“The only time I ever saw Jack really get angry was not sitting in his office. It was when we were in Russia. We were in Moscow. We were in a meeting with this guy who was the head of the Gosplan, and he was an old-style Soviet. And through the interpreter he was spouting a lot of propaganda. At one point where he ended up coming close to comparing Ronald Reagan to Adolf Hitler, at that point I thought Jack was going to get up and punch him.”

“Jack Kemp was pretty much what I came into politics to be about, and more than anybody I ever met he exemplified that idea of what I thought the Republican Party should be. Outreach, making it a true national party.”

“When Jack used to introduce me as his speechwriter, I used to say “Well, I write them; he doesn’t very often deliver them,” because Jack was ebullient and full of ideas, and a little undisciplined, and so sometimes we would spend days working on a speech and going back and forth with drafts, and he would critique what you had done and tell you he wanted to do this differently or that differently, so you’d work hard…”

“I don’t know how much I influenced Jack. I think Jack influenced me. He strengthened the idea you could be idea-oriented, he strengthened the idea you could be inclusive, he got me much more intrigued with inner-city problems and how we were going to fix these and how we would take responsibility for them, and he convinced me that you had to be permanently on offense on ideas in a way that was much more aggressive than I probably would have been if I never met Kemp.”

“It was Jack competing, Jack pushing, pushing to win and pushing to achieve….”

“I said, ‘Jack, how’s it going?’ He said, ‘You know, Paul, I really like your perspicacity.’ Now, I didn’t know whether to punch him or thank him. But he smiled, so I figured it was good.”

“I had a chance of working for Jack for a couple of good years as his staff sort-of economics policy person at Empower America, his think tank. I traveled the country with him. I was drawn to politics by Jack Kemp. My own goal in life was to go on to grad school and study economics and work in the field of economics…I just wanted to learn from what I thought was the best economic mind in the conservative movement at the time, in the early nineties. What I guess I didn’t expect was how he would draw me so much into public service as a vocation that I ended up going into politics myself, basically as a result of the mentorship that he gave me and the example he set.”

“I got involved with Jack because I wanted the Reagan Revolution to continue. I knew in my early twenties, coinciding with the Reagan Revolution, I was working in the U.S. Senate and I saw what Bush and the people around Bush were doing to the Reagan Revolution.”

“So the first time I met him was at, I think, a cocktail party in Vail given by Rod Slifer and Beth. I don’t know if those names mean anything to you. Rod at the time wasn’t, but became the mayor of Vail for several terms. We immediately hit it off, partly because he knew my background and I knew his, so it wasn’t we were total strangers in that sense.”

“I had met Jack in the 1970 campaign, which was his first campaign for Congress. I was involved, as was another person on this panel, in the Buckley for Senate campaign in New York, and the intersection of Youth for Kemp in Buffalo and Youth for Buckley throughout the state brought us together for one time.”