Retired journalist and public affairs executive Jim McQueeny released the following statement on the death of former Governor Richard J. Codey:
As a rookie Star-Ledger reporter just assigned to The Star-Ledger’s State House bureau, one of my first assignments was to interview another rookie—a twenty-something freshman legislator who at that time was the youngest member in either the General Assembly or the State Senate. He was genuinely nervous, noting he had never faced “Big Media” before. “Oh, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said. “The public is forgiving.” He shot back “not my (county) chairman who got me here!” He got down there as a party organization man and morphed over the years to his own ma, by and large. I got to see back then in 1974 a Dick Cody whose Irish caustic humor helped him get along so well with the press throughout his half century in Trenton. Humor was his bright side, tilting as it could, to what the Irish know as Black Irish—a form of sour and cranky despondency from never quite believing you are appreciated enough. Call it Irish Rodney Dangerfield relapses maybe. lt can cause a lot of caustic behind-the-back commentary too. In the political Tong Wars of Essex County and Trenton, he won and lost a lot over the decades. He also exhibited flashes of Irish Amnesia in his politics, forgetting much of the greater good done for him and choosing to remember more who and when you were done bad by. He never got over how Jon Corzine’s Goldman Sachs money pushed him out of running for a full four year term. Snacking one afternoon in a cafeteria, he crankily confided in me that Corzine was fortunate “to have been born in the Lucky Sperm Club.” Over the years, we became quite friendly, at least as measured by how candid he was in sharing views on NJ politics; with the kind of information from the stealthy depths that never, ever, bubbled up to the transparency of “news.” He was fond of saying how his wife, Mary Jo, a delightful woman, enjoyed their shared limelight when he was Acting Governor for a little more than a year after the scandalous and sudden resignation of Jim McGreevey. When that happened, he said to Mary Jo “in your wildest dreams, did you ever see this happening?” To which she responded, “Dick, in MY wildest dreams, you’re not in them!” Dick had both an appreciation for the press and a perspective about its self-importance. That was brought home to me one afternoon when a former reporter colleague of mine was being waked at his family’s funeral home. From the back of the room, he crooked his finger at me to join him. “A lot of your (media) colleagues have been lionizing her about her importance to New Jersey and all that,” he whispered, “I want to show you something.” We walked over to a window. He asked: “how many cars do you see in the lot and up the street?” I remarked the lot was half full and there were only a few cars parked in the street. “When a cop, fireman or long tine local official are waked here, the lot is PACKED and the cars are parked on both sides of the street for as far as you can see, with cops needed to deal with the traffic. What does that say about how connected you media people are in comparison to “ordinary” people?” That seemed mean but it was his blunt appraisal from his largely blue collar world about who is connected more to whom. Another time, he shared with me an essential truth about projecting power in NJ politics. We had just gone into commercial one night as I was hosting a N12 live call-in show when he was Acting Governor. A prior call was ftom someone in NorthJersey who had a housing problem of some kind. Dick went into an incredibly sequenced and arcane chain of recommendations to help the caller, even asking him to write them down as I recall. I praised him during that break for taking the time to help out that caller. He said: “If you want to be a good Governor, you have to act like the mayor of this state, not the CEO.”
