“Reagan knew that Jack would be purer than him, right? Because Reagan was governor, he knew how to do that stuff and would always say to Jack, ‘Keep pushing me. Keep pushing me. We need this.’ But my sense is it was a pretty good relationship until ’82…”

“I guess we went to a football banquet or something like that, and we met Jack then and got to know him very well. Herb and I took him to the 1964 convention in San Francisco, where he was exposed to Goldwater, which had a lasting influence on him. And from then on we were good, close friends.”

“A statesman who could have been President. He was one of those remarkable men who did so many different things extremely well.”

“My first day on the job as press secretary, Jack was on the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and on all three networks. My mom called me up and she said, ‘You are really, really doing a good job.’ [laughter] I’ve said ever since then, the many decades since then, that the easiest job in the world was to be Jack Kemp’s press secretary.”

“I was the Congressional press secretary during the campaign. I come to the Kemp camp from a little bit of a different outlook. I was a big time lefty, I worked for CBS and then became a convert, I became a Kemp Republican and a very enthusiastic one.”

“I worked for Jack in his Buffalo congressional office from 1974 until December of 1988, when he closed the office door for good. I was his executive assistant.”

“John and I …would take turns traveling with him out on different trips. We had a list—I don’t know if you remember this—on the back of the door of the things we didn’t want him to say anymore, Moses, Maimonides, and things that we just knew were dear to him, but we could see in these little forums that we’d be in, that the eyes are glazing over and people don’t know what he’s talking about.”

“I was the third one who had this type of role, sort of this Jack of all trades, called “Aide to Kemp,” so I started in December of 1978, I believe, and stayed through ’81, was asked to interview at the White House and got a job at the White House day one in the Reagan Administration. So I went from intern, to staff, to friend of the family.”

“Jack invited me to innumerable Super Bowls. He always had a right to bring 30 friends or something like that. And bring his biggest financial contributors and me, for the price of a talk to the group. It was a ball of fun, and my kids got to go and we all have very happy memories about them in city after city. The most important thing for me is Jack was the agent of completing my intellectual turn on economics.”

“I was with Jack for four and a half years, ended up being special assistant, and Sharon and I were trying to figure it out yesterday, but in October of ’84, Jack and I travelled to about 35 or 40 cities in the month of October. He was number three on the campaign circuit for speakers, so we did a lot of travelling.”