Jack Kemp

Jack Kemp is Founder and Chairman of Kemp Partners, a strategic consulting firm which seeks to provide clients with strategic counsel, relationship development, and marketing advice in helping them accomplish business and policy objectives.

Jack Kemp has also been honorary co-chairman of the Free Enterprise Fund since its inception in January 2005.

From January 1993 until July 2004 Jack Kemp was co-director of Empower America, a Washington, D.C.-based public policy and advocacy organization he co-founded with William Bennett and Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.

In September 2001, Jack Kemp helped form a new non-partisan, non-profit think tank, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, to counter the terrorist propaganda efforts, and he has been writing a weekly syndicated column for the Copley News Service nationwide since February of 2000.

Jack Kemp received the Republican Party’s nomination for Vice President in August of 1996 and since then has campaigned nationally for reform of taxation, Social Security and education.

In 1995, Jack Kemp served as chairman of the National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform, which promoted major reform and simplification on our tax code in order to unleash the American entrepreneurial spirit, increase economic growth and expand access to capital for all people.

Prior to founding Empower America, Jack Kemp served for four years as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Jack Kemp was the author of the Enterprise Zones legislation to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation in urban America and continues to advocate the expansion of home ownership among the poor through resident management and ownership of public and subsidized housing.

Before his appointment to the Cabinet, Jack Kemp represented the Buffalo area and western New York for 18 years in the United States House of Representatives from 1971-1989. He served for seven years in the Republican Leadership as Chairman of the House Republican Conference.

Before his election to Congress in 1970, Jack Kemp played 13 years as a professional football quarterback. He was captain of the San Diego Chargers from 1960-1962. He was also the captain of the Buffalo Bills, the team he quarterbacked to the American Football League Championship in 1964 and 1965, when he was named the league’s most valuable player. He co-founded the American Football League Players Association and was five times elected president of that Association. In 2005 Jack Kemp was recognized by Sporting News as one of the Top 50 Best All Time Quarterbacks.

Jack Kemp was born and raised in Los Angeles and educated in the LA public schools. Jack Kemp married Joanne Main of Fillmore, CA, also a graduates of Occidental College. They have four children (Jeffrey, Jennifer, Judith and Jimmy) and fifteen grandchildren. Jack Kemp passed away in May 2009, at the age of 73.