Book Review: Governor, statesman:
A life of Tom Kean

BY JOHN FARMER
(as reviewed in The Star-Ledger, June 11, 2006)

Tom Kean was not the most important governor in the modern history of New Jersey -- that honor belongs to the late Alfred E. Driscoll -- but Kean was unquestionably the most popular. And, with the exception of President Woodrow Wilson, he has made the greatest impact on the national stage.

The life and times of New Jersey's 48th governor, his many pluses and few minuses, are explored in detail in Alvin S. Felzen berg's voluminous biography of Kean, published this month by Rivergate Books, a Rutgers University Press imprint. It's not an authorized biography, but no authorized version is likely to be more laudatory.

Felzenberg, who worked in the Kean administration in Trenton and as spokesman for the 9/11 commission Kean chaired, likes and admires his subject. Understandably so. There's not much to dislike about Tom Kean or to disapprove of in his four-decade public career.

Even old foes offer little criticism, at least in Felzenberg's ac count. "Tom did not do bad things," says one ex-rival, former Gov. Jim Florio. And former state Senate President John Russo, another Democrat who fought fre quently with Kean, is quoted say ing that "when the history of Tom Kean is written no one will be able to challenge his belief in the children of the state."

Actually, when history takes a look at Tom Kean its applause will be reserved not so much for his tenure as governor but for his exemplary leadership of the 9/11 commission's exploration of intelligence failures prior to the terrorist at tacks of Sept. 11, 2001. (I had a closer view of his efforts than most; my son, former New Jersey Attor ney General John Farmer Jr., served as senior counsel to the 9/11 commission.)

Despite the egos and political tensions within the 10-member bipartisan commission and the obstructionism of the Bush White House, Kean steered the group to a unanimous report and recommendations that led to a restructuring of the U.S. intelligence establishment.

It was his finest hour.

Kean began life as a shy child with a serious stutter, hardly assets for an aspiring politician. But other influences inevitably put him on a path to politics. Two relatives had served in the U.S. Senate from New Jersey, and his father, Robert, represented a New Jersey district in the House of Representatives for 20 years before losing his own bid for a Senate seat. Living for stretches in Washington and helping in his father's failed Senate campaign, young Tom Kean saw politics up close. And he liked it.

Though no great student, Kean was the child of an aristocratic family and was educated at St. Mark's, an exclusive prep school in Massachusetts modeled on English boarding schools -- compulsory sports and cold showers -- and at Princeton University. His upbring ing and education left him with a style of speech -- almost British in its accent -- seemingly alien to gritty New Jersey. It also accorded him a sense of noblesse oblige manifest in his commitment as a young man to helping the underprivileged, first as a camp counselor and later with a private foundation.

Kean's early career interest lay in teaching, especially history, but the pull of politics proved stronger. In November 1967, Kean was elected to the state Assembly in an anti-Democratic tide created by urban rioting, the Vietnam war and weariness with an expiring Democratic administration in Trenton.

"In his navy blazer, gray slacks and penny loafers, Kean could eas ily have passed for the graduate student he had been just four years earlier," Felzenberg writes. "In his manner of speech, demeanor and appearance, he bore no resemblance to the kind of politician I had grown accustomed to seeing. He seemed more like a Republican version of John F. Kennedy ..."

Kean's rapid rise through the Assembly leadership ranks sets the stage for his run for governor. But his Assembly career also produced the one major stain on his record -- a crass deal with a brilliant but de vious Hudson County Democrat, David Friedland. Friedland delivered the Democratic votes in 1972 that made Kean, at 36, the youngest Assembly speaker in the state's history. In return, Kean handed Friedland half of the speaker's patronage, plus chairmanship of the bipartisan Conference Committee, with power to move legislation to the floor for a vote.

The press, for the first time (and the last), landed hard on Kean. An exercise in "cynical expe diency," The Star-Ledger called the Kean-Friedland deal. "What in heaven's name was a nice guy like Tom Kean doing getting mixed up in a wheeler-dealer game" with the likes of Friedland, The Star-Ledger's political columnist, Frank Gregory, asked.

The deal preoccupied the press for weeks but, surprisingly, aroused little public interest. The Friedland bargain, Felzenberg concludes, worked to Kean's advantage. He had, it seemed, a kind of Reaganes que Teflon quality.

From that time forward, Kean's eye was on the real prize -- the governor's office -- and, after a flir tation with the idea of running in 1977, he finally won the office in 1981 over Florio in the closest gu bernatorial election in New Jersey history. Four years later he would win re-election by the largest gu bernatorial margin the state had ever seen, sweeping all 21 counties, including Hudson, home to the historically powerful Democratic machine.

This was a testament to Kean's skillful use of the governor's considerable powers, coupled with his own boyish charm and what Fel zenberg calls his "third way" politics -- an artful passage between the right-wing conservatives in his own party and the leftist excesses in the Democratic camp.

Felzenberg paints Kean's time as governor as something special. And it was, especially in the realms of education and tourism (recall the slogan "New Jersey and You: Perfect Together" -- or, as Kean pronounced it, "Puhfect together"). His immense popularity and the clout it gave him to get things done in Trenton lifted the image of the state. But he owed some of his suc cess to two of his predecessors and a large slice of economic luck -- facts not much noted by Felzenberg.

Kean, like all New Jersey governors, was indebted to Republican Al Driscoll, a political genius who coaxed, cajoled and cosseted the state's warring Democratic and Republican machines into accepting a radical Constitutional revision in 1947. That revision transformed the governor's office from the weakest in the nation to the most powerful, reformed a sclerotic and corrupt court system, curbed much of the power of county machines to dic tate to the governor, and empowered Driscoll to begin creation of the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway.

About the only thing Driscoll left undone was repairing the state government's inadequate financial base. And that was handled by Brendan Byrne, the man Kean replaced as governor in 1981. Byrne, in whose administration I served for a year as director of public information, broke the decades-long anti-tax spell in the state by enact ing, with help from the state Supreme Court, a state income tax. (Dialogues between Kean and Byrne on political issues are published regularly in Perspective.)

Kean came to office in the midst of a national recession. But for the bulk of his eight years as governor he enjoyed the bounty of the Reagan-era recovery that, combined with the state's broader tax base (breaking his own campaign pledge, Kean also raised taxes), poured the cash into Tren ton that financed Kean's ambitious education and environmental agendas.

He left the governor's office in January 1990, with higher approval ratings than any governor in at least a half-century. He seemed a sure bet for federal office -- the U.S. Senate, perhaps, or maybe a Cabinet job. He was ambitious enough, and although he was a proclaimed moderate, he could trim his sails to suit a conservative audience, as demonstrated by his keynote speech to the 1988 GOP convention that nominated the elder George Bush for president.

Holding up an hourglass, he assured the convention that "time had run out on the liberal vision of America."

In the end, Kean reverted to his first love, education, by signing on as president of Drew University in Madison rather than continuing in politics. He might have run out his string at Drew except for the 9/11 commission and the role it played in exposing the tangle of turf wars, failed communications, personal rivalries and bureaucratic incompe tence that hamstrung U.S. intelligence prior to the terrorist attacks of 2001.

President Bush, who opposed the commission, chose Kean as its head when he couldn't get Henry Kissinger, notorious for his willingness to accommodate power, not confront it. Kean was deemed equally accommodating, someone who preferred cooperation to confrontation. Bush misread his man.

Kean understood, as Felzen berg points out, that the commis sion's report would have to be unanimous or it would be ripped apart by partisans in Congress. Kean's accommodating nature was just the quality needed to keep commission members together. He went out of his way, for instance, to make Lee Hamilton, the vice chairman, virtually a co-chairman. When Bush balked at releasing critical documents -- as he did frequently -- Kean's first course was persuasion, with the threat of subpoena in the background.

He feared a public fight with the White House would doom the commission as partisan -- or embroil it in a court fight it might lose. In the end, Kean, under pressure from his staff, did approve subpoenas for the Defense Department, the Federal Aviation Authority and New York City, but only as a last resort.

The result was a unanimous report, so exquisitely written that it won a National Book Award. Kean wanted a report that would not re main unread, collecting dust on a shelf. He wanted one that would have a dramatic impact on the nation and on the way it girded itself for the war on terrorism. And he got it.

Far more than anything he did as governor, it's his passport to a favorable place in history.John Farmer is The Star-Ledger's national political correspondent. He has been covering politics for most of the last 50 years.

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