Sure, He'd Rather Be President, but Conservative Jack Kemp May Be the Right Man on the Right for Hud

Jack Kemp, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, used to be a pro football quarterback. But on this day, as he extols the virtues of capitalism to a luncheon crowd of housing advocates and local luminaries at a Pittsburgh hotel, he sounds more like a cheerleader.

The way to get people out of poverty, he declares, is to “empower” them—starting by giving them the chance to manage, control and finally buy their own housing. “A piece of the rock, if you will! Equity in America!” cries Kemp, 54, his excitement rising. “My daddy was a small businessman in Los Angeles, put four boys through college by driving a truck, then buying a truck, then hiring a truck driver, paying wages and plowing his profit back into more trucks! Ladies and gentlemen,” Kemp concludes, his raspy, high-pitched voice cracking with enthusiasm, “gotta make it work in downtown Pittsburgh! Gotta make it work in Watts, in Harlem, South Bronx. Miami, Motown! We can’t leave anybody behind!!”

The audience applauds exuberantly as, for a moment, the room is suffused with hope and everything seems possible. Indeed, if the power of positive thinking could raise roof beams, America’s housing crisis would be over. Jack Kemp is the truest of believers—in capitalism, in Republicanism, in himself. For Kemp, problems exist to be solved, and every setback is an opportunity in disguise.

When George Bush named him Secretary of HUD last year, it must have seemed one of the better-disguised opportunities to come Kemp’s way. After running unsuccessfully for President—he won only 39 delegates before dropping out of the Republican race—the nine-term Congressman from the Buffalo, N.Y., area had hoped to be tapped for Vice President. He would have been content with Secretary of State or Treasury. Instead he got HUD—a department so mired in corruption that it was less a government agency than a feeding trough for well-connected developers and politicians. Kemp’s predecessor, “Silent Sam” Pierce—who denies any wrongdoing—is under investigation by a special prosecutor, and a congressional inquiry seems to find yet another apparent past abuse at HUD with appalling regularity.

Kemp had scarcely uncrated his bust of Abraham Lincoln in his new office when he called in HUD Inspector General Paul Adams for a briefing on the problems besetting the department, including charges of influence peddling and fraud. The meeting took up most of two days, and the written report that followed filled 700 pages. The bottom line: Misappropriation of HUD funds during the Reagan years could cost taxpayers more than $4 billion. “Lurking underground were all these goblins and snakes and vermin,” says Kemp. “Incredible problems of mismanagement. It’s unbelievable.” Kemp says it really “frosted” him to learn that rich Republicans were ripping off the poor, but he criticizes Pierce only for having a “management style” that was “lax.”

Kemp’s approach to running HUD is anything but. He keeps a pad by his bed-side to jot down ideas in the middle of the night, and during his 10-hour workdays, he rolls up his sleeves and cruises HUD’s hallways to exhort the troops. “Hi, I’m Jack,” he says to startled bureaucrats. “Who are you?”

A self-described “bleeding-heart conservative,” Kemp admits his concern about urban problems ran considerably deeper than his knowledge when he started at HUD. He tells a story about his naïveté on a visit to a Philadelphia housing project in the winter of ’89. As tenant manager Virginia Wilks gave him a tour, he says, “We walked outside on this cold February day, and about 30 feet away were five guys standing around a trash-barrel fire. I said, ‘Isn’t that nice. Those guys are warming their hands and having a cracker-barrel philosophical discussion.’ She said, ‘Mr. Kemp, they’re crack dealers.’ ”

With typical zeal, Kemp returned to Washington and ordered his legal staff to notify 3,300 public-housing authorities that they had exactly 30 days to evict anyone dealing drugs. It was a bold step—a little too bold for the due process of law, as it turned out, but a step all the same. “I can’t say we’ve gotten drugs out of all public housing,” admits Kemp, “but we’re getting cooperation.”

He got the cooperation of both parties in Congress his first year, pushing through reform legislation that opens the HUD funding process to public scrutiny. He has targeted 50 decaying areas as “enterprise zones” to which he hopes new businesses can be lured with incentives, including tax breaks. Now he’s asking for a $5.3 billion increase in next year’s HUD budget (to $23.7 billion), including $ 1.2 billion for his favorite initiative, the HOPE (Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere) program, which would help the poor buy the low-income housing they live in. “We treat poor people as though they’re going to be poor forever,” complains Kemp, who vows to “change every rule we can get our hands on to reflect the fact that we want people in public housing to move through and up and out.”

Critics point out that a program to help people who are already in public housing does nothing for the millions receiving no assistance at all. Indeed, some say Kemp’s HOPE plan looks suspiciously like a program to cut back public housing. “He’s got a tight budget. The HOPE money has to come out of the money for modernization and construction,” says Mark L. Wolfe, director of Federal Funds Information for States, which serves state legislatures and governors. “But at least it’s good to see an activist like Kemp in there, someone who can slap other Cabinet members on the back and get their attention.”

Indeed, Kemp regularly sounds off at Bush administration cabinet meetings—and not just about HUD matters. “I’m HUD Secretary and not Secretary of State,” he says, “but Bush loves to tolerate a good debate. He knew what he was getting with Jack Kemp.” Like Vice President Dan Quayle, Kemp is a spokesman for the Republican right. “I talk about trade and foreign policy,” he says, “though [Chief of Staff] John Sununu won’t let you get long-winded.” With Kemp, that’s a challenge. What he calls his “natural quarterback ebullience” spurs him to such feats of oratorical stamina that his staffers regularly give him the “Cut! Cut!” sign midway through his speeches. Even his younger daughter, Judith, drew her hand across her throat when his toast at her 1989 wedding threatened to outlast the reception. Observes Kemp’s wife, Joanne: “We tease him all the time. We have to say, ‘Hey, someone else wants to talk.’ He’s just always on.”

Some say it was Joanne who pushed Kemp to take HUD when George Bush offered it. She reportedly told him, “If you don’t do it, don’t expect anybody to take you seriously about a conservative war on poverty.” In fact she has been his trusted adviser since they met in 1956 as students at California’s Occidental College, where she was Maid of Cotton and he the star quarterback. (They married in 1958.) But at HUD, he has had to fend for himself. “I really haven’t given him much advice as HUD Secretary, because it’s so complicated,” says Joanne, 53, a former teacher who now leads a weekly Bible study group of congressional wives. Of late, her chief contribution to his political career, she says, has been taking up the slack at home so he can pour his energy into HUD. “It has been my function to hold everybody together when he’s out saving the world,” she says. Even when he’s relaxing, she adds, “he’ll read a World War II history book at the same time he’s watching TV and switching channels. He’s a multimedia wizard.”

Joanne has apparently performed her home-front function well: The family remains extremely close. The four kids—Jeff, 30, a Seattle Seahawks backup quarterback; Jennifer, 27, a Virginia schoolteacher; Judith, 24, an aide to Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.); and Jimmy, 18, a Wake Forest University sophomore and quarterback—still get together at the family’s Bethesda, Md., home or join their parents skiing in Vail, Colo. Jack Kemp the dad, says Jeff, “talked with us constantly. He was our motivator, encourager—very optimistic. When we were kids, our football games and ballet recitals gave him great material to brag about for a month.” When the children were young, Kemp would constantly remind them as they headed off to school, “Be a leader!” And during hard times he would leave upbeat notes called JK-grams on their pillows.

Kemp’s positive outlook had been drummed into his head by his strong-willed Christian Scientist mother, Frances, a social worker. “I was taught, if you’re not happy where you are, you’re not going to be happy where you’re not,” he recalls. It can’t have been easy to fight discouragement during his early pro football years. At 6 ft. he was small for a quarterback and had to stand on tiptoe to see over his blockers. Kemp spent three seasons seeing little action with five different teams. Finally, in 1960, he signed with the Los Angeles Chargers (since relocated in San Diego) and led the infant American Football League in passing. Sold to the Buffalo Bills in 1962, he was chosen to play in six AFL All-Star games. Yet his most enduring gridiron achievement was political, as co-founder and president of the AFL Players Association. “He went out on a limb when it wasn’t popular for players to challenge the management,” recalls former linebacker Nick Buoniconti. “He got us a pension, medical benefits and a lot of things players never had. He was always a take-charge kind of guy.”

Retiring from football in 1970, Kemp promptly won a Buffalo-area seat in Congress, with 52 percent of the vote. Eight years later he polled 95 percent. He had become a celebrity in the Republican Party, thanks to his advocacy of supply-side economics, the theory that tax cuts would stimulate economic growth and actually result in increased tax revenue. Ronald Reagan loved the idea. “Dear Jack,” he wrote in a 1988 letter framed on Kemp’s office wall, “We showed this town that if you want to make this government move, let a guy from Hollywood and a football player call the plays.”

Of course, George Bush is now the one calling the plays, having consigned Kemp to the grunt work at HUD. Yet even the housing mess has its positive side. “I look at it as a chance to do something good and have fun at the same time,” Kemp says. Gazing out of his 10th-floor window at a panoramic view of Washington, Kemp observes, “I’ve got to believe I’ve got the best job in the world—other than the President.” Just how long the job will remain “fun” is another question. “He runs a political risk if he stays too long,” says one Capitol Hill staffer, who points out that the nation’s intractable housing problems could taint Kemp with failure. “He talks a good game. Now he has to produce. There’s talk that he will stay two years and get out.”

For now, Kemp the inveterate campaigner is speaking an average of once a week to audiences around the country. While he’s at it, he’s building a personal political base among the poor, a constituency to which few other Republicans can turn for support. A born-again Christian, Kemp likes to quote “my favorite HUD Secretary,” the Biblical master builder Nehemiah, who restored the fallen walls of Jerusalem and helped provide homes for the poor. “Nehemiah said, ‘Come, let us build.’ Now, there were some on the sidelines who said, ‘He’s a fool.’ But he wouldn’t give up, because he had something burning in his breast.”

Some observers think what’s burning inside Kemp is the desire to be President. Kemp, however, disavows such ambitions. Beyond HUD, he claims to aspire to nothing more lofty than “the World Bank or the U.S. trade representative or the Agency for International Development. I’d like to go to every third world country and preach Adam Smith and democratic capitalism.”

Skeptics point out that he could preach all the louder from the bully pulpit of the White House. But few doubt his sincerity as he tackles the task at HUD. “I don’t believe it is the natural condition of the human soul to live in grinding, abject poverty,” says Kemp. “I think something can be done about it.”

—James S. Kunen, Jane Sims Podesta on the road with Kemp

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