Which Exit?

Two of the biggest New Jersey stories of the last twenty years borrowed his name. Neither one knew the real story. On Boardwalk Empire, Walter Edge is a supporting player in a good suit. In the Bridgegate scandal, "Wally Edge" is the alias a political operative wore while helping jam the George Washington Bridge, the bridge run by an agency the real Walter Edge set in motion. Both reached for the name of a man almost nobody remembers, and that is the joke at the center of this book. Because Edge was no bit player. He governed New Jersey twice, sat in the United States Senate, and represented his country in Paris, and he got there the way everything got done in New Jersey: by a deal. In 1916 the bosses of the north and the south, sworn enemies who agreed on nothing, agreed on him, and a clean-named ad man from Atlantic City took the governor's chair owing his election to two machines and turned out to be nobody's creature but his own. Which Exit? is the story of the most gifted political operator New Jersey ever produced: the machines he rode and outlasted, the rivals he charmed and the reformers he outfoxed, and the vanishing act he performed on himself, editing the bosses and the deals out of his own memoir until there was no story left to remember him by.