Michael Aron, the enormously respected dean of the New Jersey Statehouse press corps who spent nearly forty years covering government and politics as the chief political correspondent for the state’s public television network, has died after a long illness. He was 78.
Aron covered every New Jersey governor from Brendan Byrne to Phil Murphy, every legislative leader, party chair, statewide candidate, and Supreme Court Justice from 1982 until his retirement in 2020 as the senior political correspondent for New Jersey Network News.
Along with KYW-TV New anchor Diane Allen, later a state senator, Aron moderated his first New Jersey gubernatorial debate between incumbent Tom Kean and challenger Peter Shapiro in 1985. Aron is the author of Governor’s Race, which chronicled the 1993 campaign between Jim Florio and Christine Todd Whitman.
He hosted Reporter’s Roundtable and On the Record on NJN for many years.
Aron had worked as an associate editor of Harper’s and Rolling Stone, and as editor of New Jersey Monthly before his shift to television.
He was a graduate of Harvard University and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
The arc of the distinguished newsman’s career sometimes bent into national news, and not every politician came out of a talk with Aron better than they came in.
In June of 1995, President Bill Clinton came to New Jersey to kick off fundraising for his re-election campaign, and Aron was there.
Clinton’s press office had ignored daily requests to interview the president for nearly a month by then, but Aron, through luck or sheer force of will — he didn’t say — found Clinton alone in a room with attorney Al DeCotiis, who organized the fundraiser.
“I wasn’t supposed to get this interview,” Aron told the New Jersey Globe in 2020. “It was unauthorized. I had requested it for a month. I got turned down the day of the event and then happened to stumble upon him in an empty room with my cameraman as the event was breaking up, and his host, the lawyer Al DeCotiis, who had just raised a million dollars for him, saw me and invited me over.”
The reporter was allowed a single question but pushed in a second as Clinton went to leave the room, asking the president about the criticism he’d faced for his willingness to switch positions.
The president was less than pleased.
“He said ‘I disagree with that. I disagree with that. I disagree with that,’ and then he wagged his finger in my face and got all red and said ‘that is pure press propaganda from people like you. Name me a president who’s raised taxes while in office. Name me a president who’s taken on the NRA. You can’t. You can’t. That is just pure press propaganda,’” Aron recalled.
DeCotiis, who had recently been appointed as honorary ambassador to the United Nations, urged Aron to hold the tape.
“He said ‘if you use that second question, I’m dead. They’re assholes. They’re assholes, these Clinton people. I’m fucked if you run that,’” Aron said.
But Clinton made news, and Aron ran the story.
“Half an hour later, I was introducing that piece of tape in the dark from the Garden State Convention Center in Somerset,” he said.
That night, Aron got an angry call from Clinton’s deputy press secretary.
The next day, the Secret Service swept the building to investigate how a reporter had stumbled into the most powerful man in America.
Aron had little in the way of a departing message to the politicians he covered for close to half a century.
“I don’t know that it’s my role to have a message,” he said.
But he offered the state’s more junior reporters one last word of parting advice.
“My message is to the press corps. My message is to keep doing what you’re doing,” he said.