Jack French Kemp wears the monogram JFK discreetly sewn onto the cuffs of his starched, high-collared shirts. His steel-gray hair looks just like the other J.F.K.'s might have, had he lived to old age, or even Kemp's 61. But in crafting his own political persona, Jack Kemp, a self-described "bleeding-heart conservative," superimposed the ideas of another political model on the style of John F. Kennedy. Kemp melded Ronald Reagan's sunny supply-side philosophy and belief in the power of free markets with Kennedy's youthful vigor and populist-patrician manner to create a new kind of Republican. Now Bob Dole is hoping that Kemp's blend of Kennedy charisma and cheerful Reaganomics can persuade voters to give the Republican ticket another look.
Jack French Kemp was not made to be a follower--the job description of a Vice President. "Be a leader," he has always exhorted his four children. "Be who you were meant to be." Headstrong, undisciplined, sometimes self-righteous, he is a man who has a predilection for shooting himself in the foot over a principle--or a peccadillo. In his talky speeches, he never uses a simple word where a fancy one will do, coming across like the class jock who would rather be perceived as the class brain. That's partly why some say Jack Kemp tries too hard. But the point is, he tries, and never stops trying. Through nine terms in Congress from suburban Buffalo, New York, and four years as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Bush Administration, Kemp was that rare, even unique thing in Republican politics, an economic and social conservative who yearned to genuinely make the Republican Party the party of Lincoln by embracing minorities, union workers and immigrants. As Jack Kemp has said, he has been to places other Republicans have never dared to go.
Until last week Kemp seemed to be loitering at the margins of his own party. A few months ago, he remarked to reporters that he was in his "wilderness years," implicitly likening himself to Winston Churchill in self-imposed exile from a conservative party he could no longer countenance. Instead of speaking from the heart, Kemp has spent the past few years speaking for pay, for as much as $35,000 a pop, to groups around the country. He wasn't expanding the nation's economic pie but his own. Even his role as the prophet of the panacea of tax cuts seemed to have been ceded to his onetime protege Steve Forbes. Only three weeks ago, at one of the regular dinners of the pro-growth gang known as the Five Amigos--Kemp, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senator Connie Mack of Florida, former Minnesota Congressman Vin Weber and Senate majority leader Trent Lott--Kemp got in a shouting match with Gingrich, claiming that the party was forsaking its Reaganesque message of growth. So alienated was Kemp that, earlier this summer, he allowed his name to be dangled before the Reform Party as a possible nominee.
It would not have been the first time Kemp's political career took a detour. He is a California boy, but not the California of Beach Boys songs and surfer girls. His father started a small trucking company and raised his four sons in the middle-class Wilshire district of Los Angeles. Kemp's persistence comes from his old man, who gradually expanded his business from one truck to 14, but his empathy comes from his mother, a onetime social worker and Spanish teacher.