MONTCLAIR, N.J. (AP) – Who saw it coming? Outside New Jersey, it’s safe to say, pretty much no one. But as quickly as you can say “live on CNN,” it became part of the national conversation. And understandably so.
By any measure, it was extraordinary: a sitting governor, live on national television, coming out as a “gay American” and resigning. The political theater acted out by New Jersey’s James E. McGreevey was an odd product of the season in which it unfolded – a holy-cow moment that united scripted politics, a whiff of reality television and the debate over the place of gays in society.
Squarely between the 2004 Democratic and Republican conventions, with the American public braced for meticulously calibrated political messages, here was a burst of the ragged and the real: a man in public life making a personally shattering announcement, then striding from the podium leaving New Jerseyans and TV viewers in disbelief.
And the way he did it – a personal revelation delivered in a crisp, three-minute announcement obviously prepared down to the letter, if hastily – was received as remarkable as well.
“We’re in a period now where most of the political speech we’re hearing seems like it’s come fresh out of the laboratory – tested, retested, adjusted, packaged,” said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television. “And then out of left field, with no drum roll, this guy comes and delivers what appears to be a very candid speech that ends in a resignation. He pretty much puts it all out there.”
McGreevey’s problem is more salacious than that of another chief executive from the New York metropolitan area, Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, who quit in June facing ethics accusations. McGreevey’s saga is “a question of sexuality and the public person,” said David Rebovich, a political scientist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J. “The psychobiographers are going to have a field day.”
On regional talk radio and television news Friday, announcers invoked the Kobe Bryant and Laci Peterson cases, the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Richard M. Nixon’s famous 1952 “Checkers” speech. “It makes “The Sopranos’ look like “Ozzie & Harriet,”‘ said Jim Gearhart, a talk-show host on New Jersey 101.5 radio.
That’s hyperbole; after all, nobody got whacked. But the attempts to parse McGreevey’s public disclosure underscored the fluid historical moment in which America now exists – where television and reality dance a delicate dance, where politics often bleeds into Hollywood. Add an election-year campaign season and the country’s deep obsession with seeing fellow citizens twist in the wind in various personal situations cooked up for reality TV, and you have an event that some say will be remembered far beyond the average news cycle – in part because of McGreevey’s appearance of candor.
“It was a textbook example of how someone should communicate to the public. To us, it was a home run,” said Catherine A. Bolton, who runs the 28,000-member Public Relations Society of America, the world’s largest organization of PR professionals. “The basic public-relations advice is very simple: Get the truth out, get the negative story out, and acknowledge where there have been problems,” she said. “But to get a leader or a CEO to do that is the hardest thing in the world.”
The question of McGreevey’s homosexuality itself is certainly an ingredient in how the disclosure will be assessed. His announcement came the same day that the California Supreme Court voided the 4,000 same-sex marriages sanctioned in San Francisco earlier this year, and his situation lends an entirely new dimension to the debate over gays’ role in society – for both sides.
“A lot of us who’ve struggled with that at some point in our lives, really connected with that,” said Steven Fisher at Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization. “He could’ve equivocated, he could’ve stayed a politician. … Instead, we saw an eloquent human being.”
It seems clear that McGreevey and his handlers took a page from Nixon, who – accused of benefiting personally from campaign donations as a vice-presidential candidate in 1952, two decades before Watergate – came forward to address the allegations. “I want to tell you my side of the case,” he said.
He went into details of his childhood, his wife, his children, and he vowed that one gift – a dog named Checkers, loved by his daughter, Tricia – wouldn’t be sent back. And Nixon said he had not taken the expedient route.
“It isn’t easy to come before a nationwide audience and air your life as I’ve done,” he said, elaborating on an earlier point: “The usual political thing to do when charges are made against you is to either ignore them or to deny them without giving details.”
Nixon came back, and we all know that story. Bill Clinton’s star still shines for many Americans, despite his insistence that “I did not have sex with that woman.” What of McGreevey? This may be a country where honesty is appreciated as a fundamental trait – think George Washington and the cherry tree or Honest Abe – but that sometimes goes only so far, especially if more details emerge.
“The people of New Jersey will be sorting out the truth for quite a while now,” The Star-Ledger in Newark said in an editorial Friday. And, it lamented of McGreevey, “he will be recalled as the governor who confessed to an adulterous affair with another man and then, smiling, walked out of the room with his wife at his side.”
AP-ES-08-13-04 1515EDT
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