Train Wrecks: McGreevey v. McGreevey

Jim was — and in many ways still is — the kid who wants everyone to like him, and who uses that “Hey, buddy” aura to insinuate himself into the cool kids’ club, no matter what the moral cost. “An ambitious politician quickly learns, as I did, to countenance and even sponsor fundamentally corrupt behavior while insulating himself, for as long as he can, behind a buffer of deniability,” he writes in The Confession, his 2006 autobiography that landed him on Oprah’s couch and put a good number of readers to sleep. (An entire section details the history and demographics of Woodbridge, New Jersey.) People wanted shovels of dirt and got teaspoons. The book, like McGreevey himself, is affable, slightly maddening, and often disingenuous.

Perhaps it was this quixotic brew that attracted Dina Matos when she first met him in October 1995, at a meeting of a Portuguese civic group. He was 38; she was 28. She later recalled thinking “he was handsome, in a Tom Hanks kind of way.” Dina was and still appears reserved, somewhat entitled and a tad icy, which hasn’t served her well through the trial. But as a Portuguese immigrant who came to this country at the age of eight not speaking a whit of English, she always felt somewhat off-center, out of the mix — which may help explain why she so easily mistook the faux intimacy offered by the winsome Jim McGreevey for the real thing. Why, by her own admission, she “missed the signs.”

Their courtship was banal and ordinary, mainly conducted at chicken dinners for New Jersey politicians. Jim was the mayor of Woodbridge and an up-and-coming face in the hurly-burly world of New Jersey politics; Dina was a community organizer and an adept fund-raiser for a hospital in Newark. But even without the guidance of hindsight, their romance seems oddly detached, lacking in the tender, tiny, just-the-two-of-us moments that forge genuine love affairs. One of the most telling anecdotes both relay in their respective memoirs is of a romantic getaway they took to Montreal, only to hit a stretch of black ice on a highway en route and spend the night in an off-the-beaten-path motel. (Interestingly, each claims to have taken the wheel as the car spun out of control.) Once inside the room, Jim — according to Dina — began climbing into the opposite single bed from hers, until she convinced him to come snuggle with her.

McGreevey had lost, barely, his initial run for governor against incumbent Christine Todd Whitman in 1997. He was certain he could come out on top in 2001, when he would eventually face conservative firebrand Bret Schundler. And having a Laura Bush Lite wife would surely help. He hoped, he writes in his book, “that living with Dina would help me enforce the boundaries I’d been trying to maintain for years. If I stayed single, with no structural safeguard, there was no telling what sort of volatile situation I might get into.”