I knew Sweeney wasn’t acting alone—he was backed by George Norcross, South Jersey’s most powerful party boss. George practiced a direct and blunt form of power politics; if you crossed swords with him, you knew what the issues were. George believed it was bad economic policy to remove the whole Highlands region from future development maps. We had a serious disagreement on this.
But his opposition was causing our Highlands Coalition—an uneasy amalgamation of Republicans and Democrats—to fracture. Jack Schrier, the Morris County Freeholders’ Republican chairman, was taking tremendous heat from certain conservatives in his local base. So were Leonard Lance and Bob Martin, Republican senators who supported the bill. I thought briefly about overriding George and Sweeney with an executive order protecting the four hundred thousand acres of land, but decided against it. An executive order would be temporary at best and would halt any momentum we had in favor of a permanent solution.
In the first week of June, I pulled every string possible to force the bill out of committee. Sweeney gave a condition for capitulating. He wanted a parallel law making it easier for developers to build in designated “smart growth” areas of the state. Specifically he wanted to fast-track reviews of permit applications, giving the Department of Environmental Protection just forty-five days to study the impact of any filing, hold hearings, and request changes before voting. If the review wasn’t yet completed by deadline, the permits would be issued automatically.
This was unacceptable. Unless we could be sure we had the necessary regulatory wherewithal to get the job done within the allotted time, development outside the Highlands would be more likely to foul the water tables.
We pushed back. In a series of meetings at the Marriott Hotel a few blocks from the statehouse, Michael DeCotiis, my chief counsel, horse traded—not with Sweeney, but with George Norcross’s brother, Phil, the managing partner of a prominent law firm. Meanwhile, we looked at our permit review process to see how nimble we could make it without sacrificing oversight.
Ultimately, we reached a compromise we felt we could live with. Some members of my staff disagreed with me on this, vehemently arguing that the so-called fast track bill was too high a price to pay for the Highlands bill. Passions ran high on the subject, but I felt that as long as I was in office, I could personally oversee the overhauling of our regulatory structure with Commissioner Campbell to make sure no new development would slip through the cracks without a thorough environmental review. On June 11, without debate on the Senate floor, the Highlands Act passed, making history as the single most sweeping environmental law in a generation—by far the most significant policy initiative I had ever undertaken.
NO POLITICIAN HAD WORSE LUCK THAN I. THE HIGHLANDS VICTORY should have enjoyed a few weeks of positive press, even national attention. Not for the McGreevey administration. Instead, another scandal exploded—the biggest yet. Regrettably, it involved my friend Charlie Kushner. And the gallons of ink that accompanied it stained me and everybody in the administration.
Even before I appointed him to the Port Authority board, Charlie was locked in ugly fights with his own brother and sister, who claimed he had mismanaged the family company. Among other things, they claimed that he had illegally diverted company funds to help political candidates, me included. I didn’t think there was anything to the charge. But Charlie later charged in a lawsuit that his own former accountant, Robert Yontef, was secretly helping his siblings develop their case against him, revealing what he knew about Charlie’s bookkeeping schemes.
As their lawsuits advanced, Charlie suffered an abject surrender of his senses. In an outlandish move, he paid $10,000 apiece to two prostitutes and instructed them to lure his sister’s husband and the accountant to $59-a-night rooms at the Red Bull Inn in Bridgewater, which Charlie had rigged with video cameras. Apparently, he planned to use the tapes to force them into retreat. It was an outrageous move, even by New Jersey standards.
Wisely, the accountant declined the woman’s entreaty. The brother-in-law wasn’t so prudent. Acting anonymously, in May 2004, Charlie mailed a copy of the sex tape to his own sister for her to see her husband’s transgressions. Another copy was sent to each of the couple’s children.
Making this distasteful and terribly stupid matter much worse, it turned out that Charlie’s brother-in-law was a cooperating witness in a federal tax investigation against Charlie, meaning Charlie had tampered with a federal witness, a felony. Yontef was also cooperating with the probe; so, in fact, was Charlie’s own sister.
Under threat of arrest, he turned himself in to the FBI in July 2004, to face charges of conspiracy, tax evasion, obstruction of an investigation, and promotion of interstate prostitution. Within the year, my dear friend Charlie Kushner—the son of Holocaust survivors, a former Humanitarian of the Year, a pillar in the Orthodox Jewish community—pleaded guilty to myriad and serious crimes before surrendering for a two-year sentence.
Through the years, I had gone to the mat over and over for Charlie, as he had so often for me. Charlie was a driven accomplished businessman, but he also was among the most generous souls I ever knew. The press pilloried me for our friendship after this ordeal. But I never got angry. I knew Charlie would return from prison wiser and healthier. Mostly, I regretted that he’d obliged the demons in his head.
This I knew so much about.
BY THE SUMMER OF 2004, I CAME TO THE REALIZATION THAT MY marriage had deteriorated beyond salvation. By that point, we were hardly speaking much at all. On the second floor of Drumthwacket, a cold wind blew.
As the long July Fourth weekend approached, I heard from Dina’s scheduler that she was taking Jacqueline to the governor’s official beach house at Island Beach State Park, a pristine barrier island near Seaside Park. She had already invited her parents; I wasn’t expected to attend, nor, I understood, would I be welcome.
Facing the prospect of that long weekend separated from my family, I was profoundly lonely. That Saturday, as a distraction, I made a five-hour trip to help a friend move down to the shore. After dropping him off, I had the state troopers take me past Congress Hall, a beautifully renovated 200-year-old hotel on the Atlantic Ocean owned by Curtis Bashaw, whom I’d asked to serve as executive director of the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, the state agency that had used casino revenues to restore Atlantic City’s grandeur and turn it into a modern family entertainment center. Curtis was charming, exceptionally bright, profoundly knowledgeable about state politics, and an important player in the ongoing effort to redevelop South Jersey.
He was also a Republican, as he quickly admitted when we’d first met a year before. But he happened to come from a profoundly spiritual and religious background—his grandfather was Rev. Carl McIntire, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher whose sermons were broadcast on more than six hundred stations at the height of his fame in the 1960s. Communism was his main foe, but McIntire also battled some Protestant churches (those he considered too liberal), the Roman Catholic Church (which he considered “fascist”) and, later, homosexuality.
Yet somehow Curtis had grown up as a well-integrated, balanced, religious, gay man, who lived openly with his partner, Will, in the same town where he grew up—and attended the evangelical church that had nourished him as a youth. “I don’t buy the baby-and-bathwater stuff,” he once explained, with typical good humor. “You can’t accept the religion of your parents without questioning it, not if it doesn’t accept you. But don’t abandon it, either.” Curtis told me that he’d found a way to make his faith his own. “The Bible says, ‘Let the words in your mouth and the meditations of your heart be acceptable to God.’ That’s the bottom line. Forget about living up to some standard set down by preachers. If your words, your actions, and your feelings all align, then you’ve pleased God. My grandfather said it all the time.”
Talking to him made me realize how far away from my faith I’d drifted. I longed for the emotional alignment I felt when I was right with my Church. Without it I
felt as though I were navigating in a storm, letting each challenge determine my course. My goal was no longer to do what was right, but to do what got me to my next plateau.
I don’t know why it was so important for me to see Curtis that night, but I asked the Congress Hall staff where to find him, and they pointed me toward a birthday party he was hosting nearby. I decided to crash the affair. When I arrived, the scene was something out of a dream of mine: Curtis and his partner surrounded by their extended families and friends, along with dozens of members of the local establishment; couples and singles, gay and straight alike. There were no barriers here, certainly none based on sexual orientation. Curtis welcomed me to the party, and I enjoyed the evening immensely, but by the end of the evening I had just plunged further into loneliness.
As he walked me out to the car, I squeezed his arm.
“I really admire how integrated your life is,” I told him.
“You know, the root of the word integration is the same as the word integrity. When the words in your mouth and the actions of your hands and the feelings of your heart are one and the same, you’re a whole person, you’re integrated, and there’s integrity in your life.”
I don’t suppose he knew then about my secret. I was suddenly overcome with a need to confess it to him. I knew he would understand better than anyone. But I didn’t dare. Instead I talked about my issues indirectly, confessing that I was unhappy in my marriage and suggesting that I might want to rekindle a romance with Kari; I suppose she was a metaphor in my mind for total authenticity. “It is a rare man who can not only live a decent life, but also find love and purpose,” I said. “You have that in your life.”
I remember adding, “You’re so lucky.” Of course luck had nothing to do with it, but saying what I meant—“You’re so brave”—would have revealed too much about myself.
“I’m lucky?” he said. “Look at you. You’re the governor of New Jersey!”
“I climbed the ladder,” I said, “but it led to the wrong world.”
I DON’T REMEMBER HOW I SPENT THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF Friday, July 23, 2004—whether I went to the Princeton University gym, or down to the crew house on Carnegie Lake, where there is a glassed-in room on the second floor with a comfortable chair for reading. I’d developed a habit of spending my waking hours away from the mansion whenever possible, and filling my time there with meetings, sometimes late into the night. Afterward I must have attended an event of some kind; a gathering with a crowd always puts me in a good mood, and I remember being pumped up when I got to the office around noon.
What I do remember is the expression of my chief of staff, Jamie Fox, when I arrived. He looked like he’d just gotten news of a nuclear accident. He pressed the fingers of one hand to his upper lip, as I’d often seen him do when anxious or angry.
“We have a bit of a problem,” Jamie said. “Michael DeCotiis is on his way over.” Michael was our general counsel. “We’ll talk about it when he gets here.”
“What is it, Jamie? Just tell me.”
I didn’t expect him to answer. But he looked at me brokenheartedly, lowering his hand from his face. His voice fell to a whisper. “Michael got a call from a lawyer representing Golan. He’s suing for sexual assault and harassment, unless you pay fifty million dollars.”
It was the other shoe I’d been waiting for. Golan would go public, on fantastically trumped-up charges, or try to extort a fortune from me to keep him quiet. Either way, since he could no longer be a part of my administration, apparently he’d decided to burn it to the ground.
The weariness I’d been feeling for a year became almost too much to stand. I rolled my head on my shoulders. Jamie looked concerned.
“We’ll get over it,” he said. “Michael will make this go away.”
I knew he was wrong. “It’s all over,” I said.
THAT SUNDAY, WE WERE ALL PLANNING TO GO TO BOSTON FOR the Democratic National Convention, where John Kerry would sweep the party’s nomination to oppose George W. Bush. It was to be a big moment for us. I hadn’t been asked to speak from the main stage, but I was scheduled to give a talk about my stem-cell research initiative before a meeting organized by the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. I’d spent all week preparing for the proceedings. I’d asked my old friends Jimmy and Lori Kennedy to come along; I hadn’t seen much of my old friend lately, so I was looking forward to a week in their company.
Now I sat alone in my office dreading the outcome of Golan’s gambit.
Michael DeCotiis arrived early that afternoon, joining me and Jamie in my office. That morning, Michael began, he’d received a call from a New York lawyer named Allen Lowy, alleging not only that I’d fired Golan for spurning my advances, but that our sexual encounters were never consensual. Both of these were preposterous charges. From a legal perspective, Michael was surprised that Golan’s lawyer hadn’t laid out the specific elements of his allegation, giving dates or any corroborating evidence.
“He wants money,” Michael said. “Lots of it. And he gave a very strict deadline. If we don’t meet his demands by Tuesday, they’re going public.”
“That’s blackmail, Michael. I never harassed or assaulted Golan,” I said flatly. “It was consensual from start to finish.” Those were the first words I ever said out loud about my homosexuality. In retrospect, the confession was probably unnecessary, at least from Jamie’s perspective; I could see in his eyes that he had surmised my truth, one gay man to another.
A silence fell over the room. Finally Jamie spoke. “I always said Golan was a gold digger,” he said. “I wonder if he’s been fired from another job recently. If he’s without income, that would explain a few things. And if he’s on somebody’s payroll, I wonder if his boss knows he’s blackmailing the governor.”
A few phone calls later, Jamie knew a bit more. Golan had recently sold his Princeton townhouse and moved to Manhattan, where he was living in an expensive rental on Columbus Circle. He was working for Dan Tishman, the fourth-generation chief of the Tishman Construction Corporation, the massive development firm that had built the World Trade Center towers in the 1970s. “Tishman must be paying him a lot of money to afford that address,” Jamie said.
“The first thing you’re going to need is a lawyer,” Michael told me. Jamie called Bill Lawler of Vinson & Elkins, who had helped resolve the Machiavelli case and had since become a good friend.
“I’ll call Lowy back and stall him,” Michael said. “I’ll set up some sort of meeting with him, Bill Lawler, and me early next week.”
Jamie asked what we knew about Lowy. Very little, it turned out. Michael had looked up his credentials in a legal directory and discovered Lowy was an entertainment lawyer, which struck Jamie as odd. But all we could do was play the cards we were dealt.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, BILL LAWLER AGREED TO FLY IN TO MEET ME at Newark Liberty Airport to discuss the case. My old friend Nene Foxhall of Continental arranged for us to meet in a room at the Continental Admiral’s Club. He asked me a million questions about my relationship, intimate questions that were embarrassing to admit. I could see he was disappointed in me.
But I was pretty sure of one thing: the fact that I was gay did nothing to diminish Bill’s affection for me. I can’t express exactly how much this surprised me. It was the first test of my own self-hatred, in what would become an endless series of tests, and the first time I recognized how much I’d misjudged my friends.
ON SUNDAY, AS PREVIOUSLY ARRANGED, WE WENT TO BOSTON. Dina, Jacqueline, and I shared a suite. Dina could tell I was distracted, I’m sure, but by then our relationship was so distant that the new tension in the air went entirely unmentioned. On Monday, I delivered my stem-cell address.
On the way back, Jamie and I released the state troopers and sat on a bench in Boston Common, watching a beautiful afternoon unfold. Children played, and pairs of swans circled in the lake. I realized for the first time that I was filled with fear about the future, what it would mean to my family and
my parents, to all that I’d known. I was overwhelmed with the sense that I had jeopardized everything I held dear.
But Jamie was a tremendous comfort. Without his constant friendship and love, I could never have survived what was to come.
“You’re strong enough to handle this,” he told me. “People are either victims or survivors, and it may be painful, but you’re going to be a survivor. You’ll get through this.”
All of a sudden, I looked at my friend Jamie differently—not just as my chief of staff, but as a gay man. I imagined the life he lived when he wasn’t in the office, the adolescence he must have endured—one that was probably much like my own. The thought that Jamie had survived his own journey gave me strength.
In the afternoon, we returned to wage the war in a small catering room on the mezzanine level at the convention center reserved for the New Jersey delegation. Huddled around the telephone, Jamie and I strategized with Bill Lawler and Michael DeCotiis, who had met Lowy at the Manhattan offices of Vinson & Elkins. Bill said that Lowy wasn’t a litigator. Based on his business card, which read “Classical Alliance,” he appeared to be an agent or manager for classical musicians. He arrived at the meeting without a briefcase or notepad, Bill reported, carrying nothing but a book, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling.
“Lowy started out saying, ‘If the case were to go to trial, I have no doubt we’d be able to collect damages in excess of fifty million dollars,’” Bill said. “So I said, ‘Well, what did the governor do? I understand they had a consensual relationship for a period of time while Golan was a state employee, that he left state employment for reasons having nothing to do with the governor, that Golan resigned and moved on, and really hasn’t had a significant amount of contact with the governor up until recently.’”
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