Jack kemp biography book review
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How Jack Kemp changed America (book review)
Jack Kemp, left, vice presidential running mate of GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole, greets Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari during the Republican National Convention on Aug. 13, , in San Diego.
(AP file photo)
JACK KEMP: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America; by Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes; Sentinel Books; ; pages.
A review by Herbert W. Stupp
Excluding those who were elected President, Jack F. Kemp was probably "the most important politician of the 20th Century." So write Mort Kondracke and Fred Barnes in this readable, well-researched and uplifting biography.
Kemp, a future football star, congressman and cabinet secretary, was raised in California, his father driving trucks and then creating a delivery and messenger service, while his mother worked as an administrator and social worker in the L.A. school system. At age 5, young Jack determined that he would become a professiona
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Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America
I will start off by sharing that I’m not a big fan of political biographies because biographers have a compulsion to put their subject matter in context — to identify who the successor to their mantle is and project a great deal of thinking to help make their writing more relevant to the modern reader. inom think that these efforts often detract from the actual story — it’s almost as if the writer fryst vatten so busy trying to show you where you’re going that you don’t spend enough time learning about how you got there.
For my part, this was a fascinating, if largely one-sided, look at a period of political history that wasn’t really c
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Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America
The late s were miserable for America. It was the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, a time of high unemployment, ruinous inflation, gasoline lines, Communist advances, and bottomed-out U.S. morale. In the s, it all turned around: "stagflation" ended and nearly two decades of prosperity ensued. The Soviet Union retreated, then collapsed. America again believed in itself. And around the world, democratic capitalism was deemed "the end of history."
Ronald Reagan’s policies sparked the American renaissance, but the Gipper’s leadership is only part of the story. The economic theory that underpinned America’s success was pioneered by a star professional quarterback turned self-taught intellectual and "bleeding-heart conservative": Jack Kemp.
Kemp’s role in a pivotal period in American history is at last illuminated in this first-ever biography, which also has l