Kemp Touts Reconciliation to Students

In a homecoming address at his high school alma mater, GOP vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp mixed stories of his football days as a member of Fairfax High’s class of 1953 with a vision of racial harmony in the 21st century.

“Racial, ethnic and religious reconciliation are the single most important goals in America here on the eve of the new millennium,” Kemp told a packed auditorium of attentive students and teachers Tuesday morning. “I’d sacrifice the tax cuts and all of the political policy ideas, if we could heal the wounds and bring people together.”

Deviating from a partisan and political script, Kemp took the opportunity to urge the students to enter the adult world with the zeal to spread democracy and civility throughout their lives.

Staring out from a stage festooned with red, white and blue bunting and oversized photographs of himself as a high school quarterback, Kemp ridiculed the notion that the nation is like a game of musical chairs where only a few people have the right to sit in comfort.

“That’s not America,” he thundered. “We need a country in which we’re building more chairs, a bigger table, where there are more jobs, more access to credit and capital and education, where there is opportunity for any man, any woman, any boy, any girl to be dreaming big dreams and doing big things.”

Kemp recalled that when he was a student at Fairfax, his big dream was to one day play professional football. Turning from side to side as he addressed cheerleaders to his right and football players on his left, Kemp said that he fumbled a punt in one game against Los Angeles High that led to his team’s losing the game.

“No one would speak to me for weeks,” he said, drawing a big laugh from the audience.

But back in the old days, the high school was a different place, he noted. Opened in 1924, Fairfax was one of the anchors of the solidly middle-class and Jewish Westside community.

“I was a minority at Fairfax in the 1950s,” Kemp said. “This whole school and all of West Los Angeles was predominantly Jewish. As a Gentile and a Christian, I was treated with respect and dignity.”

Today, he said, the 2,300-member student body is learning the same lessons of tolerance and cooperation--albeit in more diverse ways--because of the variety of ethnicities and religions it includes. According to school officials, 47% of the students are Latino, 21% black, 18% white--including a large Russian Jewish population--and 11% Asian.

In his eagerness to talk to the students, Kemp began regaling the audience with football stories even before he was formally introduced by Student Body Vice President Nadia McPherson.

First, he tossed a football in a wobbly spiral pass to Keith Thomas, a beefy football player who jumped from the stage and ran up the auditorium aisle. Then he returned to the microphone and launched into his only political message at the event.

“This is the size of the tax cut you’ll get if Bob Dole and Jack Kemp are elected,” Kemp said, holding up a football jersey--unaware that it bore the numeral 60, which he wore in high school, rather than the 15 he carried as a quarterback at Occidental College and during his professional career.