The Confession (35 page)

I'd pushed through many initiatives that made me extremely proud. One of the most provocative had to do with stem-cell research, a hot-button issue at the White House but pure common sense to those of us who believe in the wisdom of Albert Einstein's observation that “scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.” I set aside $6.5 million in the new budget to create the first state-financed stem-cell institute, part of an eventual $50 million public-private commitment to new biotechnologies. I lobbied the legislature hard and won their support, narrowly.

My own Church went into overdrive. Priests criticized me from the pulpit, conflating my support for stem-cell research with my defense of a woman's right to choose. They threw me in with the presidential bid of Senator John Kerry, who was under pressure to not take Holy Communion because he disagreed with the Church on abortion. For the bishops in New Jersey, it was one straw too many. Bishop Joseph Galante said he would refuse me communion if I entered a church in Camden, and Newark's
archbishop John Myers published similar warnings in the biweekly
Catholic Advocate
.

Out of respect for them, I announced I would no longer seek communion in public Masses. But I knew I was doing the right thing. I made the stem-cell announcement at the Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick, surrounded by young men and women with spinal injuries, and their families. “This isn't an abstract academic debate,” I said. “People are suffering today, and what we offer them is hope.”

Getting the institute funded and passed was the crown of my first term. With a reelection campaign around the corner, I hoped it would help frame my priorities in the eyes of the voters.

But first I knew I would need to defang Lynch. I made an appointment to visit him at his home and bury the hatchet. This was a gesture of decency on my part. Lynch was by now the target of a handful of separate probes. I knew from my state trooper detail that he was under constant surveillance. Cruisers were stationed around the corner from his house. I assumed my arrival would be noted in some report. It was an unsuitable environment for a sitting governor to enter, but I went out of respect for his enormous influence in New Jersey, and for our long friendship. Jamie Fox and Michael DeCotiis joined me.

Lynch's wife, Deborah, greeted us at the door, as cordial and amiable as ever. Deborah was a wonderful and loving woman. I had missed seeing her. She and I exchanged good books we'd recently read, as was our old tradition, as if no time had passed. I was surprised to see pictures of me and Lynch still hung on the family's walls.

John greeted us all warmly. And for a few hours that night—and a time or two thereafter—we worked at rekindling our friendship over pasta and desserts. It was not to be. His bitterness was extreme, but I could barely understand what it was about. He hammered at me about the “Machiavelli” fiasco, without understanding what really happened there, and said that he somehow felt personally tainted by it. He philosophized about leadership and responsible government, returning to his critical themes.

I sensed that despite his many intellectual gifts, his adoring family, and the abundant personal wealth he had amassed, John Lynch had appraised
his life and found only dissatisfaction. There was nothing I could do to calm him.

 

IT WAS NOT QUITE SEVEN IN THE MORNING, A DAY OR TWO BEFORE
Easter in 2004, when I had one of my last phone conversations with Golan. I was on the treadmill at the gym at Princeton, as I was every morning. On the treadmills next to mine were Shawn Brennan, an aide, and Sgt. Tim Whille, a state trooper assigned to my detail. When Golan's name popped up on the phone, I decided to answer it. For many months I had sent most of his calls to voice mail, on the strict instructions of Jamie Fox, my chief of staff. Jamie is a keen judge of character. I'd asked him to have breakfast with Golan once, long after Golan had left government. “He's a lunatic, a hanger-on,” he reported back, not knowing our history. “Got an ego the size of Manhattan. I'm telling you, stay away from him.”

But just that morning back at Drumthwacket, as I was showering, I'd wondered why I hadn't heard from him in so long. I wanted to know he was okay.

So I answered the phone.

Golan's mood hadn't improved. He wanted me to know again how I'd destroyed his life, and the rest. I listened again, wearily offering my counsel as usual. Then he surprised me.

“I told my parents,” he said.

I knew exactly what he meant. He'd told his parents about our affair. This stunned me, which I'm sure was the effect he desired. He never even addressed our relationship with me, except obliquely—and never, ever on the phone. If he sat his parents down and confessed to being gay, and if he was suddenly willing to admit this on the phone, that meant he was moving in a whole new direction. What he was telling me, I felt sure, was that he was no longer going to keep the secret. It seemed like a crazy move, borne of desperation.

“Good,” I said.

“I never would actually do anything inappropriate,” he said. “I've never asked for anything inappropriate. I've never asked you to do anything improper.”

He never talked like this. My mind raced. It occurred to me that he was probably taping the call, but I couldn't imagine why.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“I just wanted to be clear about that. That's why I told my parents.”

Perhaps he was trying to create a record of our affair which he could trade me for his job back. That would be blackmail, pure and simple. The idea made me angry.

“Gole, I value your advice and opinion, your work, and I tried to the best of my ability to find something that was both productive for you and benefited the state, and that failed. Life moves on. I want you to live a productive, vibrant life, as I do for all my friends. I've done my best to work with you, but that's all any of us can rationally expect. I don't owe you anything. I don't owe you an income. I'm prepared to work with you, but I don't owe you a position in the statehouse.”

He demanded to see me, hoping to continue the conversation—or the tape recording.

“I'm leaving for Vancouver to see my daughter for Easter,” I told him. “I'll call when I get back.”

I suppose I had no intention of calling. He picked up on this right away.

“If I don't hear from you,” he said, “I'm going to have to take action.”

I didn't ask what he meant by that. I said, “Do what you have to do.”

 

WHILE I WAS AWAY, I CONTEMPLATED NEVER CALLING GOLAN
back, but that seemed unfair. I told Jamie Fox and Jimmy Kennedy that he'd threatened me, without giving specifics. Both felt a clean break was in order. One afternoon I walked along the Fraser River for two hours in Vancouver trying to decide how to handle this. I stopped downtown at the Christ Church Cathedral and prayed for a peaceful resolution. But I realized it was too late. Nothing I did now would assuage Golan. He was incapable of processing what happened to him. Fate had already determined our futures.

I invited him to visit Drumthwacket a few weeks later, on a bright Saturday morning in April. All around the mansion, daffodils had unfolded
from the lawns in pure celebrations of spring. A family of ducks had nested in the small pond beside the terraced garden. No one else was at home.

When he arrived I was surprised at how unpolished he appeared: Jeans, sneakers, a windbreaker. He was shaking slightly, whether from the morning's chill or from his teeming rage—or perhaps from trepidation over what he was setting in motion, his own moral meltdown.

I listened as he vented again, petulantly and with rancor. “People are asking me questions about our relationship,” he said. “People in Israel asked me. People are still interested. What do I tell them, Jim? I have to take certain steps.”

I was careful about my reply. “You can answer them any way you want. God bless you, Golan, whatever happens, happens.”

We walked through the house together, drinking tea. His anger did not abate, but instead returned to a plea for his old job.

“Golan, this isn't real,” I interrupted. I swept the air with my hand: “You think Drumthwacket is real? It's not real. This house isn't mine. These state troopers, this helicopter—I'm just passing through, Golan. This is democracy. The privilege we have is to serve for a brief period of time. That's it, and then it goes. For you, it has gone. I'm telling you as a friend, you have to move on.”

“I don't consider you a friend anymore,” he said. “Friends don't do this to friends.”

“Golan, I'm the only one who is still standing with you! I'm the only one who will sit with you. I'm the only one who still cares about you. Just out of curiosity, if I'm not your friend, who is?”

When he left, I tried to hug him good-bye—I'll admit, I would have patted him down for a recording device, given the chance. But he pulled away, coolly offering his hand instead. A very bad sign, I thought.

GOLAN NEVER CALLED ME AGAIN. BUT I WAITED FOR HIS REAPPEARANCE
with a mounting dread. Meanwhile, my staff was convinced we were staging a comeback, even if our numbers hadn't yet turned around. That summer, my approval rating crossed the 40 percent mark, higher than at any time in the last two years.

“We're starting to get traction,” Eric Shuffler, my senior counselor, said enthusiastically. “We have a year and a half to go before the election—it's time to start campaigning on your victories. Not just the environmental stuff or balanced budget. You're the first governor to invest in stem-cell research, you passed the toughest antibullying legislation in the nation, fixed the Department of Motor Vehicles and E-ZPass. You opened experimental clinical trials for cancer research in a state with the third highest breast cancer rate, Governor. Think about it. This will be the first campaign in a generation where auto insurance isn't even an issue. You fixed it.”

My most ambitious initiative, one I hoped would be the legacy of my term, was yet to come. I wanted to find a way not only to battle sprawl but to change the development dynamics in New Jersey once and for all. Billions of dollars in private investment were being lavished on new malls and residential developments, consuming more and more of our farmland. Lured by the comfortable new neighborhoods often priced below market, an endless stream of New Jersey families were leaving established communities in our historically vibrant cities, small towns, and older suburbs to put down new roots there.

Local leaders where the development was taking place thought this was
good for their towns, because of the increased tax base. But that's a myth. They're not simply adding new taxpayers to the rolls. Rates are driven up as well. It's the only way to cover costs of the new expansions.

Why is that? Because for every farm tract taken over by developers, taxpayers must finance new roads, build new water treatment facilities, and outfit police forces, schools, and hospitals to serve the migrating middle class. Only the revenue associated with new developments ever gets our attention—not the costs. Engineers, contractors, and builders were making ample profits, it was true. But they weren't reinvesting those profits in the infrastructure their developments required. That was left to the new homeowners, who thought they were getting spanking new homes at bargain-basement prices.

The sad part is that the costly new infrastructure they get stuck with financing is all redundant to the systems they left behind. Across the state, perfectly comfortable cities and towns were being abandoned or underutilized. I saw this in parts of Woodbridge. Newark and Paterson hadn't seen any appreciable investment in decades. Camden was the worst. Though it's just minutes away from Philadelphia, downtown Camden looked like a war-torn Middle Eastern city, collapsed and forgotten, a desolate wasteland. Life in those circumstances is a Hobbesian nightmare. In 2003 and 2004, Camden had the highest murder and violent crime rates in the nation.

In order to attack sprawl, I knew we needed to defend our cities. I wanted to make it much more advantageous and profitable for developers to rebuild our cities, and much more cumbersome for them to bulldoze farms and forests. My environmental commissioner, Bradley Campbell, and I devised something we called the Building Intelligent Growth Map, depicting every road, stream, and river in the state. We then colored the map according to where we felt development should be encouraged or discouraged.

Though we surely never intended to throw a blanket of protection over our entire wish list, unfortunately our map came to define our campaign in the minds of our opponents. Ultimately we had to remove it from our website in the face of an overwhelming backlash—a backlash that made all our sprawl efforts that much more difficult.

Our plan was to make Camden a demonstration of our program. For starters, we invested $175 million in the city, focusing on the local college campus and improvements at the hospital. We undertook several environmental cleanup projects, beautified the parks, and modernized the sewer and water systems. Tax breaks were extended to new and growing businesses, and we streamlined the application process for building there. It was beginning to show returns. Similar reinvestments were taking place in towns across the state.

The biggest single tract of land colored as off-limits was the Highlands region in northwestern New Jersey. In addition to harboring thirty endangered or threatened species and providing outdoor recreation to millions of visitors each year, the 800,000 acres of the Highlands produced drinking water for 4 million people statewide. The population there was growing 50 percent faster than in the rest of the state. Between 1995 and 2000, twenty-five thousand acres were lost to sprawl. If development continued on that pace, the water would soon be contaminated. It was time to act. Countless governors before me had tried to freeze development there, to no avail. We were determined to succeed.

Jamie Fox and Eric Shuffler, who were as personally committed to this initiative as I was, helped devise the winning approach. In late 2003 we formed a committee to study how best to protect the reservoirs and streams there. Six months later, I accepted the Committee's plan to preserve all four hundred thousand acres of the most sensitive areas, which included the Wanaque Reservoir. It was bold. We announced a series of hearings on the study with the hopes of passing a bill by Earth Day, April 22, 2004.

No undertaking since entering politics had ever been more important to me. If I could prove that “smart growth” worked, we could save the Highlands and the towns and cities both. Future kids would have the same glorious experiences I had growing up, living in functioning small towns with vibrant Main Streets and unspoiled nature just miles away. I felt this as a daunting challenge, and a rare opportunity—the thing that drew me into government in the first place, a chance to make a difference.

But I had grossly underestimated the kind of opposition we were facing.

The newspapers lauded the plan as the most sweeping and important
environmental program for the state since Governor Byrne preserved a million acres of the Pinelands in 1979. But unlike the Pinelands, which consisted of remote tracts of sandy scrub land, the Highlands encompassed ninety towns in seven counties, with some of the state's choicest building lots.

The developers were outraged. They warned that my plan would wreak havoc on the housing market, driving up home prices, which were already nearing an average of $500,000. We disagreed. One real estate group took out a full-page ad in the
Star-Ledger
alarming homeowners in the region into believing that they'd be prevented from building porches or pools if the bill passed—a total misrepresentation. Farmers weren't any happier. They wanted the right to sell their land to developers at market value, and worried that the state would insist that they had to go on farming it, also not true.

A series of public hearings on the bill drew crowds five hundred strong, galvanizing opponents and environmental advocates in a way never before seen in the state. Jeff Tittel, the executive director of the Sierra Club and a staunch ally or a harsh critic of mine, depending on the occasion, called the issue the “Super Bowl of Sprawl.” At one hearing, state troopers were called on to keep the proceedings calm.

By early June, the Highlands protection plan had squeaked through the Assembly. But we hit a brick wall in the Senate, where a Democrat from Gloucester, Stephen Sweeney, blocked it in committee. He and the delegation from South Jersey, which honestly wouldn't be impacted by the law at all, began fomenting local opposition among developers there who were still angry at me for my earlier preservation efforts in the region. His argument was that we were pumping substantial dollars into North Jersey to protect their water supply and landscape without any direct benefits to the south.

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.