The Confession (29 page)

That seemed totally irresponsible to me. I had a massive government to run. Being in control was exactly what the voters had in mind for me.

“There are too many variables, too many constituencies, for you to be thinking that way,” he said. “You're stuck in the fog of the war. Find your center. Know what you want and the rest will follow. You're the lodestar.”

To be honest, I thought Ray had completely lost it. I felt frustrated, like he'd walked away from the game just when it was my turn at the plate.

At the same time, a rift was also growing between Lynch and Ray, perhaps in relationship to my shifting attentions. Though they'd long been Senate colleagues, Lynch had a way of stirring up trouble between them, regularly claiming to the press that he was my most intimate adviser. Those remarks seemed intended to remind me I owed a debt to Lynch. But they also served as warning flares to keep Ray on the defensive while our personnel decisions were being hammered out. (In John's defense, Ray had also made some offhand remarks of his own to the papers.)

I found all this intramural feuding unseemly, given the huge challenges we all faced, and I blamed Lynch, whose constitutional unhappiness was becoming a poison eating at the administration.

But I took out my frustration on Ray. I tore into him during his second visit to the governor's office, calling his comments to the press corrosive and vulgar. At the top of my lungs, I demanded an apology, and a promise that he would keep his mouth shut. It was a cruel thing for me to do. He felt
totally excoriated, cut down by his former protégé. He said nothing in his defense—in fact, he started crying—but I didn't stop. The power of my high office had gone right to my head; I was destroying the warlord who'd brought me this far.

When Ray left my office that day he said, very formally, “Good afternoon, Governor.”

I didn't see much of him around Trenton thereafter. Whenever we bumped into one another, he always addressed me with cool respect, always as “Governor,” never again as Jimmy. It was as though we had never been friends.

 

I KNEW HOW DIFFICULT ALL THIS WAS ON DINA, WHO WAS STRUGGLING
through early parenthood nearly alone while I was locked in my own battles. We'd barely had a moment together since before she went to the maternity hospital. To remedy this, we slipped away on February 1 for a weekend in Cape May. Her parents agreed to babysit. My staff agreed to watch the government helm. We left our babies behind—our daughter and my administration—and headed down to the shore, a little jangled but glad for the relief.

On the second night, before a late dinner, we went for a walk, as we'd always loved doing before life grew so complicated. We headed south along the boardwalk toward an abandoned World War II concrete bunker and a lookout pavilion with views onto the lighthouse at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. It was a cold night, but beautiful.

Something about the night made me a little silly. I took Dina by the hand and ran with her across the sand, dancing a jig in the crisp moonlight. But high tide had left a four-foot cliff in the sand beneath us, and I landed with one foot on the high side, the other caught on the edge. I had snapped my thigh bone in two.

It hurt so badly I couldn't sit up. Dina dragged me a few feet inland so a tide surge wouldn't find me, then called 911. At my request, she handed me the phone. “This is McGreevey,” I said. “Governor McGreevey.”

The dispatcher, Ann Casher, was incredulous at first. “McGreevey?” she asked.

“Yes, the governor.” I was wincing in pain. “I think I broke my leg because I ran over a sand dune. It wasn't the smartest thing in the world, but I need an ambulance,” I said. “I think I need a stretcher, too.”

In a few hours I would go under anesthesia and a fifteen-inch titanium rod would be implanted in my right leg. I couldn't help hoping this wasn't a metaphor for my young administration: shattered in a silly misstep on an otherwise beautiful journey. Knowing how much pain I must have been in, the anesthesiologist—a Democrat—said, “You can tell you had a Marine Corps father.”

“That's not it,” I told him. “I had a nurse for a mother. My father would have been yelling at somebody.”

Throughout the ordeal, Dina was tremendous. She kept her head and helped me keep mine.

 

TEETERING AROUND ON CRUTCHES SHOULD HAVE SLOWED ME
down, but it didn't. Even handicapped I covered more ground than most of my predecessors, swiveling into meetings and press conferences from one end of the state to the other. Looking back, I realize I just kept on campaigning well past the election. That, after all, is what I knew how to do—campaigning, not running a massive multi-billion-dollar operation. Anyone looking at my schedule of events might have thought I was an underdog candidate, not an incumbent governor.

The first thing I needed to sell to voters was my coming budget, which I knew wasn't going to be popular. In mid-February, I began making appointments with reporters and editors in the state to prepare them. I was a pretty good spokesman. I knew the $24 billion spending plan so well, I could flip to a line-item in an instant.

I wanted to be the only person communicating our economic policies to the media and the public. Balancing the budget was a big leadership challenge, and I felt voters had a right to know that I'd personally rolled up my sleeves and slogged through the numbers. My decision to muzzle everybody else in the government was seconded by Paul Aronsohn, my spokesman. “You want to give the people a government that speaks with one voice,” he said. Many other governors and chief executives adopt similar policies.

But in my case it backfired wildly. In fact, it began an awful relationship with the press that only grew more distrustful and hostile as time went on.

On February 14, 2002—by chance it was both Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day, and the anniversary of my engagement to Dina—I sat with the editorial board at the
Bergen Record
at their offices in Hackensack, reviewing details of the budget. They were particularly interested in my numerous campaign promises that would make driving in New Jersey more comfortable—reducing auto insurance, speeding up toll booths with a new E-ZPass system, and modernizing the Department of Motor Vehicles. New Jersey was still issuing paper drivers' licenses, making us unacceptably vulnerable to fraud in the post-9/11 world because they were so easy to counterfeit. I had proposed allocating $6 million to digitize our licenses.

Would that plan survive the economic difficulties, I was asked?

“Absolutely,” I said. “After the attacks, this became an urgent goal for New Jersey. We will not skimp on security. We actually brought on a security adviser from the Israeli Defense Forces, probably the best in the world—not probably, they do the best in the world. So we are examining bid specifications.”

It was a mistake for me to bring up Golan in this context. His appointment had escaped public scrutiny, and his job description was far more diverse than I'd suggested—offering security insights was only one informal part of his job. In fact, I'd tapped a tough former prosecutor, Kathryn Flicker, to head my Office of Counter-Terrorism; she would later be followed by Sid Casperson, a career counterterrorism expert with the FBI, both of whom reported to David Samson, the attorney general. Yet here I was calling Golan Cipel my “security adviser,” a glib slip of the tongue.

What was I thinking? I've asked myself that question many times.

It was hubris. I was feeling invincible. I'd won office by a landslide, and then quickly squeezed $3 billion out of one budget and $5 billion out of another. I'd done all that while managing a love affair under everybody's noses. Twice Golan and I had managed to spend whole nights together—once in Philadelphia, where we'd gone for the Army–Navy game and a Jewish event; and another time for a meeting of the American Israeli Political Action Committee in Washington DC, where we had the nerve to tell the state troopers we would share a double-occupancy room “to save taxpayers'
money.” We grew so concerned about the troopers listening in that we made love on the floor, fearing a squeak from the beds.

“I could stay forever in this moment,” I remember telling him on one of those nights.

Given how dramatic those first few months had been for me, I suppose I felt like bragging a little to the
Bergen Record. Look at me,
I was saying.
I'm so smart I've got an Israeli doing security.

Little did I know how badly that would play. The next day's papers carried insightful stories about my budget, about which I was proud, and no mention of my disclosure. But I knew the
Record
's staff had taken notice. Our switchboard was burning with calls from them, demanding Golan's background and credentials, his immigration status, and his Israeli military records. I told my staff to give out no such information, which only inflamed the paper's curiosity. It was over a week before I even allowed his name to be released.

Having a name whetted their appetite. Requests for documents flew into the office, citing the state's Open Public Records Act. We heard indirectly that they'd called the FBI and learned that Golan, as a resident alien, was ineligible for security clearance. This hadn't occurred to me, unfortunately; I'd even given his name to the White House as an emergency contact, because more than anyone else in the administration he knew where to find me night and day.

It was a big error in judgment. I trusted Golan implicitly. What's more, he came from an ally nation. But it was nonetheless extremely unwise of me to put him anywhere near our security apparatus.

Meanwhile,
Record
reporters Clint Riley and Jeff Pillets made repeated requests to interview Golan, which I quashed. My policy was to let nobody talk on any subject. But I especially didn't want Golan sitting with reporters. I had an irrational fear that they would trick him into disclosing our secret, though I knew he guarded it as vigilantly as I did. But I was also worried about his arrogance and abrasiveness—even if the reporters missed our obvious love for one another, I was concerned that he'd say something they would twist into an embarrassment. For a moment, I forgot that Golan was an experienced public relations man, more able in that regard than I.

Golan took me to task. “This makes no sense,” he said. “Let me speak to the press. Allow me to tell them who I am, what my background is, what my skills are. Allow me to rise or fall on the merits.”

I didn't relent. “You'd only be putting more wood on the fire, Gole. I respect your intelligence and your political instincts, you know I do. But frankly I don't want the press deciding for us who will be speaking and who won't. Ignore this. It'll go away.”

It didn't. On February 20, I allowed Pillets, the
Record
journalist, to interview me for an hour about Golan. What I should have done was tell the truth about Golan's job, that as my senior counselor he advised me on a broad range of matters,
including
security policy. “Golan is just another pair of eyes on policy,” I should have said. But saying that would have required me to retract my earlier braggadocio to the
Record,
and my ego rejected that course. So instead, I defended Golan.

“The Israelis live with terror every day. Their very survival depends on being prepared,” I explained. “Golan has served in the Israeli military. He is uniquely qualified to point out weaknesses.” Even before we took office, I explained, he had toured the state's nuclear power plants, refineries, bridges, and seaports. Riley wanted to know why I hadn't put him through a tough security check, and I explained I didn't think it was necessary.

“I know Golan and I've worked with him closely. He's a super-bright and super-competent individual who brings a great wealth of knowledge on security. Look, he's someone who thinks with a different set of eyes, and that is very hard to find. If we've learned one thing since September 11, it's that homeland security is all about communications. We've got all these agencies out there but we've got to make them work together. It's all about coordination, it's all about intelligence. Golan knows this stuff cold.”

 

I CAN'T SAY I WAS CONVINCED THAT AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW IN
the
Record
would dig us out of our hole. But I was horrified when Pillets's article appeared the next day. I read it in a cold sweat. Pillets and coauthor Riley seemed to be hinting broadly that there was a homosexual subtext to Golan's appointment. For instance, rather than calling him a naval officer in
the Israeli Defense Forces, where he was indeed a lieutenant, they called him a “sailor.” Somehow they found he had written a collection of poems in high school, so he was also “a poet.” His background was public relations, they said, not security at all.

But the worst line was this: “Democrats close to the administration say McGreevey and Cipel have struck up a close friendship and frequently travel together.” It was like I was right back in Cub Scout camp again: I wasn't sure if I was reading too much into this article's innuendo or too little.

That confusion ended when my mother called me. “Jimmy, they're saying you're both gay,” she said in disbelief.

It certainly wasn't lost on anybody else. Shock jocks on the radio were talking about “Little Golan,” openly implying that he was my lover. I'd been in office for just five weeks, and already my secret life was in jeopardy.

I demanded a meeting with Jeff Pillets, who was summoned to my office that afternoon. For a half hour I shouted and screamed at him, putting much more emotion on display than I should have.

“What really hurt was calling Cipel my traveling companion. He and I were together only in large groups,” I bellowed. “You implied something was there that is not!”