The Confession (25 page)

To quote the desert monk Hermas, he was “the wrong angel.”

 

IT WAS A MAGNIFICENT, SUNNY DAY IN OCTOBER 2000, WHEN DINA
and I got married at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. A slight breeze lifted Dina's veil as we took photos.

A Washington wedding was my idea. In my mind, it was a kind of campaign stop—in a longer campaign that might someday carry me to the Senate, perhaps, or the White House. In the elegant ballroom at the Hay-Adams, I was laying down a marker. Dina would have preferred a Catholic Church service, but my divorce made that impossible unless I filed an annulment, which I refused to do for Morag's sake. So first we had picked one of the gorgeous candlelit chapels at Georgetown, and we found an ancient
Jesuit priest who agreed to marry us in defiance of Rome. But after we had the invitations printed up, we discovered that he'd mixed things up—the chapel used for “non-orthodox weddings” was elsewhere on campus, and in pictures it looked as attractive as a frat house. So we settled on the Hay-Adams for the ritual Mass and reception, preceded by a small church wedding back in Woodbridge with Father Bob Counselman at Trinity Episcopal Church.

After our ritual affirmation of our marriage, in the presence of our dearest friends, including Ray Lesniak, Calvin West, and the Kennedys, we moved on to the reception. With gorgeous tapestries lining the walls, and cocktails being served on a sweeping veranda overlooking the White House lawns, it was as grand as a royal wedding.

Whatever the imperfections of our marriage, we were taking one step away from our ordinary lives.

 

WITH THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY BEHIND US, I WAS READY TO
meet the Republican challenger. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 48 percent of the state's registered voters were behind me.

The Republican primary, meanwhile, was something of a surprise. Whitman had been tapped by the new Bush administration to run the Environmental Protection Agency—a peculiar choice, frankly. During her tenure, law enforcement efforts against air and water polluters in New Jersey had effectively stopped; fines had dropped by 70 percent. The staff at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection was slashed by 738 jobs. And the state's anti-sprawl regulations were totally dismantled: more virginal open space was handed over to developers during her tenure than at any other period in New Jersey history.

Donald DiFrancesco, the congenial state senate president, filled in as acting governor for her remaining few months. But he wasn't satisfied serving as acting governor and soon threw his hat in the ring for the Republican primary. He ran a relatively decent campaign against Bret Schundler, a self-made Wall Street millionaire whom even state GOP leaders found impossibly right wing. Schundler was progun, antichoice, and out of step with New
Jersey's traditionally moderate brand of Republicanism. He ran a brutal primary campaign, tearing DiFrancesco limb from limb. It won him the nomination handily, but his performance was so unseemly that few Republican loyalists had the stomach to campaign with him.

I couldn't have asked for an easier target. All the way through August I had a sizable lead, even grabbing 14 percent of Republicans in independent polls.

If my luck was cresting, my old pal Joe Suliga's was a tidal wave. Poll after poll showed he was on his way to becoming senator from the 20th Legislative District. His Republican opponent, a former Olympic gold medalist, was twenty points in the dust. Every time I bumped into him along the campaign trail, an awesome pride showed on that large face of his. Joe was about to land the job of his dreams. So was I. And I was thrilled for both of us.

 

ON THE CRYSTALLINE BLUE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER
11, 2001,
I GOT
up early as usual and worked out at The Club at Woodbridge before beginning a long day of campaigning. After a quick meeting at headquarters at eight o'clock, we raced down to Ocean County to talk to a group of senior citizens about tax relief. Driver Joe Massimino Jr., my “body man,” Jason Kirin (whose job was to stand at my side, take notes when needed, get me in and out of buildings on time, etc.), and I had already reached the banquet facility when somebody told me that a plane had gone into the World Trade Center. I pictured a little Cessna flying off course, a tragedy on a relatively small scale. But when we got word that a second airplane had hit the buildings, the horror of the attack sank in. We found a television set and watched as both towers burned. Reporters announced that people were jumping to their deaths, a thought too awful to bear. A third plane had hit the Pentagon and a fourth was headed for the White House, at least according to early reports.

Everything changed in that moment. A distant dispute had reached our shores. Anyone could see the storm clouds of a protracted war gathering on the horizon.
Whoever did this must be made to pay
, I thought.
America can not let these deaths go unanswered.

I also knew that among the dead would be a disproportionate number of New Jerseyans, ambitious and innocent men and women who boarded the morning train or ferry in Hoboken, Weehawken, and Atlantic Highlands for finance jobs in the Towers. In the final count, nearly seven hundred from my state perished in the attacks. One town, Middletown, lost fifty sons and daughters that morning, men and women just like the kids I grew up with in Carteret, whose only involvement in global affairs was to work hard to improve their lot in life. The majority were employed by one investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald.

The rest of the day unfolded as if in a surreal dream, muffled and terrifying. We turned the Buick around and raced back to Woodbridge, to our families and responsibilities at home. From the Parkway we could see the two columns of smoke rising over Manhattan; an easterly wind bent them toward Brooklyn. My first call was to Dina, who was shaken but fine; my parents were also okay.

As mayor, I rolled out our own disaster plan. We prepared the police to respond in case of local attacks, which seemed less likely by midmorning as the skies overhead filled with American fighter jets. According to our emergency management policies, we provided security to local corporations, oil tanks, rail lines, and chemical plants and mobilized officers along the Turnpike, Parkway, and interstate. I raced to the campaign office, in one of Woodbridge's tallest buildings, where the burning towers were visible, about ten miles away. On the way, I stopped at St. James Church for a private prayer. Monsignor Cashman, my longtime spiritual adviser, gave me Holy Communion.

We weren't able to establish communication with New York City, so the television news and the bird's-eye view from the windows became our main sources of information. We dispatched ambulances and emergency service trucks to the city, but they were turned back at the tunnels—there were no survivors yet to tend, increasing our sense of helplessness. Our firefighters got through, though, and worked at putting out the blazes. And then we heard the terrible noise of the first tower collapsing. We ran to the top floor of our campaign headquarters, which had an unobstructed view of the unimaginable horror. My mind couldn't comprehend the losses; the truth
was too awful to contemplate. When the 110-story-high second tower slammed to the ground, a chorus of cries rose up over Woodbridge's rooftops, crowded with stunned observers.

 

GOLAN CIPEL WAS PACING BACK AND FORTH, ARMS CROSSED OVER
his chest. “The Middle East war has arrived to America,” he was saying, even before we had any idea who was behind the attack. “Everything has changed. It is a new paradigm.”

It was unclear what would happen to the elections, but I knew we had to suspend campaigning. I called Schundler and he agreed. We were both briefed about ongoing efforts to secure the state's airspace and harbors. We heard about National Guard deployments, coordination with the Defense Department, mobilizations at Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base, and intelligence briefings from the FBI in Newark. Until this moment I had never realized how colossal and complex the state's security systems were, or how imperfectly coordinated they were with New York's. National defense hadn't been even a remote part of our campaign to date. There was so much to learn.

The next several days were excruciating. Scores of Woodbridge families were searching frantically for their loved ones, but no answers came. They prayed for a miracle, that a husband or wife was alive in an air pocket in the rubble pile or wandering through the city in a daze. They photocopied “missing” posters, with heartbreaking photographs and descriptions of the clothing they wore that morning, and went to Manhattan to tape them to every building, streetlamp, and fencepost. I helped organize first responders at Liberty State Park, where the state police had set up an emergency management headquarters in view of the smoldering embers, then volunteered to help fill ferries with water and food to ship to the rescue workers.

On the second day, Jason Kirin, Kevin Hagan, and I hitched a ferry ride with Jersey City firemen to lower Manhattan. The scene was indescribably grisly: fire trucks twisted and flattened by falling debris, the grimy firefighters with specially trained dogs lowering listening devices into crevices, hoping against hope. At one point the rescue workers thought they'd heard a
noise and frantically dug through the debris. For several hours we helped out, standing on a bucket brigade and moving an endless stream of stones and mortar from left to right, hoping in vain that someone's life had been spared. That night, we held a prayer vigil in Woodbridge. More than a thousand people came.

On the morning of the third day, I ran into Cynthia, a woman I knew from a local Baptist church where I occasionally attended services—we held our annual Martin Luther King Jr. services there. Cynthia's daughter was among the missing, and she was heading into the city in search of information, a dire and heartbreaking mission. She was all alone and desperate for information about her daughter, but she found a tremendous strength in her faith. “I know my girl's lost in the city,” she said firmly. “I know she'll be okay, but I have to find her first. I have to find my baby.”

“I'm coming with you,” I said, taking her by the hand. We arrived at the family relief center Mayor Rudy Giuliani had set up at the Chelsea Piers on the Hudson River. Inside was a scene of chaotic despair. Ministers, rabbis, and priests had written their affiliations on masking tape across their chests for easy identification, so the bereft could find them quickly in their darkest hours. Muted televisions replayed footage of exhausted rescue workers, empty-handed and crying. I watched a young woman tearily handing over toothbrushes and razor blades for eventual DNA typing.

Having seen Cynthia get through that day, I am sure she's the bravest person I have ever met. Steadily, and with hope, she filled out the paperwork she believed would lead to her daughter's rescue. From her purse she pulled a photograph—I recognized the woman, just a few years younger than I was—and affixed it to her form. We prayed together over her family Bible that the girl was still alive. Alas, she was not.

 

I ATTENDED DOZENS OF FUNERALS IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED
. Many of our Port Authority workers perished in the attack. James Lynch, a Port Authority cop from Woodbridge, was among the first confirmed dead. I had known him and his family well. At his wake I learned he was off duty that day, but when he saw the towers burning he raced to help his fellow
officers—an American hero. These were working-class guys who loved their families, their communities, and most of all their country. In one day we lost Christopher Amoroso, a former football star at North Bergen High School; Kenneth Tietjin, who, after saving people from Tower One, grabbed a pack, waved to his partner, and went into Tower Two; Thomas Gorman, a Port Authority emergency services unit cop who'd taken his wife boating on the Jersey coastline to celebrate her birthday just days before; Richard Rodriquez, whose Puerto Rican heritage didn't keep him from playing in the Emerald Society Pipes and Drums wearing a tartan kilt; and Fred Morrone, superintendent of the 1,300-member Port Authority police force and a daily communicant at a Catholic church near his home in Lakewood. I didn't know Fred well, but throughout all the ceremonies his wife, Linda, was a towering figure of strength.

For New Jerseyans, as our grief expanded, the terror didn't recede. On September 18, a nationwide anthrax scare began after five letters containing the deadly bacterial spores were dropped at the post office in Trenton, destined for reporters at ABC, CBS, NBC, the
New York Post
, and the
National Enquirer.
Two more anthrax letters were postmarked in Trenton, addressed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, causing a shutdown of the Senate as well as post office branches across New Jersey. The toxin was also found in curbside mailboxes in Princeton. In all, twenty-two people were infected and five died; five years later, the case remains a mystery.

The scare gave our local Woodbridge police force cause for alarm, and we met frequently to try to plan for the arrival of terrorism in the township. How would we coordinate response to an airliner attack? Quarantining after an anthrax contamination? God forbid, a nuclear event?

With all this going on, Dina was enduring troubles of her own. By this point we were expecting a child, but it was turning out to be a difficult pregnancy. She went into preterm labor on November 2, twelve weeks premature. She was ordered into bed for the duration and moved into inpatient care, first to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, then to Saint Peter's University Hospital under the specialized care of Dr. William Scorza. On many days, it looked like we were going to lose the fight. Scorza began administering steroids, hoping to promote lung development in the baby in
the case of an extremely premature birth. Simultaneously, he put Dina on a regimen to stop contractions and dilation.