The Confession (30 page)

 

STATE SENATOR BILL GORMLEY WAS ALL OVER THE GOLAN STORY.
He demanded Judiciary Committee hearings into Golan's background and qualifications, as well as into the circumstances of his appointment. This made no sense. Golan was simply an adviser—advisers have never required senate approval in the past, and I wasn't going to allow it now.

When he heard I was stonewalling, though, Gormley upped the ante. He was about to conduct a Judiciary Committee hearing into my appointment of Charlie Kushner to the Port Authority board. He told reporters he would postpone that hearing until I sent over Golan, which I wasn't about to do.

What was in it for Gormley? Here's the way I saw it. He was sincerely concerned about the prospects of an Israeli without federal security clearance assuming a sensitive position. But Gormley also happened to be close to
John Lynch, an influential political figure—being Irish Catholic bonded them more than their polar party affiliations. And Lynch had gone ballistic when I named Charlie to the Port Authority. I was never sure why this was, but it didn't matter. I knew Charlie was the best for the job—and stood by him despite Lynch's opposition. Lynch clearly wanted to impede the appointment, and must have seen the otherwise unrelated Golan scandal as a mechanism for doing it. My guess is that he pressed Gormley, who is a master at the game, to light a fire under the Golan issue.

My staff was tied in knots. By now they hated Golan, and they urged me to cut him loose. “Gormley's not going to let this fly,” Paul Levinsohn told me. “As long as you stand behind Golan, he's got ammunition.”

“You're taking hits,” Gary Taffet, my chief of staff, agreed. “You're starting to suffer losses.”

I looked for ways to correct my original mistake. Perhaps I could hold a press conference, I mused, to point out that Golan was working in many areas besides security: interfacing with counsel generals' offices, UN missions, heads of state, and federal protocol offices. And he was doing these things well. Golan favored this approach, with a twist: he wanted to give the press conference himself.

But everybody else thought it was too late. I would come across as disingenuous—despite the fact that it was true—or worse. To be retracting my own remarks this early in the administration risked making me seem out of touch and unreliable as an extemporaneous speaker. I'd put my foot in my mouth in my first free-ranging media summit, a fact we all agreed should be downplayed.

“We need to stop the hemorrhaging,” Taffet said. “If we remove Golan from any external function, then Gormley will acquiesce—he will have fulfilled whatever commitment he made to Lynch, and Kushner can move forward.”

We settled on a plan that in retrospect didn't fare much better than my proposal to come clean. Taffet called Gormley and promised we would “reassign” Golan to handle myriad nonsecurity issues, with the same title and salary, if in exchange Gormley would move forward on Charlie's nomination. He agreed.

Late that Friday afternoon, two weeks after the
Record
story appeared, I approached the subject at the end of an unrelated press conference. “Mr. Golan Cipel has met with me repeatedly and he has requested to be relieved of his state-security duties due to his Israeli citizenship status, which would prohibit him from receiving security clearance,” I read from a script. “Reluctantly, at this time, I have accepted his request. In his new position, his responsibilities will be varied. Simply put, there is no shortage of work in the Governor's office.”

 

THE WHOLE ORDEAL DISGUSTED GOLAN AS MUCH AS IT ANGERED
me. If only he'd been allowed to speak for himself, he complained, it all might have blown over. I can't say he was right or wrong; all I know is that my approach failed miserably. This wound was self-inflicted. I'd been excruciatingly careful my whole life never to hang myself up. That's what was so crazy. I spend my whole life in the closet and in politics, never allowing the two tracks to cross. I'd mastered both universes. I had everything under control—everything but my goddamned heart, which neutralized my political instincts, rendering them useless.

My press statement hadn't killed the story. Instead it made it more deliciously mysterious to local reporters, and just about everybody in the New Jersey political class. I suspect that some former members of my state trooper detail had spied on me and Golan when we thought we were alone. In my first weeks as governor, I'd reassigned many of Whitman's detail and brought in a fresh group; perhaps I ruffled feathers doing this, and they felt free to speak their minds about their experiences.

But it was also the case that Golan had angered certain state police brass. He'd attended many of the homeland security meetings we held on counterterrorism, and often his contributions were abrupt and demanding. There was nothing accommodating about Golan's approach to security, and his attitude made him no friends.

Either way, we completely lost control of the story. Soon the papers were reporting that former FBI chief Louis Freeh had volunteered to do the job gratis, but I'd chosen an untrained, mysterious foreigner instead. This
was wrong. Indirectly, Freeh—a New Jersey native—had made overtures about becoming part-time chair of our Domestic Security Preparedness Task Force. Not possible, I said. By statute, this is the responsibility of the attorney general, who by definition is in constant contact with federal authorities, counterparts in other states in the region, and statewide law enforcement officials. Our task force was not a blue-ribbon panel. It was a working agency, one that was unfortunately responding to terror threats on a nearly daily basis following 9/11. This was not a job that could be handled by anybody on a part-time basis, even someone as knowledgeable as Freeh.

I want to also make this clear: Golan Cipel was not part of the task force. His role on homeland security was never on the front lines. He had no practical portfolio there. Rather, he acted as my ears at meetings I couldn't attend and helped me formulate policy and think about security in ways no governor in the country was prepared to do at this point in time.

These were scary times, as my former attorney general reminded me recently. Being so close to New York City, we had a huge obligation. None of us had ever done anything like this before. But we acted quickly and aggressively, well ahead of most other states. Remember, the White House didn't establish its simplistic Homeland Security Advisory System—the color-coded alerts that cranked up people's anxiety levels—until March 2002, six months after America came under attack.

In short order, we established the first round-the-clock bioterrorism rapid-response teams in the nation, created under Health Commissioner Lacy. We trained more than a thousand local law enforcement officers to be our first responders in case of a direct attack, and we helped coordinate readiness with business leaders and parks officials to protect our 110 most essential sites. And we devised and implemented a state-of-the-art intelligence system—a model nationally—that let local police departments study surveillance data the minute it was intercepted.

Nobody kept track of the raw number of terror alerts we fielded in those first few months, ranging from allegations that Newark Airport was an imminent target to supposedly credible reports that tractor trailers filled with explosives were on the New Jersey Turnpike heading for the Lincoln Tunnel. I'll bet we received hundreds of such reports, maybe more. There
were countless nights when none of us slept, unsure where the next attack would come. But we knew we were doing everything we could think of, everything possible, to protect the people of the state.

 

IN THE WEEKS AFTER THE
RECORD
STORY, THINGS BETWEEN
Golan and me never returned to normal. In April, Dina and I finally moved into Drumthwacket, creating an even larger barrier to the secret affair. Now I lived behind a remotely-powered gate in a building surrounded by state troopers and domestic staff. I was miserable. Being separated from him was destabilizing for me—besides happiness and counsel, I found a calmness in being with him, the kind of peace that can only come with honesty. We saw each other regularly during meetings at the statehouse, and sometimes stole a private moment in my office. But the public life we both desired hemmed us in and ultimately kept us apart.

At my encouragement, Golan moved from Woodbridge to Princeton to be nearby. He found a townhouse he liked in the West Windsor community but was apprehensive about taking on the expense. I inspected the property with him and offered to cosign the mortgage if he needed. Clearly I was courting discovery more actively now. The trumpets of Gomorrah would have sounded if I put my signature on that mortgage. Luckily, his application passed muster without my help.

I was glad to have him so close, but it was never like Woodbridge. In our fishbowl existence, I managed to visit him there only once. It seemed like a mistake. He hadn't yet hung any curtains on the back of the house, whose windows looked into the woods.

“This is insane,” I told him. “The state troopers are sitting in the parking lot.”

“You see somebody out there?”

“If they get out of their car, we're finished.”

Golan was as cautious as I was. We locked ourselves in his bedroom, fearful refugees from our own lives.

We were no longer as brazen as we'd been in the past. We even started curtailing our official interactions, to quell talk among the staff. But our
affair continued, in a fashion. It
was
insane. We knew that reporters were increasingly curious about what appeared like a “special relationship.” The Gannett chain had sent reporters to Israel; Golan's childhood friends were asked about his history with men and women.

“They're trying to prove you're a homosexual,” Jo Astrid Glading, my communications director—who happens to be gay herself—warned me.

I was sure she was wrong, that she was as paranoid about these matters as I was. But Golan couldn't stand the pressure. His calls to me became more and more frantic. For him, I think, being known as gay would have been worse than death. The idea of people digging through his personal life paralyzed him with fear. He fought me repeatedly and aggressively about our media policy—he wanted to extinguish this chatter about his job in homeland security by speaking directly to reporters and setting the record straight. He wanted to come out of one closet in order to remain in another.

Of course, I have to admit that there's a chance Golan wasn't gay. I have thought about this often. Though he claimed he'd never had sex with a man before, I didn't believe him. During our relationship, he told me about a few women he'd had sex with. I was never jealous about that, though I would have been had he told me about sex with men. Since our secret became public, he has denied having a homosexual identity. I don't believe that. But taking his protests at face value, it's just possible that our shared attraction did tempt him to cross the aisle, just as my love for Kari and later for Dina had carried me into heterosexual romance.

He never expressed any conflict or regret about our time together, only frustration over the obstacles between us.

One afternoon in May, after a lengthy meeting at Drumthwacket on a long-forgotten subject, Golan stayed behind in the large, rather uncomfortable library on the first floor as the other state officials left. Dina was upstairs with Jacqueline. I looped through the kitchen and dismissed the cook and building manager, returning to the library with two cups of tea. Behind the library was a more intimate study, a small room lined with historic books and oil paintings from the New Jersey museum collection. In the middle of the room was an oval-shaped desk that was said to have belonged
to Woodrow Wilson, the thirty-fourth postrevolutionary governor of New Jersey.

Golan was frustrated. He felt that I was freezing him out of my inner circle, marginalizing his contributions. It had been weeks since we'd even seen each other.

“Of course, I want to be with you—selfishly,” I told him. “But my time is fully regulated now. The scheduling process is brutal. We discuss everything: is this the right meeting to have, is this an open or closed meeting, should it be ten minutes or five? We have themed weeks, Golan. Last week was
transportation,
next week is
education.
We'll be in South Jersey all week because we need to drive the message there. The governor can't take time off. I can't run to West Windsor. I
want
to be with you. I want to spend time and go over the day's events like we used to.”

I closed the blinds. We kissed. There was a feeling of doom, as if we both knew this was the end. The thought made me crazy.

“I love you, Golan,” I said. “You make me so happy. I've never, you know…”

He looked so sad just then; I knew he understood.

“I could leave all this behind. I could leave it all. I could leave the governor's office and the career in politics. I would. I would leave it all for you if you told me we'd be together forever.”

He seemed shocked. “Do you mean that?” he asked.

I did mean it. For me, Golan represented a chance to be honest and true with myself, to have an authentic life in a gay relationship. I never felt more alive and passionate and integrated and healthy than when we were together.

But looking into his eyes I could see that life ever after was not a possibility. He was not willing to walk into the sunlight with me if it meant walking out of politics. He was like me that way—desperately wanting two things that could never fit together.

“Yes,” I answered.

He didn't reply.

Although we never said a word about it, we both knew this was the end of our affair.

 

I DIDN'T LIKE LIVING AT DRUMTHWACKET. THE ROOMS DOWNSTAIRS
were like a museum. The enormous dining room table was constantly set for thirty; its centerpiece was a polished sterling silver soup tureen on loan from the USS
New Jersey,
valued at $170,000. We were supposed to wear special gloves to touch it. The enormous living room was better equipped for greeting heads of state than for reading biographies in my boxers, my traditional mode of relaxation.