When Jack Kemp ran for president, in 1988, I was the New York Times reporter assigned to cover his campaign. I traveled with him, talked with him, joked and jousted with him literally from New Hampshire to Tegucigalpa.
Years later, after 9/11, he was one of a small group of prominent individuals who recruited me to set up what became the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was our first chairman. In recent years, he’s been our chairman emeritus and, I am sorry to say, I have not seen so much of him.
During his extraordinary life, Jack was a great athlete, as well as a thinker and a politician whose views and insights were consequential for social policy, economic policy, and he impressed on me the founding principals of FDD: that terrorism is always wrong, that the ideologies driving terrorism must be fought in a war of ideas, that free nations have a right to defend themselves and an obligation to defend one another, and that we should be not only against terrorism but also in favor of freedom and democracy.
He will be greatly missed.