Jim, we hardly knew ye
: In the Globe and Mail, Lawrence Martin writes about the 25-year-old Jim McGreevey he knew at the Kennedy School at Harvard:
The future governor of New Jersey, then 25, walked into the library with a flourish. (He did everything with a flourish.) Accompanying him was a raven-haired beauty who looked like she had just stepped off the cover of Vogue.
Student McGreevey upstaged her. While she demurely followed, he pumped hands with everyone in the room, as if he were running for something. A guy sitting next to me grumbled, “What a piece of work.” He was referring to him, not her.
A couple of days later, I found out that Jim McGreevey was moving into my dorm, as was the woman. The place changed overnight. Animal House, if I recall, was one of Jim’s favourite movies, and he did his part to turn our residence — Cronkite Graduate Center — into a replica. Food fights, stink bombs (he stuck one under my door), boozing until the break of dawn. Wild weekends at Cape Cod.
But all the while, Jim McGreevey had The New York Times under his arm; and all the while, he was campaigning; and all the while, we suspected he was going to make it.
At 25, he had virtually every detail on his route to the White House mapped out. His plan was to assemble the perfect academic r
