Timothy Carden Interview - Eagleton Institute of...

Center on the American Governor, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University http://governors.rutgers.edu/

Timothy Carden Interview (October 30, 2007)

Michael Aron: Tim, how did you enter the orbit of Brendan Byrne?

Timothy Carden: Well, my first encounter with Brendan Byrne was actually after I

had worked in his administration but had no contact with him and had left to run for

the state legislature in 1977. I was running in Somerset County, which you would

recognize was the home county of Ray Bateman, his opponent, and so my

campaign was running rather an independent streak relative to the Byrne election.

His fortunes had risen and fallen over the course of that race but, more importantly,

I was running in a deeply Republican district in the place where the hometown

senator had waited a long time to run for governor and there was a lot of

enthusiasm for his candidacy. So I was running rather as an independent

democrat. Somewhere in the heart of that county, I'm going to guess it might have

been Bow Brook or somewhere along the Route 22 corridor, there was an afternoon

candidates gathering that I attended. Brendon Byrne arrived and he arrived with

his entourage, which was small by today's comparison but you could notice that this

was a gubernatorial candidate, not a humble legislative candidate. I watched him

perform. I think we might have exchanged greetings, I don't remember that. He

performed adequately, briefly, and left. His campaign style was never, at that

stage, I think his strength. I think he became a stronger and more comfortable

public figure after his reelection. That was it. I knew that my job, at that point,

was to run as hard as I could and to look at independent of Brendon Byrne as I

could. I got 49% of the vote in a deeply Republican district in a year when we were

working very hard to elect the top of the ticket, who, outside of Somerset County,

didn't fare so well.

Michael Aron: Ran for senator or assembly?

Timothy Carden: I was running for the assembly.

Michael Aron: What district?

Timothy Carden: It was the 16th district. In the Republican hierarchy of the

moment, Ray Bateman had vacated the senate seat, which was enabling Jack

Ewing, who had been waiting a long time, to run for the senate and it left an open

seat in the assembly. So not only among the two assembly seats available, I had

targeted one of them, not the one that Walter Cavanaugh was holding and was

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Timothy Carden Interview (October 30, 2007) page 2 of 53


going to stay in but rather the one that Elliott Smith, who was a newcomer and not

all that well known in the county. While I didn't target Elliott Smith per se, it was

clear to me that, if someone was going to win that race, it was only going to be one

of two assembly people that-- Walter Cavanaugh was a shoe-in and, if there was a

chance, it was that newcomer might actually not have all the support that Walter

did.

Michael Aron: Did you have an assembly running mate or a senate running mate

or were you a lone democrat?

Timothy Carden: I had both and we still ran fairly independent campaigns. We

appeared together but we didn't jointly fundraise and we didn't jointly organize our

efforts. That's somewhat the nature of when you're running in a district that is as

difficult as that. It's difficult to gain benefit one from the other and I was clearly, in

that instance at least, the stronger and better funded candidate.

Michael Aron: What was your background that led you to be a candidate for office

in the middle of Somerset County?

Timothy Carden: Well, the location is sort of an odd choice for a democrat but it

was the coincidence of life. I'd grown up in Manhattan and spent summers and

weekends in [the] farm that belonged to my parents. My father was a doctor and

his sister and brother-in-law had moved to that part of New Jersey in the early 20th

century. My father was born in 1907 and he probably started visiting there in the

early '20s, having moved up from Dallas, Texas. So if there's a reason why I ended

up in that location and a democrat it's that he was a yellow dog democrat. His

father had been the state party chairman, the state of Texas, a very close friend of

William Jennings Brian. My father's first name was William Jennings Brian Carden

and he somehow had, in my view, the foresight to sit on William Jennings Brian's

lap at one point and said, "I want to be named after my father." So he ended up

George Alexander Carden. But, after college, I had...

Michael Aron: Where'd you go to college?

Timothy Carden: I went to Harvard and I majored in government so I had an

interest in politics and in government. I probably spent more time in the theater

than I did in government classrooms at college. My brother, who was two years

older at the time is still in the theater today so we actually got to share space in the

stage. But I came to New Jersey, stayed at this farm and, in the fall of '72, worked




in a Congressional campaign that encompassed what was then the fifth

Congressional District, running from Parsippany, Troy Hills in northern Morris

County down to Princeton in Mercer County. That was the breadth of that district.

It was held by Peter Frelinghuysen at the time and the Vietnam War and a sense of

concern about the nature of where the country was going had stirred a lot of the

progressive roots in that district, which were more- still in the minority but very

active and still are today. So Fred Bowen, who had worked in the Johnson

administration, and had been in the Ford Foundation, took a leave and he was a

Princeton resident and ran for that seat. We didn't do terrifically well, as you can

remember. The McGovern-Nixon race made that a difficult race anywhere for

democrats but particularly in a Republican district. But we thought, in retrospect,

that the strength of both his candidacy, the sense of concern about the war, which

this race really articulated, was a contributing factor to why Peter Frelinghuysen,

two years later, chose not to run for reelection. He may have had lots of other

reasons as well.

Michael Aron: Who succeeded him?

Timothy Carden: Well, there was a primary in which Tom Kean was pitted against

Millicent Fenwick and Millicent Fenwick succeeded and became the candidate and

eventually became the storied Congresswoman from that district. That was who we

ran against in 1974. I worked in that campaign as well.

Michael Aron: For?

Timothy Carden: For Fred Bohen. Again, two years later, he chose to run a

second time for that seat and it was after he had declared his candidacy that

Frelinghuysen announced that he was not going to run for reelection. We saw that

as a great opportunity and it was actually, for a district that was skewed as

probably as strongly as it to a Republican bias, it had more attention and targeting

from the national campaigns than it would have otherwise.

Michael Aron: Was Fred Bohen related to Bill Bowen, the president of Princeton

University?

Timothy Carden: No, his spells his name differently. B-O-H-E-N and Fred came

very close in that race, a lot closer. Millicent won but he went on to work with Joe

Califano when Joe Califano was Health and Human Services' secretary. He was one

of his senior deputies.




Michael Aron: Under Jimmy Carter?

Timothy Carden: Under Jimmy Carter. Then moved on from there.

Michael Aron: What else were you doing besides working at campaigns at that

time in your life?

Timothy Carden: That was the thing that I did the most. In between those two

campaigns, I had traveled back to my native New York and worked for Herman

Badillo when he ran in his first mayoral race, which I thought was a terrific

campaign. I didn't have a particular affiliation with Herman Badillo. I had the

experience of one long campaign under my belt and I looked at the papers and

knew that I was in New York and I went to different campaign offices of candidates

that I thought I would have in and showed them my resume and said I had vast

experience in political campaigning and wanted a job that paid money, which my

first job hadn't. Was hired for $42.22 a week to do local issues research by Jack

Bode, whose brother, Ken Bode actually was- they were actually both very active in

the original Iowa McGovern activities and Ken went onto a career in journalism and

Jack stayed on in politics and then into nonprofit service.

Michael Aron: You remember the number of cents in your paycheck?

Timothy Carden: Yeah, that one stuck in my mind because I actually got $50 a

week to start with and then they felt they had to withhold so, when it went from 50

to 42.22, it really stuck in my mind.

Michael Aron: So you were really into the mechanics of electioneering?

Timothy Carden: I think I was causal in my approach. I really believed that it

was a time to produce real change in the country and that there was opportunity to

do that and politics was the vehicle that I had chosen to try and make that happen.

After the Badillo against Bean was a super primary runoff. There were seven

candidates in the New York primary but Abe Bean, who eventually became the

mayor, and Herman Badillo were the two finalists and they had a primary runoff in

'73. By the time that was over, Governor Byrne had just about won the primary

here in New Jersey and I did come out and visit his campaign offices and looked for

work that was there but they were flooded with people. If you looked at the polls,

there was a good reason for them to be flooded with people. He was running very,

very far ahead of Congressman then Sandman, who was a staunch supporter of




Richard Nixon, whose fate was being decided at that time. So Brendon Byrne

looked like a shoe-in. Not surprisingly, the campaign offices were flooded with lots

of help and, while I gave thought to trying to work in that, I said I really think they

need less help than I can provide elsewhere and I didn't go to work for Brendan

Byrne then. As a result, I ended up working for Fred Bowen in his second race in

1974.

Michael Aron: Who sparked your interest in politics? Anybody in your family?

Anybody at Harvard?

Timothy Carden: That's a good question. I think it's internally generated. There

was no long history of political involvement by members of my family. As I recall,

we did discuss the Nixon/Kennedy election and I thought we were staunch

democrats. It turns out that my mother, to her dismay, had a change of heart on

election day and ended up voting for Richard Nixon. I still don't-- in 1960. So

there was conversation and deliberation about politics but not a lot of activism in

our family. I'm the only member of our family that got involved in government or

politics.

Michael Aron: 1974, you were involved in a second Bowen campaign and 1975,

you joined state government, is that correct?

Timothy Carden: That's correct. After the November elections in '74, I rewrote

my resume and made it look more governmental than political and traveled

between Trenton and Washington, D.C., where I had at least acquaintances, if not

friends, on both fronts, looking for a job in either the federal government or the

state government. The first one that suited me and that was I was offered was in

the Department of Transportation under then Commissioner Alan Sagner, whom I

didn't know personally but his executive assistant at the time was a man named

Tim Hull, who had been working with Alan since the beginning of this administration

and who had as a colleague, Peter Shapiro. Peter Shapiro had just left the

administration to run for the assembly himself, leaving a vacancy in that office.

Both of those were Essex County Democratic activists, as was Alan, so I was sort of

an outsider to that circle and had known them tangentially but Tim hired me and I

went to work in the Department of Transportation.

Michael Aron: You're now an Essex County resident but you were, at that time, a

Somerset County resident.




Timothy Carden: Correct.

Michael Aron: And so you took Peter Shapiro's position at Transportation?

Timothy Carden: Yeah.

Michael Aron: Which was what?

Timothy Carden: Executive Assistant to the Commissioner. There were two or

three sort of assistant jobs that were filled by generalists and not by specifically

press or communications that were sort of the go to people to ensure that the

initiatives of the commissioner were being followed up or to take on special projects

on his behalf.

Michael Aron: How was that experience?

Timothy Carden: I think it was alternately interesting, demanding, and

frustrating. But most of all, I think it was as good an education into what makes a

state, I wouldn't say just state but government the size of state government, what

makes it work and what makes it awkward because the Department of

Transportation is a well established franchise. It knows what it's doing. Its mission

hasn't changed. It was in the process of changing while we were there but Public

Works is a central part of modern government and, obviously, roads and their

maintenance is a pretty central part of Public Works. So you have a bureaucracy

that can and will deliver a product with reasonable certainty. It won't necessarily

be the most efficient, it won't be as quick as some would like. It may make some

hesitations along the way but it's probably going to get the job done. When you're

in the process of trying to manage an agency of that size, there are two challenges.

One is to not get in the way of the progress that's being made and the other is, if

you have ambitions to alter its mission or revise it, to recognize that it probably

won't be as instantaneous as you'd like because there's a process and a tradition

and a history that you have to both address and overcome, in a sense, to make it

work. At the time we were there, Public Transportation was just becoming part of

its agenda. It's a much larger part of the Department's agenda today and the

Public Transportation system, which was caught between public and private sector

at that time, is managed almost exclusively within the public sector today. So,

within the Department, there was resistance to the idea that this new office, which

started out as, I think, the office of Public Transportation, it wasn't even a division

or an operating entity, and which grew, over the course of Governor Byrne's two




terms, to become New Jersey Transit that we know today, a separate operating

corporation. Was trying to find its way along a path where people who were used

to building bridges and roads and maintaining them wanted to secure both the

attention and the capital and the resources that they could to that mission and were

not quite as enthusiastic about the idea of Public Transportation being a component

of their agency and equally resistant to the idea that environmental impact

statements, which were really just coming, again, into their first stage of maturity,

had a role in highway construction and maintenance. The best example of an

environmental impact statement's growth during the term that preceded my arrival

and certainly succeeded my departure but spanned a lot of Brendan Byrne's

administration is that the first environmental impact statement that was submitted

to the Federal Highway administration for interstate 287 was a slim single probably

100-page volume. The final was, I don't know the exact figure, a 13 thousand and

thousand a page volume document. So the first effort is saying we know how to

build a road from all the way down here in Edison, New Jersey, all the way up to the

New York state border and we know what the environmental effects of that are was

probably 200 pages of we're going to knock down a few houses, we're going to

probably knock down a few trees, there might be a couple of streams we're

crossing here to what people today are used to seeing, which is awkward,

cumbersome but a necessary part of strategic planning.

Michael Aron: When did 287 get built?

Timothy Carden: A lot of it was built by the time I got there and some of it was

certainly built before the environmental impact statements that are commonplace

today were really being developed. So the part that was most in contention at the

time I arrived was the segment north of Morristown up to the New York state

border. It had sort of- you had a department that said, "Well, we built all of this by

basically saying we're going to knock down a few houses and we'll probably cross

some streams and we'll let the Army Corps of Engineers know that and, if a few

trees go along the way, that's part of the price of progress" to a department that

was no looking at a whole host of new regulations and requirements that were

being promulgated both by the federal government and by lawsuits and by the

courts saying, "No, you have to measure this in a whole host of different ways" for

the final, say, 30 miles, if that's what that distance is. It was not completed during

Brendon Byrne's term. I think it was completed in the subsequent administration of

Governor Kean but not right away. It took a long time. It sat there, for those who

study New Jersey politics, congressman Bob Roe, who became the chairman of the

very important and powerful house of Transportation and Public Works committee,

was a champion of this road and I'm certain that his role in continuing to assure

both its funding and resolution of issues at the federal level, who have to approve

both the funding and the actual construction occur.




Michael Aron: What was Alan Sagner like as a boss and as a commissioner?

Timothy Carden: Alan Sagner was both a personable and interesting boss. He

had, in some respects, a developer's mentality, which means his attention span was

very short, which was both an asset and a liability but you wouldn't have a meeting

that Alan Sagner sat through that would last longer than an hour. There were a lot

of people in that department who were ready to meet for a longer period of time

than that so things would end sometimes abruptly but I think we probably got more

done in the course of a day as a result of that. He was then, as he is today, very

health conscious and had converted the normal bowl of candy that sat outside of his

office to one that only had raisins and peanuts. That was a symbol. He had used

his own funds to install a shower in his office so that he could exercise in the middle

of the day and still make certain that he stayed fit. He embraced both the

challenge of the department and its administration but also the importance of this

environmental movement that I think another commissioner, who came strictly out

of a background of Public Works could have been more resistant to. So that put

him somewhat as a broker and somewhat at odds with elements of the department.

At the time we were there, the economy was not in particularly strong shape and

there was an outcry within the government circles for more Public Works jobs and

that was championed, not surprisingly, by the champions of labor and that put even

greater pressure on why are we observing or holding up the construction of any

number of different projects to complete these environmental statements. The

commissioner was both certain of his ground in saying we have to follow through

this and independent in the way that he expressed this sometimes. That

independence didn't always comport with what the governor's office- I don't know

about the governor but the governor's office certainly wanted to hear coming out of

their Transportation commissioner, who I think they wanted to hear more resilient

sounds of we're going to get more work out there, we're going to put more dollars

to work quickly and get more people back to work. It got to the point where Lou

Kaden dispatched John Degnan, then one of his assistant counsels, to DOT to sort

of babysit Alan Sagner. He got an office that was in the commissioner's wing and I

think his principle job was to sit there and, before Alan went out and made another

one of his statements about how we have to be measured in our response to this or

that, that it would conform to what the governor wanted or what the governor's

office thought was appropriate. As John, I think, would tell you, it lasted about

three weeks. It was the most frustrating position he held. He realized that Alan

was a good and loyal soldier, not necessarily controllable and that sitting there all

the time wasn't probably going to be exert a lot more affect or control. He may

have also realized that the debate, whether it was always playing out in the

governor's political favor, was an important debate to have. So he went back to the

State House in the counsel's office to continue his job.




Michael Aron: Did you view him, when he arrived, as a colleague as a friend or as

an interloper from another arm of government?

Timothy Carden: Yeah, more I think as the latter. It was that sense of tension

that rises and I think it's a very important part of both how New Jersey government

works but how agency and how the executive branch has many different moving

parts. He was clearly an interloper or an observer, not there necessarily to support

the principle for whom I worked but to support the agenda of the governor. It's not

as though we weren't all loyal to the governor but the breadth of issues and

problems that government confronts creates that difference. If you start with a

view that every action of a government should be to enhance or strengthen both

the image, popularity, re-electibility of a governor, you won't get very far. You

have to be prepared to take risks and assume that the results of those are going to

the public benefit and that the public benefit, in turn, will determine the day on any

given election. If not, that you still fulfilled what was your public responsibility.

Given how tightly controlled I think some governor's offices since then have

controlled the activities and statements of those agencies, this was a pretty light

touch. One of the things that I credited Governor Byrne for much more when I

worked directly for him but realized, to some extent, during this period was his

commitment to and capacity to delegate and to trust people to do their jobs, not

necessarily agree with them all the time but that they were doing their jobs and

they were doing them, in large part, in pursuit of the same interests that he

thought were important, which were both policy initiatives, on a broad sense, but

also the public interest in a more direct sense.

Michael Aron: I think it's an important point you make about the cabinet officer

having to do what he or she thinks is right in his bailiwick without necessarily doing

that which burnishes the reputation of the governor.

Timothy Carden: There's another important aspect to that, which is it also

protects the governor. If you delegate that responsibility, there's a degree of

protection that is very hard to secure if you are exerting significant control over

every moving part in your administration or in an administration or trying to. So

that it is possible to allow someone to bring forth an initiative or an idea and to put

it out there either for action or for deliberation and to not neither bless nor

condemn it but to say that person is working that agency, which is their job, and

I'm going to let them do their job. If they're clearly going contrary to policies that

I've set, broad initiatives I've set, that's a different matter. But if it's the specific as

running the trains or building the roads or preserving the parks or looking after

those who can't look after themselves, that agency should have a chance to operate

on its own and, within its purview, there are very interesting and qualified people




who will actually execute that plan. If, from the commissioner all the way down,

people think that their actions are going to be subject to that sort of quick and

immediate either political or new cycle review, it changes how effective you can be

in doing things and I think it limits what a governor or chief executive can

accomplish because they're constantly being held accountable for things that, two

weeks later, may be completely forgotten. Or be great successes but didn't look

that way on the day that they began. So that delegation of responsibility, that

willingness to trust people, not only to act on your behalf but trust them to make

mistakes and recover from them is a very important part of this which I didn't

realize at the time. I do think that I learned it watching Brendan Byrne and I think

it's one of his great strengths as a chief executive.

Michael Aron: I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you want to ask it?

Q1: You mentioned the distinction between what a governor wants or the

governor's office wants from your perspective in the department, which is later

expanded when you moved over to the governor's office, but, while you're in the

department, how do you know who is speaking for whom in terms of the governor's

interests and when do you think you're getting manipulated by the staff instead of

the governor himself?

Timothy Carden: You don't know and you speculate a lot from a departmental

perspective. One of the interesting insights that Bob Mulcahy brought to the

governor's office when he became chief of staff and one of the reasons he hired me

to work for him, because, when I went to work in the governor's office, I was

actually hired by Bob Mulcahy, who had just been appointed chief of staff, was that

we both had experience in state agencies in this administration and understood

both that tension. We were both loyal to both the governor-- we were not in any

sense disloyal but we had a good understanding that those questions of who's

actually asking this could paralyze reasonable routine activities that would occur at

a state agency because you didn't get an answer to a particular question or because

you had gotten an indication that there might be a concern about action X, Y, or Z.

So, in an agency, and I think it may be truer in the first term than in a second term,

I wasn't in the governor's office, obviously, in the first term, there is a significant

risk that agencies will not be able to move as effectively or advocate, frankly, on

behalf of their constituents as effectively because they are busy trying to figure out

whether what they're doing is within the realm of acceptability within the governor's

perspective. To the question of what's the governor's position and the governor's

office position, I think that's a very visible difference. The governor's perspective in

this experience of mine is broad and it's pretty clear, when you are running the risk

of crossing the governor's views or policies. The governor's interests, what's going




to advance his or her wellbeing is more the purview of the staff. It is subtler

because no one's going to go out and announce a major initiative that's clearly

going to benefit the public without either involving the governor, if it's large

enough, or informing the office that good news is coming. Similarly, if there's

something of dramatic import that's negative, you're going to want all hands on

deck and you're going to want to know that the governor's there. But there's a

whole measure of activities that fall between those two broad, major good and

major bad initiatives that you'd have to say, well, "Do we need to involve- should

we inform the governor's office of this? Not the governor, the governor won't want

to listen but maybe we should know the office." Once you do that, you're in a

position of do you act without a response or do you await a response? And, in the

frequently frenetic activity of a governor's office, agencies wouldn't get answers for

days on what could be very modest little initiatives. No one's trying to disable their

capacity to deliver, it's simply the way things work. You then either make the

decision that you'll take the risk and go ahead and do it because nobody called you

back and then get the call that says, "Oh, my god, why did you do that without

waiting to hear back from us?" Or you spend a lot of time and effort trying to

penetrate and get the answer one way or the other that you want to do.

Michael Aron: Do you think you crossed the governor's office at Transportation

during those two years that you were there?

Timothy Carden: No, I think there were disagreements and disputes over how to

answer certain questions and there was a vulnerability that you could not avoid to

not enough work, not enough Public Works going out that was going to create a hue

and cry. That hue and cry was going to be heard in the governor's office. You

could have probably massaged it at different times to ameliorate it a little bit more

but the fundamental problem of not enough jobs going out was going to continue,

particularly because the resistance to accepting the relevance of environmental

impact statements was widespread in the construction and highway community. It

was a relatively new phenomenon and it was easy to say, "Why are we doing this?

We need to (a) complete the project and (b) that will generate jobs." This is all

unnecessary paperwork.

Michael Aron: There was a lot of ridicule back in those days of environmental

impact statements.

Timothy Carden: Exactly. Tree huggers and sneaker people and all those

phrases emerged because there was a legitimate public tension. It continues to this

day but the environmental side of it, as we are all aware, has grown a lot more




forceful and sophisticated and effective to the point where it's now- there are

deserving questions asked on the other side as well saying, "How much is how

much?" How much can you do this before you actually say, we've now analyzed or

studied or mitigated to our greatest extent?

Michael Aron: Was there a road project, a rail project, that dominated your period

of time there?

Timothy Carden: The 287-- well, from this dissention-- two things happened

while I was at Department of Transportation. The first is, we had a bond issue fail.

So, in either 1975 or 1976, and I think it was 1975, a Public Works bond issue, my

recollection it was $500 million, which would have at least provided money in a

fairly strapped budget and in a down economy to support Public Works failed. It

failed because perhaps it was an off year and people weren't particularly anxious to

authorize the public to spend more money. I think that a legislative only elections

year is a tough year to enact public bond issues, unlike presidential years or

gubernatorial years where you get a higher turnout. It wasn't helped by the fact

that the environmental moment imposed a lot of restrictions on the bond issue itself

and, ultimately, was scattered in its support. It was not uniformly opposed because

there were a lot of concessions placed in the bond issue as to how money would be

spent that would satisfy their interests on mass transit and on bikeways as opposed

to just highways. But the support was scattered and it created a lot of dialogue

saying this isn't-- there wasn't uniformly a voice out there saying, "This is a great

thing we have to support it." Whether that made a difference or whether it was

simply the dynamics of the electoral climate, I can't tell. But once that failed,

again, you had a very vocal and needy constituency, needy in the sense that jobs

were needed and the work was needed with nowhere else to turn. This is a big

engine when it's running at full force. So I don't recall specific projects that needed

to be finished that were authorized for completion that were major but both

interstate 78 and interstate 287 were front and center in this environmental debate

and continued to be, frankly, all the way through Governor Byrne's administration.

Because of their size and dimension and because they were interstate highways,

they would frequently be, at least, the item that caught the most attention in the

public eye. Why haven't you done this to move this one step closer to reality?

Michael Aron: Today, we could name the environmental leaders in Trenton. Was

there an environmental leader you recall...

Timothy Carden: There were environmental groups. I don't think there was the

level of day to day advocacy, lobbying, engagement that there is today, but not




only in the environmental movement, I think, you know, that whole side of

advocacy and information sharing has grown by many dimensions and certainly in

the environmental side, it has as well.

Michael Aron: Do you recall a particular labor leader being deeply involved in

trying to get Public Works going?

Timothy Carden: Charlie Marciante was hell bent on getting Public Works going.

He was developing a political opposition to Brendan Byrne because he probably

didn't think that the governor was moving quickly enough or imposing his will on

the Department of Transportation, whether you say it on Alan or on anyone else.

Joe Hoffman, who was the Commissioner of Labor at the time, was very close to

Charlie Marciante and ultimately ended up running for governor against Brendan

Byrne at the end of his first term in no small part because he thought he had

Charlie Marciante and the AFL CIO's backing.

Michael Aron: Marciante was president of the AFL CIO?

Timothy Carden: That's correct.

Michael Aron: And, as I recall it, or subsequently learned it, the dominant labor

union official in the state of New Jersey?

Timothy Carden: Yes. And very specifically in the area of Public Works.

Michael Aron: And a democrat or unclear?

Timothy Carden: It's unclear. There are people-- I met him but I didn't know

him personally and there are people who would argue that he was a Republican his

whole life. Others might have argued that he fought more for Democratic causes

but I think that's- I don't know the answer. I think it's interesting, however, that,

when Joe Hoffman finally did choose to run for governor and announced his

candidacy, Charlie Marciante didn't support him.

Michael Aron: Did not. Did he support Brendan Byrne?




Timothy Carden: I believe he supported Bob Roe. He did not support- I mean,

Joe Hoffman had built this whole campaign on if I have the support of the AFL CIO

and he'd turned his back on the governor who had appointed him and said, "I'm

going to run against you" on the basis that he had the support of the AFL CIO and

then Charlie probably said, "I'm going somewhere else."

Michael Aron: During the Byrne administration, the decision was made to

complete interstate 287 but not I-95. In retrospect, was that the right decision?

Timothy Carden: I don't feel qualified to judge if it was a right decision or not. It

was a decision made in the second term and it was made under the leadership of

Lou Gambaccini of the Transportation commissioner, who I didn't work for because

I was in the governor's office at the time. But, of the Transportation commissioners

that I've seen, they had a better grasp of both the relevance of Transportation in all

its modalities, meaning both public transit and the highway, and its importance to

the functioning of the state. His grasp was as great as anyone I can know in that

position. He certainly had vast experience in the field. He was a professional,

much less of a political appointment than many other cabinet officers and certainly

than Alan Sagner was. The question of de-designation of 95, which I supported at

the time, was one that evolved not only around burgeoning issues of air quality and

how much more traffic throughput can the state tolerate. There was an awareness

of air quality issues was mounting. But also an allocation of funding, that it was

clear that what had been a very generous interstate program with 90% federal

funding and 10% state funding, was becoming more and more constrained in its

capacity to fund things without question or with certainty. So whereas in the 1950s

and '60s when that program was first launched, and going into the '70s, there was

a certainty that, if you got a project designated, it was going to have the funding it

would need and other needs would be met as well. Those constraints were being

hemmed in so it was not just a matter of de-designation of an interstate highway, it

was also allocation of state and federal resources to critical transportation projects.

Michael Aron: You used the term de-designation. Explain the issue of de-

designation of I-95 to those of us who weren't here at the time.

Timothy Carden: The interstate highway system, which began under the

Eisenhower administration was a Public Works project to create a network of

highways across the country. His methodology, I believe, Eisenhower's rationale

for suggesting that states could build highways with 90% of the money coming

from the federal government was a belief that they should be built to a standard

that would support defense movements within the country. So whether they were




designed to take the largest tank or not, they could take as big a truck or as big a

vehicle as the Defense Department could ever need to move goods and troops

around the country. Whether he envisioned that as his critical or as a way of

actually creating a network of highways across the country is something that I don't

know the answer to. So each state had an obligation to prepare a plan of interstate

highways within its borders and the rules were that they had to connect one to the

other so an interstate highway can't just end on a state road, it has to end either at

the water's edge or at another state, another interstate highway so it would be an

interlocking system. Once the initial plans had been drawn up, they were

amendable. You could change your plan once you'd done it. I don't know the

process for amendment but I can imagine it was difficult, complicated and time

consuming. In order to take a highway and remove it from the interstate system,

you would have to de-designate it. That was the term. The federal government

would have to both accept the logic and the purpose and be certain that the overall

transportation objectives of the interstate system were still being met.

Michael Aron: So where did 95 begin and end in New Jersey?

Timothy Carden: At the time this whole program was launched, the New Jersey

Turnpike had already been built. So the New Jersey Turnpike and the interstate

system at that time did not include any toll roads. That was not part of the plan but

the Turnpike accommodated the dimensions and purpose of the interstate system

so it was designated I-95 from Exit 10, where interstate 287 joins it, up to the

George Washington bridge. South of 10, there was no I-95 which came up through

Pennsylvania and crossed just north of Trenton. So the interstate 95 in

Pennsylvania comes up and crosses north of Trenton onto what's now called 295.

The 95 that was de-designated was supposed to pick up on that beltway from

around Trenton and carry up to the exit 10 area of 287. So it would intersect with

287 and then the existing Turnpike would continue. That's what we have today

with the exception that the designation of I-95 was moved down to I believe Exit 7A

on the Turnpike to where it connects with interstate 195. Or else I'm wrong about

that and there is still a missing link that could someday be resurrected and built.

Michael Aron: I-92.

Timothy Carden: Yeah. <laughs> Well, one interesting piece of the interstate

struggles in this state is that there was plans to build an interstate highway straight

through Newark and Jersey City that I think was called, I don't remember the

number but it's the designation that created I-195 and it happened at a time when

another congressman, Jim Howard, who represented that district was a ranking




member of the house of Transportation and Public Works committee so it was a way

of moving available federal funds from one area of the state to a project that wasn't

going to succeed to another area of the state.

Michael Aron: And it's the James Day Highway, I think.

Timothy Carden: It was named after him.

Michael Aron: Who else did you work with at DOT besides Alan Sagner?

Timothy Carden: Well, there was a deputy commissioner, Manny Carbala [ph?],

who came out of the Lindsay administration and was a really competent and

sophisticated government manager. He went on, I think, to administration in

Massachusetts subsequently. I worked with Peter Stangl, who was one of the first

heads of the Office of Public Transportation; went on to be Chairman of the MTA in

New York. But he worked in that administration for probably the two years I was

there in DOT, and for another four years after that. And in the second term, once I

left the department and had my run for government, I worked with a number of

officials who came into that department and to the beginning of the New Jersey

Transit Operation.

Michael Aron: From your perspective, what were the problems during the first

administration between DOT and the governor’s office? Who did you have difficulty

understanding or getting through to, if anyone?

Timothy Carden: I was a step down the pecking order, so I didn’t have daily

interactions with the governor’s office. I had internal operations as sort of an area

that I worked with, so it was not as though I knocked heads with the department

on a daily basis. Tim Hull [ph?] had the legislative relations role, and was-- and I

think Alan really managed the both governor’s office and treasury deliberations that

happened between DOT and--

Michael Aron: What were the reputations within DOT of people like Dick Leone and

Lou Cadin [ph?]?

Timothy Carden: They were-- I think they were appreciated by Alan, who had

been the Finance Chairman for Brendan Byrne as a candidate, and certainly felt that

he had a role and portfolio, while different from theirs, that was equal, so that it--




two individuals who were reputed, and probably correctly reputed, to be very smart

and capable and driven, and not necessarily the most accommodating to others. I

don’t think Alan had difficulty in relating to either of them. He was successful before

he came into state government. He had recently sort of, I think, made a decision in

the course of the campaign to try his hand at something other than what he had

done professionally, and the opportunity to work with him within a government

administration is something that he not only aspired to, but I think took to very

well, as well. He has a strong bent for public policy, which I think both Dick and Lou

would’ve respected, but at the same time, there was an enormous challenge in the

school funding issues and in the economy, which probably affected DOT more, all of

which consumed the governor’s office time, and there were not that many

occasions where DOT could constructively contribute to solving one of those

problems. So you had needs of your own, you had contributions you could make,

whether it was a ribbon-cutting or announcement of something positive, but those

were few and far between, so that the debate would be over getting answers to

issues that seemed relevant enough to bring to the office’s attention, and, to some

extent, negotiating whose job is it to make what announcement, and what should

the phraseology be that of the public face of DOT in the face of a challenging

economic environment.

Michael Aron: Was Brendan Byrne popular when you arrived in state government?

Timothy Carden: He may have been popular at the time I arrived, but there had

already been one failed effort at the income tax, and by that summer, which was

the summer of ’75, so the legislative elections that lost a number of seats, he was

not enormously popular or in demand, and his political persona was not as

respected as I think his understanding of government was, that he was-- he was

probably underestimated in terms of his political calculation at the time, because he

had a kind of an awkward public presentation. It wasn’t always at ease, and he

wouldn’t always-- the sense of humor that has emerged so much since wasn’t as

evident then. And these were difficult times, when you’re taking on a major

challenger. He had schools under-- in a very difficult spot, and no answers

financially to solve that problem, but a certainty that this was a team that was

going to try and make it happen.

Michael Aron: He would come to be known as “One-Term Byrne.” As this was

happening, did it have an impact on morale at DOT?

Timothy Carden: It didn’t affect the line bureaucrats. It clearly affected those of

us in the unclassified or politically appointed positions-- those positions that were




close to the administration. The One-Term Byrne syndrome really evolved from the

successful vote for the income tax, and what’s, to me, interesting about that is that

having proposed in two different ways income taxes before, he had placed the issue

in the hands of the legislature and said, “We need a resolution and we need it by

the fall.” He had the benefit of a chief justice who had served in the same office

that he was currently occupying, whom he might have had some relationship with,

who chose to close the schools, but chose to close them during the summer

months, so that you had a confluence of both informed and good strategists; I think

the strategy of the chief justice to say, “We aren’t going to open the schools until

you solve this funding problem, but do it during the summer so that you don’t have

absolute student chaos,” and a governor who says, “I’ve given you two proposals

that you’ve rejected as answers to this funding problem.” Now, instead of saying,

“And I’m going to browbeat you into a third one that you may not accept,” said, “so

you come up with your own answer,” and let the problem deliberate with this

deadline hanging over them were critical to success.

Michael Aron: What did it feel like being in government that summer of ’76?

Timothy Carden: Well, it felt very-- there is a part of the daily work. I wrote

memoranda of record of almost every meeting that the commissioner had, so that

we would have not only a document that described what happened in that meeting,

but an agenda of action that was supposed to come out of it. So whether it was

with external folks who were seeking road or other projects and visiting with the

commissioner, or whether it was internal staff learning what the assignments and

priorities were, I sort of had the pen, and I had the record. It could be a-- that part

of it was a very demanding but routine job. On the other hand, I found government

a very heady place to be, in that I felt then, even in small ways, that I was

participating in trying to improve and advance the lot of the state and of its citizens,

and the commitment to that was pretty universal. So you could debate and

deliberate and be frustrated with the response you did or didn’t get from one or

another agency, but there was a real sense that there was a purpose being served

here that was larger than the debate and any individuals.

Michael Aron: As it became almost certain that Brendan Byrne couldn’t be

reelected, did you consider leaving state government?

Timothy Carden: Well, as a matter of fact, I did leave state government.

Michael Aron: Did or did not?




Timothy Carden: I did leave state government to run for office myself, but I think

that was prompted less by Brendan Byrne’s diminished chances, since I’d be

running in the same party he was, and simply by a sense that there was an

opportunity for me to run for public office in a district that I had pretty close

familiarity with because I’d worked in it in two successive election cycles and had a

number of friends and political supporters within it.

Michael Aron: So you left when to run for what?

Timothy Carden: I left in early 1977 to run for the state legislature.

Michael Aron: In District 16 again?

Timothy Carden: In the 16th district, which is the home district of Ray Bateman,

who, at that time, was not certain to be the nominee, because, once again, he was

in a contest with Tom Kean, who he beat in the Republican primary.

Michael Aron: And you had come so close two years--

Timothy Carden: No. This was my first run for office.

Michael Aron: Oh, this was your first run.

Timothy Carden: Yeah, but I had hopes that Tom Kean, for selfish reasons, would

win the primary because it would’ve diminished the activity and support that the

Somerset County Organization would’ve invested in a general election.

Michael Aron: When did you leave government?

Timothy Carden: I’m going to say December of 1976 or January of 1977.

Michael Aron: So you must have been dashed when Bateman won a primary over

Kean.

Timothy Carden: It was not helpful. <laughs> It was not helpful.




Michael Aron: And you had running mates. Who was your Senate running mate?

Timothy Carden: I’m trying to remember. I believe that Tim Cunya [ph?] was the

other legislative candidate, and I don’t remember the name of the Senate

candidate.

Michael Aron: But you ran a fairly independent campaign?

Timothy Carden: It was a very independent campaign, and it was the only way to

really try and pick off one seat then.

Michael Aron: Was your experience in the Byrne administration a drag on your

candidacy?

Timothy Carden: No. It was-- it gave me a foundation for saying I had credibility

and reason to be an effective legislator, because I understood the executive branch,

and I even used my close relations within the Byrne administration to orchestrate

events that would advance my candidacy.

Michael Aron: Such as?

Timothy Carden: Well, for example, we had a classic transportation issue: an

issue of high-level lighting in Bridgewater at the intersection of 22 and 287, which is

a form of lighting that’s different than the traditional highway lamp poles. It’s, say,

three times the height and five times the intensity, so it basically washes the whole

area in light. So if you have a complicated intersection, the transportation theory is

everybody gets to see where everybody is and you don’t run over anybody.

Michael Aron: That was the Somerville Circle, right?

Timothy Carden: This is just north of the Somerville Circle. Well, the communities

that-- it was in Bridgewater, and there was an extremely active, informed,

intelligent group of largely, but not exclusively, women who had analyzed this issue

and believed that it was detrimental to their community and to themselves and to

the surrounding homes.

Michael Aron: Light pollution?




Timothy Carden: Light pollution. And they did a lot of research on this and came

up with a analysis of what it would do to wildlife and what it might do to a whole

host of other things, and demanded a meeting with the governor, or the governor’s

office. And I got Don Linky to host a meeting at which he could be browbeaten by

this crowd of really intelligent and well-informed women who knew a lot more about

the issue than I did, and who wanted a place to be heard. And so there was an

example of my experience in the Byrne administration inuring to my benefit as a

candidate.

Michael Aron: Did the lights get built?

Timothy Carden: I think they did, ultimately, but not quickly.

M1: This guy Linky-- I’ll chip in a little bit because I remember that meeting well. I

think there were maybe five, six hundred people there.

Michael Aron: Really?

Timothy Carden: Yeah. That’s unbelievable.

M1: And they--

Michael Aron: Not in your office?

M1: No, no.

Timothy Carden: No, it was a public meeting.

M1: It was in a gym or somewhere. But in any event, I was amazed. First of all,

they sent me up. I thought it would be 10, 20 people. And also I was so impressed

by the intelligence of the audience. There were Ph.D.s in botany, and then

engineers who had so much more knowledge than the state people in the

Department of Transportation that I think we essentially said, “You know more than

we do and we’ll go back and rethink what we’re doing.”




Timothy Carden: I think that’s exactly right, because it didn’t get built during that

election cycle. That much I’m certain of. And my recollection, having driven it in the

last 20 or 25 years is that there’s some high-level lighting there now. Hopefully,

those impacts have been mitigated and addressed, and we’re growing the right

plants and saving others as a result.

Michael Aron: You were focused on your own campaign, but how did Brendan

Byrne confound conventional wisdom that year?

Timothy Carden: Very simply. And to his credit, he stuck to his guns, he didn’t

back down, he, I believe, informed the public that he hadn’t entertained or engaged

with that he was predictable in what he was doing in Steadfast [ph?] so that they

knew what they had on that side. With the help of former Secretary of the Treasury

William Simon, Ray Bateman came out with a plan for funding schools that made no

sense, and it was apparent the minute it came out that it made no sense. So the

opposition, in a sense, from a substantive standpoint, which seems so alien to a lot

of what we see of politics today, looked like an emperor without clothes. While

people could easily criticize the idea that the state had enacted an income tax and

that Brendan Byrne had supported it, people could-- it’s an easy cause to rally

around as an opponent-- there wasn’t an answer to school funding, which people at

that time acknowledged was something that both-- because the courts demanded it

and because they raised the idea it needed to be done.

Michael Aron: Do you think it’s unusual that a substantive position sinks a

candidacy?

Timothy Carden: In this instance, it was so much a cause of the-- the expectation

was that the issue was going to drag Brendan Byrne down. The absence of a

coherent response-- which, you know, flimflam and one-sentence sound bites

appear to be successful in so many instances-- weren’t going to work here. People

saw through it. And perhaps most important from a straight political standpoint, the

Bergen County Republicans and Independents, who commuted on a daily basis to

New York, many of them, and paid income tax to the city of New York, realized that

they weren’t going to pay a New Jersey income tax, and that if this had some

modest impact on reducing or slowing down the growth on their property tax, it was

a good thing for them. So, contrary to all those expectations and polls, the Bergen

County results were very favorable to Governor Byrne, and Bergen County was a

far less Democratic county at the time than it is today. So that was just one good

example of what, I think, people saw through the rhetoric, they looked at the facts,

and they made a determination that made sense.




Michael Aron: Do you recall the nickname for the Bateman fiscal plan?

Timothy Carden: I’m trying to remember what they-- it was the B.S. Plan?

Michael Aron: Bateman-Simon.

Timothy Carden: <laughs> The B.S. Plan. I do remember being a supporter of the

income tax in a district that wasn’t anxious to hear about support of the income tax,

and having a good lesson in political preparation, because I think it was in Chester.

I had a couple of communities in Morris County were included in the district, and

someone asked me how high I thought the income tax could go. And I think I used

11 percent as a figure, which I’d gotten from somewhere, and I realized as I walked

out of the room that however many people in that room and however many

relatives they had in the district, I’d just lost all of them. It wasn’t reported that--

Michael Aron: What was the high rate? Three percent?

Timothy Carden: Three. Yeah. But they said, “How high would you let it go?” And

I don’t know. I’d read an analysis somewhere, and I was young and naïve.

Michael Aron: And honest.

Timothy Carden: And honest. I said, “Well, it could go up to as high as 11

percent.”

Michael Aron: What else do you remember about your campaign season--

meetings, confrontations, senses of victory?

Timothy Carden: There were great moments of excitement, enthusiasm. It was a

campaign that generated a lot of interest, so I had young people and people whom

I had met in two preceding election cycles that climbed on and did more for me

than I could possibly have meant. So there was a--

Michael Aron: What was your issue?




Timothy Carden: The biggest issue that I found success with, I was generally

probably aligned within support of most of the things that Brendan Byrne said,

although if the income tax was the dominant issue, I was supportive of an income

tax. I said that land-use planning in this area was the most important step that

these communities had to take as a whole, because with the-- at that point, 78,

which runs right through the heart of that district, was not complete. I came from

the Township of Bedminster, which had endured and was in the process of enduring

a 10-year suit over affordable housing adjacent to an AT&T Long Lines facility that

employed people who probably were commuting between 15 and 30 miles a day,

simply because they couldn’t afford to live in the township in which their corporate

headquarters was located. And I looked at the whole corridor along route 78, and

my argument to them was, “You want to preserve the quality of life that you have,

and you think that as individual municipalities you can withstand the pressures of

economic development and growth that will occur when this highway is completed,

and someday it will be. And you’re wrong. You will succumb, one by one, and you

will find yourselves with a whole set of both environmental and quality-of-life issues

surrounding where commercial development ended up, where residential

development ended up.”

Michael Aron: Were you right?

Timothy Carden: Absolutely.

Michael Aron: But other than the Hills, which got built after--

Timothy Carden: But I had another agenda. This was my way of saying that we

can’t abandon our cities, which I didn’t think was as coherent an argument for

Somerset County. And--

Michael Aron: But the Route 78 corridor is not that bad today. It developed okay,

one would say.

Timothy Carden: Drive it. <laughs> No, it’s interesting, because the Route 78

corridor, once it was completed, looks and appears very comfortable relative to the

Route 80 corridor, which, if you ever get in your car during rush hour and listen to

the traffic reports, you’ll always hear something on Route 80. I’ve heard it for 10

years. Right now, 78’s probably at or above capacity, and what we have not

succeeded in doing is saying, “Here’s a coherent way to utilize the resources that

we can’t replace, which is our land and our open space.” And simultaneously, we




have yet to create a coherent and effective framework for investment in our cities.

It says, “These are sites where we will, as a state and society, make the

investments that are necessary to make the site competitive and economically

viable for new businesses.”

Michael Aron: You were trying to become the Assemblyman from the Bedminster

area. You say affordable housing was something of concern to you. What do you

think about the Hills development, which brought thousands and thousands of units

of new housing, 20 percent of them set aside for lower- and moderate-income

people?

Timothy Carden: That development was the outgrowth of the suit I mentioned

earlier, and which was in the courts when I was running in 1977 and 1978.

Michael Aron: Nothing had been built yet?

Timothy Carden: Nothing had been built yet. I was-- and part of the argument

that I made from a no more than a fairness standpoint, I said, “Everyone who lives

in Bedminster has just realized a 50 percent, if not more, reduction in your property

tax.” That’s what the effect of the AT&T Long Lines were-- literally at 50 percent. I

said--

Michael Aron: When AT&T moved in?

Timothy Carden: When they moved there, everybody’s property tax-- they said to

finish the building, property taxes dropped by 50 percent. And here you were, eight

or ten years later, and to me, the argument that the people who worked there were

generating all this revenue that’s enabling us to live the way we do there without an

increase in property tax, and can’t live there, there ought to be some opportunity to

do that. So I think that the Hills-- and I campaigned there more recently when I ran

for Congress in 2002, and I think it’s a pretty successful development. It has a

mixed demographic group. There’s some very high-end housing in some sections,

and definitely affordable housing units in others. And given the growth of jobs for

which people who need affordable housing could qualify for in that area, that

housing is needed, and there probably isn’t enough of it overall in that general area,

so it’s an important step.

Michael Aron: You said you got 49 percent of the vote in that election. How long

did it take to get over losing?




Timothy Carden: A long time. <laughs> It takes a while, yeah. It takes a while.

But I sort of pulled myself out. I actually got to meet and had the benefit of

campaigning with Bob Mulcahy], whom I hadn’t known in the first administration,

but he’d been the mayor of Mendham Borough, which was in the district. So he

campaigned with me on the streets of Mendham. I almost won Mendham, and I

certainly didn’t almost win Bedminster, which was my hometown. And I sort of

pulled myself up by my bootstraps and said I got to move on with life, and at about

the same time, Bob was then the Commissioner of Corrections, but had been

announced in transition that he was going to be the Chief of Staff to the governor,

and he called me shortly thereafter to ask if I was interested in coming back into

the administration. So I had a short period of mourning, and then an opportunity

presented itself fairly--

Michael Aron: What did you think you might do before Mulcahy called?

Timothy Carden: I was contemplating whether to simply find a way to earn a

living and run for the Assembly again in that area. I thought there was a good

chance that in the right year, we could actually win that district. And if I didn’t do

that, I was looking at opportunities in going back into government.

Michael Aron: When Mulcahy called, what did he say?

Timothy Carden: Well, Bob and I had developed a good relationship during that

campaign. I think we’d actually met in the previous campaign for the Congressional

candidate Fred Bowen, that I’d worked for in 1974, and included that, but not spent

much time together. And I was enthusiastic about the conversation we had about

his approach to the governor’s office and the importance of having people who had

experience in the state agencies, which was a common bond that we shared, and so

I was persuaded quickly that this was an opportunity that was as interesting as I

might’ve had in the legislature, if not quite as independent, and one worth pursuing.

Michael Aron: Did he give you a specific position?

Timothy Carden: He wanted an executive assistant, which was my first title there,

and it was clear to both of us that my strengths were not in dealing with the

legislature or with other parts of the executive branch, but in helping him create a

more coordinated and effective relationship between the governor’s office and the

agencies. And it was shortly after I got there that we re-created, or renewed, the

position of Cabinet Secretary, which had existed briefly in the first term, but was--




they’d left the position vacant after the first incumbent started doing four-way

searches on people who might or might not be candidates without asking anyone

else for the authority to do so. It was sort of like a-- the guy’s name was Jeff

Ketterson, and again, this is all I learned once I got the job, not while I was working

for Alan Sagner. He took it upon himself to sort of be the investigator of record for

existing, potential other candidates, and so he was sending out authorizations for

people to have state police checks done on their background without any certainty

that this person either should be subject to that, or was even eligible for a position

that they might someday get. So that was one of a number of concerns that his

presence in the governor’s office made, and when he did leave, which he did, they

just didn’t fill the position.

Michael Aron: Let’s take a break.

Timothy Carden: Okay.

<crew talk>

Michael Aron: So Bob Mulcahy offered you a job and you took it promptly. You

don’t remember if you took it on the spot or needed a day or two to think about it?

Timothy Carden: I don’t remember.

Michael Aron: You came in as an executive assistant to the Chief of Staff?

Timothy Carden: That’s it. Yep.

Michael Aron: Was he the first Chief of Staff?

Timothy Carden: In the second term. There hadn’t-- yeah. There was a Chief of

Staff, I think that-- no, because executive secretary happened on that, so yes,

you’re right.

Michael Aron: He kind of created that position.

Timothy Carden: That’s right.




Michael Aron: And Harold Hodes would succeed him.

Timothy Carden: And Harold came in as the deputy.

Michael Aron: Deputy Chief of Staff?

Timothy Carden: Deputy Chief of Staff.

Michael Aron: Who did you report to?

Timothy Carden: Bob.

Michael Aron: What was your title?

Timothy Carden: It was executive assistant, and then, when I was promoted to

Cabinet Secretary, while I conferred with Bob, I was technically to report to the

governor at the time, and so--

Michael Aron: How long after you started did that happen?

Timothy Carden: Bob lasted until the Sports Authority opened, and then there was

a question as to whether Bob was going to stay as Chief of Staff or take a position

as the first head of the Sports Authority. And he chose the Sports Authority, which-

-

Michael Aron: Was that about a year later?

Timothy Carden: Yes, about a year.

Michael Aron: What did you do that first year?

Timothy Carden: Just as we were talking before, I spent a lot of time developing

relationships with each of the Cabinet officers and their senior staffs, and

developing relationships meant enabling them to do their jobs better. That was a

large part of it. Now, they had a-- from a legislative standpoint, they had direct




contacts and specific personnel assigned in the council’s office who looked at all

legislation, but on administrative matters, it wasn’t as clear, and we assumed in

Bob’s office and in that side of the governor’s office the responsibility for either

initiating, overseeing, or facilitating administrative actions-- the opening and closing

of something, the announcement of one initiative or other. Or in conjunction with

that, when we had Cabinet meetings or meetings with Cabinet officers and the

governor, there would always be an agenda that came out of that meeting--

generally the governor’s agenda. And the governor’s agenda wasn’t always the first

thing on that person’s list when they left the office, so one of my responsibilities

was to ensure that it stayed high on their list and that it got completed.

Michael Aron: Now you’re on the other side of the equation from the one we were

talking about a little while ago.

Timothy Carden: Exactly.

Michael Aron: It must look different from the perspective of the governor’s office.

Timothy Carden: On the one hand, it looks different. On the other hand, we

approached that not as dictators, but as people who have to work together to

achieve common objectives. And so going back to tell the governor that something

that he had mentioned to his Cabinet officer he really wanted done, and it’s not

done a month later doesn’t help anyone, so even if it wasn’t the first thing on

someone’s list, it was always useful to say, “Let’s make certain that this gets done

so that the other things you’re trying to accomplish are.”

Michael Aron: Was Alan Sagner still Transportation Commissioner?

Timothy Carden: No. Lou Gambaccini had taken over that position in the second

term, and was a very active and engaged commissioner from the day he arrived,

and the agenda was one of the largest, in terms of actual activity, and even in

terms of initiative, that this administration undertook, because it was during that

administration that we not only succeeded in passing a major bond issue which

reinfused capital funding for transportation, but we also established the New Jersey

Transit Corporation, got the legislation enacted, and appointed the first board, the

first director, and actually sorted out the bulk of public transportation activities from

the department, and placed it in this new corporation. Included in that was the

acquisition of a whole host of railroad assets that emerged from the Pennsylvania

Railroad bankruptcy and from Conrail’s decision to get out of the passenger rail




business. When Pennsylvania Railroad went bankrupt and there was a recognition

that there was a need both to maintain freight service, but more importantly, from

a state government standpoint, to maintain commuter service, Conrail was the

entity that took over the assets of the bankrupt Pennsylvania Railroad, and they

also operated the passenger service that was being operated over those tracks. But

they got out of that business, and states acquired major pieces of rail right-of-way

and rail assets.

Michael Aron: What do you know about why Mulcahy created this new title Chief

of Staff? What was the idea there?

Timothy Carden: I think that Bob’s approach reflected both a background in

business and a sense of organizing around the operational functions of government,

which he had been deeply involved in during the first term. When he came to state

government, he joined-- he was the Deputy Commissioner for Commissioner Anne

Klein--

Michael Aron: What had he done before?

Timothy Carden: Who oversaw both institutions and agencies, and it was a

sprawling, massive bureaucracy, and is still today, even in its somewhat divided

state, meaning that pieces of it have been carved out since. It’s still the largest

department in terms of actual spending. At that point, it would’ve dwarfed the other

departments because it ran and operated all the prisons, the schools, and facilities

for the developmentally disabled, all the hospitals that house the mentally ill in the

state, and ran the troubled and at-risk youth programs under DYFS. Plus, they had

a number of other agencies, plus they had community service branches of those

different divisions. So it was-- at the time that I became commissioner three years

later, it had a $2 billion budget out of a $6 billion state budget, and today I think

the budget of the current Department of Human Services is on the range of 7 to 8

billion in a $36 million budget, so...

Michael Aron: What was his background? You said business?

Timothy Carden: Yeah. He’d run a business in the Morris County area. I think it

was in development and construction.

Michael Aron: Do you think his predecessor called himself Executive Secretary and

not Chief of Staff?




Timothy Carden: Yes. And there was a tradition to that Executive Secretary to the

governor, and I think Bob’s goal and role was different than just being sort of an

overseer of the activities of the governor’s office, and wanted to create a capacity

to bring some management capability to the governor’s office that was not

competitive with, but separate with council’s role, which had a different relationship

with each of the agencies.

Michael Aron: What commissioners did you most interface with during that first

year?

Timothy Carden: During that-- I can’t remember whether it was different in the

subsequent years, but Human Services, Transportation, DEP to a lesser extent,

Corrections when things came up, because that was sort of the-- it was less

frequent. And then Energy, which had sort of a roller coaster presence in the

administration, meaning that there were times when the energy issues would rise to

the surface, and when they didn’t, it was a fairly quiet agency; and occasionally

Community Affairs. Those were the ones. I dealt with the Attorney General, but

there were fewer action initiatives because John Degnan had been in that office, he

had a very direct relationship with the governor, and they discussed and dealt with

court and legal issues outside my purview. If there were administrative issues, I

dealt with them.

Michael Aron: Give us a description of each of the commissioners in those

departments that you just rattled off.

Timothy Carden: Lou Gambaccini was a very effective and thorough and

thoughtful public manager. He understood government. He was a true believer in

the importance of government in this role and society and all, and he brought those

skills of 25 years of running services at the Port Authority, most notably the PATH

service, to the Department of Transportation. He brought expertise that the public

hadn’t-- and in particular, the legislature hadn’t necessarily seen in every

commissioner, and so he brought credibility to the debate--

Michael Aron: Was he a New Yorker coming over to New Jersey?

Timothy Carden: No. He lived in Ridgewood and raised his family in Ridgewood.

When he took the job in Trenton, he actually moved there during the week,

because he was working long hours. But he had always been a New Jersey

commuter to the Port Authority in New York. Anne Klein, who was continued from




the first term, was a recognized and revered advocate for people with needs of

different sorts, and--

Michael Aron: Was it called Human Services?

Timothy Carden: It was then called the Commissioner of Human Services. And

she was very effective in both advocating and articulating the issues, but not as

strong a manager, and it was a sprawling bureaucracy. She had good people

underneath her, and we probably had a number of issues that percolated up to the

governor’s office because they were either important or she wanted the governor to

know what was going on, to get the attention and support that she needed. She

was a terrific lady.

Michael Aron: How did she become commissioner?

Timothy Carden: She ran against Brendan Byrne. She was an Assemblywoman

from Morris or West Essex County.

M1: Morris.

Timothy Carden: Morris County, which was unheard of. And Democrats didn’t win

in Morris County-- they still don’t win that often-- and had as a liberal Democrat,

and had run against Governor Byrne in the primary in 1973. So he knew her and

invited her after the primary, after the general election, to join his administration in

that capacity. So she had a very strong relationship with the governor.

Commissioner of Corrections Bill Fauver had basically grown up in the corrections

system of New Jersey, with the particular prerequisite of having served as the

warden of Trenton State Prison, which is the most significant maximum security

prison in the state, and had been a deputy under Bob Mulcahy. So he was

seasoned, experienced, and reliable in managing what no one else really wanted to

know too much about, which is how we run our penal system. And issues came up

on funding occasionally, and on incidents. He would deal on that. Jerry English

became the Commissioner of DEP. There was-- I think Rocco Ricci was the

commissioner at the start of the second term. I had familiarity with transportation,

so it came to me naturally. I had an engagement and interest in the human service

field, so my grasp of that came faster, and I was able to facilitate things. The DEP

debate within the governor’s office was to some extent on budget, because there

was always parks and forests and the amount of resources we had to devote to

that, but on the regulatory developer side, it was more-- there were fewer policy




initiatives. Obviously, the Pinelands, when it came up, is an enormous part of that,

but it wasn’t directly an agency issue. So I had less direct involvement with DEP.

And Rocco Ricci was professional, confident, very good, and when Jerry took over, it

was as a skilled administrator who knew the--

Michael Aron: She came out of the governor’s office?

Timothy Carden: And she came out of the governor’s office and moved up there,

so she had the governor’s ear, and there was an assumption that she would

understand the governor’s priorities, and if there was an issue that reflected the

two, they’d sort that out.

Michael Aron: Community Affairs?

Timothy Carden: Joe LeFante [ph?] was the Commissioner of Community Affairs,

and an ardent Byrne loyalist who had stood up for him when the income tax vote

was called for, and he was a Hudson County politician who had also run a furniture

store and was very much in touch with the communities, and a very willing ear

when the governor had something that he wanted done.

Michael Aron: You did say “Energy,” so let’s resume there.

Timothy Carden: Joel was a--

Michael Aron: Joel Jacobson.

Timothy Carden: Joel Jacobson was the commissioner. He was the first

Commissioner of Energy, which had been created as a department in part because

of the oil crisis in the mid-seventies, and he was, again, a really loyal and ardent

advocate for both the causes of energy conservation, which he embraced

immediately, for the causes of labor, which he came to naturally. I always

remember that he said he would never on the Garden State Parkway go to a booth

that had a token basket, because he wanted to make certain that he handed his

change directly to an employee who was getting paid to pick up that money, so I

don’t think he’d have been a big fan of E-ZPass-- and who was extremely loyal to

the governor.




Michael Aron: Cliff Goldman?

Timothy Carden: I had a lot of interaction with Treasury, and Cliff was a really

quiet and a strong presence who largely kept his own counsel, always knew where

all of the money in the administration was and how to effectuate change when it

was possible, and on a number of occasions, I was responsible for brokering

different resolution of funding issues with agency heads and Cliff. There’s one in

particular that I often recount as how the workings of government can appear trivial

but be important, and it involved the Department of Corrections and the

Department of Human Services. The Department of Human Services had contracted

with the-- and this issue arose to the governor’s office, and I was sent to have a

meeting with the Treasurer, myself, the Commissioner of Corrections, and the

Commissioner of Human Services. And the Commissioner of Corrections had

actually been in Anne Klein’s department when Corrections was part of it, so they

knew each other well, they certainly got along, but they were having a dispute that

they couldn’t resolve. Corrections had been contracted by the Department of

Human Services to wash sheets from institutions, and there’s quite a volume of

sheets that come in, and recently the department had made a major expenditure

for new washing machines-- this was the Department of Corrections-- so they had a

big-budget item and an investment in new washing machines. These were all

operated by prisoners, and by the description of the Commissioner of Human

Services, and with some affirmation from the Commissioner of Corrections, it was

noted that they would, in their zeal or anger, push the sheets into the washing

machines so tightly that there was no room for water so that there was very little

washing going on in their washing machines, and the sheets were going back to the

Department of Human Services not clean.

There was a bigger complication, which was that there was an uncertainty under

operating rules as to who was to pre-clean the sheets before they went into the

washing machine. Now, this happens to be sheets that come out of institutions

where people’s continence is not certain, and in many instances a number of the

people who used these aren’t continent, so that you’d have defecation and all sorts

of problems that were in sheets, and it wasn’t clear as to whose responsibility it was

to remove that material before the sheets actually got to the laundry. This actually

became a union issue because there was a claim that one of the unions didn’t have

responsibility and that it therefore fell somewhere or nowhere. So we had two

Cabinet Officers, the State Treasurer, and myself sitting around a table, trying to

resolve who was going to be responsible for removal of fecal matter from sheets,

and how we were going to reduce the either anger or frustration of the prisoners

who were responsible for washing sheets, or we were going to default and go to the

Commissioner of Human Services, Anne’s, suggestion, which was to outsource the

washing sheets to someone who really cared about these issues. So we sorted




through that, and Cliff was very reasonable, and we agreed that it would be a

mistake to lose the value of this major investment in a large number of large

washing machines, and that there would have to be some instruction to the unions

at some way of mitigated or handling the pre-cleaning activity in a way that would

be suitable to everyone, and we left the room with a resolution that there would be

some closer oversight and better monitoring of how the sheets were actually placed

in the washing machines. It took about an hour and a half, but government

marched on.

Michael Aron: That’s a good story. Jim Scheran

Timothy Carden: Jim Scheran was a close ally of the governor for a long time, and

an admired veteran, as well, who had come out of the same area of Essex County

in West Orange that the governor had, and whom he knew really well. Both

Commissioners Scheran and Buddy Beanky [ph?] had relationships on a personal

level with the governor that--

Michael Aron: Beanky was Banking Commissioner?

Timothy Carden: And he was the Banking Commissioner-- that enabled me to give

them instruction or direction, or to talk to them or their staffs when necessary, but

they had a-- they didn’t have that much on a daily or monthly basis to discuss with

the governor, in terms of actions and activities, and I think their access was fairly

personal.

Michael Aron: Phil Alampi

Timothy Carden: Phil ran Agriculture. I don’t think the governor or most of us

spent a lot of time worrying about agriculture, and Phil would champion agriculture

at each of the Cabinet meetings. He would find some way to raise the issues of

agriculture and inform the gathered group that there was another event or activity

or season in agriculture, and he would also find his way to always praise the

governor in each of those statements. So he would have a statement about

agriculture and what’s going on in agriculture, followed by a statement in praise of

what a great job the governor was doing. It was uniform and universal.

Michael Aron: How was it regarded?




Timothy Carden: Everybody enjoyed it, and everybody expected it. But it also--

Michael Aron: He had served other governors, so he had to show his fealty to this

governor every time?

Timothy Carden: We would assume that he made the same statement to the

preceding and succeeding governors, because he served a long time. But one of the

things that Governor Byrne did-- and this was, I believe, his mandate and not Bob

Mulcahy’s [ph?]-- is we met as a Cabinet on a regular basis, and part of our

responsibility was to develop that agenda. And sometimes the agenda was

relatively thin, but it never precluded having a Cabinet meeting. I think he really

believed in the form of having your commissioners understand that they got to not

one-on-one for discussion of their particular issue, but gather as a group to share

both concerns and ideas, to bounce ideas off the wall, and Governor Byrne was an

astute listener and was slow to speak. It’s part of what I think he understood, that

his voice carried greater weight than anyone else in the room, and he wanted to

hear and elicit thoughts and issues from other people. I know that a number of

other administrations subsequently-- I don’t know about the preceding

administrations-- that pattern has not been as consistent, and there’ve even been

administrations where the Cabinet has met, but with the Chief of Staff or with the

senior governor’s office personnel, but not with the governor themselves. Brendan

Byrne oversaw every Cabinet meeting that he was here for, which was almost all of

them. We ran a Cabinet retreat each of the years that I served as his Cabinet

Secretary, which was two days and a constructed agenda in which we all talked

about not necessarily any specific issues. We developed policy issues that would be

far reaching or immediate. And in the course of...

I guess it was the first year of my service in working for the governor that we had

the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and there was a cloud that emerged from

that, and the question was where was that cloud going to move, and what were the

risks associated with that cloud? Well, no one in Governor Byrne’s Cabinet had an

enormous amount of information or knowledge about subjects of clouds with

nuclear risk associated with them, or we knew that weather generally moves from

west to east, but how quickly and when? With what degree of dissolution? No one

knew. But we met every day as a Cabinet to discuss where the cloud was, what we

had learned overnight, and what, if any, actions we should contemplate or consider.

Joanne Finley, who was Commissioner of Health, would comment at every one of

those meetings. Colonel Pagano, who was the Superintendent of State Police, was

specifically invited to those meetings to give an update or to respond to issues of

what would we do if we needed to evacuate one or another, as what would be the

procedures that would need to be followed. And more than the substance of the




dialogue, because eventually the cloud dissipated and no particular action was

required of the state, I thought this reflected someone who understood the

importance of being ready even if you didn’t have an immediate answer, and also in

ensuring that everyone placed a stake and took a stake in making certain at the

outcome.

Michael Aron: That person being the governor?

Timothy Carden: Yeah, and that was the governor.

Michael Aron: I forgot to ask you whether the sheets got cleaned properly after

that meeting.

Timothy Carden: They did. We actually got a better result. We checked up and

followed it, and that meeting produced a successful result.

Michael Aron: Stanley Van Ness?

Timothy Carden: Stanley had a great reputation and standing in the

administration, and as you know, Brendan Byrne created the Office of the Public

Advocate, and it was a really valued position. His role, in part because of the nature

of the Public Advocate within the order of the governor’s office, was not as strong,

because he was in a sense a form of citizen watchdog, and he certainly was an

outspoken participant in all the Cabinet meetings about what policy was, and I think

the governor listened to him attentively. I didn’t interface with him or act on

initiatives within the Public Advocate’s office, and obviously if they were bringing

suit or raising complaints about operations of the administration, that would fall into

the hands of either Council or the Attorney General’s office.

Michael Aron: Do you recall him suing any department within the Byrne

administration?

Timothy Carden: He sued frequently and with vigor when it was necessary. When

I was appointed commissioner, before I was confirmed as Commissioner of Human

Services, I already had a suit on my desk with my name on it, and I don’t

remember the issue, but conditions in state institutions and in many state programs

needed more attention than we were readily able to or willing to fund, and suits




were an important part of prompting action, even sometimes unwilling action, by

this and other administrations.

Michael Aron: Joanne Finley?

Timothy Carden: Joanne was-- among other things, Joanne was a very outspoken

Health Commissioner, and I’m trying to remember if we had issues beyond Three

Mile Island that really rose to the surface. I think we definitely talked about either

flu outbreaks if they emerged, things that would happen, and her counsel was

looked for consistently. Health had a number of roles. The time that I had the

closest involvement with her was we had six deaths in an institution as a result of

food poisoning over a weekend, and it was Marlboro State Hospital, and they were

geriatric patients who had eaten tainted chicken, and they basically dehydrated,

and it was a major issue. We called in my-- well, I think that there was a uniform

consensus to call in the Center for Disease Control from Atlanta to do an analysis of

what had actually happened, and Joanne was directly involved in determining the

epidemiology and the causes of the actual reason why these individuals had gotten

sick and not gotten the care they needed to survive. So she was competent, active,

engaged.

Michael Aron: To what extent did you have any involvement with federal issues?

Timothy Carden: I had some involvement with federal issues, but the majority of

those were handled by Marilyn Berry Thompson, who ran the Washington office,

and she had a good relationship with the governor. She conferred with Bob Mulcahy

directly during his tenure there, and with Harold a good deal when Harold took

over, because they were seventy percent related to the federal budget-- what

would be available and what wouldn’t. And she put together an office staff and

mastered that budget faster than anyone could, and became sort of the

indispensable resource on, “Where do we go, and how do we do that?”

Michael Aron: Was she a Jersey person or a D.C. person?

Timothy Carden: I knew her as a D.C. person, and I’m not sure whether she came

from New Jersey, really, but she was there, and remains there today.

Michael Aron: Do we still have the position of Cabinet Secretary?




Timothy Carden: It succeeded in the Kean administration. Chris Daggett took the

position. I’m not sure that it’s survived the subsequent administrations, so--

Michael Aron: I don’t think anybody has that title anymore.

Timothy Carden: But there are a number of deputy chiefs of staff, as opposed to

one, which, in the case of Byrne’s second term, Harold was the Deputy Chief of

Staff, and there was not a Deputy Chief of Staff after Harold assumed the position

of Chief of Staff. So there are within the current structure, I think, deputy chiefs of

staff who carry some of this responsibility.

Michael Aron: While you were still Executive Assistant, to what extent did you

have contact with Governor Byrne?

Timothy Carden: I had less contact with him before then. It was-- and I

remember seeing-- I have a visual image of my first visit into his small office, which

was a really interesting and very modest-size office crammed with memorabilia and

cartoons about him and how he was never going to win reelection. But right on the

wall adjacent to his desk was a reprint of a ballot from 1977 with his name and my

name. Now, that meant that it was from the Somerset County ballot, and to my

chagrin, during the entire time I was there-- his name is misspelled; it’s spelled

“Bryne [ph?].” And as you may know, when the ballot comes out, everybody in a

campaign rushes to make sure that you haven’t been somehow corrupted or lost

your way, and so I obviously had checked the spelling of “Carden” very closely, but

I hadn’t been nearly as vigilant in checking the spelling of Governor Bryne.”

<laughs> But no one else had, either, so...

Michael Aron: Who made you Cabinet Secretary?

Timothy Carden: The governor, I think. It’s not something that--

Michael Aron: Who did you succeed?

Timothy Carden: There was no one there. It was really sort of part of a transition,

with Bob leaving to take over responsibility of the Sports Authority. Harold was

moving up to be Chief of Staff, and so they were expanding my role to have a

better title, have a somewhat larger title in the context of overseeing or assisting in

the administration operations.




Michael Aron: What does it really mean?

Timothy Carden: It meant what you make of it. What it meant to us was, Harold

had two or three people-- it was a much smaller office than it is today-- who

worked with him on legislative matters. He had responsibility for everything, as Bob

had had, and I was his primary person on administrative matters. And on

administrative matters, he was liberal in passing what I wanted to do or suggest or

recommend under the governor through me or by me. He didn’t have any

hesitation to say, “I understand what you’re saying, and I’m going to make sure the

governor knows.” I’d just say, “Go tell the governor.”

Michael Aron: How did Hodes differ from Mulcahy as Chief?

Timothy Carden: He’s a very different personality, and ready to delegate to you

the responsibility not only for making sure it happens but for explaining how it’s

going to happen. He doesn’t have to understand everything. Bob had a demand and

sort of a sensibility that he wanted to understand things on a broader level more

comprehensively than Harold would, so he trusted you to be smart and to know

what the administration and the governor’s interests were and to be observant of

them.

Michael Aron: What did you work on?

Timothy Carden: Well, we worked on a variety of issues. I mentioned the creation

of New Jersey Transit and the transportation challenges that the state faced, and

that was-- there were big dilemmas in how to both fund and manage the

transportation system. I mentioned earlier that the railroad assets had recently

become part of the public estate, they they’d basically transferred from the private

sector to the public sector. Transport of New Jersey, which had been a subsidiary of

PSE&G, the statewide utility, was the major bus company in the state, and at the

time I was at DOT, the state was funding losses of Transport of New Jersey in

increasing amounts each year, and in the course of the second term, in the creation

of New Jersey Transit, New Jersey Transit acquired all the assets of Transport of

New Jersey. So a privately operated but subsidized public bus company became the

state’s public bus company-- the first statewide transit agency in the country. And

working through all those issues with both the Commissioner, Lou Gambaccini, and

with the governor, involved a lot of back-and-forth. There were similar issues in

Human Services that dealt more with the operations of institutions-- the funding of

them. Crises and funding were frequent and needed to be resolved. Cliff Goldman

would be the primary resolver of those, but there were also issues that came to the




governor’s office that I dealt with. And where two agencies-- say, DEP and

Transportation-- had to come together around an issue, I’d find myself thrown into

the middle of that, making certain that, A) resolution was reached, and B) the

governor’s interests were observed.

Michael Aron: What were typical discussions at a Cabinet meeting like?

Timothy Carden: They could vary widely. Sometimes the governor would just

come in with an idea he wanted to throw out, and he would say, “So, what do you

think we’re doing right and wrong in Atlantic City?” And just listen. Other times,

there would be administrative issues that needed the attention of all the cabinet

officers. “We’re in the midst of salary renegotiations, so this is where things stand,

and we want you to understand that, and they’re going to occur once we get

through this process.” And if there were major budget issues, Cliff would almost

always give an update on where the budget stood, but also there were times when

he and the governor would have to inform the Cabinet that there either were or

were not going to be the resources that they were expecting.

Michael Aron: Who decided it was time for a Cabinet meeting, or were there

regular meetings?

Timothy Carden: We had a meeting once a month, and I set the agenda in

consultation with the governor. That’s what that was.

Michael Aron: Was it a fixed time? Was it the fourth Monday, or whatever?

Timothy Carden: Yes. It was changed by the way schedules change, but it was an

effort made to keep it at a regular time.

Michael Aron: Were they useful or a waste of time?

Timothy Carden: Useful.

Michael Aron: How so?

Timothy Carden: The tendency of individuals who have as much to do as senior

officials in government do is to want to have the independence and the capacity to




do what they have to do and be left alone to do it. That’s also true of people in the

governor’s office, who would want to ensure that the governor’s interests were

being observed and that the administration’s achieving its objectives in a timely

fashion. Coming together removes people from that sole focus and forces them

both to listen and to learn something about the larger picture, and it also gives

them and the governor a chance to recognize that this is a enterprise that is about

more than just about themselves, and that it’s not just about what next week’s

headlines or next week’s deadlines represent, but it’s about where we’re heading

and what we’re actually doing for this state.

Michael Aron: Did Byrne ever ask for a vote on something important?

Timothy Carden: I think he did. Yes. He actually-- he would poll the Cabinet. He

wouldn’t necessarily be guided by it, but he would poll the Cabinet.

Michael Aron: Do you recall any issues?

Timothy Carden: I don’t remember an issue that he would-- he would not take

that approach on a major issue. He would rather listen to the counsel of those

who’d spoke, and keep his own.

Michael Aron: How are we doing on time, and should we try to finish within the

next 20 to 30 minutes?

Timothy Carden: <inaudible>

Michael Aron: We’ve gotten you deeply into your role as Cabinet Secretary, and

that’s going to soon evolve into a Cabinet appointment for you. How did that come

about?

Timothy Carden: The governor made a declaration at the end of the third year of

his second term that anyone in his Cabinet-- and there were a number of potential

candidates-- who wanted to run for governor was welcome to do so, but that there

was a requirement that they resign before they announce. And there’d already been

some rumors, and maybe even a little back-and-forth, between different Cabinet

members about their interest in running. And Anne announced her intention to run

and set a date for resignation early in 1981. And I had dealt with a number of

different human service issues, had both a commitment and an interest in that




department, and went to Harold and said, “I’m really interested in this position.”

And he said, “Well, then you got to tell the governor.” So I found an opportunity

where the governor and I were alone-- I think it was at Morven-- and I said, “I

don’t know how to ask this question without putting it in an awkward fashion, but I

want you to know that I’m very interested in the position of Human Services

Commissioner. If you would consider me, I’d appreciate it.”

Michael Aron: Was that difficult to do?

Timothy Carden: It was difficult for me. And--

Michael Aron: You were pretty young.

Timothy Carden: I was 31. And he acknowledged the question. He said, “Okay.

Thanks.” And that was the end of the conversation.

Michael Aron: What did you think?

Timothy Carden: I said, “Well, that’s like him.” I had spent a lot of time informing

people who had seen him seem agreeable to an idea when they were in his office,

that the fact that he seemed agreeable did not mean he’d said yes, and it did not

mean he’d said no. They should not take away from it that he had made a decision.

And I’m going to diverge for a second because that reflected to me an

understanding that Brendan Byrne had about what the office of governor is about--

about the magnitude of it, his respect for it, and also his understanding that when

he said yes or no, it was a definitive decision that was going to affect maybe one

life, maybe many lives, but the state. And understanding the power and authority of

that office and how to both respect it and use it effectively is not something that

one acquires naturally. I think he learned a lot by serving in that office, which he

had under Governor Meyner, and I think he came to it with an appreciation both of

the politics of it and of the importance of moving the state in a positive direction. If

he were only interested in the politics of it, he would never have even contemplated

the office, I think, or if he had, he certainly wouldn’t have advanced the income tax

and other progressive changes that he thought were important for this state.

Michael Aron: Did your personal relationship with him evolve over those years,

from the initial point of walking into his office and seeing his name misspelled?




Timothy Carden: Yeah, and they evolved in a very deliberate fashion. I happened

to be one of the-- the person in his office who knew how to play squash, which he

liked to do in the winter, and who knew how to play tennis well enough that he

actually liked to have a partner who was perhaps as strong or a little stronger, a

little quicker, than he was. So in afternoons when he wanted to get some exercise,

we actually got to know each other better because I got to play squash with him in

the afternoon, and tennis with him occasionally. And being on his staff, it wasn’t

something that you either had to nor could you readily say no to. When he decided

at two o’clock that it was time for a little exercise, said, “Let’s go play some tennis,”

say, “Well, I’m up for that.” And if I had responsibilities, I’d come back and take

care of them at a later time.

Michael Aron: That sounds like a real privilege.

Timothy Carden: It was a real privilege. It was a real privilege, and I enjoyed it,

and it gave us a chance to both occasionally talk about things that related to the

job, but more often than not, get to know each other, so...

Michael Aron: Squash is a single’s game. You played against each other.

Timothy Carden: Yes.

Michael Aron: Who won?

Timothy Carden: We split. He was good. I don’t remember who won more often,

but I didn’t always lose, and he didn’t always win.

Michael Aron: In tennis, you played doubles?

Timothy Carden: Yeah, and he’s a lefty and I’m a righty, so we usually played as

partners. Occasionally we’d switch it up, depending on who was on the other side of

the net. So back to the commissionership. The lines went dead. I never mentioned

it to him again; he never asked me another question. But what I learned was that

he went out and performed his own due diligence. He talked to people that he knew

and respected who had something to do with that department, and asked them

about me. And the reports were favorable enough. And obviously he knew who I

was and that he could trust me to be observant of his interests, but he wanted to

make sure that it wouldn’t backfire on him if he did it, which was smart, and that I




was probably up to the job, which it’s hard to say anybody walking into an agency

of that size with that many challenges is certainly up to the job, but he thought I

was good enough.

Michael Aron: Did he call you, summon you to his office, or have Hodes give you

the good news?

Timothy Carden: He told me, but in a very indirect manner. As I recall, I learned

from him that my name was going to be placed in nomination, but I had heard from

a number of other people, not from Harold, that he was moving in that direction,

that he’d talked to them and that he didn’t see a reason not to do this, and that he

had reasons to do it.

Michael Aron: When was it?

Timothy Carden: March-- well, I took office in March. This would’ve happened in

early 1981. I’d say January and February I took office, and I was sworn in in March.

Michael Aron: Very short period of time.

Timothy Carden: It was a short period of time. It was very quick. I had a easy

confirmation hearing because the-- well, we had Democratic majority so it wasn’t a

partisan issue, and the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were courteous

and knew enough about me that they didn’t have a reason not to want my

nomination to go through, and they obviously wanted someone in that position. And

less than six weeks later, I was back there at the legislature, presenting a $2 billion

budget that I’d had to sort of get my arms around and explain to them. And six

weeks later from that, we had a crisis in Welfare funding that brought me back to

the legislature for a supplemental appropriation. I think it was $16 million. It may

not seem like much today; it was a lot at the time. And we succeeded in getting

that appropriation. Governor Byrne presided over my swearing in in the governor’s

office, and never gave me any direction or caution to be observant of his interests

or to care. He was-- once he made the decision, he said, “This is going to be--” He

essentially said by his manner, “This is your job. Now go do it.” And no one around

him then took me aside to say how it should be done, how his interests should be

protected, and all those, I think, are signs of someone who understood that if

you’re going to manage something as large as a state, and as diverse as its needs

and wants are, you can’t be all in control, and you have to trust people to go out

and do the job best they can, and to be mindful of how they got there.




Michael Aron: You presented a budget. You went before the legislature to solve a

funding problem. Anything else stand out as highlights of your brief tenure as a

commissioner?

Timothy Carden: Yeah. We were responsible for managing the department during

the first round of Reagan budget cuts, the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981,

which brought all of the cuts to social services that David Stockman could achieve,

and we had to go out and both manage that in the instances of entitlement

programs where there was just literally a reduction in funding, and try to prevent it

or offset it in those discretionary areas, which would be the social service block

grant area. And the approach that I took was to make a concerted effort to reach

out to the community of human service, both constituents and providers, and say,

“This is not my problem. I have to make decisions that have been

________________, but it’s our problem if you’re willing to engage and embrace on

how we solve it.” So we created county-level steering committees made up for

managing the social service process, which was running the risk of getting 10 to 20

percent reduction in federal funds, which was, again, a lot of money that could not

be made up by the state. It wasn’t like, “If it doesn’t come from here, we can find it

somewhere else.” It included day care, senior care, senior day care, other services

for at-risk youth, certain foster care, nutrition programs for the elderly or for the

disabled, battered women’s shelters-- all an array of community-based services

that were, in one way or another, at risk. So we created a county-level block grant

steering committee that reported to a statewide-level block grant steering

committee by appointing people or asking people to volunteer to serve on these

boards to help us figure out where is this network go-- have the ability to withstand

the kind of funding cuts that may come? Simultaneously, I did a personal audit of

the entire administrative structure of the department, and I actually selected people

who understood personnel but were outside the Human Resource Department,

because I wanted an objectivity that I didn’t think was going to be available there.

And we sent out a questionnaire to every person who did not have direct contact,

provide a direct service to a Human Service client, to describe their job and to

describe it and what their use was. The net result was we ended up cutting jobs.

We eliminated over 300 jobs, and inside the agency we eliminated some very

senior-level jobs that I got sued for eliminating, and--

Michael Aron: Sued by the individuals?

Timothy Carden: By the incumbents. Yeah. They thought that it was illegal for me

to-- and we probably cut some money, but the action itself, to me, was

representative. “We’re not going to try to withstand something as large as this by

simply holding ourselves harmless.” That, in turn, engendered a respect from the




community level that enabled us to elicit from them recommendations that I never

would’ve expected to hear about how to manage a service cut, because we started

by saying, “Let’s look at a set of criteria over what’s the most crucial service--

something that prevents someone from losing their life. What’s the next most

important service? Something that sustains someone who can’t sustain

themselves.” And so we had a hierarchy of service criterion. I said, “Use this

criteria. Look at what you have and tell us where you would first or last cut services

if you had to do that. Now, if you want to simply protest the fact that this is

happening, you’re welcome to do that, and I will make the decisions that I have to

make, but if you’re willing to engage in this process, then we’ll have a better

informed and hopefully a better outcome.”

Michael Aron: Does the process itself somehow vindicate the budget cuts at the

federal level?

Timothy Carden: It helped a lot, and one of the-- to give you a sense of how the

politics-- the thing that surprised me or sort of represented a substantive victory is

that in each county, the service that they claimed should be cut last was the

services for battered women’s shelters because they were very underfunded, they

were very new, and they were very small. So they were a small constituency in this

large pool. For example, day care was a very big part of the mix because there

were a lot of day care agencies and a lot of kids getting day care. And a number of

other agencies, or types of agencies, had large constituents. So you could’ve

argued the large will sort of claim their majority and diminish it to someone else.

But across the board, people looked at that set of criteria and said, “Okay, the one

thing we can’t do is touch these battered women’s shelters because they are few

and far between, they’re understaffed and overutilized.”

Michael Aron: But were humans harmed by the budget cuts, or were the budget

cuts somehow justified once you got to the end of this exercise and realized, “We

can do this”?

Timothy Carden: What the people-- there were services that were lost. There

were clearly benefits that were lost, which we couldn’t control because those were

basically a federal criteria. You couldn’t get food stamps after if you didn’t meet a

certain threshold that had been lowered, and the same with Welfare, and the same

with Medicaid. So that was-- people did lose benefits that they needed. In this area,

where there was a degree of discretion, I think we created an environment for self-

help and interactive support that didn’t exist before, and an ability to evaluate a

service for reasons other than, “Because it’s here, we need to fund it.”




Michael Aron: So the cuts had some productive impact?

Timothy Carden: Adverse environment can create positive outcomes. That’s sort

of what was my conclusion, that it wasn’t all good, but good things came out of it.

Michael Aron: Was it difficult becoming a Cabinet officer so late in the Byrne term?

Timothy Carden: I was young enough and ambitious enough and excited enough

about it that it never held me back. I probably did choose not to make certain

changes that I would have had there been more time, but I certainly made enough

changes in the time that I was there that I felt I was using the opportunity

successfully. And, as I said before, I was given a free hand to do that, with the

expectation that I’d do it well.

Michael Aron: Was the bureaucracy cooperative, or did they see you as a short-

termer?

Timothy Carden: No bureaucracy is fully cooperative, I think, to anyone who is

not deeply part of that system. It’s part of the bend and flow in government. So

some people were more cooperative than others. Some were probably watching

their watch or calendar from the day I arrived. And you learn quickly to be insistent

when you have to be, to be supportive where you can be, and to be realistic about

what you can and can’t change in the timeframe that you’ve got, but not to lose

ambition over that.

Michael Aron: Any other human services issues that you recall having to deal with

in that period of time?

Timothy Carden: I’m trying to think if there’s another good singular anecdote.

There’s a-- the migration of service-- what was happening then and what I think

continues to evolve today is the migration of service from isolated institutional care

to more inclusive and community care, and it’s a major challenge across the board

because it involves constituents and bureaucracies, as you were describing, that are

resistant to change, and it involves workforces that aren’t necessarily ready to

make the change, but it’s clear that the model that we inherited in the Byrne

administration and that exists to some extent today is a model that’s based on

much older thinking, where people with disabilities or people with mental illness or

people who have difficulty conforming to normal behavior have to be isolated from




society, as opposed to integrating them in some fashion, and we’re still wrestling

with it, but it was a big part of what I dealt with on a day to day basis.

Michael Aron: So you believe in deinstitutionalization?

Timothy Carden: I do.

Michael Aron: As the administration came to a close, what did you consider as

your career options?

Timothy Carden: I didn’t plan particular closely what I was going to do next, and I

worked through the first-- I delivered a very comprehensive transition report to the

incoming Kean administration, and because they had a little difficulty in finding

someone to serve in the office of Human Service Commissioner-- turned out to be

George Albanese-- but it took till April before they actually found an appointment

that they were ready to make. So I was a holdover for three or four months, and by

the-- I did some consulting work after that in a couple of human service areas, and

by the end of the year, I went to work for Walter Mondale in his presidential race.

Michael Aron: I know you’ve had a very active political life since then. You’ve run

for Congress at least once.

Timothy Carden: Once. Yeah. I run for office every 25 years. I ran in 1977 for the

Legislature, 2002 for Congress, so in 2027, maybe we can have an interview, and

we can--

Michael Aron: Maybe you’ll pick a Democrat district to run in.

Timothy Carden: No. I’m-- no. I tend to pick the uphill battles.

Michael Aron: How do you regard Brendan Byrne today?

Timothy Carden: As a-- I feel really fortunate to have worked with and for him. I

think that he is representative-- he is a person who both understood the office and

appreciated the importance of it from the day he got there. That, he didn’t have to

learn. There are other skills that he developed along the way, but it stood him in

good stead during a very turbulent and difficult first term, and it enabled him to




have major accomplishments in the second term. So I admire his gubernatorial

record, and in the subsequent years of seeing periodically his appreciation both for

the humor and the excitement that government can bring.

Michael Aron: At what point during this time did you become a married man and a

family man?

Timothy Carden: Oh, I married the woman who took my job at DOT in 1977. I left

to run for the Legislature, and in that same Alan Sagner-run Department of

Transportation, Amy Rosen, whom I’m still married to, literally took my job. So

during my--

Michael Aron: What had she been doing prior?

Timothy Carden: She had-- she likes to say that-- she worked for Paul Jordan

when he ran for governor against Brendan Byrne, and she likes-- in ’77. And then

she likes to describe it-- she said that the Paul Jordan campaign was bought by the-

- that she was sold to the Brendan Byrne campaign because when he dropped out,

he endorsed Brendan Byrne, and in a sense, all the people who had been working

for him were said, “Now you’re all Byrne supporters.” But she didn’t know much

about Brendan Byrne at the time. And so she’d been working in that campaign and

had graduated college a couple of years earlier, had been working in a law firm

before that, and not as a lawyer. And so she knew Tim Hall [ph?] and knew Alan

Sagner and decided to look for a job, and coincidence brought her to the

Department of Transportation. So when I was running for office, she and I would

talk about what I had done when I was in that position, because she kept hearing

from people in the department that whatever she was doing was not the way that

Tim Carden did it, which is exactly how a bureaucracy reacts to every newcomer.

They always claim that whoever was there before, making their life miserable, did a

much better job than the newcomer does. So we had a good chuckle over that, and

she actually helped me set up that meeting on high-level lighting that we got Don

Linky to oversee, and we got to know each other then, and when I was in the

governor’s office, where those issues of transportation, and in particular the

condition of the transit systems-- the railroads, in particular, were in dismal shape,

and we were wrestling to try and come up with answers to that. I have a-- we had

a-- there was a commuter group called Shore Commuters for On-Time Service, or

SCOTS, which had a very petulant leader whose name I don’t remember. I think it’s

Nesbitt, but I’m not sure. And he had a habit of calling the Department of

Transportation, the commissioner’s office, at seven o’clock or six thirty or seven

thirty in the evening, and he would always open with, “Well, you might wonder




where I am.” And he would not get the commissioner. He’d get Amy. And he’d say,

“Well, I’m standing on the platform here in Newark Penn Station waiting for the

5:04, and it’s 7:32, so you can imagine how I feel.” So they would discuss why, and

she would give him the reasons why. It so happened that the 5:04 seems to have

been stuck in New York or never made it out of Asbury Park or whatever, and he

would rail and then get off the phone. Two times out of three, he would then call

the governor’s office, dissatisfied with the answer he’d gotten from the Department

of Transportation, to report this egregious service, and he’d get me. So one of the

ways that Amy and I got to know each other is that we would get to share stories

as to how angry the commuter advocates were on a particular night.

Michael Aron: He should know what happened.

Timothy Carden: <laughs>

Michael Aron: When did you marry?

Timothy Carden: Nineteen eighty-one, right before I became commissioner. I was

nominated in February, I was married March 7th, we took a one-week honeymoon,

and I was sworn in on the 11th or 14th. No, probably the 16th or 17th of March.

Michael Aron: And her father was running for the U.S. Senate that year.

Timothy Carden: That’s right. That’s right. He ran that year.

Michael Aron: Unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination.

Timothy Carden: Unsuccessful for the Democratic nomination that Frank

Lautenberg secured and held for three terms.

Michael Aron: How many children did you eventually have with Amy?

Timothy Carden: We have three children, ages 23, 20, and 17, so...

Michael Aron: Do they ever say to their mother, “That’s not the way Daddy does

it”?




Timothy Carden: <laughs> Every child learns that trick. Every child learns that

trick.

Michael Aron: You’re still politically active. What do you see as New Jersey’s major

problems?

Timothy Carden: I think New Jersey’s problems are not unique to New Jersey. I

think New Jersey tends to front-run what is affecting both other parts of the country

and the country at large, and that is we have not engaged in a political support

building for the services that we all expect, so everything is underfunded, and we

are increasingly underserved, relative to our expectations. I think there are bigger

and broader issues on the horizon that we are coming to grips with, but our ability

to do-- and that would be dealing with the concept of an energy-constrained

environment again, of issues of environment and quality of life that are closing in on

us quickly and that are not unique and that New Jersey can’t solve alone. But again,

our political dialogue leaves very little room for broad acknowledgement of the size,

magnitude, of the problems, and therefore the magnitude of the solutions that has

to be. I think we’re still wrestling with education, both in our cities and in our poorer

areas, but also across the board, in determining that we have a system that, while

we’re educating children better than we have, we still haven’t gotten as far as we

should, particularly considering the amount of money we’re investing in that

system, that it’s a system in which we are making robust investment and not

getting a sufficient return.

Michael Aron: Can this state afford more taxes?

Timothy Carden: Yeah, I think the state can afford more taxes, but I don’t know

that there is political will to devise and manage that, and I think that equally

important is to simultaneously dedicate yourself to efficiency, which government

constantly lags the private sector on achieving, and to redistribute it in a manner

that’s fair, which is a simple of way of saying that the property tax, to the extent

that it’s dependent on across the board, makes it very difficult to create a uniform

and balanced system for whatever it’s funding.

Michael Aron: If you were talking to somebody very young, what would you say

Brendan Byrne did for the state of New Jersey?

Timothy Carden: He raised the level of integrity and substantive ambition for the

government, I think, during his two terms in office. He introduced the-- he




succeeded in enacting an income tax, which two previous governors had failed to

do, so it was a watershed moment, and I think that it is an important element to a

modern revenue structure for this state or anywhere else. And he was selective in

the initiatives that he chose to pursue, and that selectivity reflected both an

ambition to be successful in those, and a recognition that you can’t do everything

within a given timeframe, and that to spread yourself too thin is to risk not

achieving what may be the most significant contribution, and I think of the

Pinelands as one of those that he came to during his term in office. He didn’t start

with an ambition to preserving the Pinelands, but by taking it on as he did in his

second term, he succeeded in perhaps making as great a contribution as any

governor could to the future well-being of the state.

Michael Aron: Was he as good a governor as you’ve seen in your time in this

state?

Timothy Carden: I haven’t seen any other governors as close up as I’ve seen

Brendan Byrne, and I have a personal loyalty, so I have a prejudice to that extent.

I said it before: I think his strength was how he understood the office and how to

perform the assignment of governor with both an ambition to be successful and a

respect for what that office is as something larger than himself.

Michael Aron: Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.

Timothy Carden: It’s great to be here.


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