Quotes of the Day
His heart was in a constant, turbulent riot ... Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet ... They were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that about his great American faker, Jay Gatsby. Another faker, New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, last week finally smashed the rock upon which his world was founded: "I began to question what an acceptable reality really meant for me," he said at one of the most extraordinary news conferences — at turns lyrical, philosophical and evasive — in U.S. political history. "Were there realities from which I was running?" And then his answer: "My truth is that I am a gay American." That thunderclap was quickly followed by two more: McGreevey said that he had had an extramarital affair with a man and that he will resign Nov. 15. McGreevey neglected to mention that he unburdened himself because he expected the man to sue him for sexual harassment.
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So ends the career of an ambitious New Democrat, a man who slaughtered his Republican opponent in 2001 and had long ago set an eye on Washington. But if this is a story of one man's dashed hopes — a man whose parents called him "our lad of great expectations"--it is also the story of a state's. McGreevey never fulfilled the promise he made in his inaugural address to "change the way Trenton does business." Actually, if you add up all the scandals involving McGreevey and the men and women of his inner circle, you could say he did change the way the persistently corrupt capital operates: he made it worse.
And yet the scandal that got him, the one that led to his sudden fall, was tangled up with homosexuality. For gay Americans, the Governor's words recalled the blistering shame and crushing fear that can accompany an adolescent's realization that he is gay. "I often felt ambivalent about myself," said McGreevey, who turned 47 this month. He compensated by being a good Catholic kid, a member of a pious high school group called the God Squad, according to the New York Times. He toiled fiercely — to transfer from Catholic University to Columbia; to become an assemblyman, mayor and state senator; and finally — after two grinding campaigns — to take the oath as Governor. "Plan your work; work your plan," his father — a former Marine drill sergeant — had taught him.
Many Americans, particularly those who have suffered in the closet, sympathized. "I don't know how anyone could watch the Governor and not feel sad," says Matt Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "What this situation represents is why people don't come out — because coming out can bring everything that you've worked for down around your head."
But is that what brought it all down? Many gay politicians serve openly today, from Republican Congressman Jim Kolbe of Arizona to Oregon Supreme Court Justice Rives Kistler. And countless straight politicians could tell McGreevey that a career can perish even when your secret passions are heterosexual. Just ask former Governor Paul Patton of Kentucky, who had to abandon plans for a 2004 Senate race after he was accused of misusing his office to help a woman with whom he had had an affair. Or Jack Ryan, the millionaire who was running for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois this year until tawdry allegations from his divorce papers hit the airwaves. Or Robert Livingston, who was to be Speaker of the House in 1998 but resigned his seat because of alleged adulteries.
Like so many other gays who have come out, McGreevey was plainly relieved after the news conference. "When he came back into that room yesterday, I saw this great sense of a burden being lifted," says New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority president George Zoffinger, who has been friends with McGreevey for 15 years. Zoffinger says he didn't know McGreevey was gay until the day the Governor announced it. "He holds this in for 20 years of public life. Can you imagine having to tell your wife and family? They did not know." McGreevey told them only the day before he told the nation, according to Zoffinger.
But as others pointed out, McGreevey's act of revelation also functioned as an act of concealment. "McGreevey did a good job saying 'I'm a gay American' and making a hero of himself," says one of his former advisers, "but that's not the story"--at least not the whole story. The whole story is found not just in the Governor's inner turmoil but in the slosh and intrigue of New Jersey politics.
Jim McGreevey met Golan Cipel (Pronounced Tsi-ple, rhymes with ripple) on a junket to Israel in 2000, when McGreevey was mayor of Woodbridge, N.J. At the time, McGreevey was a rising Democratic star — mayor of the state's sixth largest city and the man who had three years earlier come within a whisper of unseating Governor Christine Todd Whitman. Among the stops on the tour, sponsored in part by the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest, New Jersey's biggest Jewish philanthropy, was the city of Rishon le-Ziyyon, south of Tel Aviv. Cipel then worked as the city's spokesman. According to MetroWest's vice president, Max Kleinman, McGreevey met Cipel, who is 12 years younger, at a reception.
They hit it off immediately, says former New Jersey Jewish News editor David Twersky, who later became friends with Cipel. In the late 1990s, Cipel had worked as a press officer at the Israeli consulate in New York City. Gideon Mark, who was Cipel's boss there, says Cipel handled both national and New Yorkarea news outlets, which would have given him some familiarity with New Jersey. "He was talented but not brilliant," says Colette Avital, the consul general at the time. Another person who worked with Cipel back then says he "was the kind of guy who was politically ambitious ... He wanted to rub shoulders" with dignitaries.
He got his chance to do so with McGreevey, who "saw something in me," Cipel would later tell Twersky. Within months, the Israeli had relocated to New Jersey to work for McGreevey's gubernatorial campaign as liaison to the state's Jewish community. "It was a strange choice," says someone who held a senior position in the campaign. "He was an Israeli and obviously a Jew, but that didn't mean he knew anything about the Jewish community of New Jersey." Cipel's relocation to New Jersey was facilitated by real estate impresario Charles Kushner, a top contributor to McGreevey and the Democratic Party. In addition to sponsoring Cipel's U.S. visa, Kushner gave the Israeli a p.r. job worth $30,000 to supplement his meager campaign salary.
After McGreevey won the election, he blundered his way through the beginning of his term, and has presided — to this day — over an administration beset by ethical lapses. McGreevey's commerce secretary, chief of staff and state police director have all departed under various conflict-of-interest charges. And Kushner was recently charged in a bizarre sex scandal; he allegedly sent his sister a tape of her husband having sex with a prostitute in an effort to gain leverage over his brother-in-law, who was cooperating in an investigation of Kushner's finances. Finally, McGreevey was caught on an FBI tape using the word "Machiavelli." Prosecutors said it was a code word to trigger a bribery scheme, but the Governor said it was merely a literary allusion.
In this pageant of alleged malfeasance, Golan Cipel was the first sign of trouble. The day McGreevey took his oath of office — Jan. 15, 2002--he quietly named Cipel his special assistant on homeland security. Although it was just four months after 9/11, Cipel did not undergo an extensive background check. Cipel had served as only a low-ranking officer in the Israeli navy and had no counterterrorism expertise. Despite his thin qualifications, he received a $110,000 salary. When reporters started asking questions, McGreevey refused to order a full vetting of Cipel and wouldn't make him available for interviews. After it was revealed that Cipel couldn't even obtain federal clearance to see top-secret data because he is a foreigner, he left the homeland-security post for an undefined "special counsel" job in McGreevey's office. He quit state government altogether in August 2002.
Rumors had gone around Woodbridge for years that McGreevey might be gay. Even before controversy broke over Cipel's homeland-security job, at least two reporters had asked McGreevey about the gossip. "That old thing," the Governor told Twersky some time in the summer of 2001. "I can't believe they're bringing that up."
Before Cipel departed, McGreevey defended the young man as "someone who thinks with a different set of eyes," according to the Bergen Record. It was a deeply mixed metaphor, but McGreevey was interested in more than Cipel's eyes anyway. Though the Governor did not name Cipel in his coming-out speech last week, his advisers told reporters that Cipel was the guy McGreevey was talking about when he said he had "engaged in an adult consensual affair with another man."
But the well-respected Israeli newspaper Ha'Aretz quoted Cipel's lawyers Alan Lowy and Rachel Yosevitz as saying that Cipel is heterosexual and that there was no affair. At a rain-drenched press conference in Manhattan on Friday, Lowy read a statement from his client portraying the Governor as something of a sexual aggressor. "While employed by one of the most powerful politicians in the country, New Jersey Governor McGreevey, I was the victim of repeated sexual advances by him," the statement said. "When I finally dared to reject Governor McGreevey's advances, the retaliatory actions taken by him and members of his administration were nothing short of abuse and intimidation."
McGreevey's press secretary denied any strong-arming, and late Friday the two sides traded bitter accusations. McGreevey's team spread the story that in July Cipel sent word to the Governor that if he didn't get a $5 million settlement, he would noisily file a sexual-harassment lawsuit. Another version of events — reported Friday on the local NBC affiliate — says Cipel sought not money for himself but political favors for Touro College, where Kushner, his visa sponsor, is a board member. Kushner attorney Benjamin Brafman says he "absolutely, categorically" rejects the "seedy rumor" that Kushner is behind Cipel's suit. The Governor's people say they eventually came to view Cipel's demands as extortion and reported him and Lowy to the FBI, which is investigating. For his part, Lowy, who like the Governor didn't take questions, says McGreevey's representatives offered his client hush money "without provocation." Cipel has filed no lawsuit so far, but Lowy didn't rule one out.
When McGreevey got married for the second time in 2000, he and his wife Dina had their wedding reception on a hotel roof in Washington, according to Philadelphia magazine, even though neither is from that city. From the top of the Hay-Adams hotel, you can toss a cat onto the White House lawn. Jim and Dina were clearly an ambitious couple; she has been a mover in New Jersey's large Portuguese community. What does his coming out mean for her?
Predictably, Dina is "heartsick," according to a McGreevey adviser. But, he says, it was her decision to stand by her husband at the news conference. She wore a slightly vacant, utterly immovable expression, but she was next to him. His first wife Kari Schutz is also there for him, in her way. From her home in Canada, she was telling reporters last week that her former husband is a good father and a supportive ex. Asked if she knew he was gay, she told TIME, "We've always had open communication."
Over the past few weeks, as the threat of a Cipel lawsuit mounted, McGreevey had to decide whether he would just come out of the closet or also resign. Some advisers, including Zoffinger, argued that he should try to weather the scandal. In the end, however, "[McGreevey] didn't want to go through what Bill Clinton went through with the impeachment process," says Zoffinger. "He didn't want to put the state through 16 more months of debate about this issue."
McGreevey apparently didn't mind putting the state through three more months of debate, since he's not actually leaving until November. The delay is nakedly political — by waiting so long, McGreevey ensures that the state cannot hold a special election on Election Day. A fellow Democrat, state senate president Richard Codey, will finish out McGreevey's term as Governor, which lasts until January 2006 (New Jersey has no Lieutenant Governor).
McGreevey has worked hard for the Democrats for many years, and the timing of his departure will be his final gift to the party as Governor. But all his work — what has it meant? "He never achieved an approval rating that was close to 50% because of this litany of lapses of judgment," says Ingrid Reed of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. McGreevey's father once told him, "Don't worry about being liked. Worry about being respected." McGreevey could well leave office with little prospect of either.
- John Cloud