The Confession (40 page)

 

IT SEEMS ILLOGICAL TO SAY, BUT COMPARING MY INAUGURATION
to my resignation, I can't tell you which moment was most jarring. But I can tell you this: in only one of them was I my true self. History books will all say that I resigned in disgrace. That misses the point entirely. Resigning was the single most important thing I have ever done. Not only was I truthful and integrated for the first time in my life, but I'd rejected a political solution to my troubles and took the more painful route: penance and atonement, the way to grace.

THESE DESPAIRING WORDS COME FROM VIKTOR FRANKL, IN HIS
memoir
Man's Search for Meaning,
as he describes his disorientation in the days and weeks after being freed from the Nazi death camps. Years before I left office, I remember standing inside the grim barracks at Auschwitz, unable to fathom the horrors that took place there. Surely history has recorded no darker hell.

Of course, my small story cannot compare with Frankl's. But his steadfast focus on survival, on even unwitting resilience, helped me to understand my last days at Drumthwacket. I suddenly existed in a wide-awake world, unvarnished by dreams or lies, the world I'd imagined a thousand times in my mind—only to find that I couldn't recognize it, that I could find no comfort there.

If my relief at finally coming out made me momentarily ebullient, the feeling didn't last. In fact, I sank into an agonizing depression. I couldn't sleep; my usual four hours a night were reduced to two. At work, I barely
functioned. I couldn't concentrate on anything beyond my own distress. I felt a need to be doing something, but I didn't know what that something was. It was encrypted in my DNA to
plan my work and work my plan,
my dad's old maxim. I'd used the phrase so much myself that I'm famous for it; it is spelled out in countless throw pillows and carved wooden plaques that friends have given me over the years.

Yet now I had no plan, I had no work. A week before the press conference I had enjoyed a relevance and influence, a power. Now I was trivial and inconsequential. It's as if God had turned on a giant fire hose and washed away any traces of my old life. A few people reached out. Bill Clinton and John Kerry called. So did George Norcross, the warlord from South Jersey. Governor Kean kindly reminded me that I'd accomplished many good things.

But mostly my phone went silent. I was no longer of use to anybody in New Jersey.

With little else imposing on my time, I spent many of these evenings in front of the television with Jacqueline on my lap, plugging videos into the VCR. Though she was only three, I felt that Jacqueline sensed our family's troubles. She let me hold her for hours on end—consciously comforting me, not the other way around. In these days, her favorite video was a Sesame Street story in which Kermit was reluctant about having to leave his pond behind, but found in his travels that he had retained the pond in his memory. When the tape finished playing, Jacqueline would rewind it and start it again. We must have watched Kermit's apt allegory fifteen times, and each time I grew more convinced that Jacqueline was responding to its message.

Some days I didn't go into the office at all, but instead walked and jogged in circles through the stone-dust paths of the mansion's gardens, a prisoner of my self-obsession. The fall colors were brilliant that year. In the towering trees that crowded Drumthwacket's lawns I saw God's renewing powers, His beautiful sense of order and cycles, birth and rebirth. My faith was returning in small stages. Once or twice I entered a religious reverie in the gardens, convinced that my new plan was hidden somewhere in God's larger order; it would become plain to me if only I could align my heart with God's.

But peeking through the foliage were the constant reminders of my
own troubles: photographers wrapped around tree limbs and balanced on fences, television trucks with their tall masts extended, microwaving images of me into living rooms in Jakarta, Melbourne, and Carteret. Much of the coverage following my resignation was respectful, but some of it claimed I'd escaped a bad situation (the mounting scandals) by drawing favorable attention to my gayness. Christie Whitman, in an appearance with Chris Matthews on
Hardball,
even charged that I was engaged in some sort of cover-up. “It's not about his sexual practice, it's about the corruption,” she said. “That was a feint.”

“Only in New Jersey can that be a cover-up,” Matthews fired back.

The absurd implication was that I'd made up the affair, or at least magnified its gravity, as a distraction. In time, that notion actually gained some credence. In one poll, only 8 percent of respondents believed that my gay affair was the real reason I was resigning. The satirical newspaper
The Onion
picked up on the false controversy with this headline: H
OMOSEXUAL
T
EARFULLY
A
DMITS TO
B
EING
G
OVERNOR OF
N
EW
J
ERSEY
.

I read Frankl over and over, finding words in his narrative of resilience to describe my own challenges, and to give me hope. The lessons Frankl teaches are universal. We all fight against a hopelessness, a sense of our own imprisonments. Yes, I built the gates that contained me, wreathed them with barbed wire myself. I dreaded being ripped open by bullets from the sadist in the guard tower, where I was the only gunman, a construct of my own delirium.

Mostly I'd entered a conspiracy with a world that drove gay kids into a state of dualism—part of the world but apart from it, unable to participate wholly. I hated this world. Every minute I saw what it did to me, how it twisted me against myself. How it exiled me, even when I refused to leave.

Frankl wrote, “Anything outside the barbed wire became remote—out of reach and, in a way, unreal. The events and the people outside, all the normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life, that is as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man who looked at it from another world.”

In the garden on these formless days after my announcement, a “normal life” seemed further and further from reach.

 

WHILE I READ
MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING,
DINA FOUND COMFORT
in a volume called
The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitative Relationships.
She carried it around Drumthwacket for all the staff to see. It was an obvious swipe, but I didn't blame her. I had it coming. Tony Coelho called it right: I had publicly humiliated her, much more so than if my lover had been another woman. There was little she could do to settle the score.

Dina was also very bitter about our sinking fortunes. On the door of her office she posted a sign counting down the number of days before our move—“before homelessness,” as she'd acidly titled her countdown chart. Every morning I saw her open the door and cross off another day.

On the second night after our lives were changed, her body gave way under the strain. We were sitting on the sofa in the formal living room, our demilitarized zone. We didn't have much to say to one another, but a respect—and what remained of our love—bound us together. She was crying. Crashing waves of sobs overtook her. She was in excruciating pain. Suddenly her breathing grew labored and irregular. As she hyperventilated, her eyes widened with panic. Then her head collapsed to one side and she slumped over, still heaving for air. She couldn't speak to explain what was happening to her. I feared she was having a heart attack.

“Dina, are you okay?” I called out to her. “Deen?”

The look in her eyes cycled between terror and lifelessness.

I opened her jacket. “Dina? Dina!”

I cradled her in my arms and rushed her down the long narrow hallway to lay her in bed on the opposite end of the house. Carrying her was difficult. Each of her labored breaths was like a seizure. It rocked her in my arms, jerking her body against my chest. Once or twice I thought I might drop her.

When I reached the bedroom, I laid her down in the covers and dialed my dear friend Dr. Clifton Lacy, the commissioner of health. He immediately saw the problem for what it was—a panic attack, most likely brought on by all the pressures, not a heart attack at all, thank God.

Lacy offered to drive over from Highland Park, but instead I called Dr. Janet Neglia, a friend who is assistant director of Student Health Services at Princeton University nearby. She rushed over with a sedative and spent
many hours with us that night, holding our fracturing family together. I will always remember her for this kindness.

With Janet's help, Dina managed to sleep through the night. Not me. I lay awake beside her, consumed with worry and guilt for bringing this trauma on her. Her suffering tore me to pieces.

 

UNABLE TO SLEEP, I PASSED THE NIGHT TRYING TO IMAGINE WHAT
our lives would look like once we'd put this all behind us. There would be a divorce and complicated negotiations about raising our daughter. I knew Dina would find a good position in the working world; her time as first lady had showcased her many talents, and her biggest contributions were yet to come. But I prayed that she'd also find happiness and, with luck, maybe even the strength in her heart to stop being angry. Could she forgive me, I wondered? Not easily. At least one day she might understand why I did what I did.

For my future, I forced myself to imagine a career in public service that didn't involve elected office. I doubt that it's possible to live as a totally integrated person and succeed in the backrooms of America's political system. That, more than my sexuality, would prevent a comeback. Nonetheless, I hoped to find a place in public life where I could perform a valuable service for children, where I could be uncompromised and of use.

Mostly, I allowed myself to picture a life organized in harmony with my heart—the kind of life my friend Curtis had imagined for me: “When the words in your mouth and the actions of your hands and the feelings of your heart are one and the same, you're a whole person, you're integrated, and there's integrity in your life.”

I fantasized about being in love, really in love—ordinary, boring, romantic love, the kind that takes you into old age, the kind my parents still have. Frankl considered love the foundation of all meaning, the highest truth to which we can aspire. In his mind always, in the darkest of his days without hope, was the luminous image of his lover, his wife. “Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart:
The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

In my love was my humanness, the meaning of life.

The thought of finding love gave me comfort, which in turn gave me strength to endure these difficult days. As Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “He who has a
why
to live for can bear with almost any
how.
”

 

MY SISTER SHARON WAS CONCERNED ABOUT MY WELL-BEING, PARTICULARLY
my inability to sleep. She checked in on me every day. Reclaiming my relationship with her was an essential part of how I survived these days. She was also among the most critical of what I'd done. “You've been through a trauma,” she told me. “You need to get some help for that, you need to find a therapist. But I have to say this, you also need to realign your moral compass.”

If anybody else had tried telling me that in the first days after my announcement, I would have been defensive. Some things you can only hear from a sibling whose love for you is unconditional. Of course, she was right.

I called Trinity Church, the Episcopalian parish in Princeton, and asked the lead pastor there to see me for spiritual counseling. I couldn't imagine seeing a Roman Catholic priest; not now. All the years I'd spent sitting in those pews, listening to the Church's pointlessly cruel war against gays and lesbians, had helped drive me into self-denial and self-loathing. For a long time I didn't even see the hypocrisy of my actions. Coming out of my closet changed that.

Not everybody fractures the way I did. The damage takes many forms. In its relentless rigidity on sexual matters, the Church hierarchy had established unrealistic norms and standards I could not live up to, much as I tried. While I deeply loved the Church and its traditions, I realized that the Church had checkmated me into a posture of dishonesty from the time I was in eighth grade. It may be that I never once gave a fully honest confession. Ironically, all I wanted to be was faithful, but for a gay person, the Church made that impossible.

Father Leslie Smith was a godsend. He began my very slow process toward establishing an honest—and for once really meaningful—relationship with God.

Lori Kennedy showered both me and Dina with the kind of support we
needed through this time. But my heart and soul needed more active intervention. Luckily, I found Dr. Richard Leedes at the Princeton Counseling Center, whose demeanor and guidance were deeply soothing. Also helpful to me was a book Jamie gave me,
Stranger Among Friends,
written by Clinton insider David Mixner. The book moved me so much that I had my secretary locate a phone number for the author—on a tour of Holland—so that I could call to thank him. I was stunned at how closely his emotional experiences as a young gay kid in New Jersey, where he grew up in poverty, mirrored my own in the working class.

But none of this was working to settle my mind or return my sleep cycles to normal. Being an overachiever, I vowed to try harder. I was going to recover from this tumult in my life with hard work and diligence.

“You're not doing it right,” Ray Lesniak told me one day. Alone among my friends from politics, Ray called me constantly. We prayed together, on the phone and in person. He saw right through any façade I tried hiding behind.

On the day of my announcement, Ray gave me a book called
The Twelve Steps: A Spiritual Journey (A Working Guide for Healing).
I had always thought of the steps as being for alcoholics or addicts. Ray, who had always enjoyed his red wines in moderation and never went in for drugs, opened my eyes. “It's a route to the Divine,” he explained. “We're all in recovery from something. For me, it's about being the adult child of a dysfunctional family. I'm addicted to many things—mostly control. I've got this need to be in control of everything and everybody. You have the same addiction. Being governor only made it worse.”