Princeton resident returns to state government as director of Corzine transition team
By: Emily Craighead
Earlier this week, Richard C. Leone was looking forward to spending a quiet Thanksgiving Day at home with his family in Princeton one brief day of rest in a whirlwind of activity that began on election night and will last at least until Gov.-elect Jon Corzine’s inauguration.
By Monday, when Mr. Corzine’s transition team officially opened its West State Street office in Trenton, the team, led by Mr. Leone, already had developed its approach to tackling major government issues and appointed people to lead groups dealing with various aspects of the transition.
"We’re getting a lot of advice, some asked for, some not asked for," Mr. Leone said, sitting in an unclaimed corner office overlooking the Delaware River.
The transition team’s focus for now has been to fill cabinet positions, and interviews are expected to begin within the next few weeks.
"The overwhelming number of appointments will be from New Jersey," Mr. Leone said. "There’s a lot of talent in this state and a lot of people interested in this administration."
To head up the transition team, he is taking time off from his position as president of the Century Foundation, formerly the Twentieth Century Fund, a public-policy research foundation.
"It might have been impulsive," Mr. Leone said. "I wasn’t asked to do this until election night."
Impulsive or not, Mr. Leone appears to be equal to the task of leading the transition team, at least according to his resume.
After coming to New Jersey from Rochester, N.Y. "for the climate," he quipped he earned the first doctorate ever awarded by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
There, he learned to analyze public-policy issues, and later he returned to teach. His one criticism of the school is that it does not focus enough on real-world skills, such as communications and advocacy.
"It’s one thing to do the analysis, it’s another to make people understand and win an argument," he said. "Those are battles I lost when I was on the faculty."
He went on to serve as administrative assistant to then-Gov. Richard J. Hughes, whom he described as "a day at the beach, a great guy."
As head of the transition team and later state treasurer for then-Gov. Brendan Byrne, Mr. Leone tackled difficult issues that also taught him a few lessons.
"We could have done better at bringing the Legislature in, engaging them and involving them in this long process," he said.
Although Americans everywhere had to deal with gasoline shortages and rampant inflation during the Byrne administration, New Jersey at least had little debt, making the situation somewhat easier to handle than what the new state government faces today. In hindsight, he noted, a few things could have been done differently.
"We probably could have better understood what we were getting into," Mr. Leone said. "But nobody understood really well."
One advantage this time around is that the governor’s seat is being handed off from one Democrat to another, and some continuity will be maintained as acting Gov. Richard J. Codey resumes his role as state Senate president. That isn’t to say the previous transitions Mr. Leone has been involved in were unfriendly.
"The couple of transitions I know about that were from Republican to Democrat were cooperative and positive experience for the people involved," Mr. Leone said.
Since then, he has served as commissioner and chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey from 1988 to 1994. He has written analytical and opinion pieces that have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs and The Nation. Mr. Leone also was president of the New York Mercantile Exchange and a managing director at Dillon Read and Co., an investment banking firm.
The issues the Corzine administration will face restoring faith in the government and reforming the tax system will be even more challenging than those faced in the 1970s, Mr. Leone said. But he has faith in Mr. Corzine, whom he knows well.
If it weren’t for Mr. Corzine, Mr. Leone said he probably would not have agreed to return to state politics in this capacity.
"I think he’s a very policy-oriented guy who genuinely cares about public policy," he said. "We share a lot of values and that’s reflected not only in what I knew of him before he was a senator, but also what he did while he was a senator."

