Despite the variety of his books and articles, the recurring interests in his writing—whether scholarship, memoir, journalism or fiction—are New Jersey culture and America on the international stage.
Upon graduation, he was drafted into the U.S. Navy and served two years in Yokosuka, Japan as a medic working in a locked psychiatric ward for American military personnel.
[3] Leaving the diplomatic service in 1968 because of differences over the Vietnam War, he accepted a position in New Jersey as Executive Assistant to the Chancellor of Higher Education.
Rutgers University then hired him as a dean whose main function would be negotiating peace between an increasingly rebellious, anti-Vietnam student body and faculty and the state legislature.
[6] The book, with ten such adventures, followed the PBS-funded movie, Three Days on Big City Waters, which concerned two Rutgers professors who paddled across New Jersey until they land among the ruins of Ellis Island and, eventually, reach Manhattan.
[9] The George Washington is still the busiest bridge in the world, and he considered it equal in importance to the Brooklyn from an historical, engineering, and aesthetic perspective.
[11] Robert Pirsig, author of the classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, wrote about one of his New Jersey-oriented works, "Rockland isn't just observing ... he's in it all the way, fighting the old cliquès.
[13] Rockland pioneered the term and the course "Jerseyana" at Rutgers University and served for years as the cultural commentator on PBS's New Jersey Nightly News.
[17] The memoir includes chapters on days Rockland spent essentially alone with Martin Luther King and Senator Edward Kennedy in Madrid, as well as the embassy's involvement in an infamous Cold War incident where the United States accidentally dropped four unarmed hydrogen bombs on Spain.