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Interview with Jerry Fitzgerald English

Don Linky: It is the morning of December 13, 2006 . We’re here at the Eagleton Institute of Politics on the campusof Rutgers University in New Brunswick . We’re here today to talk with Jerry Fitzgerald English, who served asLegislative Counsel and Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection in the Byrne administration,also served in other roles for Governor Byrne, including as a Commissioner of the Port Authority of New York andNew Jersey . We’re going to discuss Mrs. English’s role in the administration and her various activities during theByrne terms and after. Jerry, as we sit here today many, many years after Brendan Byrne has left office as Governorof New Jersey, I’d like to start with your just general recollections about the Byrne administration and BrendanByrne in your lifetime in comparison with other governors and other administrations that you’ve looked at and beena part of.

Jerry Fitzgerald English: I did have the benefit of having been a small part of the legislature before the Byrneadministration because I had been elected to the shortest term interim seat as a senator from Union County and thenI became Counsel to the Minority in the Cahill administration and served with the Minority Leader, J. EdwardCrabiel. So the long and short of that was that I had some opportunity to observe the legislature in action with theopportunity of the Minority to point out all of the things that were wrong with the Majority. There was a verylimited access with Governor Cahill to the legislature and it came only with the leadership so that David Goldberg,who was the Chief Counsel to the Minority, and Senator Crabiel would go and call upon the Governor.Subsequently governor was part of that group on the assembly side. Anyway, the long and short of it was that theresource issue of the government, its need for a balanced budget, those issues had already been teed up. They hadbeen teed up by Cahill, they had been teed up by Governor Hughes. The Blue Ribbon Commission had already putin its report and, of course, what came out of that was the call for an income tax. Subsequently to that period oftime, I ran for Congress and then along came this gubernatorial election. So I was working for then Senator Crabiel,who subsequently determined that he could not win a primary and this person called Brendan Byrne appeared asbeing the party’s nominee, and I participated with Dave Goldberg and Joel Sterns in drafting the party platform.That’s when I started to find out that party platforms were really wonderful documents that no one ever looked atever again but we had, at that point, come into the post-Watergate era, and so that was the opportunity, I think, forthe Brendan Byrne administration and legacy to have a time to shine, and we were emboldened. We tried all sortsof things that in another time would not have passed. He had both houses of the legislature, as you recall, whichwas sometimes a burden as opposed to a blessing. For the most part we had pretty responsible bipartisan support onbills that were important. So my job, when he invited me to join his staff, was Legislative Counsel and at that pointI think that was unique. There hadn’t been something called Legislative Counsel. The Chief Counsel and his staffbasically did that work. Or the Governor himself, depending upon what role he determined to undertake and thosewho had been in the legislature before, former governors that had been in the legislature before, often did that jobthemselves.

Q: Let’s backtrack a bit. When did you first meet Brendan Byrne?

English: I met him many years beforehand when he was a prosecutor, fleetingly in the Essex County Courthouse.He didn’t remember that, but I did. More because there was this very, very young person who was the prosecutor,and I found that quite astounding, that someone who appeared to be so young could have such an important job.Then I didn’t see him for years and, of course, at that point he had gone on to be the BPU Commission. He hadgone on to be a judge and I never appeared before him and frankly did not meet him again until the election, theprimary time.

Q: Can you recall any of the circumstances of that first meeting in the campaign season?

English: I recall saying I wouldn’t meet with him because Dick Leone and Dick Coffee, Dick Coffee had also beena candidate and Jimmy Dugan was very anxious for me to come over and meet this fellow because Coffee hadstopped his campaign. He wanted me to come over and meet this fellow called Brendan Byrne and I said, “Thankyou very much but I don’t think that’s appropriate because I am working for Senator Crabiel.” On the day thatSenator Crabiel determined not to run, and within a short period of time, I did meet Brendan Byrne and with Kenny

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McPherson, and was placed in the back of a car with the two of them to go to a rally in Bayonne, whereupon Istarted to find out something about this person. But at that point I had already been invited to head up what wascalled Citizens for Byrne and that was all of the diverse groups that were going to be involved in the campaign. Somy first recollection of this person was someone who was basically terrified, going along with Mayor Fitzpatrick togo to this rally, which was held in Bayonne, involved motorcycle escorts, and a lot of people with whitehandkerchiefs waving them and some woman walking up to Mayor Fitzpatrick and saying, “Who’s this?” and theMayor said, “This is Brendan Byrne,” and she said, “Are we for him?” and he said, “Yes we are.” She said,“Okay.” Whereupon I began to understand something about party discipline and the importance of having the linein various counties.

Q: Talk a bit more about the politics about that 1973 campaign, particularly before Brendan Byrne gets into theprimary race. You mentioned some of the candidates but what was your take on that early primary field?

English: The early primary part also involved Ralph DeRose and he was the favored person of the then EssexCounty Chairman, who was considered all-powerful, and I began to learn something about the rivalries betweenHudson County and Essex County and which one was capable of really bringing out that vote. Ralph DeRose was asenator during the time that I was serving as Legislative Counsel, so of course I knew him. The Republican aspectof this was starting to become quite fractious. They basically renounced the incumbent Governor, Cahill, andCharlie Sandman, who had been a congressman and who voted for everything that Richard Nixon ever wanted,made him just kind of this perfect foil in terms of how the campaign was starting to come along. But at that point, atthe early parts, it was really more about state issues, about what were we going to do to ensure that we had somesustainable revenue, and the environment was starting to percolate as a really, really important political issue. Thebills that were passing in the legislature were, well one of the reasons that I started to volunteer to read the bills wasthat I found that sometimes there wasn’t a lot of attention to that and so was my early job to examine all of the billsand make recommendations to our leadership about positions that they might want to take. Aside from the fact thatthere were personal allegiances, I was really not at that point attuned enough to understand that statewideimplications of how these primary things were working out and who had what and who didn’t have what, except forEdward Crabiel, who was this person that would tell you within a hundred votes of how he thought a campaign wasgoing to turn out. Today’s professional staffs do that. You didn’t need a professional staff. J. Edward Crabiel couldcount. He also, which was one of the reasons that I think he was subsequently put into the position of Secretary ofState, because at that point the Secretary of State was the political arm of the administration. Much changed todaybut in those days that was one of the rules. The fact that there had been, unfortunately, some scandals within theCahill administration involving that office were one of the things that, again, started to talk about the kind of peoplethat one was looking for. We were looking for people of integrity, we were looking for people with credentials, ofcredibility, and what was unknown to me at the time, and how this happened I don’t know, but I never reallyrealized for some time that Brendan Byrne had been kind of an old hand. He had been Governor Meyner’sExecutive Secretary. He had been there, done that, in an earlier administration. So he knew far more about this thanI think he elected to let people know until it was probably more in the time when he was governing, and that wasalso very interesting.

Q: You mentioned that you knew Ralph DeRose from your time in the Senate. What was he like personally andpolitically?

English: Personally he was a very charming man, always very gentlemanly, bright, articulate on the floor, and oneof the things that Senator Crabiel did as the leader, which is one of the things that I always admired, was that heknew before we went in to any session exactly where his vote was and which ones were not going to be there in thecount, whether or not he could put forth a party position and have it hold, and whether or not he could say to theGovernor, Governor Cahill, “This will be the position of the Democrats. This is how many votes I will be able todeliver on this bill. I cannot tell you about this bill and that bill.” I think when Senator DeRose became an activecandidate, and Eddie Crabiel was someone who was going to run against him, that there may have been sometensions there but they did not manifest themselves in the caucus or on the floor. Again, it was a time ofgentlemanly behavior, of respect for another person’s situation, and as they say, it was, at least for the people thatwere around the circumstances, there was nothing unpleasant. What went on behind other doors, we were sheltered

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from.

Q: Another candidate in that race was Ann Klein. As one of the relatively few politically active women of that time,did you find your position a little bit difficult supporting these white males, first Ed Crabiel and later BrendanByrne, against one of the prominent women Democrats in that race?

English: Not at all. I had and I continue to have such respect for Ann Klein and, of course, she had come out of thenominally nonpartisan world of the League of Women Voters and having been a member of the League, itfrustrated me no end that what they did was study everything to death. I think they really weren’t out there in thehustings getting it done, but occasionally they would take a position such as being against the sales tax at the timewhen Governor Hughes was trying to pass it, and they defeated that tax. So that they were capable of educating, ina way, if they elected to. But Ann was a person of just such incredible integrity also. Brought a clarity to the issues,brought the need for sharpening the positions on all of the candidates because she could be counted upon in debateto really be a very articulate and humane voice for issues that were probably not right there in front of everyoneelse. Most of the other candidates were talking about other kinds of things but you could always depend upon Annto come in and do the kind of discussion that was focusing on those without a voice, those who ultimately, whenshe became a cabinet officer of course, she defended and had the most substantial part of the budget for. So she wasan extraordinary person. Worked very well in the cabinet and was always the person in case anybody started tostray away from why you were in government at all, to remind that that was a very, very important part about whywe were doing that, why we were there.

Q: Did you have any contacts with her before that campaign?

English: As a member of the League, yes. But not close ones.

Q: When Brendan Byrne does announce that he’s going to become a candidate relatively late in that primaryseason, what was the attitude within the Crabiel camp? That all was over or was there some thought that possiblywe could stick this out?

English: Oh, there was, in fact, kind of almost jubilation because the first thing that Eddie Crabiel said was, “Oh,he’s Meyner’s man, and Hudson hates Meyner.” Of course, this was kind of going over my head. Like, “Oh?”Because you may remember that I am not a New Jersey native and had never, in fact, even lived in the state until1963. So that past history was being set forth to me because I knew absolutely nothing about it. Although I had runfor the, of all things, well I ran for the State Senate when Governor Meyner was trying to make a comeback, so Igot to meet him on the campaign trail, a little bit, and found this rather frosty, difficult person that I had later foundout to be was not his persona at all if he decided to tell you his terrible pun jokes and stuff like that. But it was kindof, “Oh, well, that’s not going to be such a problem because first of all, he doesn’t have the time, he doesn’t havethe money, and he certainly doesn’t know any of the issues and Hudson will never go for him.”

Q: In your own political education during that campaign, why was Crabiel wrong in his assessment of the Hudsonposition?

English: I think he underestimated what his old friend, the Hudson County leader was going to do, and that’swhen--

Q: Mayor Fitzpatrick.

English: Yes, Mayor Fitzpatrick. That’s when the arcania, if there’s such a word, I like that anyway, we’ll use it, ofHudson County politics, which Senator Billy Musto used to explain to me patiently because when I saw on thefloor of the legislature I sat between the Middlesex delegation and right behind my shoulder sat Billy Musto, andthey would have a very, very important discussion on the floor and someone would be for a bill and they wouldcarry on and on about it and then he’d reach over and tap me on the shoulder and he says, “He’s not going to votefor it.” I said, “How did you know that, Billy?” He got word. Those were still the days of pretty significant

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influence of the County Chairman for those who elected to do it. So that’s about how things were starting to goalong and I started to learn more about really the nuts and bolts of who was where, with whom were you meeting,the various interest groups that would be very important to determine whether or not you got their endorsement. Ofcourse, I had been through that in my own congressional campaign but this was on a far different level.

Q: In other interviews, we’ve heard a lot about Mayor Fitzpatrick and the various negotiations and understandingsduring the first Byrne campaign and thereafter. What are your recollections of the Mayor?

English: First of all, this very genial person because at the time I was seeing him, the deal was done and it was clearthat these people could deliver a vote and that was absolutely key. Beyond that, I really didn’t have any. The personwho really knew all of this was Kenny McPherson, who was lifeblood, every single day. That’s what you couldcount on to find out from Kenny, who had a long history with Brendan Byrne and again was one of those peoplecoming out of Hudson County , the best and the brightest.

Q: Were your first contacts with Mayor Fitzpatrick after he endorsed Brendan Byrne? You had no contact with himwhen you were in the Senate?

English: That’s right. No, and that was my first that I recall.

Q: Who were the other political powers that you recall or had some personal contact with?

English: Subsequently, of course, the Essex County Chairman, my own County Chairman, Chris Dietz, who wasthe first one to come out for Brendan Byrne, and he had known him from earlier days in the Hughes administrationand in the Constitutional Convention, going way, way back.

Q: Don Lan, who worked under Chris Dietz at that time, also became a significant figure.

English: Don Lan was also from my county. I think one of the things that also happened was that because theheadquarters of the campaign was in Union County , right on route 22, a lot of people from Union County that Ialready knew then became part of that campaign and were important as those operatives, as volunteers. The role ofvolunteers in those campaigns were far more vigorous and robust than I understand them to be today. There werevery few paid professionals. You really did have your, I won’t say grassroots, but if somebody caught on andseemed to be someone that people were excited about then they felt free to knock on the door and say, “Is theresomething I can do?” and I say with regret I don’t think that that’s quite the same in politics anymore. Maybe at theprimary level when people now will travel all over the country on presidential campaigns, and that’s what I startedto find out about in the course of the campaign. These various groups that I was supposed to harness and get themto energize their membership and what have you, that was supposed to be the grassroots part of the campaign whichwas exceptionally interesting and was at below the organizational construct of the counties.

Q: You said that Senator Crabiel didn’t think that Brendan Byrne would be able to get the backing of the Hudsonorganization. In fact, Brendan Byrne does get the Hudson County line. What was the attitude within the Crabielcamp when that happened?

English: Well I had been up actually in West Orange for the debate, and I don’t think Senator Crabiel was there. Idon’t remember whether he was there. But anyway I had my card table up and I was passing out all this Crabielstuff and the first thing I did was to meet Brendan Byrne’s sister, and so here I am holding on to all of this Crabielstuff and she’s patiently telling me what a good person her brother is, and I said, “Well, you know, I’m sure that’sthe case,” but I was very much up and front and then I sat right in the front row and listened to the debate andreported back dutifully that unfortunately, as nice a person as he was, a) he was a dreadful speaker, b) he didn’tknow anything about the issues and that Eddie would walk all over him and, of course, I jest about this and saybecause of Eddie’s charisma, Eddie was the most un-charismatic person you could imagine in that sense. Heabsorbed facts. His engineering background showed. He would tell people things and you know that he was tellingyou, “That’s exactly what it is.” Now one little small side to this is it was the beginning of public disclosure of

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personal assets and your wealth, and when David Goldberg and I had to say to Edie, “Gee, I don’t know how to tellyou this Senator, but you’re going to have to tell people what your financial holdings are. Of course, he consideredus wild people, that anyone would suggest such a thing as anything so personal. But this was, again,post-Watergate. New rules. So he reached down into his legendary briefcase where he carried every single piece ofpaper that he was going to need and he handed me his business card and he wrote on the back of it and he handed itover to me and I look at it. He says, “Those are my holdings.” I said, “On the back of this business card?” He says,“Yes. When I graduated from Rutgers ,” which was one of the high points of his life, his Rutgers affiliation, hesaid, “I bought shares of AT&T and this is what I have bought since and I have never sold anything. So this wasalso watching the change in someone else. So anyway, after I report all this to Dave Goldberg and to the senator,the next morning they announce to me that they have folded camp without telling me. So they sent me up there,well knowing that this was what they were going to do. I don’t know about the rest of them but I was pretty madand said, “Oh thanks for sending me up there.” However, I must say that I have since been told by the Governorhimself that Eddie was very careful about understanding what happens when these things go on and that he askedthat the Governor be sure that people in his campaign were given roles that were substantial in Brendan Byrne’scampaign. Thinking back on it that probably wasn’t too hard because we had no infrastructure at all and the othershad existing ones and, of course, the Middlesex role, the Wilentz role, even though Dave Wilentz at that point wasallegedly no longer going to be the kingpin, he remained the kingpin and one of the things that I do recall from thatearly time was Dave Wilentz coming out of retirement to a rally in Middlesex County for Eddie Crabiel. Again, thiswas the thing that showed how that organization was also a very disciplined one, along with Essex and along withHudson .

Q: Did you either then or subsequently get an explanation from either Ed Crabiel or Dave Goldberg as to how theyassessed the political pros and cons when they made the decision to pull out?

English: I think it was all the Hudson line. They clearly weren’t going to get the Essex line because that was theDeRose line, and without that combination, Eddie would have been the first one to say the numbers won’t make it.

Q: You mentioned Dave Wilentz. Talk a little bit more about this very important figure in New Jersey history.

English: Of course I got to know of him just faintly in the beginning and I was of that time a little wary of allpeople that called themselves Party Chairman. As a group they were not exactly the kinds of folks that I thoughtwere the ones I wanted to be around too much but nonetheless, there were people who were legends and, of course,his legend went back to the Bruno Hauptmann trial and how he developed his position in Middlesex County . But itwas really more after Governor was in office that I got to know more about David Wilentz. As people who knewhim will recall, a short, slight man. Always chewing on an old cigar hanging out of the side of his mouth. And thevarious interests that he represented. That’s when I started to know something more about him as opposed to thispolitical figure. He was there on behalf of his clients or interests that he was representing and one classic one to methat I have always remembered and that has guided me is that there would be a meeting with David Wilentz and theGovernor would always be delighted to see him. He would come into the Governor’s Office, he would talk aboutwhatever it was that he was concerned about that day and then he would go away and we would start to have aconversation in that middle big office and then a knock would come on the door and David Wilentz would comeback in and he’d say, “I just wanted to be sure that I got what I came for before I left.” So that that part of notleaving something unresolved with a “yes” or a “no” was part of his wonderful technique, and I’m sure he did thatall the time. So he was the one who had this wonderful quality and of course he would make sure that everybodywas taken care of at the racetrack, advised me personally never to invest in anything that eats, which I have paidvery close attention to, and seemed to understand the melding of the public and the private life.

Q: What was his style as a negotiator as a lawyer for his clients? Forceful? Laid back?

English: He was always very persuasive, very bright, and he was always very worried if you’d go and visit at hislaw office, which I did subsequently, and he would worry about whether or not they were going to make enoughmoney to keep the doors open. So his concern about the law firm was palpable, and subsequently when his sonbecame candidate for the Chief Justice and that thing is when one saw all sorts of sides of things. But he was also a

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very valuable resource because he was somebody that understood political beings and how to read them and how toapproach them, to understand the high ego factor involved in people in public life and high positions andmeanwhile never losing track of why he was there. Did I get what I came in here to talk to you about or did Iexplain to you what it was I came in here to talk to you about? He did not waste any audiences.

Q: You said that Dave Wilentz was, at least to the outside world, phasing out his political role at that point, whichwould have been in the 1973 campaign. From your perspective, what was the relationship between Dave Wilentzand Senator Crabiel? Was it clear that Dave Wilentz still was the power in Middlesex County or was Ed Crabielthinking well, now I’m number one?

English: I don’t think there was ever any confusion that at the end of the day, the Wilentz factor was very, veryimportant. It was one that was respected and having Dave Wilentz introduce Eddie Crabiel as he did, as “This is anhonest man,” that had a lot of political importance. It was the thing that showed the gravitas with which people didthese kinds of jobs and how seriously they took them.

Q: More generally, in terms of the county chairs in the early 1970s, you’ve already said that they were stillpowerful figures, probably more powerful than they are today. How did they exercise their power? How did DaveWilentz or Dennis Carey or other county chairs implement their power and get their wishes accomplished?

English: I think they were pretty much past the point where someone would just call up and say, “On this bill, Iexpect you to leave the room,” or “You better be for this bill even if you have to grit your teeth.” Things were alittle more subtle, however when major votes, for instance, when we had really major legislation coming up and wethought that the County Chairman could be helpful, Governor Byrne didn’t hesitate to reach out for them and getthem together to the extent that he thought that they would be able to exercise any influence over the candidates.The role of the County Chairman in those days was far more important in terms of money-raising. It was at thatlevel that the money was being raised and so they had some pretty powerful opportunities, that each one would beout having to raise money for themselves, I’m sure that that happened, but the juggernaut was coming from thecounty coffers and those kinds of events that were the regular giving method, and of course this was before publicfinancing or anything of that nature.

Q: `Another tool that they had was the power to select candidates and to control the county committees that Ibelieve for the most part generally did their bidding at that time. Is that true?

English: I guess if you were really part of that system. On a personal basis, I refused to ever even meet our CountyChairman until I went down to screen for the Senate. I had run for the Town Council in Summit . Well they neverdid elect a Democrat in Summit . They appointed one once in the Great War, as everyone else had gone to war.Then as soon as it was respectable, they kind of, so I never met the person. Of course I did get to know him later on,but one kept one’s distance, from my personal point of view, with that organization figure and maybe it was justbecause I had an instinct about it that this was not my game, that if somebody wanted me to be doing what they toldthem to do then they’d picked the wrong person and so I managed to get through the screening committee withoutever even having met the man.

Q: That was relatively unusual at the time.

English: Oh, I would think so. At that point they were kind of saying, “Oh, this will be novel. Why don’t we have awoman? Gee, that would be interesting. We won’t let her run for the full term, of course. It’s okay to let her runthen.” And Betty Wilson was part of that particular group so a couple of women showed up, and again it was partof the thing that was starting to happen in politics.

Q: Let’s go back to that ’73 primary campaign. You made a couple comments that Brendan Byrne wasn’t viewed asthe most skilled candidate on the stump. Talk a little bit more about his style, his speaking ability, and so forth inthat first campaign.

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English: No one will believe it today because he’s the most sought after raconteur after-dinner speaker. Let’s get ittogether and if Brendan is going to speak, as bad as the whole thing may be and you may have been dragged there,it’s at least going to be entertaining because he’ll talk. That sure was not the Brendan Byrne that was showing up onthat campaign. He would, first of all, fumble around. Look basically terrified most of the time. Couldn’t rememberanyone’s name and would talk in this mumbly way about not too much and people would hand him briefing papersand that stuff. He disguised his sense of humor and so that became one those surprises that when you start to knowsomebody to find out that not only is there a sense of humor but a very, very sharp wit. You usually cannot be wittyunless you really understand something, and so his intelligence, he was masking an awful lot. Let’s go back. Hehad just stepped down from being a state judge, where everyone is fawning on you all the time and “Yes, sir,” and“Whatever you say, Judge,” and “If your Honor please,” and when Fariborz Fatemi was on the road with us, healways called him Judge. “Now Judge, you really must come over here and you really must do this.” Well this is aperson that wanted to be home at 6:30 at night, didn’t like going into any of the union halls that you had to go intoor any of the kinds of things that people do in campaigns. So he had to kind of be persuaded. Here is the schedule.“I’m not going to do that. No, I don’t want to do that.” “Well, but Judge, you really must come and meet thesepeople. It is very important that you come there.” “Well…” So it wasn’t just kind of you handed something or hewas handed by the campaign. “Here’s where you’ll go and this is what you’ll do and this is what you will saytoday.” This was being resisted and, of course, what some of us didn’t know was that he had used to run around andbe Meyner’s voice on the campaign trail. So he had done this for years. It wasn’t as if he had never done thisbefore. He was coming back into it after a pretty long period of time but there was, I just can’t say his name for amoment, legendary figure, a congressman from Middlesex County, and the two of them would run around forMeyner in the old days and, of course, Brendan was the straight man and this other guy, who was, oh yes, EddiePatten. Thank you. Eddie Patten, who was just outrageous. He was an equal opportunity insulter of all ethnicgroups and somehow he could make these terrible jokes and get by with it, which would never happen today.Bright, also part of the Wilentz group of these very, very bright people that were representing the Middlesexdelegation, whether in Congress or in the state. But he started to come along. He started to come along. He had alsomade a very substantial personal decision to step out of a lifelong job with guaranteed pensions and he had sevenchildren and go back to a practice that he didn’t have any clients left from. So maybe he was as terrified as heshould have been under the circumstances.

Q: Did you or Ed Crabiel or others that you talked to during the campaign, as you watch Brendan Byrne fumbleand stumble through that primary campaign, start talking about maybe you were backing the wrong horse or that hecould possibly lose this election, even with the support of Hudson and the other qualities he had going for him inthat primary campaign?

English: No, it never came to that point. I think they all hugely enjoyed the fact that they knew more abouteverything than he did, but the learning curve was obviously pretty quick and the part about getting comfortablewith the crowds of people and those kinds of skills that are automatic with some political people. You think aboutthe best political people you’ve ever watched. Hubert Humphrey, Bill Clinton. It’s an automatic thing. They justautomatically think that you are the most, you think are the most, who could be more important than me? Becausethis person wants to talk to me. That kind of quality was not right there. I think it came on, but not in the same way.He is not his brother. Frank was the natural politician in that sense, of knowing everybody’s name and making themfeel immediately comfortable. The prosecutor part of Brendan Byrne never left and still doesn’t to this day, in myview. He is still there as the truth seeker and not just a glad-hander.

Q: A couple of other people who joined the Byrne campaign from another campaign, specifically the Dick Coffeecampaign or Dick Leone and Lew Kaden. Talk about them.

English: I did not know them, except Lew Kaden and I both ran for Congress at the same time, and Lew Kadentook on the Wilentz machine, because then it was a good thing to call it a machine, and here’s this frighteninglybright whippersnapper kid, also from Perth Amboy, daring to take on the establishment. So I knew about him and Ithink we probably met one another on that kind of campaign trail briefly, but I did not know Dick Leone at all. Ofcourse, I knew Dick Coffee because he had served in the Senate during the time that I was involved and he was theCounty Chairman . I had huge respect for him. That these fellows appeared out of that campaign and from the older

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times in government, I really didn’t know about that. I just knew that these two very, very bright people appeared,who were policy-oriented people, and they were kind of in charge.

Q: Given the prominence that Lew Kaden took in the campaign along with Dick Leone, and as you’ve said hechallenged the Wilentz organization of which Ed Crabiel was a significant player, did that create some tensionwithin the Middlesex County people and with Ed Crabiel specifically?

English: I’m sure that it did. Again, these were, “How dare they, these kids? What do they know?” and there wassome disdain operating in both directions. These were the old war horses. “Let’s get rid of them. They don’t haveany ideas. We have them all.” There was enough arrogance to go all the around and dismissiveness to go all theway around. So that getting people of different ages with different backgrounds into any campaign to workcohesively so that you could concentrate on what you were there to do was no small feat, and I think people likeDick Coffee, Jim Doogan, were very helpful in that respect.

Q: Unlike most of the other candidates and most other candidates in other races, Brendan Byrne gets into this racewithout a real corps of Byrne people. He’s recruiting people from other campaigns, putting a campaignorganization together almost from scratch. Was that difficult melding all these people who got started off with othercandidates that they were loyal to and trying to get them all to work together from your perspective?

English: From my perspective, not really, because I was out trying to talk to people who had no role in thecampaigns. Those kinds of internal machinations really were not part of what I was concentrating on. I was outmeeting brand new people and saying, “This is an opportunity for New Jersey to go in a different direction.”

Q: Describe more of your day-to-day role, particularly in the early campaign and with the citizens’ organizations.Who did you work with in the campaign in trying to contact these groups and to talk to them? What was it like?

English: I was invited to do this by Lew Kaden. I mean, personally. He said, “Would you head up this part?” as partof melding in our various roles, which is what Eddie Crabiel had asked them to do and which they had committedto do. He said, “What we want you to do is to give us some trouble. Be pushing up against us. Make it so it’s notjust a…” I’m adding words to this but, “Push against us. Have these groups have a say about what they want theirgovernment to be like and get them involved.” In my own campaign for the Senate and for the Congress, of course,we had no paid staff. We had to go out there and get these grassroots people together. I had formed anenvironmental group before I ran for office, The Friends of the Watchung, in order to stop a highway, and so Iknew something about organizing this level of interest in a public issue of importance. So it was not something thatI was being asked to do that I never had any experience with. The challenge then of going around and finding outwhat was the leadership titular otherwise for various kinds of organizations, whether they were environmental orethnic or trade-oriented became how we set up these various groups. I had significant assistance from law studentsand Jeffrey Ketterson, who came to the Governors’ Office, subsequently was my co-chair and he had the line in tolots and lots of law students because he had gone to law school here and I had not. So we had the usual suspectswhich all the lawyers are always part of somebody’s political campaign. Can’t help it. Bears and honey orsomething like that. But then these other groups that came along, whether they were ethnic or sparklers, so that wehad artists and celebrities interested because again, that’s also part of the show business side of campaigning andwhat makes it fun and interesting to people to be part of.

Q: Were there any groups that you remember that were special targets, to try to swing them to Brendan Byrne’sside?

English: There were people on the ethnic side. Portuguese. The Ironbound. Places where there were enclaves ofpeople that probably had been underrepresented but were very, very important stabilizing parts of a city and animportant Hispanic approach, and then that’s when you realize that there’s no such thing as a single Hispanic, thatthere are divisions within all of these groups and different kinds of leaderships and getting them to come togetherabout something that was important became kind of the art form and then there were people that had been inBrendan Byrne’s, Buddy Bianchi is a good example of the Italian community, people that had worked with him in

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the Prosecutor’s Office. So he had a really broad range. The people that he already knew, they were coming on apersonal basis. Some of it was politically-oriented but much of it was on a personal basis.

Q: How did these groups relate? I assume it varied but did they give you a wish list, “We want A, B, and C for thecandidate to support” or was it more subtle or was it more personal in terms of just meeting and greeting and tryingto get to know each other?

English: There was very little of that, “Here’s my list.” They were interested in his position on certain issues, butone of the things that I learned very early on and that was, I think, the signature of that campaign and all the othercampaigns was that if anybody ever told me that Brendan Byrne had promised them something, I knew that was notso. He did not promise anybody anything. This position, that position, if I manage to give you this much money thisis what I want. That wasn’t going to happen. It didn’t happen. At least certainly not anything I ever heard about inall the years that I was involved with that administration or those campaigns. So that there was a freedom of if youmake a good case, if it’s the thing that’s in the best interest of the state, I’m sure that he will be listening to you.That you were being part of this campaign will make it more likely that he’ll have an opportunity to hear you.There was at that time, at least this thing of that this is where you wanted to be. You wanted to be part of this. Itwas exciting. This was not just “this is what the County Chairman wanted” and you had to go these dreadful eventsand the Mayor’s birthday party. I never knew that some mayors could have that many birthdays, but anyway.

Q: You mentioned several people in the campaign. Who were the others that you remember?

English: I remember Tom Byrne and Robert Torricelli. Tom was running one of the youth groups so he was part ofmy group and Bob was helping him. So that’s the first time that I started to work with Bob Torricelli and with TomByrne, who both, of course, have gone on to very distinguished areas of law and politics and public service, but Iknew them when they were 20 years old and the excitement that they brought to the campaign and other youngpeople that were able to come in. Of course, Bob was doing work with the university students. Tom was still atPrinceton at the time and all of Brendan’s kids were all involved one way or another coming into the campaign.Herb Wolf, who was the Press Secretary, and that was also when I started to know more about Dick Leone and LewKaden.

Q: Alan Sagner came in at some point to head the financial fundraiser.

English: Right. I had almost nothing to do with Ed other than to be sure that my group, or if it was my day to travelor somebody else’s day to travel, be sure and look out for X, Y, and Z and they’ll be there and greet them. Dealingwith the advance people so that the Governor-to-be was as prepared as he could be to the environment he would begoing into and our advance team was really excellent. They had had a lot of experience. So that kind of comfort tothe candidate is just invaluable.

Q: You were talking about your role in the ’73 campaign dealing with local community and ethnic groups. Whatwas Brendan Byrne like when he met with these groups? Did he try to tailor his message to their special interests orbackground?

English: I think he made that effort. That was part of what he was supposed to be doing there and to make it as clearas one could that the campaign was inclusive, that it was moving away from a hierarchical county leader situation,which frankly did not attract everybody, particularly suburban people that had distrust of the old urban coalitions.So I think he was making that effort. Of course he was learning. He was learning as well about how life had movedon, I think, from the time of Meyner, which was completely hierarchical and also the change because television wasthen much more important, which didn’t exist in his time. With Governor Meyner it was radio-oriented and thatwas about it.

Q: Let’s move to primary election night. What was that like? Where were you?

English: Oh gosh. I was certainly there. That part I would remember. I can’t tell you that I have a particular

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memory of that particular night.

Q: Did you feel a sense of relief? Was there still a feeling well maybe we shouldn’t be as confident as we are goinginto this primary election?

English: Anyone that says it’s a lock has never been there. It’s never a lock. But you also get euphoria within anycampaign, that how could we not win? Look at all the great endorsements that we’ve gotten, look at all of the“opinion molders, makers” and they think well and highly of this person. The theme of “The Man Who Couldn’tBe Bought” had an awful lot of cache and I think that of course the simplistic way of describing who this personwas. But again, anytime that there has been, I think we now know more about, a time of loss of competence ingovernment because of corruption, real or perceived, then that coin of the realm is so important and he had it.

Q: Now that the primaries held surprisingly on the Republican side, Congressman Sandman is the winner. Whatwas your personal reaction when Congressman Sandman becomes the Republican nominee for the general election?

English: First of all, astonishment, but now we know a little more about, I think, what happens to the dedicatedvoter and the dedicated voter in both polarized circumstances for the parties, the left, the right come out, andmoving toward the center is what they’re all going to be doing in the general election, but for some reason oranother, the Republican party determined to find a very right-wing candidate and someone who was very closelyattached to the Nixon administration and by that time Watergate was a reality.

Q: Did you feel with Congressman Sandman’s nomination that Brendan Byrne was now a lock for the generalelection or did you still have some feeling of doubt as to the result?

English: You always have doubt, but I thought it was a lock.

Q: Do you think that feeling was generally shared among the other key Byrne people?

English: I think so. I think so. I’m not sure that we ever had that kind of directed conversation, but certainly theexcitement that went on, the ability to bring people in, yeah. There was also a North Jersey and a South Jersey viewof these matters. 609, as the area code, was another state of mind but it didn’t have the population and so thatkeeping the North Jersey part together, and they’re very different community even today. Charlie Sandman, to myknowledge, did not have a presence throughout the state. He was not somebody that just everybody knew Charlie.He had served in the legislature as I recall, but he had been in Washington for some time so he was not a householdname in the state any longer. If it had been Governor Cahill, that might have been a very different issue.

Q: As the Byrne campaign plans for the general election, was there some concern among the insiders who werethere during the primary campaign that all these new people are going to be brought in and how roles may beweakened or compromised? Was there that feeling of potential jealousy as the campaign organization becomeslarger and also given the fact that Brendan Byrne looked like he was going to be a winner?

English: I’m sure that there were those kinds of issues. I was not high enough in the hierarchy to be concernedabout. That beyond seeing that things went along in the way that they should go along, it doesn’t mean that therewere no fireworks that were going on internally or that people always had a better idea about what should be done.But I don’t recall a great deal of that.

Q: Did your role change much during the general election compared to the primary election.

English: No.

Q: So you were still dealing with the community and ethnic groups for the most part?

English: Right.

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Q: One of the statements that Brendan Byrne made during that general election campaign, which came back a littlebit later to haunt him, was that he didn’t see the need for an income tax “in the foreseeable future.” Do youremember when he said that and what your reaction was when you heard about it or read about it?

English: If I told you today that of course I knew that the foreseeable future was going to be a lot more foreseeablethan anyone thought. I guess it was part of my own naiveté, that I didn’t believe that anybody wouldn’t just sayoutright “Well of course you need an income tax. What are you talking about?” and that was the thing that AnnKlein would have been saying in the primary. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course this is what we need.” That I got tolive through subsequently the rehashing and the re-discussion of that particular issue was for years and years andyears, but it was a politically cautious thing to say.

Q: After these many years, do you think that was a mistake? Do you think he should’ve come out more directly andsaid, “The state needs an income tax,” given the fact that he seemed to be a sure winner in the general election?

English: No, I don’t. We now have some examples of people being intellectually honest that should’ve been electedand because they forecast what they were going to do, they never got the opportunity to do what was required forthe fiscal integrity of the state. What goes on in campaigns and what people say in campaigns, always a grain ofsalt.

Q: What are your other memories of the general election campaign?

English: A growing sense that yes, we were going to win. Yes, there were serious things that were going to be doneas a result, and that the first opportunity that the administration had, that it would have a platform and that thatwould be acted on and that that would be ready to go as soon as possible.

Q: In your role in dealing with the local organizations and groups, were many of them lobbying for the need for abroad-based statewide tax or was it not an issue at the top of the agenda?

English: That wasn’t really the role of these people. They were there to show popular support for a person ofintegrity and credibility, and someone that made them feel good to be associated with.

Q: Who were the key people that you can remember now from those organizations that you had any dealings with?

English: Buddy Bianchi in particular. From the Italian community. I can’t say his name for the moment from thePortuguese community, and then, of course, I have made my famous plumbers for and any kind of group I couldthink of that would be some organized group of people. But in terms of the heavy union people, Joel Jacobson wasvery important with UAW, and Charlie Marciante. You were never sure where Charlie was one way or another.

Q: Talk a little bit about the position of organized labor at the time and Charlie Marcianni’s special role in his ratherrocky relationship with Brendan Byrne in subsequent years.

English: Intellectually and politically, in terms of issues, the UAW had always been the most progressive alongwith the embroiderers and needleworkers. Those progressive unions, there was an easy fit and the kinds of thingsthat the party was pushing and was going to push through this candidate and through the people that we were ableto elect, that was very, very positive and that was the substantive part of where the campaigns were starting to, Ithink, get their ideas. We also, of course, had a very important intellectual group of people that were helping tomold where government should be going and what as needed and what wasn’t already there, what needed to beimproved. Those kinds of figure became very, very important of the go-to person. If we go to this meeting, if wemeet with your membership, what will be the positions that should be taken? If there’s going to be a debate, whatwill be the key issues that the press will be looking at? What information are you able to get from these organizedgroups that are out there, number 1, with policy positions but number 2, with an ability to deliver a vote on election

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day? So there was a very pragmatic aspect to certainly the organized labor aspect, which was, I think in those days,more powerful than it is now.

Q: Did you see any improvement in Brendan Byrne’s performance as a candidate on the stump during the generalelection from the early days of the primary?

English: Oh, yes. For all I know that it could’ve been totally put on. I barely know where I am and who thesepeople are and why I’m here. Absolutely. He became much more comfortable with the whole thing and of coursehe had some acting background, which we didn’t know at the time either, and so he is, I don’t want to call him aham, but he certainly started to enjoy the notoriety. He started to enjoy the celebrity that comes with that type ofattention, but I don’t think he ever lost sight of how serious the undertaking was and how exciting it would be to beable to do it.

Q: Do you think he enjoyed the day-to-day campaign grind?

English: No, I think he thought that was dreadful. That was something, “Oh, I have to get up and do that one moreday.” Which is understandable. I mean, it’s a lot of running around and sometimes there is the right crowd there,and he was also a different face than what they were used to, meaning on the organized side. Number 1, he didn’tdrink. He was bored at cocktail parties. He wanted to go to bed at 8:00 or 8:30 or something like that, and it wouldbe our job to go into whatever hall and explain to whoever was running the event that the Governor-to-be wanted tospeak first. “Well he can’t do that, people are still coming in from work. They haven’t had anything to drink! Theyhaven’t had anything to eat!” “Well, that could be, but we have to start at 6:00 o’clock .” He was not to malleablealong those lines, that he had these certain disciplines and, by the way, “Stop everything because there’s going tobe a tennis game.” “Wait a minute, these people on national television or what have you, they want to interviewyou!” “Yeah, but about my tennis game,” or some other event of that nature, he didn’t let too much get in the wayof his own personal proclivities in that sense. Nonetheless, after a while the people had said, “Well, hey, he’s thecandidate and this is when he’s going to speak so we’ll adjust to that.” They didn’t like it too much because theyweren’t used to that.

Q: I assume part of your role was to prepare briefings before each time he met with one of these groups about whatthe background was, who the key people were, what they were interested in. Did he do his homework? Did he readyour briefings and was he prepared when he went into these meetings?

English: It was hard to tell, and one of the things that was a great training event for me was that I would prepare thebriefings or someone would give me a briefing and then I would read it, and the first thing he would do would be totake it away from me and then start asking me questions but he had the briefing. So I learned to memorize prettyquickly because it was clear that I had to know what it was about even though he had the material and he might ormight not read it.

Q: Any anecdotes you recall during these meetings? Fun things that happened or embarrassing things?

English: No, not really. Let me go back. I was a volunteer in this campaign so that I was there during lunchtime.My law firm happened to be not very far away so I would go down during lunch from my firm and do the work Iwas supposed to do and then it would be after work that I would then be around again for whatever event, but I wasnot traveling with them particularly. But I was helping with the groups and, of course, on the weekends why thenall of us were volunteers.

Q: Let’s fast-forward to election night. What was that like and what was the mood among the campaign people?

English: The usual. The euphoria, that this has been an important thing to be part of, and that is the thing that Ithink attracts and should continue to attract people to the democratic process, that you have ideas about things. Youwant to have a champion that will be believed in, that will lead people to these kinds of positive things for thesociety. Quite apart from that, it’s a lot of fun. You meet all sorts of people. You talk about things that you

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wouldn’t normally talk about in your every-day life and it’s important, and I think that that’s very attractive topeople. So election night, yay. The next morning, of course, is when everybody wakes up and says oh, now wehave to govern. Different issue.

Q: Bring us a little bit forward from that point. Day after election, what did you think? You had to make somepersonal plans as to what you did with your own career and life. Did you immediately think you would like to go inwith the new administration?

English: No, that was never part of what I was thinking about during the time that I was working on the campaign,and then I went to a fundraiser that the Governor gave for Ann Klein, because she had suffered a deficit in runningfor her, and first of all I thought that was a very classy thing to do, and I went to this meeting in Morris County, abreakfast or something like that and paid my money and the Governor-to-be came up to me and said, “How comeyou haven’t called me?” and I said, “It never occurred to me to call you.” And he gave me the name of hisscheduler and said, “Please call.” So I did, but the scheduler wasn’t really thrilled, I have to tell you, to say, “Oh, doI have to work you in too?” “Yes, kid, you do. Because he asked.” So that was the first time that it even occurred tome that there would be something that I could do or would be asked to do in his administration.

Q: I assume that meeting did get scheduled.

English: It did.

Q: What happened?

English: It did get scheduled and I thought to myself, “As long as I’m here, I might as well ask for something.” So Isaid, “How about DCA? I don’t even know what it does but how hard could that be? A bunch of mayors.” Justsounds like another interest group.

Q: <inaudible>

English: That’s right. Why not that? I could be Commissioner of that I suppose. Bold, in that I knew absolutelynothing about it and he did mention that he thought he probably would like to have a mayor do that and, of course,Patty Sheehan was part of the campaign and somebody that I had very high regard for, and then he said to me,“How would you like to be Counsel?” and then he told me his problem, and his problem was that Lew Kaden wasgoing to be his Counsel but Lew Kaden was not a member of the New Jersey Bar, and he thought that this mightcause him some trouble in just dealing on a day-to-day basis with what he had to deal with or that kind ofperception that the press might get a big kick out of. So then he said, “Well, how about Legislative Counsel?”Because Lew had no experience. No one in the staff that he was pulling on had any experience with the legislatureand, of course, I had been a state senator and Counsel to the Minority. So I could go on the floor of the Senate andinto the Assembly, which subsequently turned out to be a good thing.

Q: How quickly did you say yes?

English: Not that quickly. I was a partner in a firm. This probably happened in late November, early December, andthe administration would take effect in the middle of January.

Q: Did you talk to anyone else other than Brendan Byrne about the job?

English: Mmm-hmm. I talked to my senior partner in particular, and he said, “I would be sad that you left the firm,but you would kick yourself if you didn’t take the opportunity.” So I took that very seriously and said, “Okay, I’lldo it.”

Q: I think this is a good place to break.

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Q: Jerry, before we broke we had gotten to the transition. You met with the Governor-Elect. He asked you to jointhe Governor’s Office staff as legislative counsel. What happened next? You did talk with your senior partner atyour law firm and decided, I assume, to take the job. But what were the other memories you have of the transitionperiod?

English: Well there were transition meetings going on with various departments and I don’t recall much about thatbeyond saying I knew that there were transition papers being prepared, and then there was a discussion about whatit was that was going to happen once the legislature convened. The most important part was really to be able tohave a legislative program that started right away, that the first 100 days, which is kind of always magic allegedlyand the time in which administration gets to show itself, and being able to have those bills ready, being able to havea very, very forceful we-just-got-elected-and-boy-we’re-not-wasting-any-time. Ironically, and perhaps also forthose kinds of things that happen that you don’t quite expect, is that some of us on the very first day of going towork were going to have some trouble getting there because we didn’t have any gasoline for our cars. So it was“How am I going to get to work?” It was the time of the first shortages and--

Q: The Arab oil embargo.

Governor Byrne and Jerry Englsih shown at Governor's Energy Summit at Princeton University in 1974

English: Yes, and so that’s what having an energy office became very, very important and Joel Jacobson was partof that, another former state senator, was heading it and I’m just having a little lapse of thought for the moment, buthe was a Republican senator. After I managed to find somebody in the Counsel’s Office who was part of the Cahillorganization and that was being kept on, once I found out that I could carpool with him for awhile was very helpful,plus the fact that he would kind of explain to me a lot of things about how things worked in the Counsel’s Officeand what they did.

Q: Do you remember who that was?

English: Jim Heaney.

Q: Jim Heaney.

English: Who had been a long time in government.

Q: In general, were the Cahill people helpful in the transition?

English: Oh, yes. Extremely. Extremely, and that was also a very important lesson to everyone that the worst thingyou could do is to make sure that everyone who knows anything is gone. Let’s have the people around who are inarchive, who have been there, who have been working on some matters that bring you up to date on at least recenthistory and, of course, that is terribly important as you go really into the bureaucracy of government, quite apartfrom the people who are there, who are hired on for the job, not for life.

Q: Any other thoughts about that transition period? Were there obvious jockeying for jobs? Were there people whowere really lobbying for positions?

English: Oh, I’m sure there were.

Q: But not that you saw?

English: But I was not, other than the people that I really wanted to have. I was permitted to bring some people on,so I brought my own secretary, for instance, who elected to leave the firm and to come with me. Jeff Ketterson wasgiven a position. I found an opportunity for Bob Torricelli, but I told him that he had to stay in law school full time

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and work for me full time, that he couldn’t leave law school in order to work for me, which he did, and thenwatching these people that were going to work for you that you not necessarily ever worked with before was aninteresting part. Actually, when we got there we began to find out a couple of truisms and that is that well, theRepublicans could buy furniture but the Democrats had to depreciate it. You could never have any new equipmentor new desks or new anything, and then the office that you and I ultimately shared had those silk curtains fromWoodrow Wilson’s day, that are so light-struck that they were all falling apart, and I never was going to touch thembecause I thought they were so incredible, but I didn’t have an office or a desk that was mine so I shared the deskwith Tom O’Neil. So we would send out memos that said things, like, “From the Desk of Tom and Jerry.” We hadone phone until finally, I don’t know, a few weeks into the operation, I was going out to lunch and the Governorwas going out with somebody or another. He says, “How are things?” and I said, “Not so good.” He said, “What doyou mean?” I said, “Well, I don’t have a desk, I have a phone, and frankly, other than the honor…” I didn’t say“I’m threatening to leave” but I was showing a little kind of, you know, “This is not what I intended to do.” Thenext day, I had the old Woodrow Wilson office and the State Police came in to get rid of any listening equipmentthat might be in there, which had never even occurred to me. So they were in there and Chief Justice Hughes camein to call on me. He wanted to smoke, and I found an ashtray, and right in the middle of this ashtray was thisupturned, dead bug and I thought, well, that’s what they’re in here doing. So there were these bizarre things thatwere going on of just setting up the place. Like, do you have a place to sit? I mean, while you’re working, but wasit functional? Did anybody care about that? Don Lan, who was then the Executive Secretary to the Governor, didn’tbelieve in spending any money on anything unless he was absolutely forced to. So at least Tom O’Neil and I gotour own phone and didn’t have to say, “Hold on” while I hand the phone to the other person and run in the otherroom and get him. So those were the kinds of parts that were, you know, welcome to government. Welcome to thepublic sector where you will have a lot of excitement but please don’t expect to have too many creature comforts orthe things that one might expect from a big-time operation.

Q: As you developed that legislative program that you hoped to move quickly after the inauguration, who were thekey people who were advising and writing, I assume, drafts of these bills or at least trading ideas about what thatprogram should be?

English: Oh, doubtless numbers of people, but Lew Kaden was the point at which the legislation really didline-by-line. Dave Goldberg was certainly helpful on parts of this, the existing staff on parts of this, and on thefiscal sides, and I think Dick Leone was always part of the political think of where they had to be going and therevenue side of where they had to be going. But on the day-to-day bills going through, Lew Kaden and his staffwere the ones that were doing the actual drafting of most of the things. I would get it in the areas in which theythought I could be particularly helpful and do markups of “add this,” “put this part in,” and to the part that wouldalso come to me would be to bounce off who should be, in fact, the ones that were going to be the ones to sponsorthe bills. Which house should they be going in? Who should be the key sponsors? Who would be able to carry thebill through? The committee structure was much less sophisticated. They had very little staff in the legislature oneither side. They had Sam Alito, Sr.’s apartisan staff to draft bills for them, meaning for the legislators, but theGovernor’s bills were the ones that always had the prominence. They were always the ones that were on theGovernor’s agenda and hopefully the bills that were going to be the major centerpieces of the administration.

Q: Since Brendan Byrne had run as “The Man Who Couldn’t Be Bought,” and I guess later the label of“Government Under Glass,” I assume that much of the tension of that early legislative program was directed towardopen government, anti-corruption, that type of thing?

English: Absolutely. The gubernatorial election, the public funding of gubernatorial elections, was his very firstbill. That also included the public advocate so that there were these two parts of this. Anyone who can get agrassroots approach to their candidacy, it doesn’t have to be a self-financing individual, would have an opportunityto run and, of course, he came from that very background of someone who had been in public service most of hisadult career. Then the public advocate, being the watchdog inside government, somebody that would have theopportunity to sue a department, to say, “You’re not doing your job. Here’s where you’re falling apart,” that kindof following along with the legislative intent, to keep a program on course, to keep it from going off. That one waspretty unique and as I recall, first in the nation, not replicated too many places except maybe in a comptroller’s role

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or something of that nature, or oversight, for instance, in the Congress. But those kinds of roles did not exist in thestate, at least at that time.

Q: Of course, with Brendan Byrne’s landslide victory in November, many new Democrats also got elected to thelegislature. The advantage is you have very large majorities, but as most political scientists say, when you havethose large majorities they’re very difficult to control and to discipline. How did you see that in your relationshipwith the legislature and with the legislative leadership? Was it somewhat an unwieldy role to keep these people inline?

English: Well, let’s just say it was challenging. That old Russian proverb: “Easier to take care of one woman than abag of fleas.” When people come in in that fashion, there is some delusional aspects of it, which is, “I got here onmy own. I owe no allegiance to anyone. I don’t have to do anything that you tell me to do because the people loveme and they will return me no matter what happens to you.” Well, there may be some truth to that, but I wouldn’thold my breath about it because if it goes the other way around and the head of the ticket is vastly unpopular, andwe have just seen some of that happen in our national elections, then people that really were doing a pretty goodjob, you just got swept along. So events overtake. At the same time, I think it was very helpful to me to haveworked with the legislators. In advance, I knew them. The new people who came in I made a great effort to try andget to know as quickly as possible, to appreciate their abilities and in many instances, of course, they had comefrom districts where they had never really elected Democrats before. So they tended to be pretty idealistic, and thenafter a while they started to really like it and say, “Oh well, I really would like to get elected again. Maybe I’llbecome a little more conservative as times go along.” And with all of us there was sometimes that thing of “Well,the sun certainly couldn’t get up today unless I was out there helping it.” And some of the illusions which strikesome of them from time-to-time. But that’s when the leadership worked on everybody, that’s when the role of theGovernor, that’s when the Governor’s cabinet, that’s when the advisors become critical to explain the program, toshow how it’s important to the state, how it will enhance their careers because they’ve done something that wasimportant to the state, and for those who were bold enough to say, “This is worth my not getting reelected again.”Those were fairly rare instances but they did happen.

Q: In those early days after Brendan Byrne’s inauguration, how were the mechanics of the relationship with thelegislature and the legislative leadership in particular handled? Were there regular meetings with the leadership?What were those meetings like, and give us a feel for the dynamics.

English: Before every legislative session there was a meeting in the Governor’s Office with the legislativeleadership to go over the bills, and these would be typically just the Democratic leadership, to go over the bills,what we hoped would get passed that day, what we needed to have in an extraordinary measure, which was alwaysdifficult because there is a legislative process of how many times a bill has to be read, whether it’s out ofcommittee, how much time there is between those events and only in emergencies can you change that, and that’swith a super-majority vote. Many of the people that came into government with Brendan Byrne were also, however,new to government. Alan Sagner had never been part of government before. Joel Jacobson hadn’t been part ofgovernment before. Others might have been involved. Some of them had been in the legislature like, Anne Klein.Others had never been there except that they were the people that were key people in the campaigns and were goingto be continuing to be looked upon for advice with their particular sector of expertise. So you’d have thosemeetings and the counsel, who helped work on the bill and what have you, would usually be dispatched with theleadership to go to the caucus if they were invited to explain the bills, because once the leadership left then theywould go off to the caucus, the party caucus, where they would discuss the bills, try to get a sense of whether or notthey had the votes, and then that became the job of my group on a legislative day, to track the bill, to see where itwas going, see what the problems were, see what amendments were being insisted upon, and uh.. those were very,very long days. It started early and then they would conclude sometimes far into the night, and if they were mattersof big importance then it would just keep going on and keep going on and then there would be adjournments. Therewould be times when you thought somebody was on board and then they would have an epiphany of something thatwas really important and would start to balk and then you’d have to drag them into the Governor’s Office to have alittle chat to realign their thinking back to at least neutrality. But the other thing that happened was that the seniorlegislatures, like Eddie Crabiel, were no longer in the leadership. So we had new leadership in the legislative ranks.

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So they hadn’t done this before either. So Pat Dodd became the head of the Senate, for instance. Eddie was theSecretary of State. Eddie would occasionally go down on a bill, would be an example of something that was, again,a respected voice, someone that they knew, someone that understood all of the parties. But there was a newleadership aspect as well.

Q: Talk a little bit more about some of the other leaders who were there, again in these early days of theadministration. What were their personalities like? Their styles?

English: Well, of course, Pat Dodd was this elegant, elegant person. A very dashing figure, was kind of thebachelor type that everybody really wants to be. Beautifully dressed, very charming, and with a pretty good staff,and people who were working hard. Some of the people had been around before. And then there was HowardWoodson, who was the first Black speaker in the history of the state and he had been a very distinguished, andcontinued to be, a very distinguished minister and pastor of a very large church in Trenton . Of course, he had comefrom one of the premier Black universities in the South. Always elegantly put together and when things got difficultand people were getting a little difficult in the ranks, I would watch him start to sway and then he’d start to preach,and it would be kind of like this metronome and everyone would get calmed down, and then they could do businessagain. But he was always the person that was used to listening to people’s personal problems and brought a veryhuman side to the legislature and getting them to work together. As much as they were really wanting to maybe hiteach other, instead coming out and presenting the best face.

Q: Fairly shortly after Brendan Byrne takes office, your plans on the legislative agenda, and so the focus of theadministration, get diverted somewhat because it’s determined that the state’s finances are in such bad shape thatsomething has to be done quickly. What was your reaction when you were advised of this new change in priorities?

English: Well I remember Dick Leone saying to me, “Well, maybe we can get it done.” That was not the mostringing, it’s just no problem. Just go in there and put that bill in. I think it probably was more to my naiveté and lessto his about how difficult that was going to be. But that’s when we all got the crash course in how muchgovernment costs. How much any of us really know about how much it costs to run this state and what eachdepartment depended on and what they were required to do, and of course, those budgets seem so achievable todayversus what they are today. But we still had a balanced budget, a constitutional requirement. So this is somethingthat certainly Governor Byrne understood extremely well from his times with Governor Meyner, who waslegendarily frugal. I think that may be the best way to place that, that he was very frugal. So government was runon a pretty tight string. As soon as that came up, I did not expect initially the firestorm that eventually took place orthe duration of it, but we had some extraordinary people in the legislature. It wasn’t as if nobody had ever talkedabout it before. The Cahill Commission had already been there. Serious students of government and the people whowere in the legislature knew that this was going to come up, was going to have to be dealt with, and the first budgetthat they were going to try and cut, by the way. I’ll never forget that the first thing that the Treasury Departmentgroup decided that they would cut were funds to some group that desperately needed blood. Well if you couldimagine what that response was, which was very emotional. The wheelchairs were going to start lining up. Youbegan to find out that the politics were very particular and they were very particular to every single group and, ofcourse, that scene is reenacted on differing scales over and over. So it turned out to be a lot tougher and a lot longerthan I anticipated to begin with, and we had a relatively early victory in the assembly. So the assembly voted, wegot it, no problem now, we just turn it over to the Senate. Well not so fast.

Q: Before we get to that point, I’m still curious about the initial reactions of the legislative leaders and otherlegislators that you had contact with when you first told them well, we have to put a tax package through, eventhough we didn’t run on this, that Brendan Byrne a few months ago said he didn’t see the need for. What was thereaction?

English: I don’t remember it being all that shocked. I think they were realists but I didn’t hear too many, “Oh, yes,don’t worry your pretty little head about this. You just give me my orders and I’ll get it done.”

Q: Among the Democrats, who were the most difficult people to get on board?

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English: Well, it differed from time to time. We always had the most fun with Kenny Gewertz. Or as the Governorwould say, “We’re going from bad to Gewertz.” Because yes, he’d be there, no he wouldn’t be there, and he alwayshad a pretty good reason. But you weren’t going to go to the bank that he was going to be where he told you he wasat 8:00 o’clock in the morning. Where he was later on was another thing. I don’t want to pick him out as being theonly person that would be like that. We have to go back to the seminal issue, and that was that the Supreme Courtwas an actor in this review, because they had set the stage about what the state had to do in order to comply withtheir own efficient mandate. There was a stick there to kind of say by the way, this is not a volunteer act. You’reunder the compunction of law to respond legislature, and there were some that took that extremely seriously, andthen there were others that would say to me, “Do you really think that the Supreme Court’s going to put us all injail?” So between those two things, and then there were some that would just say politically, “Look, hey folks. If itwas up to me I wouldn’t be doing this, but it’s for the school children and the Supreme Court has said that everychild must be properly funded. So this is the only way to do it unless you want to have a 15% sales tax.” I madethat up. You know, “Unless you want us to stop having the kind of sales tax that we have, which is pretty benign toone that is.” That’s the only kind of thing that there is or a statewide property tax. And income tax is the fairest.

Q: Let’s go back to where I stopped you before. The bill does get passed by the assembly. Were you confident thenthat you could get the Senate to also pass the bill?

English: In hindsight, yes. Confident. In hindsight, couldn’t have been more wrong, and we had to go through along drought.

Q: Well talk about that process and the various players who were key in that Senate vote.

English: That’s when the skill of people like Dick Leone, Cliff Goldman, Dave, and Lew Kaden really came to thefore. Eddie Crabiel. The people who really were working all of those angles. That’s when we had to really startpulling in the county chairmen to assure them that their people would get reelected. That’s when we had to startpulling out all the stops of all the good government groups, of all of those actors that one would hope would bebehind what the state had to do in order to have a fair tax system, and to pull that burden off of the property tax andhave everybody understand that it wasn’t going to the state coffers. So there was an education process that had togo on there that took a long time getting the newspapers to understand what was going on, it’s a media campaign,and everybody was running for election in the middle of it, which is always the case. So it was the stand-up peopleremained the stand-up, the ones who said, “Yes, Governor, we will pass this bill.” But it was not an easy lift forthem at any time and other things would get held up. “If you want my vote on X, then you’ve got to do this on Y.”The Governor did not play that game. He did not sit up nights trying to be super friendly to the legislature. This iswhen he would get difficult. “I want you to talk to X, Y, and Z. I’m not going to talk to them, and by the way, Iwant Senator out of courtesy not to be exorcized and I’m going to go behind them and get this done without thecommittee.” Now those kinds of things would, of course, set chills in my spine.

Q: Did you try to argue with him that he should be a little bit more forthcoming?

English: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. “Now, come on, you know. I need five minutes. He’s desperate to see you andit’s probably not about this at all. He’s got something else on his mind and he’ll want to say to you ‘Would youplease just give my brother-in-law a job at the car wash?’ or whatever.” That was not part of my job, by the way.That’s what Harold got to do. I never had any of the patronage side. I had the Boards and Commissions that werevolunteer boards and commissions. I had the judges, the prosecutors. Those were my line jobs. Quite apart from thelegislation and working with the legislature. Everybody always had something that they were interested in doing,and all they needed to be able to say was, to whomever the group was or the individual, “I talked with the Governorabout it.” No guarantee that was going to come out the way they wanted it but “I talked to the Governor about it.”Which gave them, of course, the status of importance and continuing appearance of influence and access to theGovernor, about which there is no more important thing if you’re in public life, to be able to go to the real decisionmaker and to talk with the key staff, and sometimes there is only so many hours in the day, because meanwhileyou’re still running the government. This is not the only thing that’s going on. The government has still got to berun. There are still projects and programs and things that the Governor has to put his attention to. Putting together a

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realistic budget, getting judges appointed, getting the revenues in the door, maintaining a pretty sophisticatedsystem of government which, in hindsight and presently, I think we have.

Q: Looking back with the benefit of so many years to think about it, in that first senate vote, do you think it wouldhave made any difference if Brendan Byrne had been a little bit more hands-on in dealing directly with individualsenators?

English: It might have been. It might have been. What you were trying to do is to have someone rise above theirpersonal ambitions and say, “This is why I got elected” and some people were capable of that and others justcouldn’t face it, or thought that they would be drummed out and never heard of again and that was very importantto him.

Q: At least one or two thought that Brendan Byrne was aloof, would look down upon them. Do you think that was afair rap?

English: Not only that he was aloof, but that he also had a cadre of people around him who were aloof, that woulddisdain them and didn’t think they were very bright, had very little regard for their abilities.

Q: Some people during the course of these interviews have supported that position. What’s your own take on it?

English: Oh, I think that that was some of the feeling. Certainly I would get the complaints and I would have to saythat at least because I had been part of the legislature beforehand and I knew some of the people that I think that Iprobably heard more of it and then would try and work it around so that it wasn’t quite so irritating. But some typeof people will always take offense when what they’re being told is the bald truth and there’s not too much icing onit, or there’s nothing in it for them except downsides. In this context you also begin to find out about the strengthsof the people that are delivering the message. Somebody like Lew Kaden who, to me, I don’t think I’ve ever metanyone who understood the rhetoric of the policy and then how to implement it as well as Lew did. In the course ofhis very substantial career in the private sector has followed that. He had a human face on how to go about doingsomething and if you could get him to talk in that way to people, he was very, very convincing and was very, verygood. I think the staff only worked what, about 24 hours a day for him and continued to reach out for his adviceyears after he was no longer in government.

Q: But of course, Lew Kaden, Dick Leone, Cliff Goldman, yourself, Brendan Byrne, all had pedigreeseducationally and so forth that for most of the legislators may have been a little intimidating or even off-putting.Most of the key people had Ivy League backgrounds and a lot of the legislators were from blue collar backgrounds.Did that have any impact, do you think, some class distinction?

English: Oh it may have but it wasn’t palpable to me, and it wasn’t something certainly that I thought about. I wasalways interested in all of these people and found some remarkable things about them. So they were interesting tome. Now they may not have been interesting to everybody. On the other hand I had to deal with them and who Ihad the privilege of dealing with them, and so I would find out about their personal lives. I would find out abouttheir districts because I had campaigned in the districts. I think I had more of a sense of who they were reallytalking about, and the ones who had come out of this fluke of an election, they were at peril. Could they stay on?Were they going to be able to stay there? Would it have been helpful if there had been a little more, oh I don’tknow, care and attention? Nobody ever has enough care and attention, so certainly that would’ve helped. Would ithave produced a different vote? I don’t think so.

Q: What do you recall of those final days as the Senate gets down to making a decision one way or another? Whowere the key targets? What were the meetings like? How long did they last?

English: The meetings were endless. The hours were endless. The negotiating of the changing of bills, even to alittle bit, that’s when somebody like, again, Cliff Goldman, would come in and know the numbers to a dime,explain them extremely well. Cliff was one of the people that I think most of the legislators felt very comfortable

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with because he had an academic ability to put things in very simple terms, and he didn’t talk down to people. Heworked so hard to make it understandable so that if they had a chance to actually spend the time with him, then theywould’ve been able as they were required to do, was to go out and explain to somebody else what was going on andwhy they did what they did. So Cliff was one of the good examples of taking very difficult issue and explaining itdistrict by district and exactly what it meant and how that district was going to benefit.

Q: Who were the swing votes that you recall?

English: Charlie, what was the name of the guy? The independent gentleman who sat in the middle of the aisle. Hecame out of the Ironbound District. Sorry, I just can’t say.

Q: Anthony Imperiale?

English: Yes. We just had nightmares with people like him because, of course, he was his own kind of veryindependent individual. Very idiosyncratic. You know, to this day I can’t remember how he voted. I just rememberthat we spent hours and hours and hours with him.

Q: What about on the Republican side? Who were the people that you hoped to bring over?

English: You could always count on Ray Bateman. You could always count on Frank McDermott. You couldalways count on the people that had already been there once and survived, but Ray Bateman is the one in particularthat I think was key. He had been on the Blue Ribbon Commission. He was on record.

Q: How about Wayne Dumont?

English: Wayne, of course, was Mr. Education and a lifelong, practically, legislature. Very difficult about certainitems, including Kuser Mansion, which I think was part of his family’s heritage or something, and he always washassling me about Kuser Mansion. Unless I saw the vote in front of me today, I couldn’t tell you where he was buthe would be the kind of person that would be open to an intellectual discussion, and he wasn’t going to get thrownout of office.

Q: As it comes down to it, you aren’t able to get the votes in the Senate. What was the feeling? Just total depressionor how did you take it?

English: Well, of course, it was very depressing and there was no going away from it. There you were, and formany people, people like myself, we didn’t get asked to a lot of dinner parties. This polarized just real people, andyou could either go someplace and find yourself in the middle of a very unpleasant evening with people that wereoutraged that such a thing was going to be even considered. Then after a while you begin to pick out the three orfour people that you could see without being personally attacked. So that was, of course, depressing butnonetheless, yeah, just keep trying.

Q: Now that you’ve lost that first battle over the income tax and the school reform package, how did yourestructure your priorities? Did you go back to the early agenda of the clean government, public financeaccountability program?

English: I don’t think we ever strayed from that. That was one of the things that I think was a hallmark of theadministration, and finally when the Governor was running for reelection, and the slogan was you have to respecthim for what he did, that signature remained, and in his appointments, certainly to the judiciary, and hisappointments to Boards and Commissions, in his selection of good people to run the major departments ofgovernment. I kind of left that part out and I shouldn’t have because there was, at that time, people have such talentthat wanted to be part of government. They wanted to come and be the dollar-a-year person or to give up their lawprofession or to give up their other career or get a leave of absence, because they knew this was going to be anexciting time and they wanted to be part of it, and they wanted to be associated with someone whose character was

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one that they were comfortable with and that was not just a all-the-political-hacks-of-the-world convention. So itwas a time for really gifted people to come into government and that may, in fact, be one of the more lasting effectsof his administration.

Q: The tax issue gets revived later in the administration and either rightly or wrongly, the legislature, at least keypeople in the legislature, suggest that they take more of a lead now in developing a program. Was that your read ofit or was it a behind-the-scenes strategy of the Byrne administration to say look, we got our head handed to us thelast time and it might be better for them to look like they’re taking more of an initiative this time around?

English: Well however it really turned out, I think that’s what happened. Whether it was some divine intervention, Idon’t think but certainly by that time everybody knew one another a little better too. You knew who you couldcount on.

Q: Of course the court is also getting a little bit more aggressive in terms of fixing a deadline and saying that thelegislature’s not going to be able to push this off forever.

English: Right. And then you saw the real Brendan Byrne emerge when he decided that he was going to argue thecase before the Supreme Court, which I don’t think has ever happened since, and I doubt that it ever happenedbefore but I don’t know. So he was back in his old days of arguing as he did quite regularly before the Weintraubcourt, and that certainly set another kind of standard, which is of “I really believe in this. I believe in it enough tohave this very public display of the executive coming to the court to say ‘You have to enforce your order.’”

Q: Talk somewhat about the relationship between the governors of New Jersey and the Supreme Court, not only thespecial relationship that Brendan Byrne had with the Supreme Court, but in general. Some commentators havesuggested that it’s almost too close a relationship, that the governor and the Supreme Court gang up against thelegislature. Is that your take as a lawyer and as a former key person in state government?

English: No, but I think there is a reality that sometimes the balance tilts toward the executive, especially when youhave a part-time legislature. You had then not very robust staff, not very many people to actually do the bills. Theywould be dependent upon the executive for their information. So the holder of the information, at least in terms ofgovernmental workings, was always with the executive. The relationship of the governors with the Supreme Court,of course New Jersey, as everybody knows, has an appointed Supreme Court that has had national stature longbefore Brendan Byrne was elected. Coming from the Vanderbilt court, having one of its members go on theSupreme Court, Justice Brennan, and also another time of not the flood of litigation. Very few cases as a practicalmatter. The time for those cases to be decided, and one of the personal things for me that I never expected waswhen the Governor said, “Oh, and you’ll do the judges and the prosecutors.” I then was able to be part of theselection for the Supreme Court, and that’s the time when I really started to know the justices. The Governor had anannual dinner with them and that was the only social occasion that went on in that fashion. It was a social dinner.This was not a time when cases were discussed. No one would have ever have considered discussing a case thatwas going to come before the court with any justice. But in terms of the kind of people that should be considered tobecome a Supreme Court justice, then those were the kinds of conversations one could have and we did have.

Q: Let’s get the income tax enacted and passed. Some people have suggested in these interviews that there was afeeling of accomplishment that also very quickly became clear that politically this was going to be a very difficultissue to deal with as the administration and the Governor moved toward another election. What was your ownfeeling when the income tax did get passed and the school package was enacted?

English: I thought that’s what we were there to do. I certainly expected reelection. Didn’t think it would be easy.Thought we might lose some people. But that’s what you signed on for, yeah, and staying the course. That’s a termthat sometimes has come into some disrepute. The follow-up, the stability, that this was supposed to put in place,was why you went through all that, and it continued to show the integrity, I’ve used that term many times.

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Single-mindedness, which can sometimes be a difficult thing. “That’s all I’m concerned about, that’s all I’m payingattention to. There’s no other way.” I think that the administration became more flexible. It matured. Differentpeople came in to head different departments. Not everybody was a terrific commissioner. Sometimes people left.Better people came, worse people came, but the key people in government stayed and New Jersey has a remarkablecivil service, and you don’t get to know that until you’re actually there and you get to work with these people thathave had their careers there who you just ask one question and they know the answer to it right away.

Q: Before we move toward the reelection campaign, I wanted you to discuss in more depth your other roles asLegislative Counsel. You’ve mentioned briefly your role in the review of potential nominees as judges andprosecutors. Talk about the mechanics of that and how the Governor went about it.

English: Oh, well the first thing he did early in his campaign was to say that he would work with the New JerseyBar Association and that he would send candidates to them for their review and that for the most part he wouldhonor their up or down about whether or not the Bar Association, which does not involve every lawyer in the state.It’s a voluntary organization. But the committee was chaired by a man named William Dill. Again, a person ofunquestioned integrity, credibility, and so he ran that committee. The part that happened for me that was just awonderful experience was the Governor had a close working relationship with a retired assignment judge of EssexCounty and subsequently of Sussex and Warren, Alexander P. Waugh, Sr., who was in the old days, when youthought about what a judge was like, he was a judge, and the first time he ever called me as a private lawyer, I stoodup at my desk at the other end of the telephone, because he was the person that commanded that response. Ofcourse, as I got to know him later on, I didn’t stand up all the time but mentally I always stood up. When he askedJudge Waugh to be the primary vettor of candidates, and they could come from any place. That was part of theGovernor’s view. “If you want to be a judge, you let me know. Give me your résumé. Give it to Mrs. English.” Thecounty leaders, bar associations, had their committees. So we would get the names of people and the résumés and Iwould give them to Judge Waugh. He would then do the initial vetting and he would call. In those days, it wasmore than likely that the lawyers would have appeared before the court at some point or another. Somebody’scourt. There were not that many in-house people that were even interested in such a position. Most of the peoplewere litigating. Trial people. They were general practitioners for the most part. The assignment judge knew them.The bar was much smaller. If I said 10,000 people, 10,000 lawyers, as opposed to 80- or 90,000 today. The goodpractitioners were well known. The assignment judge would talk to somebody like Judge Waugh because theyknew that would be kept in confidence, and that he would then have a rating and then he would be able to come in,talk with me. We would then look at the vacancies that were available and it’s a bipartisan court issue now. It hadchanged to a statewide jurisdiction by that point, although we were still in the middle of some district courtelevations and things of that nature that happened in the course of the time, and I can’t really remember exactlywhen, and then we would go to the Governor with recommendations of people and I, of course, before I got there,had to be able to say, “Yes, there will be a political clearance on this particular person from the senator that had theopportunity to block that nomination.” And that became the really much more difficult part of the job becauseassume you had a really wonderful candidate that you couldn’t believe that you could get to leave their practice andgo on the bench, that had gone through the vetting and then the senator would say, “Well no, that’s not my person”or “There’s something else that I want from you, Governor, before I release this individual.” And that’s anunwritten rule, as you know, in the Senate. It’s not part of anything written down. It is a practice and it is honoredamong them. It’s very rare that anyone has ever stripped a senator of their courtesy. I think it may have happenedonce or twice but that would be for some egregious reason. So sometimes we lost really good candidates. Othertimes it became challenging because the people were extremely well-qualified but they had no political credentialwhatsoever, and we would often say because you have political credential doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t beconsidered. If you’ve been interested in political life, well good. That shouldn’t be a discrediting thing. On theother hand, if you’ve never been involved in politics before but you are really going to be a great judge, then itwould be my job, along with others, to try and make sure that they made their calls and called on the people thatthey should call on, including the senators. Tell them about their qualifications and their interest in serving thecourt.

Q: Did the Governor interview each candidate?

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English: Absolutely.

Q: What were the typical questions he would ask?

English: He would ask rather broad questions of the judges. He had different questions for the prosecutors. Theywere usually general questions. He didn’t ask them anything about a pending case or something of that nature. Hewould ask them about their experience, why they wanted to go on the court now. Did they believe that this was acalling for them, try and get a sense of were they bright people, did they seem to be, again, the people that would fitthat branch? Because as we all know, the judges live on a lot longer than the governors do and having that highcaliber sitting in the judiciary is just absolutely critical to having a civil society.

Q: Another role you had, as you mentioned, was relating to the commissions and authorities. There were somefairly difficult times with at least a couple of the authorities, like the Port Authority, in which you later served onthe board, and the Turnpike Authority, some of the others. Talk a little bit about the structure and about the politicsof relating to these quasi-autonomous and sometimes fairly independent bodies.

English: That would be one in which the Governor would have a very distinct interest. Why did the person want tobe on this particular kind of board? What were they going to bring to it? Did they have some particular competencethat was going to help make that board function properly? Some of them were paying boards. Not a lot of moneybut they got a per diem allowance. Many others were purely voluntary, and I tended to deal more with thevoluntary ones. If they had advice and consent of the Senate, that was a special role, and some of them did requirethat. Others were merely by the appointment of the Governor with potential appointments by the Speaker and theSenate President. So we had everything from the Asparagus Council, which was one of my great favorites, to theWater Authorities, the Highway Authorities, the Turnpike, the Garden State Parkway. Of course the Port Authoritywas its own pretty unique institution, as was the Delaware River Authorities, those ones that were bi-state, and therole that they played in terms of the economic ability of the state, the transportation nexus, those kinds of things,depending upon how important they were to the economic aspects of the state and its ability to function versus avery discreet group of interests had something to do with the kind of people that sought those kinds of jobs, or atrade association sought to place one of their people.

Q: Do you remember any of the particular incidents of conflicts between the Governor’s Office and any of thesecommissions or authorities?

English: Oh, yes. Certainly with the Port Authority. Governor Byrne was just death on any toll increase. He alreadyhad Alan Sagner, his former Commissioner of Transportation as the chairman. He’d appointed everybody withminor exceptions on the New Jersey side. He had good relationships with Governor Carey and Nelson Rockefeller.Not so good in the early times because they were fighting over the executive director. By the time I got involved,much of that was passed, but there were commissioners, for instance, that were sitting that were not particularlyhelpful and so you would make a determination to go in a different direction. Even though they weren’t doinganything odious but they were not necessarily doing what he thought New Jersey needed as its part of that compact,and that caused some hard feelings too.

Q: Of course a lot of these appointments have some fairly important political figures who take the positions. Duringour interview with Lou Gambaccini, he said one of his only frustrations in the Byrne administration was the failureto be more aggressive in getting control of the boards, like the Turnpike Authority. He said he could not quiteunderstand why Brendan Byrne wasn’t a little more aggressive in terms of getting control. What’s your view onthat now?

English: Well, I remember having conversations of my own to try and get the executive director of one of thoseauthorities to say, “Well, wait a minute. The Secretary of Transportation, the Commissioner of Transportation is theone with the overall responsibility. You’ll have to be on the same page here.” This was, like, “What? That hadn’toccurred to us. We could do whatever it is we want to do. We have our own sources of revenue. We get our tollsand we go on our merry way so why should we have to talk to you?” Well, that was when they started to have these

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different issues. The Transit Authority being passed, to try and get these fiefdoms to even have the same gauge forthe railroad, to have whether or not they were all going to be electrified or whether they’re going to be somethingelse. I’m sure that Lou discussed with you about how disparate and how convoluted our transportation system wasbecause it all came out of private railroads that operated on their own and then to a very aging and pretty bad newsinfrastructure that was left in the wake of that without a modern system being put in place.

Q: Apart from the income tax and the program for a more open and accountable government, what other issues inthe first term stick in your mind so many years later?

English: Well, as I say, the signature piece was the public financing and although it was in the second term, the firstpart of it started in the first term and that was the Spill Fund Act. There had been a huge oil spill in Santa Barbara.We were also talking about off-shore drilling, or I think the Congress was talking about off-shore drilling and thecompanies were pushing toward off-shore drilling. We had just come through this energy crisis and the Spill Actwas really there to begin with. We lifted that piece of legislation from California. You’d have a tanker off-shore.There would be a release, would come on shore and it would cause problems. Loss of wildlife and degradation ofthe beach are until it could get cleaned up, but there were no funds to do it, etc. I think Senator Russo was the leadon that particular bill and we added to it, almost as an afterthought, toxic waste. “Oh, and as long as we’re at it, wemight as well throw that in.” Well, of course, that became the tail wagging the dog. It was the beginning ofSuperfund and we were the first in the nation to have that bill, which then former assemblymen, I could never get avote for the income tax, Lesniak, he got to do that later on on his own but he was one of my old--

Q: He’ll live to regret it.

English: Well you know you stick around long enough and sometimes these things happen. It became Superfund,that was. Again, one of the opportunities that New Jersey had to say that these problems are all over the country.We need a federal partnership here. That bill in particular was of great importance. The Transit Bill was of greatimportance. The Pinelands Bill was the one that was kind of in the middle there but took a long time to get it put inplace. I think that’s one of the things the Governor is most proud of in terms of his legacy, and that has not beensimple to get to work any more than the new Highlands preservation bill will be simple to get to work.

Q: Expand a bit on the Pinelands Bill, which as you go into your next role you have a different mission in relationto that legislation, but talk about as the bill is going through the legislature, and what you remember about thosedays.

English: The Pinelands?

Q: Mmm-hmm.

English: This is one that became extremely contentious and, of course, now we have South Jersey in the forefront.We have a different role of players than were in the normal mix, but we had the benefit of Steve Perskie. Verybright, very progressive, also someone whose family had been involved in politics in New Jersey for a long time, asbasically the key person. Bill Gormley. There had been a commission, and I never did understand the role of thecommission that was existing, but David Bardin is the Governor’s first Commissioner of Environmental Protectionin his first administration who, as you know, was the one that caused that to happen. He brought it to theGovernor’s attention. He brought it as a federal issue. He brought it as a critical aquifer for the Northeast, not justNew Jersey, and then this vision of conservation to retain the purity of that water source that was so required andthen is still required, and then the uniqueness of the flora and fauna. I think a case was being made. I don’t thinkthat that was the end-all and be-all but suddenly that became, as part of the environmental movement, the need forit to save endangered species and plants and to encourage patterns of growth and planning in those kinds of areasthat had just been helter skelter. It had been an industrial area. It had been an important glass, cranberry, iron,forging. Something had gone on there and that had gone out except for the glassmaking and the cranberries, but theglassmaking is now gone. The cranberries are still there. Blueberries. So it wasn’t exactly a robust economicfacility. You just drove through there, and then this attention. If there hadn’t been the kind of economic growth and

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population growth that then came in to go around it, I don’t know that it would’ve ever risen to the point of beingsaved.

Q: Another issue during the first term was the authorization of casino gambling in Atlantic City. What was yourpersonal take on that? We’ve heard from some people during this series of interviews that they were against it andargued to Brendan Byrne that he should be against it also.

English: Well I don’t think I was crazy about it. Like, “Oh yay, that’s wonderful.” Anybody that had been toAtlantic City saw that this was just a dreadful place. How in the world they were ever going to turn it into anythingwas going to take some miracle, and to have that franchise, I mean, as much as the fact that I wasn’t crazy about it.If it could’ve been something else I might have been a little more enthusiastic about it. Because the signature ofgambling was not attractive. It did not seem to attract a wonderful group of people in the public mind, and what didI know about it? Nothing. I’d never met anybody in the gaming industry, although I had been to Las Vegas oncebut not to gamble. So I wasn’t being “Oh my heavens, this is the most awful thing,” because I could see thatsomething that would sparkplug the end of this blight was worth a try and, of course, they had had one referendumthat had failed statewide. So it wasn’t as if it hadn’t been road tested. It had been road tested to put it in a place tobring back a resort, which is all it was and again, we enter Steve Perskie. Bright. Bright. The person that would beable to take that show on the road and sell it. But some of the other things that happened in the course of that wasthat we, in fact, went on lots of fact-finding tours of our own, especially taking with us the law enforcement peoplebecause without that, it is something I would have found great difficulty in trying to be enthusiastic about. So thestrong prosecutor, Byrne, who used to run around with Charlie Carella and throw all these people in jail, don’tforget that one of the first things they did was to sit at the Lottery Commission and say, “Instead of throwing thesepeople in jail, why don’t we let them work for us? We’ll legitimize this.” So there was a track record there, too, thatit hasn’t turned out to be as successful in terms of rehabilitating the entire city beyond two blocks is adisappointment.

Q: Let’s move closer to the 1977 reelection. You said that even after the income tax vote, you thought that BrendanByrne could get reelected but the polls are showing that he’s continuing to fall in public approval ratings. Withinthe party he’s facing opponents, some of whom eventually formally declare their candidacies against him in theprimary. What was your own feeling about his reelection prospects as you move into that primary season? Somepeople have suggested that they thought he should’ve pulled out of the race because it would be too embarrassingfor him and the family and too difficult. What were you advising him to do? What was your take on his personalfeelings?

English: I think he wanted to do it. The Irishness was up and I think he knew he was doing the right thing. As far asI was concerned he was doing what he had an obligation to do, and then to walk away from it and say, “That’s tootough for me,” wrong message. If you went down doing the right thing, you went down doing the right thing. Did Ihave any personal concerns about whether he won or he didn’t win? If he didn’t win, I’d go back to my law firm.Go back to the law practice. Some people, by the way, did not have that kind of flexibility or opportunity and it’svery tough to have anybody be really nice to you if you’ve just come out of a losing administration. But I thoughtthat it was a good administration, that he had done the right things, that he had found gifted people to be in hisadministration who had worked very, very hard, and he had an obligation to them, too.

Q: As he considers his decision whether to run or not and also to plan for potential campaign, what were themechanics of getting organized for that campaign?

English: Henry Luther and Bob Torricelli. “Henry, leave your job as Chief of Staff. Bob, leave your job and go andset up this headquarters.” I think Brendan’s family were the ones who were manning it to begin with. A lot of thesupport that had been there in that first campaign wasn’t there. So the institutional thing of can you raise themoney? Are the polls that bad? It wasn’t as if anybody was standing by and saying, “Run, Brendan. Run.” Thoseare fairly depressing days because it’s one thing to say you’re going to run again and it’s another thing to say thatyou’re going to attract the money and you’re going to attract the attention and you’re going to win.

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Q: Let’s end there before we move on and we’ll continue after a break.

Q: Jerry, let’s begin again at the early stages of the planning for the 1977 reelection campaign. Who were the keypeople, beyond Henry Luther and Bob Torricelli that you mentioned before our break, that were involved in thebehind-the-scenes planning?

English: By that point they had hired a pollster. They had hired operatives and their roles were ones that in someways we were rather sheltered from. John Degnan and I became the ones who were left to run things on aday-to-day basis while everybody else was out campaigning, and by “left to,” meaning that everybody else was offon the campaign, and that’s pretty much the way it was envisioned.

Q: You mentioned the polls. One of the documents we’ve come across in searching through the various archiveswas a poll that apparently Jim Florio commissioned that showed that Brandon Byrne’s prospects for reelection werepretty dim. Do you recall what the early Byrne polls were telling him?

English: I just was told that it wasn’t so hot, but that’s almost like saying we’re turning our lives over to thetechnicians. My view. The drive of an individual candidate, of course, as Brandon himself will tell you, that therewas nothing more wonderful than having nine people believe that he was vulnerable. So he could run against thosenine and splinter them all over the place including, I think, the fellow that worked for me, Jeffrey Ketterson. JimFlorio was a serious candidate and as all primaries go, somehow or another a fight within the family is a very toughfight. It’s hard for people to come back from that.

Q: You mentioned how many candidates entered to oppose Brendan Byrne, and in a way that was a sign of hisperceived political weakness but it was also, as it turned out, of great benefit in splitting the anti-Byrne vote. Doyou recall discussions about whether to keep this as a multi-candidate race or were there attempts to sort of recruitone or two of the opponents to the Byrne side to try to build a larger base?

English: There may have been but I wasn’t part of that.

Q: What other strategies do you recall? Were there attempts to target particular constituencies, like labor and soforth?

English: That’s when going back to a certain segment in an unlikely place, which he probably carried it because ofhis earlier campaign, but I think that I’ve earlier said that Fairborz vowed to me, kept saying, “Now Governor, wereally must go back to Ocean County . We really must go back and meet with the people who are the senior citizensthat were really going to benefit as a result of the change in the property tax and what the income tax was going todo for them.” So that was one group. Then you have Bergen County . Heavily Republican traditionally, except insmall pockets. But those were the commuters that were going to benefit as a result of what had happened, and so itwas a pocketbook issue that was the reverse pocketbook issue in some ways of what people thought Oh, they’re justgoing to be taking more money from me. In some instances they are going to be saving money. I don’t thinkanyone ever suggested that it wasn’t a fair tax as opposed to a regressive tax.

Q: What was your role in this campaign where you were obviously more of an insider in the Byrne staff andorganization than you were in the first ’73 campaign?

English: My role during that campaign was to basically see to it that government from the Governor’s office keptrunning. I learned a lot of stuff about what went on every day that I hadn’t ever had any responsibility for beforeand so John Degnan and I basically were the people who were not out on the trail except on rare occasions and, ofcourse, it would’ve been inappropriate for us to be doing political work while we had our state jobs.

Q: What was your perception of the primary campaign? Was there a key point where you thought things wereswinging Brendan Byrne’s way or was it just in general you thought that he had a decent shot given how manycandidates were in the race and how split the vote would be?

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English: Of course, at that point I was such a partisan that I’m sure I saw everything positively. The public mighthave been upset with him. I didn’t have the sense that the pencil press was against him or that there was thisdrumbeat of, “Brendan Byrne, the most unpopular Governor.” You know, the thing that they did to Jimmy Floriofor so many years. “The unpopular Governor.” They say his name, “the unpopular Governor. The one who broughtback the income tax.” Now they do it with McGreevey. You know, the “scandal-ridden” etc. He didn’t seem to pickup that kind of moniker. He seemed to retain the respect of most of the press, as far as the clips that I could see. Sothat was very positive, and we all saw the clips about what was going on all the time and I would go and talk withHenry from time to time, and from Bob. Those guys were real operatives. I have never been an operative. Thatwasn’t what I did. I was an organizer, I wasn’t an operative.

Q: Well, in fact, he does win the primary election. Again, helped quite a bit by the split in the vote of the anti-Byrnecandidates. What are your recollections of election night on the primary night?

English: Again, elation. Everybody said, “I always knew he would win.” Well, he didn’t always think he was goingto win but at that point suddenly, everybody thought he was always going to win.

Q: Of course, unlike 1973, the upcoming general election campaign is looking much tougher. The Republicanshave nominated Senator Bateman, who’s viewed as a formidable candidate. Polls are showing a very strong lead forSenator Bateman early in the campaign. What was your own feeling about the strategy and about Ray Bateman asan opponent for Brendan Byrne?

English: Well, first of all on a personal basis, Ray Bateman is a very likable person. Again, a gentleman. Somebodythat if he told you that’s what his vote was going to be, that’s what his vote was going to be. Progressive. Had beenpart of the Blue Ribbon Commission. Had always been a very serious policy person in terms of what should happenwith the state. Well-versed in the history of the state. It would be pretty hard for him to lose his own district. Verypopular and someone whose personal company everyone enjoyed. Almost the 180 of Charlie Sandman, who did notshare all of those qualities. As we know, subsequently he put out his own plan using the former Secretary of theTreasury, William Simon, to help him put it together and then when it was announced, magically the Secretarydisappeared. He went away or he went on vacation or what have you and so Senator Bateman was left to defend thefamous B.S. Plan. As soon as you can take something that’s pretty serious and make a satire out of it, whichbecame one of the hallmarks of Brendan Byrne’s abilities, great satirist, and being very witty about it at the timebut usually hitting the mark which, of course, the people like the pencil press absolutely adore because it’squotable, and it then becomes something that can’t be defended no matter how you try, because it’s now got astamp on it of being ludicrous, and that’s very tough to come behind no matter how good a person you are.

Q: At the colloquium that was held here this past September, Governor Byrne said that his secretary, DorothySeltzer, advised against him using that B.S. line to describe the Bateman-Simon Plan. What was your own take onit?

English: It did describe the plan and, of course, God be good to her, our good Dorothy also came out of another erawhen politics may have been as rough and tumble or even rougher and more tumbler, but she believed thateverybody in their public persona should be viewed as a lady and a gentleman and so that he should not describethings with this type of argot, but that’s when you started to see that Brendan Byrne was enjoying himself. He wasstarting to like the whole thing because, number one, he had much to brag about, much to say I have done what I setout to do. I have a record of achievement with all these people that worked so hard to put it into place. Thelegislature, all of the people in state government, the judiciary. That the kind of government that you’d like to lookback on and say well, every now and then there’s a golden era and if you’re lucky to hit it, he hit it. Why not, andthen you’ve got something to brag about and if you called the other person’s plan as something less thanexemplary, that was all right.

Q: Did you feel that that press conference, where the Bateman-Simon Plan was taken apart by Cliff Goldman andothers in the administration in terms of its reality in looking at the state budget and finances, was the turning pointfor that 1977 campaign?

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English: I think so. It also showed the arrogance of someone coming in, which is the way it was played. Well let’sbring in a former Secretary of the Treasury. Someone who does not know that level of detail, was never burdenedwith that level of detail, give it a polish and a shine.

Q: In the final days leading to the election, how confident were you?

English: Pretty confident. Pretty confident. And I think that we could feel it. You could feel it, the press wasn’t assurprised when the editorials started coming out, saying well, he may have done a lot of things that we didn’t like,but you have to admire him for doing it and for having the strength of character to do it.

Q: You’ve already suggested, indirectly at least, that during the 1977 campaign Brendan Byrne seemed to behaving a much better time campaigning on the day-to-day stump. Is that true?

English: Oh yeah. First of all, he knew the people now. He knew what their names were sometimes. He was makingthe effort. He wanted it. He wasn’t being dragged reluctantly into rooms, to say please stand up here and say X, Y,and Z. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t physically brutalizing. All campaigns are. Even if you know you’re going to lose,and nobody ever believes they’re going to lose, by the way. Anybody who’s a real pol in their heart thinks they’regoing to win, even if the polls show them to be dismal that nobody in their right mind would vote for you. Younever know. No, I think he was starting to enjoy it.

Q: I guess he was better at it, too.

English: Oh, couldn’t help but be.

Q: Yeah, he was so bad the first time.

English: Couldn’t help but be.

Q: Both Dick Leone and Dan O’Hern each separately described his performance in 1973 as terrible.

English: Right. Well there’s a committee of three that agree.

Q: What was election night like in ’77?

English: First of all, it was a relief, an emotional outburst of “This is over.” Because it doesn’t matter in those lastdays. You’re never taking a really deep breath until that last vote is in and then there’s always some problems anddid this really happen, did that really happen. That was more exciting than the first.

Q: After he is reelected, at some point you talk to him or he talks to you about what your personal position is goingto be. Describe those conversations.

English: I did not believe that I would stay on in the next administration, and I had some conversations with peopleoutside of government, that it was time to move on and do something else. When Dave Bardin left in the firstadministration, I had had a long admiration for this former mayor of Red Bank by the name of Dan O’Hern, and soI said one day to Dan, “Would you consider coming down to Trenton ? Could be DEP Commissioner.” And he, ofcourse, had his established practice in Red Bank, and then I mentioned it to the Governor. Of course, he knew Dan,and so Dan came down to be Commissioner and, of course, was absolutely terrific. He served for about a year, andthen the Governor asked about my interest in moving into the judiciary, and I told him I did not think so but Ithought that Dan O’Hern would be a good candidate to do that, and that’s when he said, “Well, maybe if Dancomes here and you go over to DEP.” I had been asked to go to DEP a couple of times beforehand and just said no,this is not a good time given all the things that were going on in the legislature, that it was so key at that point thatwe pass those bills. So that’s when Dan and I switched jobs. But not before. Somebody named Don Linky preparedme to go in to talk with the legislature and you don’t remember it but I do, and this is so good that I remember

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something you don’t remember, that before I was going before the Senate Judiciary Committee, you suggested thatI bring up the fact that New Jersey really had to concentrate on toxic waste and that that would be something theywould be very interested in and, of course, that turned out to be the key issue in that hearing.

Q: As you take office as Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, did you have sometrepidation this was a very big and important department with a lot of people? It’s a role that you really haven’tplayed in your prior career. Was that a little scary?

English: I had one advantage, and that was because of my position, and I had been to all the cabinet meetings at therequest of the Governor. That wasn’t always what everybody in the Governor’s Office thought we ought to bedoing, but I knew perfectly well I wasn’t going to know what was going on if I didn’t go to the cabinet meetings. Ialso attended all the press conferences because that’s how I found out what he was really thinking and tellingpeople. So you have to say, “What’s going on?” every single day. I had had the benefit of dealing with the entiregovernment because there would be either appointments to be made or a piece of legislation that had to get movedor a budget to be passed. So I had really had the benefit of a very big picture of government in all of thedepartments. But I had a personal affinity and some background on the environmental side, and I probably wasn’thalf as scared as I should have been, looking back. It just seemed to me like it was going to be a very interesting butdifficult job.

Q: You mentioned toxic waste. What were the other key issues that you remember during your time asCommissioner?

English: The toxic wastes were manageable. I mean, just go get the money. Go get Superfund passed. I didn’texpect to have Chemical Control blow up on my watch and become the poster child for Superfund, but I testified.

Q: That was in Jersey City , right?

English: Elizabeth .

Q: Elizabeth . I’m sorry.

English: I testified more than any other Commissioner in the country for Superfund, which you recall PresidentCarter signed in the 11 th day of December in the lame duck of his administration. So it was this secret bill that gotpassed because of Congressman Florio and Senator Bradley from New Jersey . I was ready. I had every singlepotential site all ready to put into the Congress. We were always accused of having the most sites. Well that was onpurpose. That was so we would be sure and be first in line for funding, and I did make the commitment to thepeople that I was working with that when I left, my goals were to see to it that they had all of the people theyneeded, that they had all of the legislation that they needed, and they had all of the money they needed in order torun that department. So those were my goals. But it was really different. It was one thing to sit in the Governor’sOffice and say, “You will do these things and here’s the list and stop having your people say this crazy thing in thepress,” and another thing to run it on a day-to-day line basis, which was invaluable training, and that’s when I reallybecame better educated about the level of personnel that we are lucky to have in this state because they wereterrific.

Q: In your new role you have a key implementation role with the Pinelands Program that had begun in theGovernor’s first term. Talk a little bit about that, although much of it was still being directed from the Governor’sOffice even in the second term.

English: It was. Betty Wilson basically had been working on it as the deputy to David Bardin and so she continuedto work on it and then she left the state and went to interior, where she had other kinds of roles but because of itsdual jurisdiction of federal and state, it was very helpful to have somebody at interior to keep working on thoseroles and, of course, this is when the role of somebody like Marilyn Berry Thompson was absolutely critical tokeep the money coming and the appropriations that were required as well. It was what the state had to do. But I

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don’t recall there being that much, the commission was getting set up. Getting the people on the commission, thatsort of thing. That remained critical but it wasn’t one of the things that was first and foremost on the things that Iwas finding. As with all such departments, you end up doing a lot of reactive work, the extent to which you coulddo something proactive is pretty rare. Also, in my time we had a major drought. When I said we could deal withtoxic waste, you can’t make it rain, and then I found out that there were committees that had studied this issue in1969, put our major reports and not a single thing had been done. So the infrastructure trust, those kinds of thingsbecame the next thing. I had a drought czar. I had really gift people working for me, for the state, but I knew that ifI told them, “You man this hotline 24 hours a day,” it was going to get manned, and people were going to beanswering the phone for people whose whole businesses could be destroyed because they wouldn’t get enoughwater. So we had to have allocation systems set up and then start to work with the private purveyors to ensure thatthe water got wheeled around the state in a way, very imperfect, and then we had to work with New York state andthe Port Authority to be able to get the Delaware River Basin water allocated to us on an emergency basis, runpipes across the George Washington Bridge. They had been supposed to go out to the first Gulf War, and so theywere sitting there. I said, “I’ll take those pipes.”

Q: In your role as Commissioner of the department, you’re a member of the cabinet. You had mentioned that youhad attended cabinet meetings when you were on the Governor’s staff. How did the cabinet meetings run, both inyour perspective when you were in the Governor’s Office and later as you’re in the cabinet? Did you think theywere effective or were they disorganized? How did you feel they played out in terms of either advising theGovernor or implementing programs?

English: I thought they were pretty perfunctory. Rarely did anything of real substance get discussed there. I thinkthose turned out to be individual meetings that the Commissioners would have with the Chief of Staff and thenultimately with the Governor. They were generalist meetings, and it was a nice opportunity for everyone to see oneanother and try to keep some of them awake, because it was not considered that lightning was going to strike, youknow, Shazam! I don’t recall and I’m sure it did happen, and when the Governor speaks about it he’ll know better,about whether or not he ever expected to get the advice of everybody about any issue, but the parts that turned outto be of particular interest were the ones where the economists came in, and they would give us their forecasts ofhow the economy was going and all of the Commissioners, as I recall, were asked to attend. I never missed any ofthem because I found them to be terribly important to the role of government with the private sector and the ways inwhich the economy was going to be affected from the academics’ point of view, and from the working economistsyou’ll recall the chief economist for the New York Stock Exchange was the chair of it at the time and thatperspective was invaluable.

Q: Any other recollections of your days as Commissioner that you wanted to share?

English: It kind of shows you the parks were the stepchild. They never had enough money. These were reallydedicated people. This was a vocation they weren’t going to have any other place. There weren’t other place wherethese jobs would exist, and so we had world-class people involved in silviculture, involved in wildlife, in finding anew fish hatchery. These kinds of things that were tough to get money for but they were just critical to having thisstate be what it should be and could be. But you start to find out who these people are and what have you. So I said,because it was whatever disaster was going to go on the next day, every Friday please put me into the park. Somepark, any place, so I can be there and kind of regenerate myself, and we were in the middle of a drought and I wasin a helicopter with the head of my solid waste group and he was a very experienced person, and I told him aboutthat, and he said, “Commissioner, I know just how you feel. When I feel depressed, I like to go out and visit alandfill.” That gave me some perspective on what it is that makes somebody’s day, but also shows you somebodywho knows their business is able to bring to the things that have to be done by government.

Q: Governor Byrne also gave the anecdote when he was here in September about how he hated the opening day offishing season. Some of the photographs we have show you fishing alongside him. How did you feel?

English: I was a problem, because they’d never had a female Commissioner before and the state had the openingday but the fellows who were involved in that from the wildlife group were invited to come to this men’s club that

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had a private thing that they had leased. So they had this private place which was where the best fishing was, andthey had no problem taking the Governor there and Bob Mulcahy and those guys had all fished. But they hadsomething of a problem with me. First of all, how were they going to get themselves to get me invited? And sowhat they did, which I found really quite touching, was that in January, because it was going to be February or so,they came and called on me. They explained the problem to me. On the other hand, if you’re willing to learn how toflyfish. I said, “I’m willing to learn how to flyfish.” They took me out into the yard at the old Labor and IndustryBuilding , and we did practice rolls week after week after week, and they were tying flies for me and we had fishtalk that you can’t believe. So on the opening day of fishing, I have got all my gear, and they are looking at me likesomebody’s kid who’s going to the recital. Out we went. I got it, and I got the pictures to prove it, and I don’t careif they salted that and they had some guy in a wetsuit putting that fish on that hook, I was able to come back withmy fish and Brendan was over there gritting his teeth because he hated it so much, and I was having a wonderfultime. I thought it was such fun. And for years, I would get a little present from this one man that patiently madethese wonderful, beautiful little pieces of artwork. I’m not going to tell you that this is how I now spend the rest ofmy life, but there were symbols that were going on there and I think the day that really changed things with thatdepartment for me, that section, was that Dan, for some reason or another, decided that they couldn’t spring to putin a new facility for the farm fishing. How they grow the fish.

Q: Agriculture.

English: The agricultural thing, and so I said, “I think we can find the money.” I went over and talked with PhilAlampi and said, “Let’s do this together.” Then they had just found a brand new source of spring water.

Q: Another initiative that you pressed as Commissioner was to get a new building for the department.

English: Oh, yes. That was the opportunity of having worked in the Governor’s Office and I watched thateverybody was kind of tiptoeing around every time they had to deal with the Treasurer and I kept wondering whythat was. So the day came when this was an impossible building and they told me that there was nothing that couldbe done about it, and I spied some piece of property and said, “It’s a state property.” I take it. Got some shovels,went out there, got the press, started digging. I thought Cliff Goldman was going to have a heart attack. Turned outthat we probably didn’t really own it but the die was cast. We had to have that building.

Q: As the administration moves toward a close, any final thoughts about the administration as a whole? I do want tospend some time with your post-administration career.

English: My partner was right. I would have kicked myself if I had missed it. There were lots of times about itwhich I don’t think I’ve ever worked that hard in my life. I don’t think people that have those kinds of jobs can dothem for very long. They are burnout things you’re on 24/7 if you’re at that level of government. The responsibilityis palpable. The opportunity is not to be missed, and the level of people that I came in contact with, the excitementof what was going on. Not every day was terrific but you had a reason to go to work every single day and you hadresponsibilities, and I said before, if you could be part of the golden era of government, I think that’s as close as itcomes.

Q: Another position that Brendan Byrne asked you to take on was as a Commissioner on the Board of the PortAuthority in New York and New Jersey . Talk about that experience.

English: I think that is absolutely the best appointed position that anybody can get in this state or in New Yorkstate. Again, the very highest level of responsibility. It’s the heart of the transportation system. All of the airports,the tunnels, the bridges, the past system, then the World Trade Center and the opportunity to work with some verygifted people, Peter Goldmark in particular, who was Executive Director. The opportunity to watch the twogovernors relate to one another about projects that were important to each state, the level of people that wereserving as Commissioners. Again, the career people at the Port Authority who were, at that point, everyone cameand they were going to make a career there if they choose to. Lou Gambaccini is a perfect example of someone whobegan as Austin Tobin’s intern and then rises, comes to us to be the Commissioner, goes back again and then

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eventually comes to Rutgers for the Voorhees Institute with Martin Robins, and Martin, being another example ofsomebody who was a very gifted lawyer and brought into public service planning at the Port Authority, then comesto New Jersey. I don’t know if he was at New Jersey Transit. I can’t remember. But I don’t think he went to SEPTAwith Lou but then now here running the Institute. These were the kinds of people that one was in contact with, withvery, very important issues that were facing the Port Authority, trying to fulfill its bi-state compact responsibilities,to ensure that they weren’t stopping the trains in the middle of the Hudson River . They say oh, we’ve got a borderdispute here, that it was going to work, that the system that was set up of the veto of the minutes which is, ofcourse, the sort of thing that you worked on. I’m not saying that those were issues that were always smooth. Theremany times they were not. There was always a push to raise the fares and, of course, Governor Byrne had been partof the conversations when Governor Meyner got into the compact to begin with, and so he had his own views aboutthat and was always annoyed with me when I voted for a fare increase.

Q: You served in a lot of non-profit positions with advisory groups over the years. You’re currently Commissionerand Chair of the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission. Describe that role and the responsibilities ofthe Election Commission.

English: This is another situation where you pass the legislation, and I serve as Chair and the principal sponsor,Albert Burstein, is a Commissioner as well. Now we have to run it. So it’s one thing to pass something and it’sanother thing to see that it actually runs. It is a remarkable institution that again, it goes to the ethics of government,the transparency of government, the opportunity for people to know who’s giving the money for an electioncampaign, how it’s spent, the reporting responsibilities, and now it’s moved on to the lobbyists. It’s moved on towho gets government contracts that are not put out for bid, and that is just a recent part of that legislation. So again,I go back to this theme that you’ve been hearing me carry on about and that is the level of expertise, dedication ofthe civil servants of this state, and seeing to it that they come with wanting to do this thing. This is exciting. This istheir professional goal and can they stay the course? Because they get the money, the people, the legislation theyneed. This is where I cam in. Having the government know about them, having the public know about them, gettingthe support of the academic communities, Eagleton Institute has always been part of coming to hearings, to beingcritical about what it is, giving a constructive suggestion. It’s a very, very interesting institution and it’s growingvery rapidly and I will be meeting with the Treasurer to make sure the revenues are there.

Q: You’re currently partner in a major and one of the oldest and getting to be one of the larger New Jersey lawfirms practicing environmental law for the most part. How has that been a different experience from your days ingovernment?

English: Oh very much. First of all, when I first began that practice, it was a relatively new practice and hardlyanyone had one. As a matter of fact, most corporations didn’t think they needed to pay any attention to it and itdidn’t affect them. Well they’ve gotten disabused of that because environmental decisions are part of everycompany’s activities one way or another, especially if they are manufacturing companies or now we’re trying toreuse property. It’s moved into transactional areas as well where we try to reestablish the Gold Coast and all otherproperties that otherwise would be fallow and would threatening. So there’s been a continuum of that earlylegislation of “okay now, clean it up. Get the money to do it.” Now that we’ve done that, what are you going to dowith it? How can we turn that into what will be beneficial to the society and will be sustainable by the companies,and go through the transactions that it needs to go through? There’s been a very, very interesting practice and Ithink it will now start to move in the directions of eminent domain and how we value properties. It’s a field thatcombines science with the regulatory world and again, bringing expertise, the right expertise, to government so thatthere is true peer review on a project that respected professionals are on all sides. I think that that has been the goal.I think it’s happening.

Q: We started the chronology sort of mid-way in your career. I wanted, before we finished, to give you anopportunity to talk about your upbringing, childhood, education, and also your current family.

English: I had a very interesting childhood. Did you ever see the movie, The Music Man? That was done after myfather’s life, except he sold violins, not trombones. So we always had a very interesting household and his father

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had been one of the founders of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota . My mother’s first or second boyfriendwas Hubert Humphrey, another Nonpartisan League person, and my grandfather said that he thought Hubert was avery nice boy but he just talked too much.

Q: A lot of other people felt the same way.

English: So there were always politics being discussed at our dinner table and my father always had a great interestin this. I found out they cancelled out one another’s votes when they were actually going to the polls, my motherand my father. I was born in Texas and brought up in the Midwest until my father decided to go to California . Sohe started a small resort that attracted the press people and the movie people and the bigger stars of the time and sothat was the environment in which I grew up in as a teenager.

Q: Do you remember any of those stars?

English: Oh, absolutely. I got to baby-sit for Joan Crawford’s children who were just like they’re described in thosebooks. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Burl Ives was a great friend of my father’s and because of Meredith Wilsoncoming to the lodge, Fitzgerald Mountain Lodge, that’s how come he got the story of The Music Man and theyremained friends.

Q: Even though he didn’t pay for the story.

English: My mother was very upset that they discussed things in terms of pool halls because she was Marian theLibrarian. She said, “We never had anything to do with pool halls” and so we had to explain a little bit about artisticlicense. It was a great character. You would have absolutely liked him. Maybe you got to meet him. He was veryimpressed with Brendan Byrne. Brendan Byrne and Dan O’Hern were his two favorites, because he would comefrom California for things like my swearing in and some other events. He called Brendan Byrne “is an honest man,and I’ve sure seen a lot of politicians.” So he gave this stamp of approval to him, and then to Dan O'Hern he calledhim “Mr. Nice” and those two got on like a house afire. So he loved the stuff that was going on that I was doing.But he was always pretty straightforward about there will be corrupt people, and I think he thought that I was justso rosy-glasses about everything that I didn’t see any of this in people and, of course, he was a little more right thanI was. But again, I was in this time period when that was not what was happening and so was a lucky time. Butanyway, I went to Stanford University, took International Relations as a degree, even though in junior high I hadkind of said gee, I think I’d like to be a lawyer and I was told well don’t be a dime a dozen, so study for the foreignservice. So that’s what I did. Then I met a very nice man called Alan English and we married and he went into theservice for NROTC. We ended up on the East Coast with him at MIT to get his Doctorate and for me to go to lawschool, but in the meantime I was following the ship so I lived in Japan and I lived in France and bound his ship,and then one day he said, “Well, there’s this place called Bell Labs.” “Where’s that?” “It’s in New Jersey .” WellI’ve never been to New Jersey before. Well I’ve now been to New Jersey since 1963 and I’m very proud of thisstate.

Q: Move on a little bit from law school, the beginnings of your legal and political career.

English: At the time I started law school, I had two children. I had the third three weeks before my final exam inlaw school, so when I moved to New Jersey we had three small children and I was looking for a place to study forthe bar and someone introduced me to Mr. English of McCarter & English, and the first thing he said to me was, “Ithink you should stay home and take care of your children,” and my husband told him to mind his own businessand that was the beginning. We lived in the same town. We threw away each other’s third-class mail. WoodyEnglish told that story on himself years later. I happened to have a second grade teacher for a daughter of mine andthat second grade teacher said, “Gee, what are you doing? Holly’s doing fine.” “Well, looking for a place to studyfor the bar.” “Well, call up my husband.” And so I did and almost 40 years later I’m still practicing law with himexcept for my time in government. I had been a partner in a law firm before I came to government. I knew verylittle about the state in retrospect. Not half enough of what I should’ve known and I probably would’ve been moreproductive if I had had a better archive of the state. What I learned I learned from the League of Women Voters and

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then starting to run for office.

Q: What prompted you to get more active in politics?

English: I always thought I wanted to be a United States senator, so that ambition didn’t go away. Being a lawyerwas an obvious thing to do and that way I started to know something about the politics of the state and be interestedin it and liking it.

Q: But you said you early worked outside the organization structure.

English: Yes.

Q: Didn’t pay your dues within the party.

English: No. No. No that came later on. I was a member of the National Democratic Party on the ExecutiveCommittee, so I saw it on a national basis, and I found that to be less than rewarding. At least in that particulartime. Aside from the fact of the chairman that was a remarkable chairman, I did have that benefit of one chairman,but I didn’t serve with him.

Q: That was Robert Strauss?

English: Yes. Ambassador Strauss was a remarkable person and he’d call me up on election night and say, “How’severything?” and I’d say, “Well, Mr. Chairman, I think it’s fine.” He says, “I’m just minding my traps. How areBrendan and Jimmy Dugan getting along?” Not that he knew everything about what was going on. Those fellowswere not getting along at that time too well, and I said, “Oh, it’s fine, Mr. Chairman.” “I’m glad to hear that.” Sothese were the kinds of things that we got to do and I met a lot of very interesting people, but were theysubstantive? No. But Bobby Torricelli showed up then too. So these people kept reappearing in various roles. Bobsaid to me at the end of the first administration after Brendan got elected he said, “I’ve been invited to join VicePresident Mondale’s staff. What do you think?” Of course, I had my answer which is, “You’ll really be mad atyourself if you don’t do that.” So that’s when he started to be, which was very helpful to us, and Brendan was thefirst Governor to endorse Jimmy Carter with having Bobby in the Vice President’s office. We had entries to theWhite House as you recall that were invaluable for the state of New Jersey .

Q: Any final thoughts before we end?

English: Oh my heavens. I think I have talked to you for so long that anyone that can stay with this has clearly got amaster’s degree. I see my friend, Nick. We’re going to get ready to see, would this be a good documentary for himto do? I don’t know that it will sell anywhere but it’s certainly a wonderful memoir of a very interesting time. And Iwouldn’t have missed it.

Q: Thank you.

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