Jack Kemp, RIP

Jack Kemp was a hero of mine. He was one of the great ones.

I had not heard of Jack Kemp when I joined my wife and others to attend a late-1970s Washington DC rally sponsored by, I think, the Baltic American Freedom League. If it wasn't them, it was some other consortium of advocates for what were then still known as the "captive nations," Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Four politicians spoke at the event. The most famous one, whose name I've nevertheless forgotten (but then he was the "star" attraction), talked about the plight of Soviet Jews, which was a bit tangential. Two others provided generic stump speeches. One guy had done his homework, and addressed the crowd as if he really knew them, and shared their very real concerns. This guy was obviously smart, hard working, and deeply respectful of his audience.

This guy was Jack Kemp.

Over the years I accompanied my wife to many small gatherings, and a few large ones, where politicians spoke. They were usually polite, cordial and clueless. Jack Kemp was different.

Here's the New York Times obit on Kemp. It gives him great credit, as it should, for advocating the Kemp-Roth tax cuts.

Here's additional background from Jeffrey Bell on the debates within the Republican party over the Kemp-Roth approach. I had not realized that this had ever been controversial. Even more, I had not realized that Congress passed a diluted version Kemp-Roth tax cuts in 1978, only to have them vetoed by President Carter! Imagine how different the world would be had Carter launched the recovery of capitalism instead of Reagan!

The Kemp-Roth tax cuts were incorporated into the Economic Recovery Tax Act, which was enacted about 20 months after I joined the Merrill Anderson Company. We did very well publishing information for trust departments to use in publicizing the big and small changes that were ushered in. (Before ERTA, a Q-TIP was a just a stick with a cotton ball on the end.) It may have been my work on communicating about ERTA that led Merrill Anderson's senior management to believe I had to potential to break out of our attorney programs.

Thank you, Jack Kemp!