I couldn’t answer Jamie. I’m sure he took my silence as confirmation that there were other Golans, which there weren’t. I’m sure Curtis and Ray did, too. It didn’t matter to me. What mattered was they were beginning to see that I needed to quit, to take my punishment for what I’d done, to show the voters who had entrusted me with their faith that I was truly contrite—and to begin my healing out of the fishbowl of politics.
“Curtis,” I said, “I need to change the last section of my speech.”
I WENT UPSTAIRS TO GET DRESSED FOR THE ANNOUNCEMENT press conference. Dina, looking beautiful and dignified as always, sat on a sofa in the formal living room. I sat beside her and we prayed together. I had found the small pile of prayer cards my grandmother used to send me when I was in college. I read them aloud, the first time I’d prayed—really prayed—in years.
This was going to be the most difficult moment of my life. But I had brought it on myself. I knew it was also her most trying time, though she was utterly innocent. I prayed for her to get through it, and for time to heal her humiliation and to erase the shame.
I decided to stay in office until mid-November, ensuring an orderly transition for Dick Codey, the Senate president, who would take over as acting governor according to the constitutional order of succession. This drew yelps from Republicans, who thought it was an underhanded way to avoid the special election law, which called for general balloting if the governor steps down with more than sixty days remaining to the term. Honestly, this never occurred to me. Nobody even mentioned the special election law until much later.
The truth was simpler than that. I worried about Dina. I knew that when we left Drumthwacket, we would move to separate residences, and I felt it would be best for us to make the transition as slowly as possible, within reason.
That afternoon, minutes before walking into the press conference, Golan’s legal team made one last contact with Ray. They advanced a new, peculiar demand: $2 million and a charter for New York’s Touro College to open a medical school campus in the state. It was the strangest turn of events yet: I knew Golan had his own ties to Touro. For a short time he’d even worked as a consultant for the school, though that was over a year ago. But that couldn’t possibly explain this bizarre demand.
The conspiracy-mongers within our ranks all tried piecing together an explanation, but none of them made sense. Charlie Kushner was a longtime Touro booster and board member—the new medical school was to be named for his mother. Could he be involved in this, my staff wondered? Did Timothy Saia or Lowy have any business with Touro? Even Torricelli was mentioned; Touro had contracted with his lobbying firm to gain state approval for the new campus. Could this be his answer to the Twelve Days’ War? None of it added up, but I couldn’t spare an ounce of energy to think about it; I was worried about my wife and my daughter, about where we would live and what would happen next.
I decided to ignore Golan’s new demand and go ahead with my resignation as scheduled. Members of my staff were crying uncontrollably as I entered the statehouse, holding Dina by the hand. Accompanying me that day was the last thing in the world she wanted to do, but she was the picture of composure in a crisp blue suit and a broad, guarded smile. We took our place on the dais before a hundred microphones, next to my unhappy parents.
I thought I would be queasy, racing through my resignation in a blur of words. But an easy silence fell on my mind and everything seemed to stand still as I laid my notes on the lectern, as if nothing mattered in the world besides this moment.
“THROUGHOUT MY LIFE,” I BEGAN, “I HAVE GRAPPLED WITH MY own identity, who I am. As a young child, I felt ambivalent about myself. Confused. By virtue of my traditions and community, I worked to ensure that I was accepted as a part of traditional family life in America. I married Kari out of love and respect, and we have a wonderful daughter. But Kari ultimately chose to move back to British Columbia.
“I then married Dina, whose participation in political life—whose joy—has been a source of strength to me. Yet from my early days in high school and even grammar school to the present day, I acknowledge some feelings, some sense that did not put me on a level with other children in the neighborhood. And because of my resolve, and also thinking I was doing the right thing, I forced an acceptable reality onto myself. A reality which is layered and layered with all the, quote, good things and all the, quote, right things of typical adolescent and adult behavior.
“Yet at the most reflective and maybe even spiritual level, there were points in my life when I began to question what an acceptable reality really meant for me. Were there realities from which I was running? Which master was I trying to serve? I do not believe that God tortures any person simply for its own sake. I believe that God enables all things to work for the greater good.
“And this, the forty-seventh year of my life, is arguably too late to have this discussion, but it is here and it is now. At some point in every person’s life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is. And so my truth is that I am a gay American. And I am blessed to live in a country with the greatest tradition of civil liberties in the world, in a country that provides so much to its people.
“Yet because of the pain and suffering and anguish that I have caused to my beloved family, my parents, my wife, my friends, I would almost rather have this moment pass. For this is an intensely personal decision, and not one typically for the public domain. Yet, it cannot and should not pass.
“I am also here today because, shamefully, I engaged in an adult consensual affair with another man, which violates my bonds of matrimony. It was wrong. It was foolish. It was inexcusable. And for this, I ask the forgiveness and the grace of my wife. She has been extraordinary throughout this ordeal, and I am blessed by virtue of her love and strength.
“I realize the fact of this affair and my own sexuality, if kept secret, leaves me, and most importantly the governor’s office, vulnerable to rumors, false allegations and threats of disclosure. So I am removing these threats by telling you directly about my sexuality. Let me be clear, I accept total and full responsibility for my actions. However, I’m required now to do what is right to correct the consequences of my actions and to be truthful to my loved ones, to my friends and my family and also to myself.
“It makes little difference that as governor I am gay. In fact, having the ability to truthfully set forth my identity might have enabled me to be more forthright in fulfilling and discharging my constitutional obligations.
“Given the circumstances surrounding the affair and its likely impact upon my family and my ability to govern, I have decided the right course of action is to resign. To facilitate a responsible transition, my resignation will be effective on November 15 of this year. I am very proud of the things we have accomplished during my administration, and I want to thank humbly the citizens of the state of New Jersey for the privilege to govern.”
IT SEEMS ILLOGICAL TO SAY, BUT COMPARING MY INAUGURATION to my resignation, I can’t tell you which moment was most jarring. But I can tell you this: in only one of them was I my true self. History books will all say that I resigned in disgrace. That misses the point entirely. Resigning was the single most important thing I have ever done. Not only was I truthful and integrated for the first time in my life, but I’d rejected a political solution to my troubles and took the more painful route: penance and atonement, the way to grace.
16.
But after liberation? There were men who found that no one waited for them. Woe to him who found that the person whose memory alone had given him courage in camp did not exist anymore! Woe to him who, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it so different from all he had longed for! Perhaps he boarded a trolley, traveled out to the home which he had seen for years in his mind, and pressed the bell, just as he had longed to in a thousand dreams, only to find out that the person who should open the door was no
t there, and would never be there again.
THESE DESPAIRING WORDS COME FROM VIKTOR FRANKL, IN HIS memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, as he describes his disorientation in the days and weeks after being freed from the Nazi death camps. Years before I left office, I remember standing inside the grim barracks at Auschwitz, unable to fathom the horrors that took place there. Surely history has recorded no darker hell.
Of course, my small story cannot compare with Frankl’s. But his steadfast focus on survival, on even unwitting resilience, helped me to understand my last days at Drumthwacket. I suddenly existed in a wide-awake world, unvarnished by dreams or lies, the world I’d imagined a thousand times in my mind—only to find that I couldn’t recognize it, that I could find no comfort there.
If my relief at finally coming out made me momentarily ebullient, the feeling didn’t last. In fact, I sank into an agonizing depression. I couldn’t sleep; my usual four hours a night were reduced to two. At work, I barely functioned. I couldn’t concentrate on anything beyond my own distress. I felt a need to be doing something, but I didn’t know what that something was. It was encrypted in my DNA to plan my work and work my plan, my dad’s old maxim. I’d used the phrase so much myself that I’m famous for it; it is spelled out in countless throw pillows and carved wooden plaques that friends have given me over the years.
Yet now I had no plan, I had no work. A week before the press conference I had enjoyed a relevance and influence, a power. Now I was trivial and inconsequential. It’s as if God had turned on a giant fire hose and washed away any traces of my old life. A few people reached out. Bill Clinton and John Kerry called. So did George Norcross, the warlord from South Jersey. Governor Kean kindly reminded me that I’d accomplished many good things.
But mostly my phone went silent. I was no longer of use to anybody in New Jersey.
With little else imposing on my time, I spent many of these evenings in front of the television with Jacqueline on my lap, plugging videos into the VCR. Though she was only three, I felt that Jacqueline sensed our family’s troubles. She let me hold her for hours on end—consciously comforting me, not the other way around. In these days, her favorite video was a Sesame Street story in which Kermit was reluctant about having to leave his pond behind, but found in his travels that he had retained the pond in his memory. When the tape finished playing, Jacqueline would rewind it and start it again. We must have watched Kermit’s apt allegory fifteen times, and each time I grew more convinced that Jacqueline was responding to its message.
Some days I didn’t go into the office at all, but instead walked and jogged in circles through the stone-dust paths of the mansion’s gardens, a prisoner of my self-obsession. The fall colors were brilliant that year. In the towering trees that crowded Drumthwacket’s lawns I saw God’s renewing powers, His beautiful sense of order and cycles, birth and rebirth. My faith was returning in small stages. Once or twice I entered a religious reverie in the gardens, convinced that my new plan was hidden somewhere in God’s larger order; it would become plain to me if only I could align my heart with God’s.
But peeking through the foliage were the constant reminders of my own troubles: photographers wrapped around tree limbs and balanced on fences, television trucks with their tall masts extended, microwaving images of me into living rooms in Jakarta, Melbourne, and Carteret. Much of the coverage following my resignation was respectful, but some of it claimed I’d escaped a bad situation (the mounting scandals) by drawing favorable attention to my gayness. Christie Whitman, in an appearance with Chris Matthews on Hardball, even charged that I was engaged in some sort of cover-up. “It’s not about his sexual practice, it’s about the corruption,” she said. “That was a feint.”
“Only in New Jersey can that be a cover-up,” Matthews fired back.
The absurd implication was that I’d made up the affair, or at least magnified its gravity, as a distraction. In time, that notion actually gained some credence. In one poll, only 8 percent of respondents believed that my gay affair was the real reason I was resigning. The satirical newspaper The Onion picked up on the false controversy with this headline: HOMOSEXUAL TEARFULLY ADMITS TO BEING GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY.
I read Frankl over and over, finding words in his narrative of resilience to describe my own challenges, and to give me hope. The lessons Frankl teaches are universal. We all fight against a hopelessness, a sense of our own imprisonments. Yes, I built the gates that contained me, wreathed them with barbed wire myself. I dreaded being ripped open by bullets from the sadist in the guard tower, where I was the only gunman, a construct of my own delirium.
Mostly I’d entered a conspiracy with a world that drove gay kids into a state of dualism—part of the world but apart from it, unable to participate wholly. I hated this world. Every minute I saw what it did to me, how it twisted me against myself. How it exiled me, even when I refused to leave.
Frankl wrote, “Anything outside the barbed wire became remote—out of reach and, in a way, unreal. The events and the people outside, all the normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life, that is as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man who looked at it from another world.”
In the garden on these formless days after my announcement, a “normal life” seemed further and further from reach.
WHILE I READ MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, DINA FOUND COMFORT in a volume called The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitative Relationships. She carried it around Drumthwacket for all the staff to see. It was an obvious swipe, but I didn’t blame her. I had it coming. Tony Coelho called it right: I had publicly humiliated her, much more so than if my lover had been another woman. There was little she could do to settle the score.
Dina was also very bitter about our sinking fortunes. On the door of her office she posted a sign counting down the number of days before our move—“before homelessness,” as she’d acidly titled her countdown chart. Every morning I saw her open the door and cross off another day.
On the second night after our lives were changed, her body gave way under the strain. We were sitting on the sofa in the formal living room, our demilitarized zone. We didn’t have much to say to one another, but a respect—and what remained of our love—bound us together. She was crying. Crashing waves of sobs overtook her. She was in excruciating pain. Suddenly her breathing grew labored and irregular. As she hyperventilated, her eyes widened with panic. Then her head collapsed to one side and she slumped over, still heaving for air. She couldn’t speak to explain what was happening to her. I feared she was having a heart attack.
“Dina, are you okay?” I called out to her. “Deen?”
The look in her eyes cycled between terror and lifelessness.
I opened her jacket. “Dina? Dina!”
I cradled her in my arms and rushed her down the long narrow hallway to lay her in bed on the opposite end of the house. Carrying her was difficult. Each of her labored breaths was like a seizure. It rocked her in my arms, jerking her body against my chest. Once or twice I thought I might drop her.
When I reached the bedroom, I laid her down in the covers and dialed my dear friend Dr. Clifton Lacy, the commissioner of health. He immediately saw the problem for what it was—a panic attack, most likely brought on by all the pressures, not a heart attack at all, thank God.
Lacy offered to drive over from Highland Park, but instead I called Dr. Janet Neglia, a friend who is assistant director of Student Health Services at Princeton University nearby. She rushed over with a sedative and spent many hours with us that night, holding our fracturing family together. I will always remember her for this kindness.
With Janet’s help, Dina managed to sleep through the night. Not me. I lay awake beside her, consumed with worry and guilt for bringing this trauma on her. Her suffering tore me to pieces.
UNABLE TO SLEEP, I PASSED THE NIGHT TRYING TO IMAGINE WHAT our lives would look like once we’d put this all behind us. There would be a divo
rce and complicated negotiations about raising our daughter. I knew Dina would find a good position in the working world; her time as first lady had showcased her many talents, and her biggest contributions were yet to come. But I prayed that she’d also find happiness and, with luck, maybe even the strength in her heart to stop being angry. Could she forgive me, I wondered? Not easily. At least one day she might understand why I did what I did.
For my future, I forced myself to imagine a career in public service that didn’t involve elected office. I doubt that it’s possible to live as a totally integrated person and succeed in the backrooms of America’s political system. That, more than my sexuality, would prevent a comeback. Nonetheless, I hoped to find a place in public life where I could perform a valuable service for children, where I could be uncompromised and of use.
Mostly, I allowed myself to picture a life organized in harmony with my heart—the kind of life my friend Curtis had imagined for me: “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 fantasized about being in love, really in love—ordinary, boring, romantic love, the kind that takes you into old age, the kind my parents still have. Frankl considered love the foundation of all meaning, the highest truth to which we can aspire. In his mind always, in the darkest of his days without hope, was the luminous image of his lover, his wife. “Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
In my love was my humanness, the meaning of life.
The thought of finding love gave me comfort, which in turn gave me strength to endure these difficult days. As Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
The Confession Page 36