Absent congressman calls allies, but stops short of public appearance

Rep. Thomas Kean Jr. has checked in.

Republican officials in New Jersey said their phones suddenly began buzzing late last week with a familiar number as Kean began to reengage with political leaders after being absent for nearly 12 weeks with an undisclosed medical condition during a high-stakes reelection campaign.

Carlos Santos said his phone rang at 4:52 p.m. Thursday. Joe LaBarbera was in his car when his cell lit up five minutes later.

“I asked him if he needed anything,” LaBarbera, Sussex County’s Republican chairperson, recalled saying.

“‘Just your prayers,’” he said Kean answered.

Santos said Kean was upbeat in the two-minute call.

“He sounded healthy,” said Santos, the GOP leader in Kean’s home county of Union. “He sounded excited to get back on the campaign trail.”

Both men said that Kean assured them that he was expected to recover fully but did not divulge the nature of the mysterious health condition that has kept him away from Congress since the middle of March.

Harrison Neely, the congressman’s spokesperson, said Sunday that Kean, a second-term Republican running for reelection in one of the most competitive districts in the country, planned to share more information about what has been described only as a “personal medical condition.”

“He is currently focused on his recovery,” Neely said. “But when that is complete, he plans to be fully transparent and give details about his personal medical issue.”

Other county leaders reported getting similar calls from Kean, although Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a Republican close to President Donald Trump, said Sunday that he had not yet heard from his House colleague. Kean was not immediately available for an interview, Neely said.

The congressman and his circle have been notably tight-lipped at a time when many political figures have taken a proactive approach to sharing details about their health challenges. Kean’s aides have refused to answer even basic questions about the nature of his condition, even as they insisted that he was expected to make a full recovery and hoped to return to work soon.

Even allies closely aligned with the Republican Party say the explanations have fallen short.

“He’s a public figure running for reelection,” John J. Farmer Jr., the state’s attorney general during the Republican administration of Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, said last week of Kean. “It’s not a crazy thing to wonder what’s going on.”

“It’s in his interest to be as transparent as he can be with the public,” Farmer added Sunday after learning that Kean had begun to reengage state party leaders.

The blitz of recent calls to Republican officials reflected a shift in strategy. Even before his abrupt disappearance this year, Kean had been known to zealously safeguard his privacy and, in some instances, resist pressure to subject himself to questioning.

Years ago, when he and his wife bought a beach house in Bay Head, N.J., they chose to shield the purchase behind a limited liability corporation with a unique name: Rendezvous LLC. In 2024, while running for reelection, Kean was recorded on Capitol Hill awkwardly refusing to acknowledge a reporter’s questions, much less answer them.

Last year, constituents grew so fed up with his decision not to hold in-person town hall events that they held regular gatherings near his office in Bernardsville that became known as “finding Kean Fridays.” (He eventually relocated the office to a corporate park in a more remote area of the state.)

So when Kean, 57, first began missing votes in Congress more than two months ago, withdrawing from public view and offering a bare minimum of information about the nature of the issue that he had been battling, those most familiar with him and his family’s centuries-long history in Republican politics were unsurprised by the secrecy.

“The Keans are patrician,” said Jim McQueeny, a Democratic political strategist who worked for the state Assembly when Kean’s father was first elected governor. “And patricians don’t like to fight in the open.”

This month, after Kean’s chief of staff let slip a cryptic explanation for why the congressman hadn’t been seen in Washington or in New Jersey — “There’s no cameras where Tom is” — his 91-year-old father, who is also named Thomas Kean, spoke up. The elder Kean told nj.com that his son “hasn’t been able to do his full job to any degree for some months” and that he was under a doctor’s care. The New York Times has not been able to reach the former governor.

That explanation came two months into a saga that has only gained more attention as it’s dragged out. So far Kean has managed to elude prying eyes and avoid any leaks about the nature of his health issue.

“This is certainly the best-kept secret in New Jersey politics,” said Loretta Weinberg, 91, a Democratic trailblazer who spent three decades in the state Legislature.

“I’ve never seen anything like it — where somebody didn’t squeal.”

Kean is more than just a momentarily missing congressman. He is the scion of a political family that once helped to run a major New Jersey utility company and can trace its lineage to three of the country’s Founding Fathers. His great-grandfather was a U.S. senator and his grandfather served in the House. His father was a popular governor who in the 1980s waged an effort to overhaul New Jersey’s image. Years later, his leadership of the 9/11 commission burnished the family’s reputation as GOP centrists keen on bipartisanship whose name adorns a university in North Jersey.

“He helped define the state in a more positive way,” Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political science professor, said of the former governor. “It was known as a down-and-dirty place. He added a certain amount of grace to politics in New Jersey.”

In 2006, after Democrat Robert Menendez was appointed to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate, it was the younger Kean, then a 37-year-old state senator, who was tapped to try to unseat him when he ran for a full, six-year term. It was a hard-fought race that saw Kean at perhaps his most pugnacious. He called Menendez “unethical” in a debate and tried to yoke him to William V. Musto, a longtime mayor of Union City, N.J., who had been convicted of racketeering. Menendez is himself now serving an 11-year prison sentence for taking bribes.

Menendez defeated Kean. But in 2020, Kean came within 1 point of flipping a seat in the 7th Congressional District. Two years later, after the district was redrawn, he won. He was reelected in 2024 by a 5-point margin, and his fundraising has outpaced that of his would-be Democratic challengers.

Kean has $3.4 million on hand to spend to try to hang on to his seat, which Democrats see as a potential pickup in their campaign to retake the House and check Trump’s power in Washington.

Early machine voting starts Tuesday.

Kean also spoke on Thursday to the New Jersey Globe, a political news site, which ran an article that offered almost no new information, but was notable because it was the first time the congressman had been interviewed or directly quoted in months.

“I anticipate that in the next couple of weeks, I’ll return to voting and to the campaign trail,” Kean told the Globe’s founder, David Wildstein, a former Republican official, without offering details about his ailment.

Neely said Sunday that Kean planned to cast a primary ballot in the coming week, but did not specify whether he would vote in person or by mail. In November’s race for governor, he and his wife noted on Instagram that they had voted early. The couple and their two daughters have also been known to vote on Election Day at their polling place in an elementary school down the block from their home in Westfield.

Although Republican officials have now reported hearing his voice, Kean’s whereabouts for now remains a mystery.

The window shades at his house in Westfield have been pulled tight and a truck parked in the driveway has not appeared to have been moved in weeks.

If the congressman wanted to make himself scarce, he would have options.

The Kean family owns an estate on Fishers Island, N.Y., an exclusive enclave off the coast of Connecticut. The island is at least three hours and a ferry ride away from New Jersey — a fact that raised eyebrows when Kean’s father and his wife, Deborah Bye Kean, bought a large parcel there. The 10-acre estate, purchased 40 years ago for $980,000, sits more than 1 mile beyond a manned guard booth, at the end of a hard-to-access private road. The street dead-ends at a rocky shoreline known to attract seals. Kean owns a stake in it, according to financial disclosure forms.

It might seem like an ideal place to go to disappear. But several year-round residents said there had been no sign of any member of the Kean family for months.

And then there’s the “Rendezvous LLC” property in Bay Head: a gray-shingled Cape Cod that Kean and his wife purchased for $1.2 million in 2015, according to property records and state and federal financial disclosure forms.

Lawrence E. Bathgate II, a longtime Republican fundraiser who has been friendly with the congressman and his father for years, said he regularly saw the younger Kean at the Bay Head Yacht Club in past summers.

Last week, a mailbox at the house was stuffed with advertising circulars and a notice was taped to the front door, warning residents to move their cars off the street for repaving. The note was from April.

Bathgate, 87, said he had deliberately not asked the family for information about Kean’s recent health struggles.

“If there was a reason for me to know, they know how to find me,” he said.

“By not knowing, I can’t say anything.”

And, like others close to Kean, he has not.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.