Risks Seen in Choice : Kemp: Man in Motion Is Full of Ideas

WASHINGTON — If you look through the photographs of nearly 20 years in public life, it will become clear that some things about Jack Kemp have changed.

The face of the former San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills quarterback has taken on a few lines and a little weight. The gold-rimmed glasses are more often in sight. The hair now has a frosty tinge. But across two decades, the photographs reveal one constant: the camera seldom catches Jack Kemp’s mouth shut.

Jack Kemp, the New York congressman and George Bush’s choice to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is the closest thing to perpetual motion in American politics today. A decade ago, he helped spark a movement that propelled Ronald Reagan from the rightward edge of American politics to the center of national power. Today, when many veterans of that movement fear that conservatism has run low on energy and short of fresh ideas, Kemp seems to be an inexhaustible font of both.

And yet, says Kemp’s friend and adviser Ed Rollins, the former White House political director, Bush’s choice of Kemp is “a risk . . . a roll of the dice on both of their parts.”

For Bush, the risk is that Kemp, the former quarterback, will prove unable to subordinate his own political ambitions and play a supporting role on someone else’s team.

For Kemp, the risk is even more stark. Taking over a near-moribund department that faces seemingly intractable problems with no assurance of increased money, he is being called upon to do something he never has had to do before--try to make his ideas work in the real world. The man who loves theories is about to be tested in practice.

Football Ambition

Born 53 years ago as the third son to the owner of a small trucking company, Kemp set his heart on football early and studied physical education at Occidental College. In 1959, he became the Chargers’ starting quarterback.

Eleven years, a dozen concussions, two broken ankles, a crushed finger and a stint with the Buffalo Bills later, Kemp, by then married and the father of four, took his game to Congress, there to begin his political education and his theorizing.

The ideas are many and varied. At home, he touted “supply-side” economics long before it started to be called “Reaganomics.” He has pushed for the United States to return to a gold standard and campaigned for “a tax code someday so simple you’ll be able to fill out your taxes on a post card.”

Suspicious of Soviets

On foreign policy issues, Kemp has been deeply and consistently suspicious of the Soviet Union, a fervent backer of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and an ardent believer in free trade. During the presidential race, he campaigned against the intermediate nuclear forces treaty, which Bush--and Reagan--proclaim as one of the great accomplishments of the postwar era, and he accused Bush of waffling in support of SDI.

All of these are mere parts of what Kemp unabashedly calls his “vision of America,” a place where the free enterprise system, unleashed from the bonds of government control, can cure any ill, from the threat of ballistic missile attack to burned-out slums.

He believes that the policies of conservative, free-enterprise opportunity can prevail in the “war on poverty” that the policy-makers of liberal democracy--from Lyndon B. Johnson to former House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr.--waged but did not win.

‘Grand New Party’

And in the process, he insists, the Republican Party can transform itself from the Grand Old Party of mostly white, mostly Protestant, mostly affluent Anglo-Saxon middle America into a “Grand New Party . . . a great engine of emancipation, liberation, freedom, hope and equal opportunity and upward mobility; a party first of people, not of power.”

Until now, however, Kemp has only had to propose such things; others have been left to try to make them work. He has been able to advocate huge tax cuts--arguing that they would generate enough economic growth to pay for themselves--without having to find solutions for the huge budget deficits that resulted when the growth fell short. He has been able to support such ideas as urban “enterprise zones” and sales of public housing to tenants without worrying about the possible practical side effects.

“It’s a new thing for Jack, to be an executive . . . to have to sell the ideas, to see what will work,” said his former campaign manager, Charles Black.

Shows No Doubts

But if Kemp has any doubts about his abilities for the job, he was characteristically not showing them Monday.

“It wouldn’t be Jack Kemp,” he said, “if I didn’t tell you that I don’t think there’s a problem out there that can’t be solved.”