Garden State Warrior

That last point is a theme of Alvin Felzenberg’s study, which documents how Kean became the most popular governor in recent New Jersey history and went on to chair the 9/11 Commission, thus burnishing his elder statesman credentials. In Felzenberg’s narrative, Kean stood on principle, cut a centrist figure, showed compassion for the downtrodden, reached out to African Americans, and bucked the Republican base when he saw fit–all the while maintaining a chummy friendship with Ronald Reagan. Felzenberg has not quite written a hagiography, but he does paint Kean as almost too good to be true.

The author makes no secret of his bias. He served as New Jersey’s assistant secretary of state during the Kean years (1982-90) and later became chief spokesman for the 9/11 Commission. Plus, he “worked on most of Tom Kean’s campaigns.” As Felzenberg admits, he does not approach his material from a standpoint of “complete disinterest.” He played a firsthand role in many of the episodes recounted in this book and, thus, adds the disclaimer.

The book itself makes for a rich–though some times dense and slow-paced–piece of history. Felzenberg brims with charming anecdotes, such as where Kean picked up his famous accent and how he personally urged President Reagan to sign a formal apology for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Kean was born into New Jersey’s political aristocracy: Among the many legislators in his family tree were his father Robert W. Kean, a congressman, and his grandfather Hamilton Fish Kean, a U.S. senator. Kean went from St. Mark’s in Massachusetts–where, says Felzenberg, he acquired his New England Brahmin inflection–to Princeton; after graduation, he served in the 50th Armored Division of the New Jersey National Guard.

But he was inevitably drawn into politics, and worked his first campaign in 1958, the year Robert Kean ran for the Senate seat vacated by H. Alexander Smith. Despite his wealth and 20-year tenure in the House, the elder Kean lost to the Democrat Harrison A. Williams–who went on to win reelection three times before being exposed in the Abscam scandal, and going to prison. Young Tom Kean considered his father’s defeat “one of the world’s great injustices.”

He went on to earn a master’s degree in social studies from Columbia’s Teacher’s College before putting his academic career on hiatus to join the eleventh-hour 1964 presidential campaign of Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, designed to stop Barry Goldwater. (Scranton had earlier balked at running for president but, says Felzenberg, changed his mind after Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act.) Kean won election to the New Jersey assembly in 1967 in a season of racial strife, marked principally by the bloody Newark riots. It was in the assembly that he pioneered his centrist, consensus-driven approach, which would one day boost his appeal as governor. On the heels of the Newark meltdown he took the lead in promoting a hefty urban aid program, and in 1972 he ascended to speaker at age 36, the youngest in New Jersey history.

But the unusual circumstances of his ascension–it hinged on a deal Kean made with a few renegade Democrats–left many Democrats fuming. To succeed as speaker, writes Felzenberg, Kean once again applied his third-way style, “but with a different twist. This time . . . he would cut a path not between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans but between competing factions of Democrats.”

His “crowning achievement as speaker,” writes Felzenberg, was decidedly liberal: “steering to passage the Coastal Area Facility Review Act, to prevent industries considered most likely to increase pollution from locating along the state’s coastline.” Environmentalism would remain a Kean passion throughout his career, which suffered its first major setback in 1977, when he ran for governor and lost the Republican nomination to the state senate minority leader. Four years later Kean won–but not on Election Night. His margin of victory over Democratic congressman Jim Florio was so close (less than 2,000 votes) that Florio demanded a recount, and the whole process dragged on for several weeks. The recount affirmed Kean’s narrow triumph over a Democrat who had relentlessly tied Kean to Ronald Reagan and cast him as too conservative for New Jersey.

In fact, despite splitting with the president on social issues such as school prayer and abortion–and despite having backed Gerald Ford in the 1976 GOP primary–Kean became warm friends with Reagan, whose large stable of Democratic supporters helped him carry New Jersey twice. “Ronald Reagan genuinely liked Tom Kean,” Ken Duberstein, Reagan’s last chief of staff, told Felzenberg. “He would love going to New Jersey just so he could discuss policy with Tom Kean.”

Of course, compared with Reagan, Kean was no conservative. But in New Jersey, writes Felzenberg, “Kean was the most conservative governor the state had seen since the 1950s.” Conservatives inside and outside the Reagan White House lauded his efforts on education and welfare reform, and though Kean criticized Reagan over various proposed budget cuts, he was a stalwart supporter of the administration’s foreign policy in such hot spots as Nicaragua (aid to the contras) and Libya (the 1986 bombing raid). Closer to home, Kean leaned rightward on taxes, regulation, and the death penalty.

His approval rating soared to 80 percent by November 1985, when he won reelection with 68 percent of the vote, including a remarkable 62 percent of the black vote. In early 1986 Newsweek named him one of the five best governors in America, along with Bill Clinton of Arkansas. In 1988 Kean delivered the keynote address to George H.W. Bush’s “kinder, gentler” GOP convention in New Orleans, with Newt Gingrich calling Kean a “brilliant, creative governor who has applied conservative values and created a compassionate, fundamentally Republican record.”

In the 1990s Kean served as president of Drew University, and Bill Clinton tapped him for a pair of bipartisan commissions: one on entitlement and tax reform in 1994, the other on race relations in 1997. But his true return to national–and now international–prominence came after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Kean faced a daunting task: establishing what caused the intelligence breakdown before 9/11, and proposing ways to avert future terrorism. Dismissing him as “a former governor little schooled in defense and foreign affairs,” the Wall Street Journal complained that Kean was “apparently oblivious to the political hardball being played around him.” The Bush White House found itself playing defense over testimony, document requests, and the commission’s deadline.

For readers outside of New Jersey, Felzenberg’s chapter on the 9/11 Commission may seem considerably more relevant than the previous 400 pages. Still, those pages offer unprecedented access to one of the most popular Republicans of his time–an unusually successful governor whose story deserves telling.

Duncan Currie is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.