Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (26 page)

IT WAS DURING THIS
time—the early summer of 2004—that Jim was evaluating his bid for reelection. And he was on edge. From the time he became governor, he carried three cell phones, and though I’d often seen him juggle more than one call at a time, I now saw him pacing from room to room with a phone at each ear, the tension in his voice audible. Jacqueline was two and a half by this time, and to her, Daddy was a treat, because he was so rarely there when she was awake.

One evening, while Jacqueline played in the nearby family room, I walked toward our bedroom as Jim was coming out of his dressing room. “Let’s sit down,” he said as he sat on the step outside the dressing room and patted the spot right next to him. “Let’s talk.” I sat and waited for him to speak. For a second, Jim said nothing, lowering his head and running his hand through his hair over and over—always a sign that he was upset.

“What would you think if I didn’t run for reelection next year?”

I didn’t know what to say. This was the first time Jim had ever said anything like that. Both of us were fighters, not people who folded. “I don’t know,” I said. “Why?”

“It’s just not fun anymore,” he said. “It’s vicious. Not what I expected. It’s all crises and scandals.”

I had no idea that in just a month a crisis and a scandal of Jim’s own making would force him to resign as governor on nationwide television and that life as we knew it would be over. For all I know, he saw the beginnings of that crisis emerging when he spoke to me that day. However, I also knew about the rash of scandals, past and present, that had beset his administration, and those alone would have been enough to account for his distress.

Jim had run for governor vowing to clean up Trenton, but much of the dirt was either his own or from people in or close to his administration. It had begun with Gary Taffet and Paul Levinsohn. Both men had played major roles in Jim’s campaign, Gary as campaign manager and Paul as finance director. When Jim formed his administration, he appointed Gary as his chief of staff and Paul as his governor’s counsel. Unbeknownst to Jim, however, during his 2001 campaign Gary and Paul had used their position and influence to make shady deals by buying and selling billboard space. By the time Jim’s administration began, they had made themselves millionaires. Both were now under investigation and had left the administration by early 2003, a year and a half earlier. As a result of their actions, Jim’s governorship had begun on a sour note. Jim had been furious at Gary and Paul and thought they should have known better.

The dirt had continued with Joseph Santiago’s appointment as superintendent of the state police. Santiago had stepped down in October 2002, after months of charges against him, including the allegation that he had friends in organized crime, an allegation Jim had known about from the beginning. There was more. Not only had Santiago created a bogus organization on paper that would allow him to qualify for a higher rank, but there was also a disorderly persons conviction in his past. I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t, but when Jim had asked me my opinion of Santiago, I told him that according to what I’d heard he’d been effective during his tenure as police director in Newark. It was widely recognized that he had reduced crime and made the department more efficient.

And then there had been the messes Jim made for himself. One was a trip to Ireland that had played in the media as a junket and a McGreevey family reunion at the taxpayers’ expense. That was followed by a trip to Puerto Rico to speak to the longshoremen’s union. That had caused Jim problems because some of the union officials were rumored to be under investigation for alleged mob connections. And then, worst of all, of course, there had been his unconscionable appointment of Golan Cipel as his homeland security adviser, an appointment so ill-advised that it had rekindled rumors about his sexual orientation. By August 2002, Golan, too, was gone from Jim’s administration.

Now, in the last two weeks, the news had been full of fresh scandals. On June 30, Charles Kushner, who had donated $1.5 million in total to Jim’s gubernatorial campaigns, was fined $500,000 by the Federal Election Commission for improper campaign donations. A week later, on July 7, David D’Amiano, another major donor and fund-raiser, demanded $40,000 from a Middlesex County farmer in return for helping him to get a favorable sale price for his land. Shortly before D’Amiano was indicted, my mother-in-law, Ronnie, had called looking for Jim, saying that D’Amiano’s mother had called her to say that her son was “missing.” I don’t know if Ronnie and D’Amiano’s mother knew each other, but they were from the same part of New Jersey. Perhaps D’Amiano was taken in for questioning, because a week later it was all over the papers that he was under indictment. The indictment against him, written by a Republican prosecutor with gubernatorial ambitions, seemed worded to make an unnamed “state official”—obviously Jim—look as guilty as possible, although there were no charges against Jim and none pending. Jim pushed the prosecutor to make the D’Amiano indictment public so he could clear his own name, but the prosecutor refused. Nevertheless, the press had weighed in, criticizing the prosecutor for smear tactics. The prosecutor eventually had to make a statement saying Jim had no involvement in the D’Amiano case. Though the issue quickly became a nonissue, it certainly kept alive the idea that Jim’s judgment was not to be trusted.

The D’Amiano scandal had taken a toll on Jim, even though he wasn’t under investigation himself. But then Charles Kushner, who had also been Golan’s sponsor for a work visa, was back in the news with another scandal, the worst so far. On July 13, Kushner was arrested (and would later plead guilty and go to jail) for obstructing a federal investigation into his business dealings. That’s the sanitized way to put it. Actually, Kushner had hired prostitutes to entrap two witnesses—one of them his own brother-in-law, his sister’s husband—who were cooperating in the investigation. The plan was that the prostitutes would lure the targets to a motel room equipped with a hidden video camera to record what Kushner hoped would ensue. One of his targets had refused the woman’s solicitations entirely, but Kushner’s brother-in-law had merely taken a rain check, and on his return the encounter between them was videotaped. Kushner subsequently sent his sister the videotape, threatening to make it public if her husband testified against him. Instead Kushner’s sister and brother-in-law had alerted the police.

I didn’t believe that Jim was involved with Kushner’s or D’Amiano’s wrongdoing. Yes, he cared about power, but he had never much cared about money, or at least not personally. He was disappointed in both men, and I knew this because he told me so. “How could they have been so greedy?” he wondered aloud. “How could they have been so corrupt?” But in the media coverage of each new scandal, Jim’s name was invoked—the innuendo being that birds of a feather dirty their nests together.

However, shortly after Jim’s “Gay American” speech, various stories broke pointing out that Jim’s staff—almost all young men whose average age was twenty-eight—were paid an average salary of $77,000. This was at a time when the average New Jersey civil servant was forty-four years old and earning $58,800 after twelve years of employment. “McGreevey’s penchant to surround himself with young men of questionable experience only reinforced dark rumors that Jim McGreevey was a gay man on the make,” wrote the
Bergen Record
reporter who broke the story, adding that eleven staffers had received raises averaging $19,000 over the preceding three years. Golan had made $110,000 annually.

IN ALL SORTS OF
ways, the Jim I thought I married turned out to be someone that I don’t recognize now, and the fact is that I don’t know if he was involved in any wrongdoing. But on that July night when Jim sat there on the hallway step in our residence at Drumthwacket telling me that the scandals were taking a toll on him, I believed him. I didn’t want to see him hounded out of government service for problems I didn’t think were of his making.

Whatever else I feel, I continue to think that Jim accomplished a lot in the two and a half years he was governor. He provided funding for stem-cell research; he made the Department of Motor Vehicles functional for the first time in anyone’s recollection; he fixed the E-ZPass system, which had been beset by technological as well as bureaucratic glitches; he reduced class size and overcrowding by funding school construction; and last, but certainly not least, he succeeded in lowering consumers’ auto premiums. By making regulations more favorable to auto insurers, he increased their number in the state, and the resulting competition among them prompted lowered costs.

Still, I had long wished that Jim would leave politics. I’d been with him through two all-consuming campaigns, and though I’d signed up for both of them with my eyes open, I also thought that once Jim was no longer campaigning, we would have more time together. Now, almost four years into our marriage and two and a half years into Jim’s governorship, we had less time together than ever. At least when he was a candidate, I’d often been on the road with him all weekend. Now I barely saw him. He continued to conceal his schedule from me, and when he told me he had “appointments” on the weekend, there was nothing for me to do but accept it.

If Jim left politics, I wanted it to be a choice, not because he was cornered. That was what I thought, though I doubt Jim knew what I thought, about this or anything else. Once in a while he would ask my opinion—as he had about Santiago—but it was more as if I were the public’s representative or a one-woman focus group rather than his partner. Otherwise he seldom asked my opinion on anything. During the campaigns, I’d felt like more of a participant. He had consulted me about his speeches, his appearance, and fund-raising strategies. On occasion, he found my political contacts useful. I always envisioned marriage as a partnership and believed that a couple should share everything, but this, unfortunately, was not the experience I was having. I didn’t know what was going through his mind, but I was in it for better or worse.

“It’s your decision,” I told him, “and I’ll support you in whatever decision you make. But don’t let them run you out of office. If you want to fight for the job, I will fight right alongside you.”

AS THE WEEKEND OF
July 17 drew near, Jim asked me my plans, and I told him that I was preparing to take Jacqueline with me to the Ocean House for the weekend. As our routine had evolved, I generally made my own weekend plans, since Jim wasn’t including me in his. He would come to the beach whenever an event on his political calendar was to be held there, and on occasion he would come down to the shore Saturday night and stay till Sunday morning, but mostly, especially that summer, he didn’t make it at all. Though summer was supposed to be a slower time of year, and Jim was supposed to have more free time, we often wound up apart for much of the weekend. I didn’t like it.

“Why can’t you take some time off?” I had asked him more than once.

“I’m the governor,” he said. “I have work to do.”

“Even the president of the United States takes a vacation. Why can’t you?”

“I’m thinking that maybe Morag will come again in August,” he said. “Or maybe we’ll go to Vancouver to see her.”

I didn’t take the proposal seriously. Jim often changed the subject when I confronted him, attempting to evade by attempting to appease. This dance—where I’d say, “More time!” and he’d say, “How about a vacation?”—was an old and familiar one to me.

I hadn’t quite recovered from Kari’s visit, though I would have been willing to accept either travel plan. When Morag—now almost twelve—came east the previous year, Jacqueline had been too young to have any real interaction with her sister or to remember her. But in the course of the year, Jacqueline had become a full-fledged person (and then some), and I thought again that the two girls could begin to forge a relationship. I had put a framed photograph of Morag in Jacqueline’s bedroom, on her dresser where she could see it from her crib. “That’s your sister, Morag,” I told her. Sometimes when staff came into her bedroom, Jacqueline would point to the picture and say, “That’s my sister.”

Just as Jim devoted time to Morag, I wanted him to do so with Jacqueline, and with us as a family. Jim was also my husband, and I wanted some time for just the two of us, as well. But clearly, on this particular July weekend, he wasn’t in a state of mind to be able to relax with anyone. “This is the most difficult week of my career, and you’re taking off?” Jim snapped. I assumed he meant that on top of the scandals that had been on his mind, he was nearing the date where he had to decide one way or another whether to run in 2005 or not. Since he was the incumbent, the candidacy was presumed to be his, but if he decided against running, he had to let others know to give them time to organize a campaign.

“If it’s a difficult week, then why don’t you come with us to the shore?” I said, as evenly as I could. My annoyance at his neglect of Jacqueline, who was so eager to be with him, vied with my compassion at seeing how upset he was. I relented. “Do you want us to stay home? If you do, we will.”

“No, that’s OK,” he said, more sad than sullen. This was Jim’s way of saying he knew he shouldn’t have snapped at me.

THE 2004 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL
convention, at which John Kerry would be nominated as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, was in Boston from July 26 to 29. The night before we left, Jim—who rarely went to bed before midnight—did something I’d never seen him do before: He climbed into bed at 9:00
P.M.,
saying he was exhausted. Later I discovered that a day earlier, on July 23, he’d learned that Golan Cipel was planning to blackmail him. Unless Jim came up with a multimillion-dollar “settlement,” Golan’s lawyer said he would file a sexual-harassment suit against him. Ignorant of any of this, I was up doing Jacqueline’s packing and my own, choosing outfits for myself from my walk-in closet. Beyond my closet door, I could hear Jim’s restless tossing.