Legacy Matters
David Goldman's appreciation in First Things
Former vice-presidential candidate, congressman, and Housing secretary, he was the most improbable and the most important hero of the Reagan Revolution after the Gipper himself. Without Jack’s true-believer’s passion for tax cuts as a remedy for the stagflation of the 1970s, Reagan would not have staked his presidency on an untested and controversial theory.
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It was impossible to be cynical in Jack’s vicinity. He radiated sincerity and optimism. Corny as it sounds, Jack was the real thing, an all-American true believer in this country and in the capacity of its people to overcome any obstacle once given the chance.
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Jack was a leader who loved his country and put it before personal gain. When he left office he had the equity in his house and not much else. But he had four children, including two sons who played professional football, and seventeen grandchildren. By the time I got to know him he was full time on the lecture circuit, putting his family finances in order before joining the Washington thinktank Empower America. He considered a run for president in 1996 but deferred to Steve Forbes, then running as the tax-cutting candidate. His outstanding career as a Republican leader was coming to an end, but what a glorious run it was.
A devout Christian, Jack made far more of a difference than an ex-quarterback with a physical education degree from Occidental College had a right to. He earned our gratitude not only for what he accomplished, but for what he proved about the character of the United States.
New York Times obit
Jack Kemp, the former football star turned congressman who with an evangelist’s fervor moved the Republican Party to a commitment to tax cuts as the central focus of economic policy, died Saturday evening at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 73.
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Mr. Kemp was an unlikely leader for a political cause based on a theory of economics. He had majored in physical education while playing football at Occidental College in Los Angeles. When he entered politics, many Washington veterans dismissed him as a “dumb jock,” and as a junior House member in 1977, he did not even serve on the tax-writing Committee on Ways and Means.
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Mr. Kemp had also convinced Bill Brock, chairman of the Republican National Committee, that the issue was political gold. “He said, in effect, we need to restore the essence of our party, which is growth, which is jobs, which is creativity,” Mr. Brock said in an interview this year. “And the way to do that is to free people of the burden of excessive taxes.”
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“Jack Kemp is the indispensable political leader of the modern conservative economic revival,” Edwin J. Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research institution in Washington, said recently, adding, “Jack’s role in developing and exploring the potential of supply-side economics in the late 1970s laid the groundwork for Reagan’s economic program.”
Kemp was an autodidact. He focused on sports in his early life, becoming quarterback of the Buffalo Bills in the old AFL. Yet he nourished a nascent interest in politics by reading, reading, reading — WFB, Ayn Rand, economics, history. He honored ideas with the fervor of a young lover. His second passion, equal to his devotion to tax cuts, was his concern for black advancement. This was part conviction, part experience: As his friend Newt Gingrich liked to say, Jack had showered with people that most Republicans never meet. Kemp believed that the party of Lincoln had to regain its role as the champion of black America. The welfare state had not completed the civil-rights revolution; free-enterprise programs targeted at the inner city (such as enterprise zones) would do the trick instead.
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Churchill said that being with FDR was like having a glass of champagne. Being with Jack Kemp was like chugging a can of Red Bull. How could someone so alive be gone? And yet it is so. R.I.P.