Pigskin Nation by Jesse Berrett

Author:Jesse Berrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252050374
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Brochure from Jack Kemp’s first campaign for Congress, 1970. (Library of Congress)

Kemp’s people took advantage of the break to soft-pedal his athletic background even while pointing out just how many famous people knew him because of that background. Photographs showed him smiling with Ford, Nixon (“accessibility to the President and Key Administration members” would amass pork for the district), the postmaster general, and NFL Players’ Association head John Mackey. The Republican National Committee profile added shots with Klein, Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch, and Ronald Reagan. The “confident, determined leadership” he’d learned on the field, and that he’d been celebrating in print for nearly a decade, had taught Kemp perseverance. But he was moving on. “I’m not running as a football player,” he told a college newspaper. “I would hardly run after having two lousy seasons. I would have run in 1966.” His talk of small government and opportunity, and his comfort with the powerful, worked well on suburbanites, businessmen, and old-line Republicans, less so in the district’s working-class outposts. “Football is what helps me with these people,” he whispered before one awkward meeting, heavy on game anecdotes, with a group of machinists.37

On Election Day, Kemp won 52 percent of the vote, a margin of only six thousand, his closest call ever. “I’m very grateful to football,” he rejoiced, “but this is something I’ve been dreaming about for a long time.” Given the narrowness of his victory, and with political prognosticators forecasting that the wave of eighteen-year-olds eligible to vote in 1972 (as many as 54,000) could swamp him, the powers that be looked out for his future. Redistricting early that year specifically targeted to his needs moved him to a district that had not elected a Democrat since 1937, cutting out most black and Polish voters and freeing Kemp to appeal to his primarily suburban constituency, among whom he pulled down more than 70 percent of the vote against what a local paper mocked as “a string of obscure, subservient stiffs” in every one of the next seven elections. (His margin in 1972 was the largest of any Republican in New York.) His identity as a football player had not been important in the 1970 campaign and clearly was not sufficient to explain his victory—his opponent much more effectively damned Kemp as a Nixon yes-man, and Kemp built his appeal around his usual soaring celebrations of the American idea.38

“He’s really come a long way from passing footballs to passing legislation,” mused a teammate invited to his swearing-in. Kemp later admitted that “I was always a little defensive, self-conscious about being a pro football player among 400 lawyers.” His earliest speeches reflected this self-consciousness: he told the American Electroplaters’ Society that he wished they had outfitted him with a metal uniform before seguing into his main topic, waste disposal, with the boast that “I have been dumped more times than anyone in this room.” Yet a resentful senior colleague called him unquestionably “the big star of the freshman class.

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