Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (21 page)

The same wind that had swooped down to steal Jim’s tweed cap was now proving perilous to helicopter travel. One of the troopers had heard from headquarters that the wind was so severe that the Federal Aviation Administration had grounded all small craft in the area, and that obviously included the MedEvac helicopter waiting to transport Jim. Finally, the FAA gave the go-ahead—apparently for this one flight only—considering his condition and the fact that a two-hour road trip would further aggravate his injury.

It had been decided that one of the troopers would drive to the hospital and the other would fly, because there was limited space on the helicopter and because someone had to get the car back to Drumthwacket. Under the best of circumstances, I’m a reluctant flier, and these circumstances—with the wind so strong that no one else was being allowed to fly—were hardly the best. But I knew I couldn’t leave Jim.

“Come with me,” he said.

So I did.

It was a terrifying flight. At one point, the helicopter dropped altitude precipitously. The trooper and I both looked at each other, and although neither of us spoke, we were both terribly afraid we wouldn’t make it. Jim, meanwhile, was in so much pain that he could barely speak. Once we landed at the heliport at Robert Wood Johnson, Jim was immediately taken to the operating room where the orthopedic team was waiting. Kevin Hagan was already there to discuss the media strategy. There was to be no mention of Jim’s runaway hat. The story would be that he missed the ditch and fell. Jim asked that Dick Codey, president of the state senate, be informed that for the next several hours he would be acting governor. As senate president, Codey was first in line to assume the duties of governor when the governor was incapacitated—a dress rehearsal, of sorts, for his assumption to the governorship when Jim stepped down in the wake of the Golan Cipel scandal. As Jim’s wife, I signed off on Jim’s surgery, and off he went into the OR, accompanied by two state troopers, who remained in the operating room the entire time.

It was a long night.

After the surgery—by now we were long past midnight—we went to see Jim in the recovery room. The surgeon had put two metal rods in his leg, which would be left in there permanently unless they bothered him. I listened as one trooper described the procedure in vivid detail. The doctor had drilled two holes in Jim’s leg and inserted the rods and screws to hold them in place. I was sad for Jim. He was just beginning his administration and was now going to have to spend time in the hospital followed by months of physical therapy. I also knew that being on crutches would upset him. He never showed any sign of weakness, and in fact was intolerant of giving in to it. I knew that he would now perceive himself as weak.

The following day, reporters flocked to the hospital. Everyone wanted to know what had happened. Jim’s communications director and his inner circle—including Kevin Hagan, Teddy Pedersen, Gary Taffet, Paul Levinsohn, and Golan Cipel—were in and out of his hospital room on a regular basis. The troopers were also stationed outside the room. I stayed in the hospital during Jim’s entire stay, along with Jim’s mother.

Because Ronnie had been a nurse her whole adult life and at the time was a nursing instructor, she felt especially equipped to care for Jim. She kept tabs on his medications and their dosages, making sure that they were all compatible with one another. She was also aware that he would need extensive rehab and conferred with the medical staff about exactly what sort of rehab was indicated.

“Thanks for being here, Mom,” Jim said.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she replied.

Ronnie and I were his private-duty nurses, both of us sleeping in his room in side-by-side recliners. During our downtime, while Jim was working with his staff, we chatted—mostly about Jacqueline and how she was doing. “You must miss her terribly,” Ronnie said. “But it’s so great that you have your parents to take care of her.” I did miss Jacqueline terribly, even though I spoke to my parents several times a day. I knew that my mom and dad loved her and loved looking after her, so it wasn’t that I was worried about her—it was that I was yearning for her. Nevertheless, during the period of Jim’s hospitalization, I left only once—to go home to Woodbridge to get clothes and spend time with Jacqueline for a couple of hours.

After five days, we left for Woodbridge. But Jim couldn’t sleep in our bed, because it was on the second floor and he couldn’t negotiate the stairs. So he began the second month of his governorship sleeping in a hospital bed in our living room, which now also doubled as the statehouse. The staff was in and out constantly with paperwork for Jim to sign or documents for him to review. The day started at 7:00
A.M.
and didn’t end until midnight. And the phones were always ringing.

14. THE OTHER MAN

DESPITE THEIR ROLES AS
representatives of the public, political figures lead lives that are to some degree insulated. They often have people to buffer them from the experiences of ordinary citizens—people to make their reservations for them, to pay bills on their behalf, to stand in lines for them, to drive them any- and everywhere, and even to fill their gas tanks. But they’re insulated in other, more profound, ways too. The fishbowl may be transparent from the outside—so many people can see in, after all—but those inside can’t always see out quite as clearly. That’s why political figures routinely misread their constituents, and perhaps it’s one of the reasons Jim misread the implications of his actions.

It was ironic that, despite his enormous sensitivity to managing his image, Jim could be remarkably nearsighted when it came to anticipating how some of his decisions would be perceived. There was toxic fallout from several of the choices he made—his selection for state police superintendent, a costly state-sponsored trip to Ireland, a trip to a union convention in Puerto Rico underwritten by a union leader with alleged mob ties. But worst of all was his move to make Golan Cipel his “special counsel on homeland security.”

Jim appointed Golan Cipel to his administration in January 2002, shortly after commencing the affair that, by Jim’s own admission, began while I was in the hospital awaiting the birth of our daughter. It was unconscionable. I guess that people engaged in adulterous affairs think they’re less obvious than they invariably are, especially in the beginning. Jim was no exception. When the news of Golan’s appointment broke in January, the affair was still very new, which may have been why Jim was not in the best position to see how bizarrely inappropriate the appointment was or how instantly it would raise questions about their relationship.

Newspaper accounts from February 2002—Jim’s second month in office—suggest that the press not only knew that the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes but had an excellent idea of whom he wasn’t wearing them with. Reporters could stoop to the worst sort of smarmy innuendo to make known what they believed was going on but couldn’t yet prove. The
Bergen Record
, for example, vigilant but often shrill in its reporting, hinted at the affair in a page-one story appearing February 21, 2002, entitled
MCGREEVEY PICKS ISRAELI AS ADVISER ON SECURITY; CALLS EX–CAMPAIGN AIDE A “SUPER-BRIGHT INDIVIDUAL.
” Further down, the item read, “Democrats close to the administration say McGreevey and Cipel have struck up a close friendship and frequently travel together.” Given that peculiar subhead (it’s not generally big news that an appointee is considered bright by the person making the appointment), plus the paper’s characterization of Jim and Golan’s “friendship,” any reader over the age of twelve would have instantly understood that the paper was suggesting that “super-bright individual” was Jim’s term of endearment for Golan. Jim might as well have referred to him as “darling.”

If the
Record
wanted to expose Jim’s adulterous affair with Golan, they should have done so directly, without stooping to innuendo. In fact, in their role as protector of the public weal, however self-appointed, they
should
have wanted to. It was terribly dangerous for Jim to appoint Golan to a position for which he lacked the credentials and experience. Compounding the danger was the fact that the position Jim created specially for Golan was undefined and that it muddied the clarity of the chain of command, undermining the authority of others, especially in the event of another terrorist attack.

As the
New York Times
explained as tonelessly as possible in an article published on February 21, 2002, Golan reported to Jim, but Kathryn Flicker, an assistant attorney general whom Jim had appointed to head the new Office of Counterterrorism and charged with the job of coordinating responses to terrorism by local agencies, did
not
report to Golan but to the attorney general. So what exactly would Golan know that he could then report to Jim?

The
Bergen Record
elaborated on additional confusion in the same article the same day.

Flicker, former director of the state’s Division of Criminal Justice, is also chairwoman of the state’s domestic security task force, which was formed by the Legislature less than a month after the terrorist attacks.

But it is Cipel’s, not Flicker’s, name that appears on the federal Office of Homeland Security Web site as the person the governor appointed as New Jersey’s homeland security contact. Flicker was not available for comment Wednesday.

When Jim was asked to explain, he couldn’t.

“Well, Golan is not the official representative, but he’s my representative,” McGreevey said.

It was clear to the
Record
that there was trouble and that in an emergency the results would have been devastating.

When the FBI issued a terrorist alert last week, it was apparently Cipel who first contacted McGreevey, not New Jersey’s newly appointed terror czar, Assistant Attorney General Kathryn Flicker.

Also true, and newsworthy, and deserving to be placed high up in the story, instead of being buried in the middle as it was, was another piece of news: Former FBI chief Louis J. Freeh had been willing to work in McGreevey’s administration heading the state’s Domestic Security Preparedness Task Force.

Why hadn’t Freeh been appointed? “Cipel had argued strongly against the choice,” said the article.

There are pork-barrel appointments all the time, and people in such positions have been known to do less than a heck of a job. By having an adulterous affair, Jim placed himself at risk of blackmail; but by having an adulterous affair and putting his lover in a position as sensitive as homeland security, Jim put at risk the lives of the people of New Jersey, and perhaps even the entire country.

In the next several weeks, Jim had more headaches over his appointment of Golan. First, members of the federal government said they would not share classified security information with Golan because he didn’t have clearance. Then members of the New Jersey legislature—mostly Republican, unsurprisingly—complained that, at a time when fiscal belt-tightening was called for, Golan was being paid $110,000. As opposition to Golan continued to harden along partisan lines, a Republican in the state senate threatened to hold up all Jim’s appointments unless Golan presented himself to the state senate’s Judiciary Committee to be questioned about his qualifications.

All this was taking place less than six months after 9/11 in a state that had lost hundreds of its citizens and where thousands more had seen the smoke from the burning Twin Towers.

By March 7 it was clear that the opposition to Golan’s appointment was not going to disappear, and so Jim moved him to another position as his “special counsel,” a move that satisfied nobody and fooled nobody. Golan’s tenure as a member of Jim’s administration lasted for only seven months. By August 12, 2002, Golan would be gone from the government altogether. Less than two years later, in June 2004, he would begin his sexual-harassment suit against Jim, having by then gone through four jobs, each arranged by Jim or his associates, undoubtedly at Golan’s behest. In each case, Golan was fired or asked to resign in a matter of months.

It was widely assumed that I knew all along about Jim’s affair with Golan. Other people knew, or at least suspected, so how could I not? That’s how the reasoning went. Yes, I’d once or twice heard the rumor that Jim was gay, but I dismissed it just as I dismissed many other stories, most of which I knew not to be true. There was the rumor that we were living apart, that news account of us “necking” on Election Night 1997, and then the most ridiculous one of all—the rumor that he was having a gay tryst in Cape May the night he broke his leg and that I’d been flown in to cover for him. If I’d known that my husband was seeing someone else—man or woman—I would never have agreed to cover it up. I have my integrity. That story was completely fabricated.

The simple truth was that Jim’s affair with Golan, which in hindsight so indelibly colored not just our marriage but his whole tenure as governor, was then so far beneath the surface of my daily life that it didn’t even roil the waters. Even looking back, I can’t see now what I didn’t see then, perhaps because even the very surface of our daily lives was so tumultuous.

Unlike most public figures, I was a working mother, having returned to my job at the hospital when Jacqueline was two and a half months old. I was checking for spit-up on my suit and to make sure my daughter had enough diapers. I wasn’t checking Jim’s shirts for hints of another woman’s perfume, and I certainly wasn’t checking them for the scent of another man’s aftershave. As for the odor of rumor of his affair with Golan? Not even a whiff came my way, despite the fact that, unlike many political spouses, I lived a major part of my life outside the goldfish bowl in the real world. Later I asked some of my friends what they’d known, what they’d heard, what they’d thought. They’d heard some of the rumors about Jim’s interest in young men but either discounted what they heard or thought I already knew. A few knew and did think I didn’t know. So why didn’t they tell me? When is the last time you knew someone who was being betrayed, in whatever way, by his or her partner? Did you run to tell? I didn’t think so—and the last time I was in that position I didn’t either.