ShareSurvival of the Richest
The two men fighting to become the most powerful governor in the nation slog through allegations and voter apathy. So why do they want the job?
By Michael Moran
It’s 7:45 on a summer Sunday evening, and a well-dressed crowd has gathered at the Livingston estate of Miles Berger, an RCA board member and the president of the Robert Treat Hotel in Newark. A stout, tanned man with an avuncular smile, Berger works the room diligently as aides to U.S. senator Jon Corzine assure him—and, through him, 200 people sipping cocktails in his sunroom—that the evening’s headliner is just minutes away. As a few impatient couples make for the door, Frank Pallone Jr., the Democratic congressman from Long Branch, gamely reels them back in, extending introductory remarks, which began some twenty minutes earlier, into a question-and-answer period, then going around the room telling salty anecdotes about the Democratic luminaries in the crowd—Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo Jr., county Democratic party boss Phillip Thigpen, East Orange mayor Robert L. Bowser. But still no Corzine. “We’ve been running behind all day,” an aide whispers. “It’s been one of those days.”
At five minutes to eight, as it starts to rain, the senator’s platinum-colored Chevrolet Tahoe pulls up. Already this day, Corzine has been to church in Camden County, spoken in Burlington and Middlesex counties, and picnicked in Somerset County. Now he emerges looking wan but determined and thrusts out his hand even before crossing the Berger threshold. He stumbles on the doorjamb, barely keeping his balance as aides rush to his side. “That’s some entrance, huh?” he says, eliciting a few laughs.
How in God’s name did master of the universe Jon Corzine stumble into door-to-door New Jersey politics? His biography is reminiscent of another recent New Jersey senator—roots on a struggling Illinois farm, working his way through the University of Illinois, where he played on the basketball team, a stint in the Marine Corps and a night-school MBA from the University of Chicago—and he appears to have vaulted all the obstacles that life threw at him. But rather than leading the New York Knicks, as Bill Bradley did, Corzine emerged at the top of another New York institution. At Goldman Sachs, the most powerful brokerage house on Wall Street, he ultimately reached a level where someone noticed, and then exploited, a chink in his armor, ousting him in a bitter 1998 boardroom coup.
Corzine rejects the Bradley comparison. “I really didn’t have the jump shot,” he says dismissively. Seven years after his fall from Wall Street’s heights, Corzine is a man with no financial hurdles to clear and a comfortable spot in that ultimate men’s club, the U.S. Senate, with charter jets and limousines and the power to subpoena witnesses. Why, then, is he traipsing about the New Jersey headlands in a Chevy?
“I’m actually a pretty dangerous driver,” Corzine says. “I could probably lose the election just on my driving habits alone.” He delivers the line with a smile that is authentic and broad, a smile so far absent from the news photos and television appearances of his campaign. In spite of his being an odds-on favorite and a man without a political fund-raising care in the world, his oft-dismissed Republican rival in the 2005 gubernatorial race, Doug Forrester, has done a marvelous job of wiping that smile off Corzine’s face.
Forrester still may be a long shot, but events have conspired with him to reduce Corzine’s once unassailable position. Beginning in mid-July, after emerging sluggishly from the rugged Republican primaries, Forrester managed to turn his campaign around and unleash a series of broadsides at Corzine, some of them direct accusations from Forrester allies, others newspaper reports that raised questions about Corzine’s character, his political agenda, and his commitment to tackling corruption.
“If Jon thought he could move from Wall Street to the Senate to the governor’s mansion and stay at 36,000 feet, he knows better now,” says a Corzine confidant. “You could fly over the state going from Wall Street to Washington. But now he’s got to battle it out in the trenches, and he knows that means the mud is going to fly.”
The mud is coming thick and fast. In mid-July, Forrester began publicly questioning Corzine’s political and business relationships, among them his ties to Charles Kushner, a convicted felon with whom he had partnered in 2003 in a failed effort to keep the New Jersey Nets from moving to Brooklyn; George Norcross, the South Jersey Democratic party leader whose business dealings are being probed by federal investigators; and former U.S. senator Robert Torricelli, the man who recruited Corzine to run for the Senate in 2000.
Forrester has been the focus of allegations about his own campaign financing. But as the summer wore on, he showed no signs of chastening, pouncing when Corzine campaign manager Susan Bass-Levin was named among congressional candidates from the last election cycle whose fund-raising and accounting reports were under Federal Elections Commission scrutiny.
All in a day’s work in New Jersey politics, right? Yet the heat rose precipitously in August, when newspapers revealed that in 2002 Corzine extended—and then forgave—a $470,000 loan to union president Carla Katz of Communications Workers of America Local 1034, whom Corzine dated for two years, including a period before his 33-year marriage to Joanne Corzine ended in divorce in November 2003. The loan, which Katz used to purchase a home, apparently was arranged during Corzine’s separation from Joanne, and while nothing in the loan appears to be illegal—it was documented as a gift late last year and Corzine paid the required taxes on it—the GOP quickly assailed it as a conflict of interest, since Katz’s union remains a powerful force in Trenton.
For a man like Corzine, it was a nightmare come true. “The whole script of Corzine’s campaign was the White Knight thing, the guy who has already slain the dragon in the big city who is now going to slap some sense into Trenton,” says a senior Democratic Party activist who worked with Corzine during his time as head of the Democratic National Committee’s 2004 fund- raising effort. “Now that’s a bit tarnished.”
Corzine no longer could decline comment on the grounds that his “private life was private,” as he had told a reporter the previous year. “I had a serious relationship with Carla that ended, but certainly at the time when that mortgage was lent, it was serious, and at the time I thought I had the possibility of being in a long-term relationship,” he told the New York Times.
However the Corzine camp spins it, the Katz loan story put Corzine right were he did not want to be: trading barbs with the earthbound Forrester, whose relentless attacks on the senator’s character had paved the way for even the most timid media outlets to delve into Corzine’s private life.
In the wake of the incident, few passed up the opportunity to cite the angry statement issued by his ex-wife when the divorce became final: that “my husband’s conduct” led to their divorce. “Before that loan story, only a few people in the state probably knew anything about Jon Corzine’s private life,” says the Democratic committee official. “A divorce is an ugly thing, period....The timing of it all will not be easy to explain.”
Corzine’s reputation as a cool, calm customer got a serious testing in the summer heat, but he largely refused to be drawn into a shootout with the underdog. Even after the Katz loan was discovered, he held a ten-point lead in the polls, and he remains stubbornly focused on issues rather than counter-attacks. That’s not to say he’s been docile. “I’m not one to disarm unilaterally,” Corzine says. “I learned a lot about that during the last Senate cycle. I saw some incredible nonsense asserted about people, that didn’t have a shred of truth.”
Instead, Corzine depended on allies among New Jersey’s House delegation, many of whom are vying for his job should he become governor and win the power to appoint someone to serve out his Senate term. “It goes back to Kerry, to the Swift Boat stuff, to the fact that we can’t just allow ourselves to be attacked and attacked and attacked,” says Pallone. “If Forrester is being hypocritical, we have to hit back. It’s a response to the very negative campaign that they’ve made.” At times the counter-assault is delivered by Hudson County Democratic congressman Robert Menendez or Congressman Bill Pascrell, the former mayor of Paterson. Rarely is Corzine even present when his Democratic colleagues decide to hit back.
The Katz affair notwithstanding, Corzine has managed to distance himself from the fray and pound home his message, which no doubt will form the crux of a multimillion-dollar broadcast campaign this autumn: New Jersey is broken, its prosperity is at risk, and farm-boy-cum-Marine-cum-investment-banker-cum-millionaire senator Jon Corzine is just the guy to fix it.
Corzine’s priority list starts with homeland security. “Staying focused on managing the safety and security of the state is the most important need,” he says. “New Jersey is one of those places where homeland security absolutely has to be at the top of the agenda, and that means tighter regulation of chemical plants, nuclear power stations, rail and mass transportation of all varieties. Anytime you talk about this, you’re talking about bringing federal money in and making sure it’s spent wisely and efficiently. That’s the real challenge.”
Corzine notes that this year he and Senate colleague Frank Lautenberg won nearly double the funding they had landed in previous years for transportation projects and homeland security initiatives. But in New Jersey’s corrupt public sector, “the ethical climate is completely focused on people using public life for their own benefit as opposed to serving government,” he says. “Too many people look at state jobs as a way to make a living, as opposed to trying to help the people they serve. We can’t afford that now.”
In spite of his five years in the Senate, at times Corzine still sounds like a political outsider, a holdover from his years on Wall Street: “Politicians have over-promised what they can deliver with respect to revenues, and now we have an incredible over-promising with regard to tax cuts....All these issues require deep management skills....Clearly we’ll have to clean up corruption....At the end of the day, the only way New Jersey is going to get out of the box is to grow the economy.”
Corzine’s less conventional proposals include stricter enforcement of laws guaranteeing women equal pay, which he also sees as a way of augmenting family budgets; an end to the fast-track development approvals instituted by former governor James E. McGreevey, which have driven a wedge between Democrats and environmentalists; and instituting an Edison Innovation Fund, to help finance telecommunications and other high-tech projects while keeping related jobs inside the state.
Railing against the establishment, pouring scorn on a corrupt state capitol run by the heirs to the disgraced McGreevey administration—this was supposed to be Forrester’s turf. The Forrester campaign seems to be betting that the last thing New Jersey voters will tolerate is another Democratic politician with personal baggage. Forrester sounded just that note in August, saying that the Katz affair “suggest [s] an all too familiar pattern in New Jersey of public officials entangling themselves in relationships that are not private matters but in direct conflict with the public interest.”
But scandal isn’t likely to stick to Corzine, and even some in the GOP are skeptical of the long-term gains of focusing on their opponent’s private life. His affair apparently began after all his children—Jeffrey, a 22-year-old college student, Joshua, a 29-year-old real estate agent, and Jen, a 34-year-old small-business owner, had left the nest.
“If this can level the playing field, then so be it,” says a Mercer County Republican official. “Forrester certainly wants to keep the Democratic base from coming out. But I don’t think you can win against the $60-million-dollar man by branding him as ‘a divorced American.’ Too many people have been through that mill themselves.... There’s more mileage in looking at who he is than in trying to redefine him.”
Corzine is one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate. Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group that advocates deep spending cuts, rates only 4 others in the 100-member Senate less favorably than Corzine. (A half-dozen senators, including Lautenberg, tie with him for that distinction.) The National Association of Manufacturers says that Corzine supported its preferred position on bills only 9 percent of the time in the last congressional session. On the other hand, the AFL-CIO gave him a 100 percent rating in 2004, as did Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal interest group.
The Mercer County official, who supported the more conservative Bret Schundler in the GOP primary, says that Corzine is too far left for the state. “I can’t understand why this isn’t the crux of Forrester’s attack,” says the pol.
Corzine makes no apologies for his Senate record, emphasizing his work getting compensation for the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks and money to upgrade and secure New Jersey’s transportation and utilities that are vulnerable to attack and strained by overuse. He says the idea that he is some kind of pointy-headed liberal doesn’t jibe with his résumé. “I think people know where I stand on things, and that I stand up for what I believe in,” he says. “I was one of 23 people who voted against the war, because I didn’t think a sound, consistent case was made that would stand up to the kind of scrutiny that a tough decision we face in the business world would be subjected to,” says Corzine. “I come out of that world, where you’re judged on what you accomplish.”
To Corzine, this is the turf that campaigns should be fought on. He lists “bringing up three great kids” as his most important personal achievement. It’s the image—the man of substance, the self-made man, the father of three, the leader unafraid of tough challenges, the former athlete aging gracefully—that Corzine would like to put across. But he seems resigned that neither the issues nor his own personal virtues will dominate the campaign. “I find the kind of Swift Boat attacks, this concentration on personal characteristics, is not the one that the voters want to hear,” he says. “We try to destroy people, and sometimes the targets aid and abet this by throwing gasoline on the fire.... What you’re trying to do in a campaign is to interview for a job so people know who you are and how you’ll respond to issues.”
Old friends and colleagues say they wince at the stories about Corzine’s personal life; his name is still seen in The New York Social Diary, a Web site that tracks high-society doings, perhaps a holdover from his Goldman Sachs days in the 1990s. They point out that since those days, Corzine has spread his wealth to charities throughout New York and New Jersey via a foundation in his name. He also gives heavily to his alma mater, whose basketball team he follows fervently.
“It can’t be much fun to be dragged through the mud like that,” says Terry O’Toole, a Short Hills resident and Corzine friend who retired from Goldman Sachs last spring. “At a place like Goldman, you have successes and setbacks, especially on the trading side, where Jon was. You have to be able to trust that what you’re doing is the right thing and that the goals you have set are the right ones. I think that’s basically where Jon comes from. And so I can’t see him being scared off by this.”
O’Toole recalls Corzine in a pick-up basketball game at a Goldman company picnic in the early 1990s. “It was about 90 degrees, and we were dying,” he says. “And here’s this guy—the boss—and he’s ten years older than me, and he’s running the court, charging like crazy. That’s just the way he is.” Friends say that, all things being equal, Corzine would much rather pass on a campaign stop in favor of a Saturday afternoon watching college basketball in his D.C. apartment or Hoboken condominium.
If Corzine regrets the way his career ended at Goldman Sachs, he doesn’t concede the point. Having taken the firm’s reigns during a rocky time in 1994—some say he saved it during a meltdown in the bond market—Corzine went on to fight a grueling battle with his partners to take the firm public. In 1998 he was overthrown by a secret vote of the board of directors after rival directors organized an uprising while he was on vacation. Friends describe Corzine’s ouster as a painful experience for him, and at least one suggested it may have sparked the kind of mid-life soul-searching that ultimately led to the demise of his marriage. Others, though, stress that he maintained his cool throughout that challenging period. “I think he’s able to operate extremely well under all sort of pressures,” says Barry L. Zubrow, a former Goldman executive and Corzine friend of 25 years who lives in Harding. “And that’s the way you get the best decisions.” One way or another, Corzine’s decision to take the company public has proven prescient, with the stock now trading at a historic high, some 30 points above its 1999 peg of $75 per share. “The irony, of course, is that the very people who ousted Jon have benefited most from his decisions,” says a Goldman insider. “He was dead right.”
Members of the Wall Street crowd, many of whom would likely support Forrester if not for their personal ties to Corzine, see the effort to raise questions about his character as a dry hole. “Look, if there was going to be something slick or bad or really scandalous about him, with him being a Democrat and the former Goldman chief who are like the ultimate competitors, then you would have heard it by now,” says a managing director at Goldman Sachs archrival Morgan Stanley. “But you just don’t hear anything bad about him.” On the other hand, he says, “he certainly made no secret about his willingness to temper his views for the voters.”
The liberal tag that tends to drag candidates underwater has been ineffective so far. Derided by Republicans and criticized for spending a record $63 million to get elected to the Senate in 2000, Corzine remained far and away the most popular politician in New Jersey for much of his term. Lame-duck acting governor Richard J. Codey’s numbers are as strong as Corzine’s these days, but that’s a recent and likely fleeting phenomenon. As for class politics—the idea that he’s some remote rich guy—Corzine dismisses that as a mirage. Like other wealthy New Jersey politicians before him, including former governors Thomas H. Kean and Christine Todd Whitman, not to mention Lautenberg, Corzine counters the rich-guy argument by stressing New Jersey’s penchant for corrupting those beset with the financial burdens of mere mortals. “I don’t have an ax to grind. I’m not trying to enhance my financial position in life,” he says. “I think that allows me an objectivity to deal with these issues on ethics and governance in a disciplined, straightforward, and independent manner.”
Both Corzine and his supporters say they’re not surprised at the direction of the campaign. “The Republicans probably think they can’t win unless they tear the Democrats down, so most of their stuff has been negative. They’ll want to keep it negative and hope that voter turnout will be down,” says Pallone, “because they know that in New Jersey, if the voters show up, the Democrat wins.”
Corzine himself claims to bear no grudges about the recent spate of articles that question his private life. “What my opponent is trying to do is predictable. If you wanted to argue that corruption was a single-party issue, I guess it makes sense. But that fails to recognize that there were huge problems when the Republicans were in power and then walked out the door,” he says.
“Otherwise, though, I just don’t see it as a very forceful challenge. My opponent’s going to claim he has a better plan on property taxes, but it’s not realistic. And people, in the end, have had enough of being promised things that never materialize.”
By Henry Meyer
While other kids at Lawrence C. Curtis Intermediate School were home watching TV after school, young Doug Forrester was selling American flags door-to-door in his native Santa Clara, California. On weekends he and his father fished for trout and bass or camped in the mountains with the Boy Scouts. By age fourteen his skills had earned him the rank of Eagle Scout, which eludes 96 out of 100 scouts.
Forrester even found a way to marry his scouting and entrepreneurial instincts. A nature walk was an opportunity to collect pinecones and sprigs of mistletoe, which he could dress in red ribbon or decorate to sell as ornaments at holiday time. “For several years I just went from door-to-door selling things I made myself—holiday decorations, homemade wreaths, you name it,” Forrester says. “I remember doing very well with pipe cleaners formed into little angels. It was quite lucrative.” Little Doug’s lesson: Sell useful products at the right time with the proper presentation. At 52, Forrester has amassed a $50 million personal fortune by packaging and managing medical benefits for public-sector employees. Now he’s looking for an audience to sell himself as the Eagle Scout who can save New Jersey.
But Doug Forrester, GOP candidate, defies type. His is not just another story of a hotshot business whiz growing into a big-shot egoist primed for a mid-life dabble with politics. At 26, U.S. senator Jon Corzine, his gubernatorial rival, was working at a bank and sending off résumés to every Wall Street firm he knew of. At about the same age, Forrester, who had earned his master’s degree at Princeton Theological Seminary, was living in the parsonage of the Princeton Baptist Church, serving as an assistant pastor and delivering homilies about man’s relation to God. Nearly 30 years later, the dinner table at his family’s Mercer County home serves as an incubator for ideas, a place where he and his eldest son, Alex, conduct heated debates about issues of theology.
In an age in which George Bush conservatism rules the GOP, Forrester calls himself a middle-of-the-road Republican. His ceaseless talk about creating “good government policy” at times makes him sound like a member of the Democratic Leadership Council. Forrester is fond of citing the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, the twentieth-century theologian who struggled to reconcile Christian faith with modern political power in books such as Moral Man and Immoral Society, and he talks about having a mission and moral code, a “moral purity” he says is lacking in the Garden State’s political leaders.
Sitting in his campaign headquarters after a long day of parrying attacks from Corzine and other critics, a visibly tired Forrester explains his belief that he’s the one to save the state from corrupt politicians who are leading it to financial ruin. “I’m not into power for its own sake,” he says. “My interest in politics is directly related to what I understand to be the proper way to achieve justice and promote freedom. For years now, instead of making good public policy in this state, we have made decisions based on expedience. That has allowed corruption to grow freely, until we’re now at the point that New Jersey is in real danger.
“The danger is all around us. Politicians are giving needless contracts to their contributors when the state is broke. Programs are automatically renewed every year without review. In Newark they’re building hockey arenas for the sake of rich developers, when children in the city don’t have proper parks and playgrounds.” Forrester spits out the word hockey with a scowl. He’s either
truly angry or very well rehearsed.
His friends say that Forrester’s sermonettes won’t weaken, that the speeches reflect his ceaseless learning and thinking about government and his hopes for restoring a commitment to the moral footing that he believes has been lost in Trenton.
“I know it sounds corny, but Doug really cares about New Jersey,” says Albert Angrisani, a former Reagan administration official who runs a corporate consulting firm with offices in Princeton and Manhattan. “He thinks we’re on the verge of some really scary things happening here, and he wants to step in and stop them before we all get hurt. I can tell you he’s been thinking about this for at least the past fifteen years. He’s got a thick playbook.”
The Hail Mary play that Forrester has drawn up is a promise to cut property taxes. The savings, he says, will come in part by eliminating the “waste, fraud, and abuse” built into the system by corrupt politicians pandering to their contributors with no-bid, no-need government contracts. Democrats, pointing out that Forrester has failed to specify exactly where and how he would limit government, say that his projections are overly optimistic. Without providing details, Forrester says that he plans to do what no other politician has done: Bust open the books of each state agency and make administrators justify every expense. “We’re going into an economic death spiral because we can’t control government,” he says. “New Jersey needs to be put into rehab, and that’s not going to be a pleasant day.” Before Forrester’s self-proclaimed crusade can save New Jersey, it must overcome some big problems, not the least of which are self-inflicted.
His experience as an elected official is minimal. More than twenty years ago, Forrester served a five-year stint as a West Windsor committeeman and mayor, but his tenure was marred by a controversial 50 percent tax hike. Forrester insists that the money was needed to finish a town sewer project. But critics claim that he bungled the sewer project so badly, a tax hike was the only solution to cover the expense.
Some say Forrester can be an uncompromising know-it-all who listens to but rarely heeds the advice of others. In the 1980s, as director of the state Division of Pensions under Governor Thomas H. Kean, Forrester earned a reputation as a tight-fisted manager of the billions of dollars in state-worker retirement funds. Critics said he could be imperious to lawmakers who disagreed with him. During a 1989 public hearing, the late Democratic state senator Wynona Lipman exploded at Forrester’s tight control. “You’d almost think it was his money,” she said. Some Republicans, too, were put off by what one close associate calls Forrester’s “sense of righteousness.” “He sometimes acted like he was the only one who wanted to do right, and that put some people off,” one legislator says.
Forrester may be a natural-born salesman, but he’s not a natural politician. On the campaign trail, he can seem wooden and at times almost comically inscrutable. When he appeared before the Statehouse with a broom promising to sweep Trenton clean, observers said he looked like the American Gothic version of Oliver Wendell Douglas, the displaced millionaire from the 1960s sitcom Green Acres. When his baritone hits the lower registers, he sounds eerily like another moderate Republican from California, Richard Nixon. The point isn’t lost on critics who say he’s as out of step as the late ex-President was.
Forrester’s biggest hurdle, though, is neither his lack of political experience nor his stuffy style. Rather, it’s his increasingly controversial record as a businessman who built a fortune managing pharmacy benefits for public-sector employees. Late in July, the Philadelphia Inquirer revealed that Forrester’s company, BeneCard, had been built on no-bid contracts. About $160 million of BeneCard’s $200 million in annual revenue, the newspaper reported, comes from no-bid projects for towns, counties, and school districts across New Jersey. Many of those contracts were awarded by public officials who had benefited from Forrester’s substantial political donations; he’s given more than $500,000 to the state’s Republican politicians and organizations. It appeared that Forrester had built his company on the very same pay-to-play system he had pledged to dismantle. The Inquirer reported that Forrester also had finagled lucrative tax benefits by forming a subsidiary company, Heartland Fidelity Insurance, and registering it in Washington, D.C., even though the company’s clients were in New Jersey. The Heartland deal exposed Forrester to the possibility that all his political donations—some $11.5 million—are illegal; New Jersey forbids majority owners of insurance companies from making political donations. The investigation was in progress at press time.
Forrester’s summer swoon got grimmer when the Star-Ledger revealed that New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer was suing one of BeneCard’s major subcontractors, a firm called Express Scripts, for fraud; the company has denied pocketing $100 million in drug company rebates that should have gone to New York State. BeneCard itself settled two similar lawsuits, filed in 2002 on behalf of Hamilton Township and the city of Paterson, related to rebates that should have been passed on to the municipalities; as part of the settlement, BeneCard admitted no wrongdoing.
Forrester denies any personal impropriety regarding Express Scripts and accuses Democrats of distorting his corporate record. He dismisses any notion that BeneCard’s no-bid deals are improper. “The no-bid contracts that we see in New Jersey are hushed payoffs to political contributors for things we don’t even need. That is not what my contracts are,” he says. Forrester acknowledges that setting up his insurance company out of state brings tax benefits, arguing that because Heartland is not subject to New Jersey law, the arrangement in no way taints his campaign contributions. That policy end-run, critics say, is precisely what has drawn their ire.
“You can’t credibly campaign against corruption and pay-to-play politics when you’re getting no-bid contracts yourself,” says David Rebovich, director of Rider University’s Institute for New Jersey Politics. By early September, a probe by state campaign-finance regulators, requested by Forrester, continued.
Forrester’s crusade for statewide office isn’t his first. He railed against the system in his 2002 U.S. Senate race, when he ran comfortably ahead of incumbent Robert Torricelli, who had just received a reprimand by a Senate committee over his shady dealings with businessman David Chang. Torricelli dropped out of the race five weeks before Election Day, and Democrats hastily drafted retired U.S. senator Frank Lautenberg, who leapfrogged Forrester in the polls. When the state Supreme Court ruled against a GOP challenge of the last-minute switch, Forrester, who had spent $7.5 million to run, was finished. His campaign, tailored around the hobbled Torricelli, foundered, and Lautenberg won easily.
The Lautenberg Senate candidacy wasn’t the last time an unexpected blow would jar Forrester’s political life. In the summer of 2004, Forrester seemed to be the odds-on favorite in a Republican field that was massing for the 2005 governor’s race. Strong potential challengers such as former state senator Diane Allen had decided not to run. Bret Schundler, the conservative former Jersey City mayor who lost badly to McGreevey in 2001, was considered hopeless in a general election by party leaders. By the time the Republican National Convention came to New York City in August 2004, the Democrats were imploding, with McGreevey about to give 90 days’ notice in his controversial resignation.
Forrester had come to the GOP convention with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Briana. The bright, engaging high school student was lucky to be alive. Only six months earlier she suffered a crippling headache that quickly grew worse. Had Forrester not called an ambulance, doctors said, she might have died. An aneurysm struck on the way to the hospital, leaving her with impaired speech and motor skills. In the next two months she underwent three brain operations, and by the start of the convention could speak clearly but was in a wheelchair. “I thought I was getting better,” Briana says. “I felt good. I was looking forward to the convention. Dad and I were having a great time. Then the night before George Bush gave his acceptance speech, I found a lump on my neck.”
That night, Forrester drove his daughter to Philadelphia, where doctors diagnosed Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Months later, after chemotherapy, radiation, and more surgery, Briana was cancer-free and living the life of a typical high school senior. Her father, who had grown even closer to her during her ordeal, was deeply affected. As the GOP primary approached—and six other Republicans ramped up their campaigns—Forrester remained in seclusion. His friends and party leaders wondered whether he was through with politics. “Our lives had been turned completely upside down,” Forrester says. “I needed time to think about things.” Sitting with her father before a routine check-up last November, Briana confronted him about his future. “We were sitting there in the waiting room, and I asked him, ‘What are you going to do, Dad? Everyone wants to know,’ ”
Briana says. “ ‘Don’t wait for me. I’m fine. Just run. Just announce now.’ ” A few days later, at Washington Crossing State Park, Forrester declared his candidacy. But his commitment to Briana intensified, and a few months later he angered campaign aides and consultants when he went AWOL to take her to Hawaii on the first anniversary of her near-fatal brain hemorrhage to celebrate her return to health. “Campaigns come and go. Governors come and go,” Forrester says. “Time with my daughter is more important than any of that stuff.”
Douglas R. Forrester was born at the foot of the Verdugo Mountains in Glendale, California, in 1953 to Republican working-class parents. His father moved through a succession of jobs until he found a steady position with Lockheed Martin and moved the family north to Santa Clara. By all accounts, young Doug was a do-gooder who didn’t need to study hard to get good grades. In sixth grade he saw a fiery girl named Andrea cause a commotion in the school cafeteria. “Somebody was trying to cut ahead of her in line, and this girl was holding her own,” he recalls. “I was impressed. Not only was she very pretty. She wouldn’t be pushed around.”
A couple of years later, Forrester and the upstart had a chance meeting, when he was knocking on doors offering his services as a painter. His specialty was curbs; with stencils and a little white paint, he’d dab your house number on the front curb.
“I was out painting curbs all day. I was a complete mess, when I knock on a door and out comes Andrea,” Forrester says. “I had no idea she lived there. We sat on the curb together as I painted. That was pretty much how it started.” They became homeroom buddies and started dating. Andrea recalls that Doug’s sense of humor helped her endure the social rigors of high school, although she mercilessly teased the earnest and gawky young man about his ill-fitting clothes. “Nothing fit this guy right,” says Andrea, now 52, chortling over the memories. “It was like, ‘Hey, Forrester, where’s the flood?’ ” But Forrester was anything but a high school joke. He was a swimmer and All-American water polo player who was elected senior-class president on an open-campus platform that drew guffaws from skeptical administrators.
Andrea and Doug dated on and off during high school and spent graduation night on a class frolic to Disneyland. It wasn’t until he left for Harvard in 1971 that Andrea says she finally realized Doug was the man for her. When he came home for Christmas that year, they started going steady. Thirty years later, they’re the parents of Briana, now 18, who has put her nursing-school plans on hold until after the campaign; 21-year-old Ryan; and Alex, 24, who runs a nonprofit community development company in Jersey City called Rising Tide Capital. Despite the dinnertime debates between Alex and his father—“public policy, politics, theology, just name it,” Briana says, rolling her eyes—and Forrester’s doubts about whether his eloquent and combative son is a registered Republican, he’s certain that Alex will vote for him this fall. “That’s one vote I’m very proud of,” Forrester says. “I earned it.” Ryan, a senior music student at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, has taken a semester off to work as his father’s “body man,” making many campaign stops with him, keeping in touch with the advance people, and making sure his father is prepared for anything.
The Forrester kids are sincere, measured, and respectful, and seem proud to be part of their father’s quest. “We never even thought of rebelling as kids,” Ryan says. “I think that is because neither Mom nor Dad pushed us into anything we didn’t want. We had support and encouragement all the way. You could ask my dad anything, and he always had a good answer.”
Apparently they never asked him how much money he had. The kids lived in a comfortable suburban house and knew they were better off than some of their friends. “But $50 million—no way,” Briana says. “I had no idea until I read about it in the paper during the Senate race. They never told me we had that much.”
Like many self-made men, Forrester is proud of his accomplishments and committed to instilling a work ethic in his children. “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been lucky, and I’m very grateful my business has worked out,” he says. “But I don’t want my kids to confuse money and material things with what is really valuable in life.”
It was in a big white wooden church on Route 1 in Princeton that Doug Forrester first searched in earnest for life’s true values. After graduating from Harvard in 1975, he and Andrea moved to the Garden State so he could study theology and politics at Princeton Theological Seminary.
One day he walked into a real estate office in search of a place to live, and the woman behind the desk told him that Princeton Baptist Church needed an assistant pastor. He and Andrea moved in, and when the pastor suddenly resigned, Forrester found himself responsible for the parish and the souls of its congregants.
Eventually Forrester decided that he and the preaching life weren’t a good fit. He believed he was too young, too inexperienced to carry such responsibility. One day in 1976, he recalls, a distraught parishioner who had just lost her husband called the young pastor for guidance. “It hit me at that point that I just did not have the life experience to help this woman,” he says. Forrester left his post at the church but continued his seminary studies until 1983.
In the meantime, he had taken up residence in the pulpit of politics. At 26, he won election to the West Windsor Township Committee, serving for the next five years, two as mayor. “He was a natural,” says Carol Beske, a former West Windsor mayor who recruited Forrester. “He was very serious and got right down to the details of governing. The best part is that he brought a non-political approach that was very refreshing.
Forrester left local government in 1983 to spend more time with his family. By that time, his career in state government was well under way. He had started working as an analyst for the Assembly Republican office in 1977 and became assistant state treasurer in 1982. In 1984, an impressed Governor Kean named Forrester director of the pensions division, where he oversaw the state’s multibillion-dollar portfolio that benefited thousands of retired state workers and their families. He clamped down on double-dipping state lawmakers who had fattened their own pensions at public expense and made official complaints about them to the state Attorney General’s office.
His staunch defense of the pension fund earned Forrester a reputation as a watchdog. Journalists considered him a good source and his leadership was praised in editorials. Many employee unions in Trenton, which are dominated by Democrats, lauded his efforts to protect their pension fund.
After Governor James Florio’s 1990 election, Forrester left Trenton and in a matter of months, he and a partner formed BeneCard, which quickly flourished. Forrester got rich, he insists, through hard work. “There was a niche and I filled it,” he says. Forrester says that if elected, he will divest himself of the company because it could be perceived as a conflict. It’s not clear how much the revelations about BeneCard’s finances will undermine Forrester’s reform message.
By any reckoning, Forrester will have a hard time beating Corzine. The Democratic party in New Jersey has rarely been stronger or more organized. No Republican has won a statewide race in New Jersey since 1997, when the little-known McGreevey almost upset incumbent Whitman in his first run for governor. To win in November, Forrester must appeal not just to soccer moms who lean heavily Democratic but to a broad swath of Democrats and non-aligned voters in the political center. These are the same people who voted in droves for another Republican who sold himself as a good government crusader, Ronald Reagan.
“People in New Jersey, across the nation, saw Reagan not as an ideologue but as a decent, down-to-earth man of common sense,” says Angrisani, who managed Reagan’s 1980 Garden State campaign.
In style, Doug Forrester—master of divinity, policy wonk, stentorian orator in monogrammed cuffs—could hardly be farther from Ronald Reagan. He may have opened himself up to those Green Acres gibes at his Trenton photo op, but in substance Forrester is far less a conservative ideologue than Reagan ever was.
Angrisani remembers when Reagan campaigned in the Democratic stronghold of Bayonne. “He was able to sit down with dock workers, blue-collar guys, and have a beer with them, talk to them in their language,” Angrisani says. “That was Reagan’s appeal. And Doug’s got to find a way to do the same thing if he wants to win.”
Henry Meyer is a freelance writer who lives in Trenton.
Article from October, 2005 Issue.
