Bernanke Unwrapped

Colleagues, including Blinder, said they had little feel for Bernanke's personal politics beyond the general sense that he supported lower taxes. And even though Bernanke did not display any overt ambition to go to Washington, colleagues noted, his outside activities appeared to suggest such a desire. "He always seemed enormously publicly spirited," said Andrew B. Abel, a University of Pennsylvania economist and co-author with Bernanke of a leading macroeconomics textbook.

That public spirit was tested in the 1990s, when Bernanke served two elected terms as a member of the school board in Montgomery Township, N.J., a farming area that at the time was quickly transforming into a bedroom community for ambitious professionals.

Bernanke, joined a board in tumult in 1994. Area schools faced a looming space crunch as younger families crowded in. Public school board meetings often devolved into screaming matches between anti-tax advocates and pro-spending parents. "We had a fistfight break out outside one of the meetings," said Jamie Savedoff, former superintendent of the district.

Bernanke's six years on the school board highlighted his emphasis on analysis over ideology. Dwight Jaffee, a former Princeton colleague, said Bernanke would often talk about the rancorous board debates while the pair walked to their regular squash game. "He would look at the numbers and make computations about whether it made sense to build new schools, Jaffee said. "He really has faith in doing the numbers right and then living with them."

In 2000, and despite his preference for lower taxes, Bernanke provided the tie-breaking fifth vote on a bond issue that raised area property taxes by about $334. "Ben recognized that if we didn't take that action, by the time all the new kids arrived, we wouldn't have space for them," Savedoff said. The student population in Montgomery Township jumped to 5,100 this year from around 3,100 in 2000. The township opened a new high school in September.

Bernanke in Washington

In 2002, Bernanke took leave from Princeton and traveled south to Washington for a new job as a Federal Reserve governor, and three years later would become chairman of President Bush's council of economic advisers. Abel, Bernanke's co-author, cited his colleague's editorship of the high-profile American Economic Review, his chairmanship at Princeton and service on the school board as preparation for a Washington career. "Then I think when the opportunity came his way to serve as a Fed governor, he realized he was pretty good at it. And his career is studying monetary policy, which makes him the perfect person for the job."

Economist Chris Sims, one of the stars Bernanke recruited to Princeton, said unlike some other chairmen, Bernanke always clearly stated his goals and then sketched a plan to get there, taking the mystery out of departmental operations. That demystification, Sims and others said, is likely to be the key difference between the Bernanke Fed and Greenspan Fed.

What will not change, friends and colleagues say, is the occasional wry joke emanating from the Fed chairman's office.

Gertler recalled comments Bernanke made at Gertler's 1990 wedding to economist Cara Lown. "He stood up and gave a toast and congratulated me for marrying inside the faith. He didn't mean Judaism. He meant the faith of monetary economists."

Staff writer Nell Henderson and staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.