Dual-Edged Kemp Persona May Put Stamp on Ticket

This is the Jack Kemp that Bob Dole’s campaign would present to the nation: A professional football quarterback. A veteran member of Congress. A member of George Bush’s Cabinet. Energetic. An idea man. And, of course, a dedicated conservative.

And this is the Jack Kemp that the campaign would rather not present itself: A one-note politician skipping off on a pet idea that the nation’s monetary system must return to the gold standard and often finding himself crosswise with conventional conservative thinking. An unmanageable campaigner unresponsive to direction from his advisors, in this case strategists at his own campaign headquarters. Energetic--but with the unfocused, yipping-yapping energy of a puppy dog. An idea man--but one unable to restrain his natural inclination to shoot from the lip.

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The first could bring a sense of vision and leadership to the Republican ticket. The second would undermine its daily effort to present a coordinated assault on a disciplined White House working to secure President Clinton’s reelection.

Both have presented themselves in the past. Either Kemp could emerge during the intense 12-week campaign leading up to election day.

Kemp, whom Dole officially anointed Saturday as his choice for the Republican vice presidential nomination, brings to the ticket a troubled history as campaigner and as team player.

Two scenes tell the story:

Knowing both Kemps, it was not without some trepidation that Bush contemplated naming the former quarterback and congressional veteran from Buffalo, N.Y., as secretary of Housing and Urban Development eight years ago. He wanted the former. Would he be getting the latter?

As he was forming his new administration, Bush asked Kemp whether he could keep his focus strictly on housing issues, and his feet on the limited field set for him by the White House.

It was an awkward question for a president-elect to pose, but Bush felt compelled to do so.

Bush had been vice president in 1985 when he watched Kemp lead an insurrection among House conservatives that persuaded President Reagan to renounce a deficit-reduction package that Dole had laboriously steered through the Senate with Bush’s assistance.

In an interview for the book “Storming the Gates,” Kemp said last year: “I didn’t feel like I was torpedoing the budget. I thought I was torpedoing, if you want to call it, or blow it up if you will, a very, very bad deal.” Whichever, it underscored how difficult Kemp is to control.

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So it was only after he won Kemp’s postelection assurances that Bush went ahead with the housing nomination.

Fast forward a year and a half:

Forbidden by Secretary of State James A. Baker III from meeting with a controversial Israeli politician and former general at the Housing and Urban Development Department offices, Kemp travels across Washington to meet with the visitor, Ariel Sharon, at the Israeli Embassy. At the time, Baker and Bush are furious with Sharon, then his country’s housing minister, for pressing ahead with the building of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. And they couldn’t be more furious with Kemp.

And here is Kemp, at his place well down from the action at the polished oval table in the White House Cabinet Room. The housing secretary is criticizing Baker and the administration’s conduct of foreign policy, according to former White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater in his book, “Call the Briefing.”

In a scene more befitting a locker room, Baker shouts out an obscenity, Kemp leaps over furniture as he pursues him down a corridor outside the Oval Office, and national security advisor Brent Scowcroft has to separate them.

Jack French Kemp, who marked his 61st birthday on July 13, is well acquainted with locker rooms, as well as with verbal fisticuffs.

A Los Angeles native, he attended Fairfax High School; his father owned a small trucking company on Central Avenue. He played football at Occidental College, from which he was graduated in 1957. As a professional quarterback, he was cut by six teams over the next three years. In 1960, he joined the Los Angeles (later to be San Diego) Chargers and, two years later, the Buffalo Bills, whom he led to two American Football League titles.

He remains passionate about the game and attends every Super Bowl. But his dedication--at a time when his first Charger salary was $11,500--was such that when he broke a finger of his passing hand on a defender’s helmet, he had it set bent, in a sideline procedure, to fit the shape of a football.

And still he presents--in a now-gray model--the neatly long, cross-the-forehead locks of a player ready for postgame, post-shower interviews. And his athletic build gives little away to the post-player years.

During his football years, he spent time in the Army in 1958; was a special assistant to then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1967; and was a special assistant to the chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1969. He retired from football in 1970.

He was elected to Congress that year to represent the most prosperous swath of what is known as New York’s Niagara Frontier, near Buffalo. But early on, he set his sights on higher office.

In July 1980, he made a run for the Republican vice presidential nomination, positioning himself as the logical conservative successor to Reagan, the party’s presidential nominee. But Reagan rejected Kemp as his running mate in favor of Bush.

In 1987 and 1988, Kemp ran what quickly became a disastrous campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. He never succeeded in presenting himself as an alternative to Dole or Bush, the two leading candidates.

Kemp’s wife, Joanne, with whom he has four children, confided at the time: “It just may be he’s not ready to be president yet.”

In a just-published political memoir, veteran Republican operative Edward J. Rollins, who was then Kemp’s senior strategist, wrote that after 18 years in Congress--and only one tough race, his first--”Jack wasn’t prepared for what goes on in a presidential campaign.”

He continued: “Jack was a totally unmanageable candidate. We’re dear friends today, but he was a total pain in the ass in that campaign. He was impossible to discipline and simply wouldn’t listen. He loved making speeches and relished the intellectual combat of candidate forums and debates. He had a magic with crowds. But he fought all of us tooth-and-nail over the rest of the crap a candidate has to put himself--and his family--through to get elected.”

Frustrated by Kemp’s preference for delivering long-winded speeches using big words and touting equally grand--and critics say unfounded--ideas, Rollins recalled twitting him: “If I could remove two-thirds of your knowledge and three-fourths of your vocabulary, I could make you into a decent candidate.”

During the 1988 race, Kemp learned the difficulty of a presidential campaign. But in the offices of the secretary of Housing and Urban Development--a Cabinet department that sits distant from the White House in both geography and political power--he learned anew, a generation after his football days, the rigors of team play.

Still, he has long set himself apart from the dogma of conventional conservatism.

“The [Republican] party is coming dangerously close to being portrayed as [though] all we want is little government and big prisons,” he said in 1994.

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He added, in typical Kemp-speak: “If conservatives believe that government can cause problems by incentivizing the wrong thing, why don’t they believe that government can reverse its policies and encourage productive human behavior . . . [such as] families and work and saving? We are great as conservatives saying how bad government is. Why can’t government do the right thing?”

He has been single-minded and passionate in pushing homeownership for the poor--despite what critics say are impracticalities.

“He gets an idea in his head and doesn’t want to be bothered with information or the facts about whether it will work,” said a senior U.S. official who worked for Kemp in the Bush administration.

Vic Gold, a Washington writer, knows the travails of vice presidential candidates. He worked for Spiro T. Agnew, elected in 1968 with Richard Nixon, and for Bush.

The candidate, he said, is being asked each day whether he agrees with the latest pronouncements from the top of the ticket.

Bush, as vice president and president, Gold said, knew that “no president needs a vice president to be looking over his shoulder.”

“For Jack Kemp, it’s impossible,” Gold said. “The guy can’t restrain himself.”

Times staff writers Ronald Brownstein in San Diego, Robin Wright in Washington, Greg Krikorian in Los Angeles and researcher Maloy Moore in San Diego contributed to this story.

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Longtime Political Force

Background on possible vice presidential pick Jack Kemp:

KEMP’S RESUME

AGE: 61 (born in Los Angeles on July 13, 1935)

EDUCATION: Graduate of Fairfax High School and Occidental College (physical education degree).

ATHLETIC CAREER: Cut by six teams over three years before playing quarterback for the San Diego Chargers in the new American Football League in 1960. Traded to Buffalo Bills in 1962, led team to two AFL titles. Retired in 1970.

POLITICAL CAREER: Elected to Buffalo-area House seat in 1970, gave it up for failed run for president in 1988. In Congress, emerged as leading advocate of supply-side economics. Secretary of housing and urban development in Bush administration. Co-founder of Enpower America, a conservative policy group.

PROS

* Nationally established figure with strong following in GOP

* Passionate advocate for type of sweeping tax cut Dole has embraced

* Thoroughly opposed to abortion, has generally moderate record on social issues that could attract independents

CONS

* Often undisciplined orator with tendency toward lengthy digressions

* Previous presidential run was unimpressive; must demonstrate commitment to rigors of national campaign

* Opposition to Proposition 187, California’s anti-immigrant initiative, still rankles core GOP constituency here