News: New Jersey Jewish News, July 6, 2006

A long-time colleague pens a biography of former Gov. Kean

BY ROBERT WIENER, NJ Jewish News Staff Writer
(from the New Jersey Jewish News, July 6, 2006)

It was a chance meeting in 1967 that brought a Rutgers freshman in contact with an Ivy League Republican running for a seat in the New Jersey State Assembly.

But Alvin Felzenberg never forgot that initial encounter with Thomas Kean. Despite the differences in their backgrounds — Felzenberg is a Newark native whose grandfather and great-uncles founded Felzenberg Brothers Appliances on downtown Mulberry Street, Kean a blue-blooded Episcopalian who traces his political ancestors back to the Continental Congress — the two became personal friends and political allies.

Thirty-three years later, Felzenberg began work on a biography of his friend and colleague, and six years after that it has arrived in bookstores. Governor Tom Kean: From the New Jersey Statehouse to the 9/11 Commission (Rutgers University Press) traces Kean’s political life from his days at Princeton, his election to the State Assembly, his two terms as governor from 1982 to 1990, and his chairmanship of the national commission that probed the 9/11 terror attacks.

The 608-page book also relates the Kean family history in the two centuries after their emigration from England and a lineage that includes a congressman (his father, Robert W. Kean) and three senators (his grandfather Hamilton Fish Kean, grand-uncle John Kean, and grand-uncle Hamilton Fish, who also served as New Jersey’s governor and later United States secretary of state [see sidebar]).

Not surprisingly, Felzenberg compares Kean to the scion of another political dynasty. In a lengthy telephone interview, Felzenberg said that at the time of their initial meeting he was “very, very taken” with the young Kean and “how well-read he was. He struck me as a young John Kennedy. In no way did he resemble the pot-bellied, cigar-smoking ‘dese and dose’ types that I knew in Essex County. They were all Democrats, and I found them very repulsive.”

But Kean’s brand of moderate Republicanism was quite appealing to Felzenberg, and he volunteered for the campaign when Kean made his first run for governor in 1981.

After his election, Kean appointed Felzenberg New Jersey’s assistant secretary of state.

In subsequent years, their professional lives would again intersect. After leaving office in 1990, Kean became president of Drew University in Madison, and Felzenberg became a writer, editor, and fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Twelve years later, President George Bush asked Kean to chair the commission mandated to examine the causes and responses to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and Felzenberg became the commission’s official spokesperson.

And yet Felzenberg’s biography is not an “as-told-to” portrait of the former governor.

“This is not an authorized book,” the author said. “There are areas where he would probably disagree. It is not his story. It is my voice. It is my telling of his life.”

Felzenberg, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on New Jersey’s governors, said, “We pride ourselves in having the strongest governor in all the 50 states, yet after they go out of office we kind of forget them. I thought that Kean had an interesting governorship at an interesting time in American history. I thought that this would be the time to tell it.”

Felzenberg conducted 100 interviews for the 450-page book, including sessions with former presidents Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford. And although the author said, “I suppose it’s hard to write about someone you know,” he had great access to his principal subject.

Kean, said Felzenberg “sat down with me 12 times. He took countless phone calls for follow-up questions. He was always available. He opened up all of his personal papers to me. He asked all of his former colleagues to consent to interviews when I called them.”

Among the friends and foes he interviewed were the two Democrats Kean defeated, Jim Florio and Peter Shapiro. “They both talked with me and were pretty honest about their views,” said Felzenberg.

As a national figure, Kean sometimes ran afoul of the more conservative elements in his own party.

When Kean was asked to be the keynote speaker at the 1988 Republican convention “there was flack from many directions,” most notably because of his pro-choice views, said the biographer.

“The right-to-life movement objected that he was picked, but he actually did not talk about abortion in his speech,” said Felzenberg. Others close to presidential candidate George H.W. Bush “thought he was not hard enough on the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis. But others, in what there was of the Republican moderate wing, “thought he had gone too far to the Right.”

To Felzenberg, Kean was also able to bridge the partisan divide when he chaired the 9/11 Commission, where Democrats leaned to his Left and most of the Republicans to his Right. “He brought them all along,” said Felzenberg. The final report contained “a lot to criticize Bill Clinton about. He was president for eight years. Bush was president for nine months. But a sitting president had more to lose.”

According to the author, Kean turned down five invitations to run for the Senate. “He would make a wonderful president because of the ability he has to bring out the best in people and to forge consensus across the aisle.”

But, he said, the former governor has admitted that “he didn’t have the killer instinct of some other politicians and has said, ‘Sometimes you have to be crazy to want the presidency that much.’ When he wanted the governorship he was very ambitious and he fought very hard for it. But in terms of the presidency, his power needs are not that great.”

Felzenberg said he gave Kean his manuscript “just before I handed it in” to check the accuracy of some dates and the spelling of friends’ names. “He said, ‘It’s your book, not my book.’ But I showed it to him to make sure I didn’t have a factual error, and he found a few.”

To skeptical Democrats who have questioned the timing of the book’s publication at a moment when Kean’s son, now a state senator from Union County, is battling the incumbent Robert Menendez for a hotly contested Senate seat, Felzenberg said such adjacency is purely coincidental.

“When I signed the book contract in 2001, Jim McGreevey had not been elected governor. There was no reason to believe Bob Menendez would be a senator or Tom Jr. would be running for anything. He wasn’t even in the legislature yet. Politics was the last thing on my mind.”

When he finally typed “The End” at the bottom of the final page, Felzenberg said, he felt “quite a relief. It was a six-year project. Nothing pleased me more than seeing it come out with a binding on it because I knew at that point I could make no more changes.”