[4][8] Kemp grew up in the heavily Jewish Wilshire district of West Los Angeles,[5][9] but his tight-knit middle-class family attended the Church of Christ, Scientist.

[4][5] In his youth, sports consumed Kemp, who once chose the forward pass as the subject of a school essay on important inventions, although his mother attempted to broaden his horizons with piano lessons and trips to the Hollywood Bowl.

[3] After graduating from high school in 1953,[12] he attended Occidental College, a founding member of the NCAA Division III Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.

[5] At 5 feet 10 inches (178 cm) and 175 pounds (79 kg), he considered himself too small to play for the USC Trojans or UCLA Bruins, the major Southern California college football programs.

[14] At Occidental, Kemp was a record-setting javelin hurler and played several positions on the football team: quarterback, defensive back, place kicker, and punter.

[38] In the AFL championship game, he led the team to field goals on its first two possessions, but after the Houston Oilers posted a touchdown in the second quarter for a 7–6 lead, the Chargers never recovered.

[44] Buffalo Bills coach Lou Saban noticed that Kemp was available and claimed him for a $100 waiver fee on September 25, 1962,[45] in what sportswriter Randy Schultz has called one of the biggest bargains in professional football history.

[52] Kemp was the first and only Professional Football player to pass for three touchdowns in the first quarter of a season-opening game, against the Kansas City Chiefs in 1964, until the record was tied but not broken, 47 years later in 2011 by Aaron Rodgers.

[60] Kemp's role in leading the Bills to a repeat championship without Gilchrist and with star receiver Elbert Dubenion playing only three games earned him a share of the AFL MVP awards that he split with former Charger teammate, Paul Lowe.

[5] Kemp was a voracious reader, and his political beliefs were founded in early readings of Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, Ayn Rand's novels such as The Fountainhead, and Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty.

[7] Upon his election to the Congress in a class of sixty-two freshmen, he was one of six newcomers—along with Ronald Dellums, Bella Abzug, Louise Day Hicks, Robert Drinan, and Pete du Pont—discussed in Time.

[4] Kemp considered running for the U.S. Senate in 1980 and Hugh Sidey mentioned him as a contender to unseat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election[86] and was a front runner for the vice presidency at the 1980 Republican National Convention,[5][100] where he received 43 votes from conservative detractors of George H. W. Bush.

[114] Kemp notes that Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker's success at stemming inflation and the favorable regulatory environment were also major factors.

[4] Although he had an eclectic mix of supporters, Kemp's campaign began borrowing against anticipated Federal matching funds because it had quickly spent itself into the red,[4] which may have been due to the use of expensive direct mail fundraising techniques.

[96] HOPE was first proposed to White House chief of staff John Sununu in June 1989 to create enterprise zones, increase subsidies for low-income renters, expand social services for the homeless and elderly, and enact tax changes to help first-time home buyers.

[166][167] Bush's contribution to the urban agenda had been volunteerism through his "Points of Light" theme,[168] and Kemp received stronger support for his ideas from presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

[177] A free market Kemp initiative to allow homeowners to subdivide their houses for the purpose of creating rental units without inordinate bureaucracy did not get executed under the Clinton administration, however.

[96] At one point, Kemp told James Baker, White House Chief of Staff, that Bush's best chance to win reelection was to dump his economic advisors in dramatic fashion.

[8] After stepping down from his $189,000 Secretary of Housing and Urban Development job, Kemp personally earned $6.9 million in the next three years, primarily for speaking on behalf of local Republican candidates.

[235] At the 1984 Republican National Convention, Kemp, along with allies such as Gingrich and Lott, added a plank to the party platform that put President Reagan on record as ruling out tax increases.

[264] The debate topics ranged broadly from the usual such as abortion and foreign policy to the unusual such as an incident preceding the then-current baseball playoffs, in which Roberto Alomar, the Baltimore Orioles' second baseman, cursed and spat on an umpire.

[268] In 1993, Kemp, Bennett, Kirkpatrick and financial backer Theodore Forstmann co-founded the free market advocacy group Empower America,[89][269] which later merged with Citizens for a Sound Economy to form Freedom Works.

Empower America represented the populist wing of the party: while avoiding divisive issues such as abortion and gay rights, it promoted free markets and growth over balancing the budget and cutting the deficit.

[270][271] He resigned as co-chairman of Freedom Works in March 2005 after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) questioned his ties to Samir Vincent, a Northern Virginia oil trader implicated in the U.N. Oil-for-food scandal who pleaded guilty to four criminal charges, including illegally acting as an unregistered lobbyist of the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein.

[290] In the late 1990s, Kemp also was a vocal advocate for free market reform in Africa, arguing that the continent had great economic growth potential if it could shed autocratic and statist governmental policies.

"[293] Kemp was among the prominent leaders who pledged to raise money in 2005 for Scooter Libby's defense when he was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice in a case regarding the release of Central Intelligence Agency information.

[301] Kemp prepared an open letter to Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and other conservative talk show hosts on McCain's behalf to quell their dissatisfactions.

[244] As a progressive voter, he had civil rights leaders such as Benjamin Hooks, Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King and conservative black intellectuals like Glenn C. Loury and Robert L. Woodson as supporters and friends.

[326] During the Reagan presidency, when Kemp was able to effect tax cutting, a leading United States Senate tax-cutting proponent was Democrat Bill Bradley, a former basketball star.

Kemp didn't believe in limits to growth,[333] a blind spot shared by many politicians of his era and which prompted him to dismiss the 1991 Report of the United Nations Population Fund as "nonsense".