(2 of 4)
Kemp had a golden arm long before he developed a silver tongue. As a boy, he dreamed of glory only as a quarterback. He attended tiny Occidental College, where he threw not only 60-yd. bombs but the javelin as well. In 1957 he was drafted in the 17th round by the Detroit Lions and then cut in training camp. Over the next three years, he was let go by three other teams, including the sad-sack Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League. Even his family counseled him to hang up his cleats, but Kemp thought, "Ye of little faith." In 1960, the year John Kennedy was elected President, Kemp was signed by the Los Angeles (later San Diego) Chargers of the upstart American Football League and then was traded to the Buffalo Bills, where the gritty, workmanlike quarterback won two league championships and the hearts of the gritty, working-class fans of snowy Buffalo.
Even before the end of his football career, Kemp saw himself calling plays in another arena. Larry Felser, then a football-beat reporter for the Buffalo News, recalled that after games Kemp would want to talk not about linemen but bottom lines, and would rush off to a Goldwater rally or a political debate. At the same time Kemp was co-founder of the A.F.L. Players Association, the league's first and sometimes militant union. After retiring in 1969, Kemp ran for and won an open congressional seat in a mostly suburban Buffalo district of diminishing prosperity.
Shortly before, Kemp had discovered the works of the "vons"--the economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, who asserted that government interventions in free markets usually worsen the problems they are designed to correct. But in his increasingly depressed district, Kemp saw that laissez-faire could also seem like carelessness; he often voted to bring home federal job aid. Thus it was intellectual love at first sight when Kemp met Irving Kristol and Jude Wanniski, former socialists who were cobbling together a new kind of conservatism. Kristol insisted that conservatives had to maintain a social safety net, while Wanniski preached the notion that cutting taxes could stimulate investment without sacrificing government revenues or hurting the poor. Kemp's revelation was that he could be the good shepherd and the good capitalist at the same time.
"Jack Kemp is not simply the heir to Ronald Reagan," says Republican theorist William Kristol, the son of Kemp's onetime mentor. "He was a Reaganite before Ronald Reagan was." Kemp had worked briefly for Reagan in the 1960s, but in the late 1970s, the ex-QB gave the Gipper chalk-talks on supply-side theory. Kemp turned theory into action in 1978 as the Kemp-Roth tax-cut proposal furnished the basis for Reagan's historic 1981 cuts.