Representative Thomas H. Kean Jr. won his first race in 1968, beating his twin brother, Reed, into this world. The prize was his father’s name.
Thomas H. Kean Sr., who would later become governor of New Jersey, said he did not want to name either of the boys after himself. “My wife said, ‘You have to,’” he recalled in an interview. “She was very concerned there would be another Tom Kean.”
The family’s ancestors helped found this country and for generations held prominent roles in politics and in public life. And Tom Kean Jr., the congressman, has spent decades trying to uphold that legacy.
But public life was never an obvious fit for Mr. Kean, a Republican who is now 58 and seeking re-election at a time of great political and personal vulnerability.
The first time he was offered the chance to run for office — at the suggestion of a powerful family friend — he did not immediately say yes, according to the aide who recruited him. He once spent $73,000 in campaign funds on speech lessons to try to overcome a halting, awkward speaking style. Describing himself in a rare moment of public self-reflection this year, he chose a word ill-suited for most modern-day politicians: “private.”
Mr. Kean nonetheless rose in New Jersey politics, buoyed by his name, his grasp of policy and an instinct to work back channels, if not a mic. On his fourth try he made it to Washington, where he found himself surrounded by sharp-tongued, media-savvy brawlers who seemed to believe that the future of the Republican Party was someone like Donald Trump, not another Tom Kean.
“He’s not a streamer, he’s not a screamer,” said Rosemary Becchi, a Republican tax policy lawyer and lobbyist who ran for a New Jersey congressional seat in 2020 and supports Mr. Kean.
“This guy — give me a better word for ‘plain,’” said Marci Bandelli, a Democratic activist in Westfield, N.J., where Mr. Kean lives.
Instead, he became known on Capitol Hill for his mild, under-the-radar manner and his odd habit of meeting questions from the press with stony silence. Then, earlier this year, he did something that brought him more attention than anything he had done in his quarter-century career in electoral politics: He vanished.
The congressman would later explain that he had been hospitalized for depression. But during his nearly four-month absence from the public eye, his aides would say only that he was dealing with a personal medical issue. The lack of information about his ailment and whereabouts invited the kind of scrutiny Mr. Kean had assiduously avoided. He has not elaborated on what might have triggered the episode, or what treatments he received.
Now, the family legacy that helped carry Mr. Kean to Washington might not be enough to keep him there.
In the months leading up to the Nov. 3 election, the congressman has been as guarded as ever. His minders have refused to release his campaign schedule. In August, when a New York Times reporter showed up to a golf club where Mr. Kean was set to address donors alongside the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a club employee was asked to call the police to have her removed from the parking lot.
The congressman declined several requests to be interviewed and did not respond to written questions or provide comment for this article. The Times reviewed years of Mr. Kean’s state and federal financial disclosures and campaign filings and interviewed dozens of colleagues, past opponents, former classmates and others who have interacted closely with him — including his father, the 91-year-old former governor, who is less press-shy than his son.
“He’s not me,” Governor Kean said. “He’s a different person, some different priorities, and he wants to do things his own way.”
‘It Could Have Gone Either Way’
Few governors were as popular as Thomas Kean Sr. was in his day.
After raising teachers’ minimum salaries to some of the country’s highest levels, Governor Kean was re-elected in 1985 by the largest margin in New Jersey history. He forged a friendship with Arkansas’s Democratic governor, Bill Clinton, and wrote a book called “The Politics of Inclusion.”
In 1988, he gave the keynote address at the Republican National Convention, where he talked of the importance of keeping taxes low, supporting the cause of freedom abroad, curbing pollution and stamping out racism. “A government that can give liberty in its constitution,” he said, quoting the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “ought to have the power to protect liberty in its administration.”
The Keans were not just esteemed but wealthy. The family’s money is linked to their ancestors’ Gilded Age investments in banks, railroads and public utilities. A living-history exhibit in a mansion on the campus of Kean University, which is named for the family, traces their ancestors’ role in founding the country as well as their ownership of enslaved people, who toiled in the 50-room home now known as Liberty Hall Museum.
Governor Kean and his wife, Deborah, raised the twin boys and their daughter, Alexandra, about 10 miles away, at the edge of a sprawling estate in Livingston, N.J., a suburban town named after William Livingston, the state’s first governor and a distant Kean ancestor. A replica of the Declaration of Independence — to which another ancestor was a signatory — hung in their home.
As first lady, Mrs. Kean was uneasy with the spotlight, the former governor said, and reporters were not permitted at the house. The deal was, “They could get to me any time they wanted to get to me, but not to her.”
Tom Jr. went to prep school, and then to college at Dartmouth, where he joined the crew team and pledged Psi Upsilon. He was easygoing and well-liked, Thomas Swigert, a classmate and fraternity brother, said.
“You would never know that his dad was governor,” Mr. Swigert said.
College friends recall frat-house banter about Mr. Kean becoming a forest ranger. As an undergraduate he spent time in Eastern Europe, which would later inspire him to attempt a dissertation on the economics of oil and gas in the former Soviet Union.
After graduating he joined schoolmates on boating trips on the Danube River in Europe and in the Caribbean. He worked shifts at a volunteer fire department in Hyattsville, Md., with Anthony Mangelli, a childhood friend from New Jersey.
Mr. Mangelli, a retired New Jersey trooper, said Mr. Kean took to firehouse life easily, chipping in with the grunt work, driving the ambulance and sitting down for meals during overnight shifts. “You know the people who eat almost everything that’s served to them?” Mr. Mangelli said. “He was that type of guy.”
Mr. Kean did not then speak of political ambitions, but he did have a passion for the environment, friends said. His first taste of Washington life came as a young staffer at the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush. It was there that he met Rhonda Lee Norton, a compliance specialist at the E.P.A., whom he would eventually marry.
It was 2000, the tail end of the Clinton presidency. Mr. Kean was 31, living in Massachusetts with his wife and their young daughter and working toward a doctoral degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Representative Bob Franks, a family friend for whom he had briefly worked, had decided to run for Senate, and Linda DiGiovanni, an aide to Mr. Franks, said her boss had dispatched her to ask if Mr. Kean would be interested in running to replace him.
“He wasn’t unexcited,” Ms. DiGiovanni recalled. But he did not immediately jump at the chance.
“It could have gone either way,” she said. “We ended the conversation with, ‘I’ll get back to you.’”
When he got back in touch, the answer was yes.
“There’s the old saying ‘To whom much is given, much is expected.’ I think that he lives that every day,” said Alfred J. Gaburo, a lobbyist who was influential in Mr. Kean’s early years in politics.
His father told The Times that he did not push his son into the family business. Tom Jr. and Rhonda made the decision themselves.
“He said, ‘I think I can do some good down there,’” Governor Kean recalled. “You can’t argue with that.”
‘Who He Really Is’
Mr. Kean lost the Republican primary to Mike Ferguson, who went on to serve four terms. But his debut had been noted, and in 2001 Republican Party leaders appointed him to fill a vacancy in the New Jersey Legislature.
Once he had decided to get into politics, Mr. Kean plunged in with both feet, embracing his family’s legacy — and his own famous name, which was as valuable as ever.
Governor Kean was chosen to lead the 9/11 Commission, elevating the family’s national status anew. In New Jersey, Republicans began eyeing the son for the governor’s mansion.
In 2003, he once again rose in the ranks without having to win an election, as Republican leaders named him to fill a vacant seat in the State Senate. Three years later, the party turned to Mr. Kean again as it tried to topple a prominent but vulnerable Democrat, Bob Menendez, who had been appointed to the U.S. Senate 10 months earlier and was running his first race for a full term.
Mr. Kean lost, but continued to build a life and career in New Jersey, winning re-election bids and rising to become the State Senate’s top Republican. He showed flashes of Jersey-style political savvy, outmaneuvering Gov. Chris Christie’s 2013 effort to replace him as Senate minority leader — no small feat. “He got on the phone and reminded people who he was,” said Bill Winkler, a retired Republican consultant in the state.
The Keans raised their two daughters in a large Tudor in Westfield, a well-to-do suburb within commuting distance of New York City. Over the years the couple was issued more than 60 tickets combined on their vehicles — a BMW, a Volvo and several Land Rovers, records show. Most were parking violations. Unlike most other part-time state legislators, Mr. Kean never held an outside job, earning a base salary of just $49,000 a year for two decades. His family lived comfortably, though, thanks to other sources of wealth.
Year after year, Mr. Kean disclosed a raft of investments handed down through family trusts. He shares in the ownership of a large estate on Fishers Island, N.Y., a hard-to-reach summer enclave, and in 2015, he and his wife set up a limited liability company to purchase a $1.2 million house on the Jersey Shore. (He reported borrowing at least $50,000 from his father that same year — for the purchase of a home, his father said. The loan was later forgiven.)
Mr. Kean tried making money other ways. He acquired equity in several companies, including some connected to people who donated to his campaigns, but those investments appear not to have generated much of a return.
His most lucrative investment seems to have been in a consulting company for renewable energy projects, Greener by Design. He and a Democratic lawmaker, Raymond J. Lesniak, each invested $100,000, Mr. Lesniak said. Mr. Kean first disclosed income from the company in 2009. The next year, Mr. Kean sponsored a bill that advanced incentives and improved prospects for wind projects in New Jersey.
Greener by Design later worked with a company that won a contract to take part in at least one big offshore wind project. By 2021, Mr. Kean’s stake in Greener by Design had increased at least fivefold, to a value between $500,000 and $1 million, according to financial disclosures.
“That is questionable, and he should not have been voting on that from my understanding of the ethics law,” said Loretta Weinberg, a Democrat who served as the New Jersey Senate’s former majority leader. (Greener by Design did not respond to a request for comment.)
Ms. Weinberg said Mr. Kean was “a very nice person, easy to get along with,” but “never a tough or passionate adversary.” This was unusual, she said, for a minority leader who was, in theory, trying to help his party climb back into power.
Critics accused him of sometimes sacrificing principles for expediency and waffling on issues relating to the minimum wage, Social Security and gay rights.
Steven Goldstein, a civil rights activist, told The Times in 2006 that Mr. Kean had initially seemed supportive of a bill that would have granted domestic partners some legal rights in New Jersey, but then called at the last minute to say he was not going to vote for it. Mr. Goldstein compared dealing with Mr. Kean to “playing chess with Casper the Friendly Ghost.”
“He believes he can affable his way out of anything — and I’m using ‘affable’ as a verb,” he said at the time. “And he does everything in his power not to let you see who he really is.”
In 2020, Mr. Kean made his third bid for Congress, challenging the Democratic incumbent, Tom Malinowski, for the Seventh District seat. At the time, the district slightly favored Democrats, and the Republican had to navigate the contentious politics of that pandemic year. When Mr. Trump came to New Jersey, Mr. Kean attended the president’s rally. After George Floyd was killed in Minnesota, he wrote about attending Black Lives Matter events and the need to “end systemic racism.”
He lost that contest, but won the rematch two years later after redistricting and a midterm swing of the political pendulum cleared a path for a Republican victory in the Seventh District.
And so, in January 2023, he became the latest Kean to serve in Congress — something his father had never done.
‘It’s Much More Difficult’
Governor Kean had grown up in Washington, learning about politics at the knee of his own father, Robert Winthrop Kean, who was a congressman. “They had a rule in the Congress that everybody observed — you never campaign against an incumbent of the other party, because you had to work with them,” he said.
That has since changed. “It’s much harder than it was in my time,” Governor Kean said. “It’s much more difficult. And that puts a terrible strain on you.”
Mr. Trump was not in power when the younger Mr. Kean arrived in Congress. But the Republican Party had been reorganized around Mr. Trump’s personality and his movement, which had little tolerance for political disagreements with the once and future president. Gestures of bipartisanship could be seen as acts of disloyalty.
As Mr. Kean came to the Capitol, Albio Sires, a Democratic congressman who had worked on his father’s campaign for governor and served with Mr. Kean himself in the State Assembly, was leaving.
“He’s got his hands full with the crowd there now,” Mr. Sires, who is now the mayor of West New York, N.J., recently said of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters in the polarized Congress. “Half of them are nuts. I don’t think he’s that way. I’m sure he has taken a lot of difficult votes.”
Mr. Kean cast what was presumably his easiest vote on a bill to authorize funding for firefighter grant programs. He had been the bill’s primary sponsor in 2023, his first year in office. The following summer, it became his first — and so far, only — piece of signature legislation to become law when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed it.
His habit of avoiding members of the press raised eyebrows during his re-election campaign in 2024, when he pointedly ignored a reporter who was asking for the congressman’s thoughts on Mr. Trump, mass deportations, Ukraine, Taiwan — “You pick the topic,” said the reporter, Benjamin Hulac of NJ Spotlight, as Mr. Kean stared into space while holding a coffee. “Love to talk to you about literally anything.” (The congressman later explained that he had a personal policy against doing hallway interviews “on my constituents’ time.”)
When Mr. Trump surged back to power, in 2024, Mr. Kean became a reliable vote for the House’s Republican majority — including on key parts of Mr. Trump’s second-term agenda.
He provided vital backing last year for legislation that Mr. Trump calls the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which slashed Medicaid funding and food benefits and added new work requirements for recipients. The bill also rolled back environmental protections and incentives for wind and solar energy. Mr. Kean has stressed his support for a provision in that law known as the SALT cap, which increased a property tax deduction limit to $40,000, up from $10,000. Expanding the deduction had become a bipartisan rallying cry in New York and New Jersey, where property taxes are particularly high.
Being a Republican lawmaker in the MAGA era could be a balancing act, his father observed. “Unless you do some things for the party, they’re not going to help you,” Governor Kean said. “You’ve got to get their help to get the things done for the district and the state. So you’ve got to walk a line.”
In early March of this year, Mr. Kean showed up to work. He voted to fund Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. He voted against ending the president’s war in Iran. He posed a series of easy questions (“Can you discuss the key priorities in your ‘Sports Diplomacy Playbook’?”) to a State Department official.
The week ended, and Congress broke for a recess.
When the other members returned the week of March 16, Mr. Kean did not.
‘What He Feels He Was Born to Do’
Mr. Kean was still AWOL on June 2 when he won the nomination to defend his seat in the midterms. He was running unopposed, but county election records show that hundreds of his party’s most loyal members used write-in ballots to express their frustration with him.
“Anyone else,” wrote one voter.
“Someone with a spine,” wrote another.
“Not this guy,” wrote a third.
Several weeks later — and more than 100 days after he went missing — The Times finally spotted Mr. Kean standing in a brightly lit front room of his home in Westfield, dressed in a suit and tie shortly before 9 p.m. He had been recording a video of himself reading a snippet of the Declaration of Independence for Save Jersey, a conservative news site.
In a speech to Congress after his return, Mr. Kean suggested that his symptoms had been both emotional and physical. “Until you experience it yourself,” he said, “it is difficult to fully understand how powerful this illness can be.”
His father would not get into the details, other than to say that Mr. Kean first sought medical attention in New Jersey, and then in Washington. “I knew that he had some problems,” Governor Kean said. “But I had no idea it was as severe as it turned out to be.”
Did the stress of working in Washington contribute to his depression?
“They don’t know,” his father said. “And honestly I don’t think the doctors do, either.”
He said he thinks the question of whether to not seek re-election crossed his son’s mind. But, once again, the decision was Tom and Rhonda’s to make — and this job is “what he feels he was born to do,” the former governor said.
“I think it wouldn’t have been good for his mental health not to do it anymore,” he said.
Whether Mr. Kean keeps serving will ultimately be up to the voters of New Jersey’s Seventh District. With President Trump’s approval ratings reaching new lows, many experts predict a backlash against Republican incumbents, and a public poll from early September showed Mr. Kean trailing Rebecca Bennett, his Democratic opponent, by five points. Earlier this month, The Times reported that a pair of prominent Republican super PACs had looked at internal G.O.P. polling and decided to cut off support to Mr. Kean’s race.
Mr. Kean agreed to one debate with Ms. Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot and health care executive. In late September, he appeared under bright stage lights in a blue suit and purple tie.
His speech was halting, as usual — but resolute.
He noted some areas of modest disagreement with the president. But he also said Congress had been an effective check on Mr. Trump. He backed the president’s imposition of tariffs, blamed Mr. Biden (and his “Green New Deal policy approach”) for the high cost of energy and said America was winning the war with Iran. He boasted about the “Big Beautiful Bill” and took credit for helping get the property tax deductions in there.
“My focus here,” he said, “is to make sure that as a member of Congress, to focus on the solutions.”
At one point, a moderator, David Wildstein of the New Jersey Globe, made an allusion to Governor Kean. “Your father helped convince President Reagan,” he said, to “apologize and pay reparations to Japanese Americans who were wrongly imprisoned by our government.”
Should the same principle apply, Mr. Wildstein said, to anyone today who is wrongfully detained at immigrant detention facilities?
“That could certainly be one of the answers,” Mr. Kean replied. He then pivoted to talking about how important it was for state and local police officers to share information with federal authorities, so as to properly account for any “violent criminals” who “came across an unsecure Southern border under Joe Biden.”
When the debate was over, Mr. Kean made his way to the edge of the stage and leaned down, smiling and shaking hands. His father had been watching in the front row — along with other members of the Kean family, including Rhonda and his twin brother, Reed, who had gone into real estate rather than politics.
For the time being, there was still a Kean holding office in New Jersey.
“I’m terribly, terribly proud of him,” Governor Kean said earlier. “So you know my feeling — how could anybody vote for anybody else?”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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