“We Had a Great History, and We Turned Aside”

Jack Kemp was born in 1935 in Los Angeles; his father owned a small trucking company. He came of political age in a time and place that made it likely enough that he would become a lifelong Republican, and he did. But the kind of Republican Jack Kemp became defies stereotype.

Prosperous Southern Californian Republicans do not normally become professional football players, but Kemp was for nine years the quarterback of the Buffalo Bills. Nor do they normally found trade unions, but Kemp co-founded the American Football League Players Association in 1965. He became a special assistant to then Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1967, won election to Congress in 1970, and was continuously re-elected until becoming Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1989. By then an observer might have thought that the young fellow whose dad had owned the trucking company was simply getting back on track. However, the genuinely odd portion of Jack Kemp’s odyssey was yet to come.

Kemp was a central figure in the process whereby a Republican party long associated with three-piece suits and country clubs was reborn in 1980 as an exuberantly populist political movement. He was a political and cultural predecessor to Reagan, and he has at times seemed his only possible authentic successor. In the mid-seventies, in the teeth of Jimmy Carter’s asceticism, Kemp jauntily insisted on America as a cornucopia—in this, as in many other things, prefiguring Reagan’s political appeal. He always took Reagan’s posture as a spokesperson for Everyman very seriously, and he has at times seemed the only leading Republican deeply committed to confronting matters of race and poverty. When the country-club Republicans seemed to slip back into power in 1988, Kemp was not a particularly compatible figure. He appeared to be taken into the cabinet as a kind of tribute to high Reaganism.

When South-Central Los Angeles went up in the aftermath of the first Rodney King trial, however, the Bush administration suddenly needed to put forward someone with a genuine interest in the urban poor, and after years in the administration’s shadows, Kemp was on display for a few months. He was then pushed back out of the limelight; Bush lost the 1992 election; and the soul of the Republican party again went up for grabs.

Jack Kemp is not only committed to what he considers to be the historic values of the party; he is also an especially close student of the history of the party—of how those values shaped it and how, in turn, they and the party have kept changing over time. I talked to him recently about the evolution of the party he has so altered, and for whose soul he now contends.

You’re well known to be a Republican very interested in making his party again the party of Lincoln. But isn’t this a rather tall order? After all, many analysts explain the party’s majorities since the late sixties as an outcome of racial polarization.

Well, as most scholars and politicians know, the Republican party grew out of a combination of several splinter groups in the United States. It was founded as an amalgamation of the Free-Soilers, Whigs, Democrats, liberals, abolitionists, and the Know-Nothing party (they have some carry-over in the party today) and guided by a vision that the promise of freedom and equality of opportunity in America’s Declaration of Independence applied to all men. All people. For all time. And ultimately extended to all countries.

Lincoln—before his inauguration, I think it was in Philadelphia when he was being guarded so closely for fear of attempts on his life—said that he would rather be assassinated on that spot than sacrifice his belief that the Declaration of Independence was true for all people. That is, I think, the most eloquent and passionate defense of the Declaration other than Thomas Jefferson’s.

So Lincoln’s party—the Republican party—was attractive to people who down through the ages believed in equality of opportunity, the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property, to the pursuit of happiness, and these rights’ applicability to all people. After the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of the Civil War, and the tragic assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the capital that the Republican party had built up in the black community was overflowing.

First of all, it was a sin to be a Democrat if you were black; the Republican party was by far the most popular, as well as the most populist, political party. It was the party of Lincoln. It was the party of equal opportunity, the party that appealed to people not on the basis of color but on the basis of their desire to improve their lot in life.

But what did it actually offer its followers beyond the memory of a martyred President?

Very few people have really looked at Abraham Lincoln’s economics. But Professor Gabor Boritt of Gettysburg College has, and in his book Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream he notes that Lincoln hardly ever gave a speech in which he didn’t talk about the Declaration of Independence, never gave a speech in which he didn’t talk about upward mobility, about the desire of people to work and be able to save and hire someone to work for them and ultimately own their own business.

Entrepreneurial capitalism was Lincoln’s theme even though he didn’t call it that, and this whole sense of ownership, entrepreneurship, improvement, and upward mobility had a radical appeal to people. In a secular and political sense, it touched their innermost souls.

The core of the Republican party was this conviction that it should appeal to all people. With the Emancipation Proclamation and the Homesteading Act in 1862, then that same year the Morrill Land Grant College Act, the Republican party offered a combination of property ownership, entrepreneurial opportunity, educational opportunity, and the vision that any poor man in America should be able to own his own land and climb the ladder to what we call, loosely, the American dream.

So that was the party’s soul, and it was lost in 1932. Herbert Hoover caused irreparable damage. I am a fan of his humanitarianism and a fan of his integrity—but not of his economic policy. But about 1932 the electorate began to re-imagine the party of Lincoln as the party of the recession/depression.

It’s interesting: Clinton ran his whole campaign on the premise that we were experiencing the worst economic performance since Herbert Hoover. Now that is not true, but rhetorical excess aside, it was a good political attack on the Republican party. I believe the old Republican party saw the goal of American economic policy not as liberals do, as the construction of a safety net under which people should not be allowed to fall, but as the construction of a ladder of opportunity upon which people can climb. Yes, we need a safety net, but it should be a trampoline, not a trap. And right now it’s a trap. I think Mr. Lincoln would be turning over in his grave if he could know that his party is debating whether there should be a safety net or a ladder. We need both.

But the measure of the compassion of the party of Lincoln should not be how many people need help, but how many people do not need to be on government assistance because they’re now on that ladder of upward mobility that Lincoln called the desire to improve one’s lot in life.

But when you talk about the party of Lincoln, aren’t you up against bigger obstacles than Hoover? A lot of people believe that the New Deal coalition that was able to depict the Republicans as the party of depression was finally broken up by the race issue. Barry Goldwater’s rout in 1964 disguised the importance of the regional base he’d used to capture the nomination, and the swing of that base foreshadowed Nixon’s extremely successful Southern strategy. What about the role of race in realignment and the building of the eighties Republican majority?

First of all, as I said earlier, it used to be a sin to vote Democratic and be black. Preachers preached against the Democratic party: it was the party of the poll tax, the party of segregation and the Black Codes. After the Civil War it was against the law for blacks to own a business in the South. I think of how my father started a business in Los Angeles in the 1930s. He didn’t have to go to Sacramento, California, from Los Angeles and file a government application; he just started a business. The Republican party was by far the majority party among blacks. Now, that having been said, to think that George Bush and Republicans in the last election got only 10 percent of the black vote is a disgrace. People of color, be they Hispanic, or black, or Asian, want the same thing for their lives and their families as the vast majority of all families do.

Goldwater got tagged with a kind of exclusionary conservatism in 1964 because he voted against the civil rights bill with regard to public accommodations and housing. I don’t think Barry Goldwater is, or was, a racist. I think he cast the wrong vote. That’s easy to say as a Monday-morning quarterback. But there weren’t many conservatives on the side of the civil rights movement.

And I’m convinced that the civil rights movement was necessary. You don’t have to agree with every tactic, or everything that happened, to recognize that the civil rights movement in America was a necessary reform of our laws to bring us closer to the original meaning of our Declaration of Independence. I believe that, and I also think that we have suffered because of the failure of the party of Lincoln and conservatives—other than maybe Everett Dirksen and a few others—to preserve that legacy.

I’m sure there were many fine men and women in the Republican party all for civil rights, but the party was not associated with it. I give credit to the Democratic party for its role. I don’t necessarily agree with everything it did, but I recognize that some of the errors came out of championing civil, human, legal, and voting rights for all people. The Democrats had a terrible history, and they overcame it.

We had a great history, and we turned aside. We should have been there with Dr. King on the streets of Atlanta and Montgomery. We should have been there with John Lewis. We should have been there on the freedom marches and bus rides. We should have been there with Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, in December of 1955.

I don’t know if you’ve read Taylor Branch’s book Parting the Waters , but he makes it very clear that the failure of the 1960 Nixon campaign to express any public or personal sympathy with the plight of Dr. King when he was in prison for demonstrating on behalf of civil rights and Coretta Scott King—who was pregnant at the time, in October of 1960—coupled with John F. Kennedy’s making one phone call for maybe thirty seconds (thanks to Harris Wofford, for whom I have high regard and respect), may have cost us that election.

King’s father was a Republican. He gets up and says he’s gonna take up a suitcaseful of votes to John F. Kennedy, and every black pastor for the next two or three weeks was preaching Democratic party politics and John F. Kennedy. I’d always believed that it was Harris County, Texas, and Cook County, Illinois, that caused Nixon to lose so closely. Wrong, it was the fact that the black vote in America overwhelmingly went for Kennedy.

So I think the whole idea of Kevin Phillips’s Southern majority is a disgrace. You want the South, the North, the East, and the West. You want consensus, not coalitions, in my view. Politics is about consensus. Getting people above those things that divide them to a higher understanding of what would be good for the whole country, bringing the country together, and then finding common goals that people have and helping people achieve their goals. That’s ultimately the very best politics.

That really didn’t happen for us until Reagan in 1980. And it could have happened for George Bush, for whom I have high respect and regard. He started out in 1988 with tremendous goodwill in the black community, but it deteriorated, to a large degree because of the economy and the failure of the Congress to give him any inner-city economic agenda, as well as to help keep the macroeconomy growing and creating jobs.

I’m puzzled by your statement that George Bush had a great reservoir of goodwill in the black community, because the Willie Horton ad played such a conspicuous part in his 1988 campaign.

I think the uproar over the Horton thing was a farce and a product of liberal mythmaking. The press tells us that the only reason George Bush won in ’88 was Horton and this terrible campaign. First of all, it’s important to remember, from a historical perspective, that it was Al Gore in the New York primary who first focused on this issue. Time magazine elevated Horton and published a picture of him, and Gore picked up on it and ran against Dukakis in the New York primary partially on the Horton furlough.

It was subsequently picked up by some Republican conservatives, and it was run more as a soft-money and tangential part of the campaign by independent advertising than it was by George Bush. Bush did not, in my view, play up the Horton thing the way he could have. The issue had no necessary connection to race.

And that isn’t why George Bush won anyway. He won because (a) he was pledged to carry on the Reagan revolution, (b) the economy was doing well in ’88, and (c) he was very experienced. People should remember that in 1988 there were problems in foreign policy, and people wanted continuity. I think that one reason he won the primaries is that he was the most experienced person in the race with regard to the foreign policy issues, and he was trusted on the domestic issues because he was Ronald Reagan’s Vice President. And he pledged no new taxes. It was a good pledge for him to make; it was bad to break it.