McGreevey's judgment
led to eventual demise
EDITORIAL, Home News
Tribune Online, May 28, 2006
The region is abuzz after the release
of a few pages of James McGreevey's upcoming memoir revealed the former governor
had at one time trolled highway rest stops and bookstores looking for gay
partners.
Those salacious details appear to be out of keeping, however, with the book's
general tenor. Titled "The Confession," the tome is said to be a frank and
brutal account of McGreevey's efforts to live as a straight man in order to
prosper as a politician. If quoted excerpts are any indication, the former
governor does appear more humbled and more honest than he ever was as an elected
official. And yet it is still not clear that McGreevey gets to the heart
of the issue.
Many have noted that what drove McGreevey from office was not his homosexuality,
or even his extramarital affair, but the fact that he gave his lover an
important job for which he was unqualified. Golan Cipel's appointment as
terrorism chief was disrespectful to the office, the people McGreevey swore to
protect and all of those who died on Sept. 11; it also was dangerous. Did
McGreevey really think terrorism protection mattered so little that he could
give the job to someone who could not and should not do it? McGreevey is
right, however, in recognizing that his homosexuality, or more precisely his
closeted sexuality, is central to his life as a politician.
It has become quite clear in the months since he announced himself as a gay
American that many voters in New Jersey care little about McGreevey's sexuality.
His poll numbers increased after his announcement and public sympathy has
remained remarkably high given the mess McGreevey made of his shortened term.
There may be a stigma still associated with homosexuality; nevertheless voters
in many parts of the nation have elected gay politicians with little fanfare.
But McGreevey was not interested in what the voters might think. He was
interested in winning the hearts and minds of the state's political power
brokers. And in those circles McGreevey believes sexuality does matter.
McGreevey recounts that in order to keep up the illusion that he was
heterosexual, he frequently visited strip clubs, where he ran into many other
aspiring politicians. He is quoted as saying that sex and politics are
inextricably linked.
If McGreevey's book helps destroy the corrupt, old-boy system by which he
prospered, then he will have gone some distance toward repairing the damage his
governorship wrought; it also would be somewhat ironic. McGreevey took
office proclaiming he would change the way Trenton did business. Had he
been prepared to be the person he seems to believe himself to be — gay, yes, but
also moral, devout and ethical — he might have succeeded. Instead, he
simply became the most obvious and skilled practitioner of the deceitful system
he pretended to hate.
In the most astonishing quote from the released excerpt, McGreevey says he was
prepared to keep his sexuality secret forever. "I knew I would have to lie
for the rest of my life — and I knew I was capable of it," McGreevey writes.
"The knowledge gave me a feeling of terrible power."
When you are capable of lying about a central part of your identity, you are
capable of lying about anything. McGreevey's journey may have been
personally agonizing. But he is not the victim. All of those around
him — wives, daughters, parents, friends, citizens — are. And unless his
book acknowledges his terrible abuse of his "'terrible power," then he has yet
to recognize what a disgraceful governor, and person, he was.
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