Happy Birthday, Jack Kemp, Football Star and Politician

Jack Francis Kemp was born in Los Angeles, Calif., in 1935. According to MSN Encarta, Kemp’s father owned a trucking company and his mother was a teacher and social worker. Jack Kemp attended Occidental College where he lettered in three sports and was an award winning football player, he graduated in 1953. When he finished his education, he decided to pursue his passion for sports and become a football player.

After a series of unsuccessful attempts to land a permanent spot on a team in the National Football League, Kemp landed a spot as a quarterback in the American Football League (AFL). According to Pop Warner, he was the only quarterback to stay with the AFL for its entire duration, and helped take his team to five out of 10 championship games. In 2004, he received a Warner Award, which is granted to people who have “achieved excellence in athletics, scholarship, and life’s endeavors with integrity and humanity.”

In 1970, after Kemp retired from his football career, he ran for a seat in the House of Representatives and won (The New York Times and other sources attribute his victory to his noteriety from his time as quarterback of the Buffalo Bills). Although Kemp did not study politics or law in school as many politicians do, he made up for it by reading and studying extensively about politics and economics during his time as a football player and during his first years in office. It was the work of Arthur B. Laffer that introduced Kemp to supply-side economics, and inspired him to pursue bills for tax cuts while in the House and encourage the RNC to take the same stance. During the Reagan era the president supported a 23 percent tax cut that derived from the Kemp-Roth bill introduced earlier.

Jack Kemp attempted to get the republican bid for president in 1988. During his campaign, he highlighted his role in “Reaganomics.” When it became clear that Kemp could not win, he dropped out of the race and the republican bid went to George Bush, who ended up winning the election.

In 1989, Kemp was made secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This ended Kemp’s 18-year seat in the House of Representatives. Under the previous HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, fraud and mismanagement at HUD cost taxpayers $2 billion. Time magazine reported that as Kemp found himself wading through the thick of the department’s troubles, he remarked that he had “wanted to make HUD a high-profile agency. I don’t think this is what I had in mind.”

Jack Kemp was the vice presidential running mate with Bob Dole in the 1996 election. The Dole/Kemp campaign hinged around lowering taxes and pushing for smaller government. The loss of this election marked the end of Kemp’s career in national politics.

In 2007, Forbes magazine asked Kemp to define “the American Dream.” He offered a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “I am not ashamed to confess that 25 years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flatboat—just what might happen to any poor man’s son. I want every man to have a chance.” Kemp acknowledged that while President Lincoln was referencing mankind in general, he would change the definition to say “every man, woman and child in America.”

In the years leading up to his death, Jack Kemp worked at his firm, Kemp Partners, traveling the world doing consulting work as well as serving on a number of corporate boards. He chaired Habitat for Humanity’s “More than Houses” campaign and was a nationally syndicated columnist writing about economics, trade and foreign policy. He died on May 2, 2009.