JACK BE NIMBLE

By Richard Stengel

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.

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.

Be a leader, Kemp had been telling himself, and in 1988 he gave it a try. He ran for the presidency on a counter-intuitive platform of supply-side economics and inner-city enterprise zones. But his managers complained that he was unmanageable. The Quarterback Mentality, political consultant Ed Rollins calls it in Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms. "Quarterbacks think they can always make the big play and resent being controlled by anyone." To help him keep his speeches shorter, Kemp's campaign staff gave him a timer (which he ignored). Kemp resolutely refused to do the things that candidates need to do, such as call contributors and practice for debates. His campaign sometimes seemed more like a graduate seminar in macroeconomics. Rollins chastised Kemp for being abstruse, and Kemp would briefly reform himself, "but then it was back to mumbo jumbo like the gold standard, Malthusian theory, baskets of commodities, T-bill rates, Hannah Arendt and Maimonides." Kemp dropped out after being shut out on Super Tuesday.

In 1989 George Bush tapped his former rival to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and his government's house bleeding heart. From the start Kemp had to reckon with the fallout from his predecessor Samuel Pierce's scandals and a President unconcerned about urban problems. Hoping to use hud to launch his own war on poverty, Kemp persuaded Bush to support a $4 billion housing program that encouraged public-housing tenants to buy their own apartments. But the Democratic Congress allocated only $361 million for the program. In the Bush White House, Kemp was regarded as the opposite of a good soldier for criticizing the Administration's indifference on poverty issues. Only after the Los Angeles riots of 1992 did Bush take a page from the Kemp playbook, talking about enterprise zones, tenant ownership and welfare reform. But it was too late for L.A. and for Jack Kemp.

Starting in August 1994, a few of Kemp's closest aides put together a plan for him to make a presidential run in 1996. It called for 241 fund-raising dinners to bring in $35 million in cash. At the time Kemp still owed money from his 1988 campaign. The quarterback who had never made big bucks in the pros was now raking in some real cash, earning as much as $2 million a year from his speaking engagements. Steve Forbes tried to persuade him to run, but Kemp just could not get himself up for the game. He enjoyed retreating to suburban Maryland, where he and his wife Joanne, his college sweetheart and a devout Christian, created a home that could have been a model for a 1950s sitcom.

Instead of taking Forbes' early advice to run himself, Kemp joined the primary battle just as it was ending. On the very day that Dole seemed to be a shoo-in for the nomination, Kemp endorsed Forbes by complaining that he could not let the pro-growth agenda be ignored. Pundits wrote Kemp's obituaries, but curiously, it may have been Kemp's quixotic backing of Forbes that led the way to his nomination. The endorsement clearly showed that he represented a wing of the party that Dole had not been able to reach. After the endorsement, Kemp seemed to feel he had gone too far and bombarded Dole's campaign office with telephone calls offering help and seeking redemption.

Earlier this summer, Kemp saw his political career as being in the twilight. Last month he described himself to a Buffalo newspaper as a "recovering politician." On an overcast afternoon in Kansas last week, Jack Kemp's political recovery was complete.

--With reporting by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum/Washington

With reporting by JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM/WASHINGTON