Rutgers University Press

So when an editor asked him to do a series about railroads, Cunningham found out all he had to know, then wrote it for all it was worth. Maybe more.

That became his second book. "This is New Jersey" was published in 1953, and revised in'68,'78,'94. The 91-year-old author is now revising for 2008.

"About every 10 years they ask me to do it," he said. "Each revision captures a new capsule in time, and I have to update because I was, I am, a journalist. I never set out to be a 'historian.' It just worked out that way."

Again and again. That's why a group of the state's leading historians and archivists gathered Sunday at the home of St. Elizabeth history professor Harriet Sepinwall for a brunch in Cunningham's honor.

Since the first "This is New Jersey," there have been about 100 other books, on everything from George Washington to Thomas Edison, the East Jersey Proprietors to the immigrants at Ellis Island, agriculture to industry, Morristown High to Drew University.

Like "This is New Jersey," many have direct, authoritative titles: "Made in New Jersey," "The New Jersey Shore," "Newark."

It's Cunningham's way of saying: Here is the whole story ... all the answers to your questions.

"John does not write the idiosyncratic, narrow history," said Clement Price of Rutgers-Newark, one of the state's most respected historians, at the brunch. "John writes the Grand Narrative. And in that Grand Narrative, he encompasses what it is we can all agree on."

In other words, the New Jersey history for all of us. And for telling us about it for so long, he has earned a place in the story.

"My dad and John Cunningham were the two leaders -- maybe 'co-conspirators' is a better word -- in the study of New Jersey history," said Rutgers President Richard McCormick, whose father, the late Richard P. McCormick, was an esteemed history professor at the school.

"They got the formal study of New Jersey rolling," said McCormick, who came to the brunch with his mother, Katheryne, a longtime friend of Cunningham's. "If it wasn't respectable then, it sure is now. If there wasn't much archival material then, there sure is now."

Cunningham said he, the senior McCormick and state librarian Roger McDonough were "the Irish mob" who pushed to preserve and promote New Jersey history, making it academically acceptable and, to some extent, commercially profitable.

"John always said, 'Dick McCormick did the history wholesale, I did the retail,'" said author Marc Mappen, director of the New Jersey Historical Commission.

"Dick McCormick was unquestionably the leader," Cunningham said. "He brought such new energy to it. In 1964, he was the one who realized New Jersey was celebrating its tercentenary, from the time land was given to Berkeley and Carteret in 1664.

"I'd say that first meeting of what we wanted to do about bringing attention to the tercentenary was the day the study of New Jersey history began to take shape. We all had our jobs. Dick handled the academic study, I handled the publicity, and Roger handled the Legislature to get some money."

Cunningham wrote a series for the newspaper called "Tercentenary Tales," and he and McCormick traveled the state, giving lectures to historical societies.

Money was found to expand the state archives, and Cunningham did his best to fill them. In this respect, he not only wrote history, he preserved it, finding and acquiring primary-source information, including a significant collection of Thomas Edison papers.

New Jersey history was on its way, and Cunningham continued to drive the retail end, gathering more information, finding more papers and collections to archive, writing more books. Later there were TV series and movies, classroom guides, books for juveniles, and on and on.

Cunningham, it seems, continues to move along as effortlessly as history. A book on Harry C. Dorer, a legendary New Jersey photographer, comes out in May. A book called "The Elusive Army," about Washington in Morristown, comes out in June. He is making significant revisions to "This is New Jersey" and "The New Jersey Shore."

At the brunch, it was Clement Price who suggested Cunningham now write an autobiography. A history of the historian.

"At first I thought it was too egotistical, but now I think I'm going to do it," Cunningham said.

After 50 years of promoting, collecting and writing, the John C. Cunningham story and New Jersey history have become inextricably linked. He's part of it now.

Tom Kean was not the most important governor in the modern history of New Jersey -- that honor belongs to the late Alfred E. Dris coll -- 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 frequently 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 bereserved 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 topolitics. 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 easily 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 gubernatorial 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 Felzenberg 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 success to two of his predecessors and a large slice of economic luck -- facts not much noted by Felzen berg.

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 dictate 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 Trenton 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.

Dizzying and vital, Jules and Jim has been a rite of passage for many film lovers. “Overwhelmed” is how Robert Stam remembers his first encounter with Truffaut’s 1961 movie depicting a menage a trois among Oscar Werner as Jules, Henri Serre as Jim, and an impossibly luminous Jeanne Moreau as Catherine. Now a professor of cinema studies at New York University, Mr. Stam brings acuity and passion to Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptations (Rutgers University Press), exploring the linked films, fiction, diaries, and lives.

Truffaut’s film was based on a novel published in 1953 by Henri-Pierre Roche (1879-1959). Roche, the prototype for Jim, drew on his diaries of a love triangle that began in 1920 involving the journalist Helen Grund (1886-1982) and her husband, the writer Franz Hessel (1880-1941). Mr. Stam describes the friendship between the elderly Roche, who once collected women as avidly as he collected paintings and the young director, whom he limns as a “minor-league Don Juan” burdened by a “late-romantic tragic sensibility.” Truffaut would go on to adapt Roche’s Two English Girls and to direct a seemingly Roche-inspired The Man Who Loved Women, both of which are also analyzed.

As the author discusses the three principals, he spirals out to their families, other lovers, and friends, using all to explore such issues as the sexual politics of bohemia, the gendered nature of modernism, and the “bookishness of sexuality and the erotics of bibliophilia."

Another central topic is film adaptation. In adapting Roche’s Jules et Jim, Mr. Stam describes how Truffaut applied electroshock to the novel, “exploding it into discursive fragments and shards to be reassembled…” He shows how Truffaut disarmed audiences by presenting his principals as pranksters whose play is commented upon by a cool, neutral narrator. In addition, spectators are “left morally off balance” and malleable by a “whirlwind of images” that helps them embrace the unconventional.

Truffaut chose a violent end for the film, involving a bridge, a car, and Moreau at the wheel. In life, the end was messy, but with only the threat of violence. Helen broke things off in 1993 when she learned that another woman was to bear Roche’s child. From then on he was “the liar” and she forbade Franz to see him. “Helen’s violence, and her revolver, always came between us,” Franz Said. A loss. As Mr. Stam says, even before Helen, Roche had a history of sharing women with Franz in a kind of “homoerotic Don Juanism.” Or as Roche put it once, making love with Helen “is a little like making love with you.”

-Nina C. Ayoub