The Confession (38 page)

 

THAT AFTERNOON, I CALLED CURTIS BASHAW DOWN AT CAPE MAY.
I needed a friend to talk to, and at this moment I felt certain that he could offer some sound judgment. I knew he had a radio interview that morning about his work on the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority. I reached him on his cell in his car.

“Are you alone? I have something I need to tell you.”

“Sure,” he said.

“I've had an affair, Curtis.”

There was a pause. “Okay,” he said.

“With a guy.”

There was a longer pause.

“And he's trying to extort money from me. It's Golan Cipel. He used to work for me. I'm trying to figure out what to do.”

I didn't realize until this minute that Curtis had heard the rumors
about Golan. He told me a lengthy story about a New York man he used to date—another Israeli national, strangely enough; I'll call him Eitan—who happened to have called him just days before.

“Eitan is a dear, dear friend,” Curtis said. “But I hadn't seen him in two years. He said he was coming down to Cape May, so I invited him to stay with us. And when he got here he goes, ‘Is your governor gay?' I asked him why he'd ask such a thing. And he said, ‘A friend of mine knows this guy who says he used to date McGreevey.' Well, I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, ‘His name's Golan, he's a very handsome Israeli guy.' So I think this is kind of getting around.”

I listened intently. It seemed impossible to me that Golan had been gossiping about our relationship, even with friends. But if he was, containing this was going to be impossible.

“The virus is spreading,” I said.

“It looks like the shit's already hit the fan, Governor.”

“We're trying to get through to his lawyer,” I said. “But he's being totally unreasonable. And Golan has disappeared.”

“Jim,” Curtis said. “I think Eitan may be your back channel to Golan, your Hail Mary pass.”

I don't know why I didn't see it right away. Of course he was. “Will you do me a favor? Will you call Jamie? Jamie needs to know about this,” I said.

He agreed. He also agreed to call Eitan that night and come to Drumthwacket first thing in the morning to report what he'd learned.

When he arrived that Tuesday morning, Ray and I were frantically pacing the library, beneath an oil painting of George Washington. I was due to leave in a few minutes by helicopter to sign the Highlands legislation, so there was no time to spare. Jamie and Michael DeCotiis were there, too.

Immediately we dialed Eitan's number on a speakerphone. After hearing from Curtis the night before, he explained, he'd tracked his source down at the gym. He was a lawyer named Timothy Saia—the same attorney, it turned out, whom Golan had brought along to our breakfast meeting that morning when I tried convincing him to resign. It was an interesting twist, but nobody knew what to make of it.

After some quick research, we learned that Saia worked for a politically
connected firm in North Jersey where Ray knew the principals. Ray volunteered to pay his old friends a visit, hopefully shaking some information out of Saia along the way.

“You've done your gay thing,” Ray told Curtis, “I'll take it from here.”

In no time, Ray wrangled the firm's manager to the phone—from his vacation in Nantucket—and set up a meeting to grill Saia later in the day.

But exactly what advantage this back channel was going to give us, none of us knew. If Timothy Saia was just a friend from the gym who talked too much, as I assumed, the most we could hope for was to quiet him down. I never believed he could get Golan to sit with us, not for a minute. I began to abandon hope.

My brain went white with resignation. As Michael DeCotiis and I headed toward the Highlands Reservoir in the helicopter, I consciously thought,
This is the last time I'm going to fly over New Jersey before my resignation.
I remembered the first time I'd seen these magnificent stretches, the beautifully lush horse farms, the aerial splendor of the state I'd always wanted to lead.

I knew also that my White House dreams were dead, however this crisis played out. Even if I survived in Trenton, after what I'd been through, there was no way I could withstand the glare of national press scrutiny.

Shortly after I returned to the statehouse, we reconvened in my office to hear what Ray had learned from his meeting with Timothy Saia. It was good news. Under pressure from his superiors, Saia agreed to set up a breakfast meeting the following morning with Golan, in New York City. It was a momentary ray of hope.

Of course, Golan never showed. Lowy was there instead, which led me to wonder—as I do to this day—whether Timothy Saia was some sort of double agent.

 

FROM THE FIRST MOMENTS OF THIS CRISIS, WE CONSIDERED GOING
to federal law enforcement. There is no bigger crime than extorting and blackmailing a public official, especially if you're a foreigner, especially now in the age of terror. Bill Lawler raised it at our first meeting. But I was reluctant, for a
number of reasons. The main one was Christopher Christie, the U.S. attorney who had hounded me in the Machiavelli case. I just didn't trust him.

Bill Lawler felt we could bypass the U.S. attorney's office and go directly to the FBI, but he agreed that we should do this only as a last resort. “It lets them set the strategy,” he said. “So far, we're still in charge of that, at least.”

I dreaded this for another reason. I knew it would stop the extortion campaign, but it would do nothing to protect my secret. Once an official complaint was made, I knew my heterosexual pretense was over. My story would land in the pantheon of messy love affairs. Whatever Golan and I had together would be made to look like something out of one of those tawdry reality-based TV shows—an entanglement so ill-fated that we needed cops to break it up.

No matter what happened, though, I knew I owed Dina an explanation, and an apology. Ray, with his tremendous spiritual footing, helped me prepare for the moment. His faith was so strong that, in this moment, it carried both of us.

That night, I headed upstairs to talk to my wife. At the last minute, I asked Ray to join me as my confessor.

There is an elegant living room in the private wing which we rarely used. We sat there on the sofa, all three of us. I took Dina's hand. “I hadn't planned this,” I told her. “It was broken off years ago. But he never let go. I want you to know how sorry I am. What I did was wrong, terribly wrong. I violated the sanctity of our marriage. I had no right to do that. I beg you to forgive me.”

She was silent. I didn't expect her to be surprised.

“Now Golan is threatening to sue me for sexual assault, which is a total fabrication. We're trying everything to get to him. We have talked this over a million ways, Dina. No matter what happens with his suit, one way or the other, I may have to resign as governor.”

Dina turned her gaze to Ray. She was silent for a long time. On her face she wore an inscrutable mask, neither hurt nor mad nor frightened. When she finally spoke, she said with no trace of bitterness, “Where are we going to live?”

I squeezed her hand. “We can't show weakness or vulnerability,” I said.

Ray answered her question. “You don't have to worry about that, Dina. Everything will work out.”

 

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, I HAD TROUBLE GETTING OUT OF BED
. I had a morning full of meetings and obligations, but all I could do was stare at the enormous elm outside my bedroom window, counting how many times it showed the whites of its leaves. I got to the office sometime around noon. Curtis was waiting. I brought him into my suite and closed the doors. I was relieved he was there. I started talking about the things I had hoped to accomplish in a second term. Being a Republican, he disagreed with a few. He couldn't help himself.

I also relived some highlights of my term to date. We had enacted a good deal of my social and economic agenda, despite the constant din of chaos and scandal. I was particularly proud of increasing benefits for our veterans and improving standards for the National Guard. And in keeping with the promise I made to homeless vets so many years ago, we opened the Old Glory Wing at the Veterans Memorial Home at Menlo Park, a new residential wing for forty retired soldiers needing inpatient mental health services.

All this reminiscing wasn't calming my mind, though. Psychologically, I knew I wasn't fit to be at work. The world of artifice I'd created for myself was tumbling down, and the oncoming trauma was already excruciating. You don't abandon a lie after forty-seven years without consequences. Coming out wasn't as simple as removing a mask at a costume ball. The thing I was, my private truth, was nearly as occluded from me as it was from the world. I only knew my lies, like everyone else. Losing them was like losing my identity.

I had to get back to Drumthwacket.

Curtis and I left the statehouse through a back route, down a flight of stairs, through a tunnel that dropped us off right at my car, whose state troopers were always at the ready. Back at the mansion, we went to the library. Cathy Reilly, God bless her, brought us lunch.

“I can't keep doing what I'm doing,” I told Curtis. What I meant was, I couldn't go on posing as straight. “I suppose I could stay with Dina. I love and respect her, I really do. But I don't want to fix it.”

“Have there been other guys?” he asked.

I didn't know how to answer. I stared at him blankly.

“Well, do you think you might be gay?”

After spending a week admitting to a gay affair, this was the first time I'd been asked what it implied about my sexual orientation.

“Yes,” I said without hesitation. And then I started to cry in a way I had never cried in my life. Not sobbing, not angry—free. I felt free.

Curtis hugged me. Then he pulled away.

“That's it!” he shouted. “That explains everything! Don't you see? The truth will set you free. This is the truth! Tell it to everybody. Hold a press conference and tell the truth. And suddenly the tawdry affair with your political appointee makes sense. You were a man in the closet, and now you're free. This is huge, Jim. I think the voters will understand.”

Curtis's enthusiasm was like a preacher's altar call. Tears splashed down my face. I'd never told anybody this about myself before, and every word of his affirmation lifted me on a thousand wings. The transformation in my soul was shocking and instantaneous. I had told somebody I was gay, and he was right—that explained everything.

He dialed Jamie and handed me the phone, saying, “Tell him.”

“I'm coming out,” I told Jamie.

“I'm coming right over,” he said.

By the time Ray arrived at Drumthwacket, Jamie, Curtis, and I had become a kind of support group in the governor's mansion.

“I'm coming out,” I told Ray. “I'm a gay American.”

He looked at the three of us, not knowing what to say. I doubt Ray had ever knowingly been alone in a room of gay men before. Ironically, the old party boss was the most flamboyant person there, in light-colored slacks and trademark blue-tinted wireless eye glasses. Then Michael DeCotiis pushed into the room. “Guess what, Michael,” Ray joked, flinging his hands in the air. “I'm gay, too!”

 

WHEN WE RECOVERED FROM A LONG LAUGH, I SAW MY PLAN LAID
out before me. I wanted to hold a press conference on Friday, to confess my infidelity and tell my truth.

That night, I knew I would have to tell my parents. I got Sharon on the phone and asked her to gather the clan at the official beach house on the pretext that I had a major announcement for them.

As I drove down to meet them, I kept Curtis on the phone—he was driving back to Cape May to see Will and gather fresh clothes. I wanted to know what words he'd used with his parents, and how Will had broken the news to his own family; I wanted the collected experiences of this tribe to inform my language. I feared my family's rejection terribly. My need for their love and acceptance was unchanged since childhood.

I knew it would crush my father that my political career was taking this unexpected blow. But frankly what I dreaded most was my mother's disappointment over my violation of my marriage vows. Nothing was more sacred to her than honor and one's promise to God.

It all went better than it might have. My father's first response was, “You make a choice, Jim—Coke or Pepsi. You were married twice, you have two wonderful daughters. Why don't you try to make that work? Why don't you make the regular choice?”

“Dad, I've known my whole life. This is who I am.”

“You will always be my son,” he said, taking my hand and shaking it stiffly.

Later, he took refuge in the Church's long struggle with the issue. “Holy Mother the Church hasn't figured out this homosexuality stuff after two thousand years. So I figure I'm not doing so bad.”

My mother, whose love for me has proven tremendously resilient, mostly kept her thoughts to herself. But when we parted, she took me into her arms and gave me a long and tender hug, something she hadn't done in a long time. “We will always love you, no matter what you do,” she said.

Back in the car, I called Curtis with a report, but his news took precedence.

“We have to push up the press conference from Friday to tomorrow,” he said. “Somebody in Golan's camp leaked the news. ABC is getting a story
ready, probably for tomorrow night. Jamie says we've got to keep out in front of this thing.”

 

I WAS DEAD TIRED ON THURSDAY MORNING, SO TIRED THAT I
rolled downstairs in green sweatpants and a T-shirt before taking a shower. I was surprised to find the place overrun with political operatives, some of whom I didn't even know.

Besides Jamie and Curtis, Michael and Ray, there was Joel Benenson, my pollster; Steve DeMicco, the consultant; Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant from New York; the political ad man Jim Margolis; and some gay community liaison whose name I don't remember. The room was out of control. But frankly so was every other part of my life.