on the single richest source of campaign financing in the state. As a result of their financial clout, developers were able to pull strings at every level of government—they literally owned many of the local politicians, including many bosses—and in the ancillary businesses (banking, law, insurance, unions) that make up the state’s service economy.
The political establishment joined the outcry—none more than John Lynch, whose consulting firm, Executive Continental, specialized in helping developers with state contracts. Lynch and I hadn’t been getting along since I’d arrived in Trenton. Now he turned on me with passion.
From the beginning, Lynch had put a great deal of pressure on me to appoint his people to ranking positions, particularly in law enforcement. He wanted his best friend and personal attorney, Jack Arsenault, in as attorney general, the prize law enforcement post, with a staff of 9,300. But Arsenault had represented the state troopers in the politically divisive racial profiling case, making him objectionable to African Americans. I had many other candidates in mind, especially Barry Albin, a highly regarded attorney from Woodbridge who eventually became a state supreme court justice. Lynch made it clear he would punish me if I went against him. So in a show of compromise, I appointed David Samson, a Republican with an immaculate record in political and legal circles. Though Samson was friendly with Lynch, the boss felt I had betrayed him nonetheless.
That may be one reason that Lynch never tired in his campaign against Charlie Kushner, whose appointment to the Port Authority was confirmed by the Senate and who I was pushing for Port Authority chair. With Lynch’s agitation, Bill Gormley kept investigating Charlie until he found what he alleged were irregularities in Charlie’s political contributions. Evidently, one of Charlie’s trusts for a few months included a regional bank, NorCrown. A long-forgotten 1911 law prohibits bank owners from supporting candidates. Charlie argued that he was a “beneficiary” of the trust, not an “owner” under the law. But the cloud of suspicion never cleared.
FOR ME, THE ENDLESS ATTACKS ON CHARLIE KUSHNER WERE NOTHING but a political power play. I believed at the time that his integrity, decency, and commitment to public service were beyond reproach. I’d practically had to plead with him to take this job. The only reason he’d accepted was out of a sense of civic obligation following the terror attacks. Maybe Gormley had lingering resentment for me pushing Santiago through for the state police, which backfired on Santiago as badly as it did on me. He called Charlie before a committee meeting investigating his campaign contributions. Charlie refused to testify, and instead eventually resigned in February 2003, after just more than a year on the job.
Gormley is a friend of mine. But he is a master at his game in state politics. He made an art of creating crises in order to secure whatever goal he had in mind, or to accrue a debt he could call in later. This had nothing to do with his feelings about me—or even about Charlie, for that matter. It was just business.
I was reluctant to accept Charlie’s resignation, but many party leaders around the state advised me to move on. “He’s just a big headache you don’t need right now,” one of them told me. Even if I’d pleaded with him to remain, I knew Charlie had had enough of government. So I thanked him for his public service, praised his tenure in the press, and consoled him privately for the pummeling he’d endured with grace.
It struck me as particularly ironic that I was considered beholden to the warlords, when our relationship was defined by these high-level skirmishes.
A few months later, on the day I stood with the St. Patrick’s Day parade line in Bayonne, I saw clearly for the first time how my relationships with Lynch and the other bosses had been a political compromise that I’d accepted in order to advance my career. Some things I’d done, or allowed to be done in my name, were morally repugnant to me, but I did them anyway and somehow found a way to tolerate my own turpitude. I did this by “forgetting” or never allowing myself to know. I had my people strike backroom deals I kept myself in the dark about or forced from my mind if I learned too much. Obviously this is one root of my memory problems.
To feed my ambition and towering ego, I had overridden my own morality, deformed my own character. I’d become something I hated. The Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl, writing in another context, called this “the mortification of normal reactions—a kind of emotional death.” For Frankl, the cause was the cruelty of endless imprisonment in the camps. I had no jailer but myself.
From that day on, I made a vow to pursue my agenda no matter what the bosses and warlords had to say about it, knowing that they’d do what it took to stop me. This decision was late in coming. I wish I’d made it from the first day of my administration. But I worried that I’d never be able to raise money for reelection without Lynch, by far the most powerful warlord in the state.
Given the way things were going, however, reelection didn’t seem likely. If I had any chance, it would be as my own man, not as Lynch’s apologist.
But before declaring my independence, I first called Senator Corzine and Congressman Menendez to secure their support in case this erupted into a full-scale war. They backed me unconditionally. However, aides to both men leaked news of those phone calls to the Star-Ledger, which ran a story about my “epiphany.”
Lynch’s response was swift. He began seeking another Democrat to put against me in the next primary. I heard this in political gossip, but I know it was true. His elegant wife Deborah, a notable fundraiser for political and community causes, told me so herself. She and I had always had a separate friendship with one another. She showed me proof of his efforts to force a costly primary, to undo my legislative agenda, and to thwart any lasting change in the state’s political climate.
“John’s trying to hurt you,” she confided.
I tried to play it both ways. I called Lynch. “John, the Star-Ledger got it all wrong,” I told him. Then I canceled a contract for legal work with Jack Arsenault, knowing Lynch would take this personally.
A full-scale war was under way. The bosses were calling angrily, alleging that four or five developers were building a fund, with $1 million each, to knock me out in the next primary. This only reinforced my resolve. I ramped up the rhetoric—the only part of this campaign I think I took a bit too far. “There is no greater threat to our way of life than unrestrained, uncontrolled development,” I said. “No longer should communities be forced to stand helplessly by while inappropriate and unwanted development occurs.” I sounded like a Bolshevik. But I wanted to make the fight a public one, to engage the electorate. People had been against sprawl for years and years; if I could pull this off, I wouldn’t need the warlords.
I’ll never know if I could have survived. I never got to take a victory lap. But it’s clear that the bosses never forgave me. Years later, after my resignation, Lynch told reporters he would punch me in the nose if he ever saw me again. “He ruined my life,” Lynch said, calling my administration the “worst thirty-four months of my life.” When I did bump into him at Benito’s, there were no fisticuffs. I extended my hand to him genially, and he gave it a perfunctory squeeze. If Benito’s were a Wild West saloon instead of the favorite Italian eatery among New Jersey pols, the flame in his eyes would have cleared the place of every living thing.
THE TACTIC WAS WORKING. I WAS TAKING THE INITIATIVE BACK from the sca
ndalmongers and spearheading an important conversation in the state, one that could change the landscape in perpetuity. Not until months later, in March 2004, did I find out that even as we were gaining ground, the U.S. attorney’s office was trying to pin corruption on me personally, as part of an eighteen-month-long undercover sting operation.
It began on December 20, 2002. That day, I swung by a holiday reception, one of my first as governor. Everybody knew I was going to be there; it was on my schedule. At some point in the evening, I bumped into David D’Amiano, the guy who was holding a cell phone to his chest.
“Governor,” he called out. “Can I buttonhole you? I’ve got this Middlesex County farmer on the phone who’s trying to save his farm. The county freeholders are trying to condemn it for development.” Mark Halper, a Piscataway farmer, was desperate, he said. The freeholders, as the state’s county legislatures are called, were offering $3 million to buy him out through eminent domain, and he considered it inadequate.
I did not know then—and would only learn from the U.S. attorney—that D’Amiano had charged Halper a fee of $40,000 to get to me. Or worse, that the cash had been given to Halper by the FBI, to whom he had reported the shakedown. Apparently, the FBI and the Justice Department believed I was getting some of that money; they’d put a wire on Halper to undertake a sting, and D’Amiano fell for it.
I’d known D’Amiano for years. In retrospect, I suppose the temptation to trade on our long acquaintanceship was too profitable for him to ignore.
As a favor, I took D’Amiano’s phone and heard Halper’s long litany of complaints. “I want nothing less than a full reprieve,” he concluded.
“Have you spoken to the mayor of Piscataway?”
“He won’t speak to me.”
Talking to the county and township people is the usual process, I explained. “I suggest you reach out to Freeholder Director Crabiel,” I said. “He’s a good man. If anybody can help, he can.” I then invited him to report back to D’Amiano, not to me.
The Confession Page 30