In all honesty, your best course of action is to get hold of a Tamiya 1/700
Missouri. It's a beautiful kit - and represents that ship in her WWII configuration. All the
Iowa-class ships got heavily modified after the war; changing a kit in 1983 configuration back to the WWII version would be a real challenge. And it probably would end up costing more than the Tamiya kit.
There were some differences between the
Missouri and the
New Jersey. The latter came out of the shipyard with a round bridge structure that was unique among the ships of the class. By the end of the war, however, she had a "square" bridge that looked almost exactly like the
Missouri's. Making an accurate model of the
New Jersey from that kit would be pretty straightforward - and if you didn't make any changes at all (other than the color scheme) few people would notice.
Youth, talent, hard work, and enthusiasm are no match for old age and treachery.