NEW YORKER
Sitting in traffic destroys the soul. In the Hobbesian logic of a jam, each car becomes every other car’s enemy, and life’s purposefulness turns on itself. Time dilates. The NPR headlines roll by, then roll by again. Inching your way toward the tauntingly designated E-Z Pass lane, you grow to despise the man in the gray Audi, but it’s the woman in the blue Subaru who cuts you off. Progress slows until you reach a standstill. You begin to fantasize that you’re the victim of a malevolent force, that your lane has been singled out for some sort of cruel test or act of vengeance. This is a sign that you’ve lost touch with reality—unless, of course, you live in New Jersey.
Last week, as the scandal inevitably known as Bridgegate bubbled away, Governor Chris Christie delivered his fourth annual State of the State address, in Trenton. It was, to paraphrase A. A. Milne, a Sad Christie, a Melancholy Christie, a Small and Sorry Christie who spoke to state lawmakers. The Republican governor, normally the King of I, was all about comity and collaboration. He alluded only briefly to the incident in Fort Lee, and only vaguely. “Mistakes were clearly made,” he said. The very next day, the Wall Street Journal published a photograph of Christie chatting with David Wildstein, the official at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who apparently ordered up the George Washington Bridge lane closings. The picture, taken mid-backlog, was plainly at odds with the Governor’s assertion that he and Wildstein had scarcely spoken in years. Meanwhile, the New Jersey Assembly and Senate, both controlled by Democrats, initiated a new round of investigations aimed at tying Christie even more directly to the tieup. It’s too early to say what these investigations will uncover; on Thursday, subpoenas were issued to seventeen people, including the Governor’s chief spokesman, his former campaign manager, and his chief counsel. Already, though, the scandal has done so much damage to the Christie administration and to every other organization it has touched that it almost doesn’t seem to matter.
Back in 1921, when the Port of New York Authority, as it was then chauvinistically called, was founded, it was—in the words of Jameson Doig, a professor emeritus at Princeton and the author of “Empire on the Hudson,” a six-hundred-page history of the agency—a “reformer’s vision.” A product of the Progressive Era, the authority was to be insulated from the vagaries of politics on both sides of the river, which is to say also from Trenton’s and Albany’s multifarious forms of corruption. Half its commissioners would be appointed by the governor of New York and half by the governor of New Jersey, but to promote their independence they would serve staggered, six-year terms.
Amazingly, this arrangement worked for the better part of the twentieth century. One of the Port Authority’s first major construction projects was, as it happens, the George Washington Bridge. When the bridge was dedicated, on October 24, 1931, New York’s governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, declared that the authority was “charting the course toward the more able and honorable administration of our nation’s affairs,” and that it should serve as “a model for government agencies throughout the land.” The span—twice as long as any suspension bridge previously built—was completed below budget and ahead of schedule. The authority earned a reputation for integrity and professionalism. Writing in the nineteen-fifties, a reporter for the Newark News noted the “incredible vigor and efficiency” of its operations, “as contrasted with the slumberland of the average City Hall.”
A recent audit of the Port Authority, which, in addition to the George Washington Bridge, now runs the New York metropolitan area’s three major airports, the path train, the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Bayonne Bridge, the Goethals Bridge, and the Outerbridge Crossing, described the agency’s operations succinctly as “dysfunctional.” The audit, performed by a private consulting firm, suggested that at least some of the problems could be traced back to September 11, 2001, when the authority, which owned and was also headquartered in the World Trade Center, lost its executive director and eighty-three other employees. The terrorist attack, the report observed, took “a significant emotional toll on the psyche of the organization.”
In this case, as in so many others, farce followed tragedy. As soon as Christie took office, in 2010, he set about stuffing the weakened agency with his supporters. A lawsuit filed by a former employee revealed that within two years the new administration had sought berths at the Port Authority for nearly fifty loyalists. These included Wildstein, who attended high school with Christie, in Livingston, and was hired as the agency’s interstate-capital-projects director, at a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. (Wildstein resigned last month.) The patronage push made front-page news in the Bergen Record in early 2012, a development that should have been chastening to the Christie administration, but wasn’t. By the end of the year, the patronage count at the agency had reportedly reached eighty. By September, 2013, when the events at the center of the scandal took place, the authority was in such disarray that top-level Christie appointees were barely speaking to their colleagues from across the Hudson. The authority’s executive director, Patrick Foye, a New Yorker, seems not to have learned about the jam in Fort Lee until four days in; when he did, he ordered the lanes reopened. The chairman, David Samson, a New Jerseyan, responded with fury. Foye, he wrote in a private e-mail since made public, had a habit of “stirring up trouble.” This time, Samson said, Foye had “made a big mistake.” The chairman reached for a suitable metaphor: “He’s playing in traffic.”
Politics, as everyone knows, is not a profession for the fastidious. But there are rules even about stretching the rules, a precept that Christie either never bothered to learn or chose to ignore. As a consequence, his political career is now quite possibly in ruins. Unfortunately for anyone who flies out of Newark or Kennedy Airport, or who takes the path train or the George Washington Bridge, or who just believes in the “honorable administration of our nation’s affairs,” so, too, is the Port Authority. ♦
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