Journalist author to discuss latest political biography
Published 8:46 am Saturday, October 24, 2015
Morton Kondracke will visit Eagle Harbor Book Company at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 25 to discuss his latest book, written with Fred Barnes, “Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America.”
Kondracke served as the executive editor and columnist for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call and was the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and a senior editor of The New Republic. He was a regular commentator on the Fox News Channel, a panelist on “The McLaughlin Group,” a cohost of The Beltway Boys and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal as well. His previous book “Saving Milly” was a New York Times bestseller.
The late 1970s were miserable for many in 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 1980s, it all turned around: “Stagflation” ended and nearly two decades of prosperity ensued. The Soviet Union retreated, then collapsed. America again believed in itself.
Ronald Reagan’s policies sparked this American renaissance, but his leadership was only part of the story. The economic theory that underpinned America’s success, argues the author, 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 illuminated in this first-ever biography, which also has lessons for the politics of today. Kemp was the congressional champion of supply-side economics, the idea that lowering taxes would foster growth. Even today, almost no one advocates a return to a top income tax rate of 70 percent.
Drawing on never-published papers and more than 100 Kemp Oral History Project interviews the authors trace Kemp’s life, from his childhood through his football career to his influential years as a congressman and cabinet secretary. As the American Dream seems to be waning again and polarized politics stifles Washington, Kemp is a model for what politics ought to be. The nation, the authors posit, is in desperate need of another Kemp.
Eagle Harbor Book Company is located at 157 Winslow Way East.
