Trustee for Tomorrow
Fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen: I have the honor to present to you at this time the brilliant and distinguished Senator from New York. As I need hardly tell you, he has a 94% rating from the Americans for Democratic Action and a real, down-the-line liberal voting record. He wows the minorities at the polls--and the majority as well. Not to mention his lovely wife and all those bright kids. Education? Physical fitness? Culture? Why, the Senator almost invented them. As for politics, hardly a day goes by without his making a speech, offering an amendment, getting his picture in the papers, jetting up to Manhattan or down to Latin America. Senator, take a bow . . .
Senator? Hey, what's that little bald guy standing up for? Where is Bobby Kennedy, anyway?
Well, Bobby was off solving Africa's problems. But if anyone had in fact delivered such an introduction in Washington last week, it would have applied with equal accuracy to a non-hirsute, non-Harvard winner named Jacob Koppel Javits, 62, senior Senator from New York, lifelong Republican and, like Bobby Kennedy, a loner athirst for bigger things.
An irrepressibly energetic man whose normal gait is a gallop, Javits has been a Senator for nearly ten years. Thus, though that exalted station might once have seemed impossibly remote for a poor boy born in what Javits fondly describes as "the urban counterpart to a log cabin--a janitor's flat in a tenement," its ambit today seems too confining for his vaulting talents and ambitions. Having never previously stood still in any one place for so long, Javits is pawing the track and sniffing the air in quest of a higher prize--a place on his party's 1968 presidential ticket.
Preposterous? Jack Javits for President? Or Vice President? A slum-born Jew from the Lower East Side of New York? A luncheon companion and confidant of the G.O.P.'s Eastern "kingmakers" and Wall Street internationalists? A mugwump who backed F.D.R. in 1940 and bucked Barry Goldwater in 1964? An urban apostate who out-Democrats most Democrats? ("If you get any more forward than you are," Hubert Humphrey once kidded him, "you'll be ahead of the Democratic Party.") To the brand of Republican who keeps the conservative faith between elections with readings from Robert Taft and denunciations of Lyndon Johnson, the idea is anathema.
"To start with," sniffed a Midwestern Republican, "he's from New York. Add to that his religion and his voting record, and it just wouldn't go down too well with a lot of people out here." Maybe Javits would offer the nation a new face for 1968, snorted arch-Conservative William F. Buckley Jr.--but "so would Mario Savio." Exclaims a Senate colleague: "Preposterous!"
The Compleat Senator. Audacious, perhaps. But preposterous? Not really. While Javits' faith might once have barred him even from fleeting consideration, the old religious and racial stigmata of U.S. politics were pretty well dissolved by John F. Kennedy's victory in 1960. In 1964, few voters were concerned that the G.O.P. presidential candidate was half-Jewish, his running mate a Catholic. "There is no office now closed to a Jew, including the presidency," says Javits, and he is convinced that a member of his faith will be a national candidate within the next decade. "It would be nice," he muses, "to be the fellow it happened to."
Some of Javits' friends consider him dotty even to try. He will be 64 at the next convention, close to the acceptable age limit even for a Vice President. One of the greatest votegetters in New York State's history, he is a shoo-in for a third six-year Senate term in 1968. Though a member of the minority party and something of a maverick, whose abrasiveness and hustle have always barred him from the Senate's cozy inner establishment, he has achieved rare respect and stature by force of intellect, diligence and integrity.
The compleat Senator, Javits never forgets his role. He has grown so used to the limelight that the public figure and the private man have fused and become virtually indistinguishable; his handsome wife Marion complains, only half in jest, that even at home he will not answer a question without clearing his throat and buttoning his coat. When approached by a streetwalker late one night in Manhattan, the Senator introduced himself, shook her hand and proceeded to solicit her vote. He loves his eminence and supports it with a sober single-mindedness matched by few, if any, of his colleagues.
Yet Javits is willing to risk all he has won for what he wryly refers to as "my vice-presidential foray." He makes no secret of coveting the nomination. "Hi, Mr. Vice President," cracked Missouri's Democratic Senator Stuart Symington when the two met aboard the Senate subway the other day. "Hi, yourself," Javits grinned, slightly embarrassed but mightily pleased. As an enthusiastic and frequent student of form at New York's Aqueduct Race Track, he knows that he belongs in the long-shot category. He also knows that handicapping politicians is, if possible, a less precise science than handicapping Thoroughbreds.
Mid-Channel Course. Javits argues convincingly that in pursuing the nomination his transcendent interest is not his personal future but that of the G.O.P. "It is my burning desire," he says, "to bring the Republican Party to modern terms." Regardless of his own fortunes at the G.O.P. convention, he sees the very fact of his candidacy as the most logical and effective platform to achieve that end.
"What the hell," he notes, "even Harold Stassen had a bigger voice than I did simply because he was a candidate. You have to be a candidate to be heard." He adds: "I'll be any kind of candidate for anything to carry this cause--or I'll be no candidate, if that's the best way to get the Republican Party back into the mainstream of American life."
That mainstream, in Javits' view, weaves between the Scylla of the right, with "those who ignore international realities and look back with nostalgia to the economic jungle of the 19th century," and to the left, the Charybdis of "increasing control over the nation's economic and social life." He feels it is the responsibility of Republican liberals to chart a mid-channel course, thus offering the voter a choice "between a Democratic Party which instinctively leans on the Government to solve any problem, and a Republican Party which instinctively seeks ways to bring the resources of the business community into collaboration with the powers of the Government in a mixed economy."
A Matter of Priorities. The G.O.P., says Javits, must quit being embarrassed over its ties with business. "There is nothing wicked about being the 'party of business,' " he wrote in Order of Battie: A Republican's Call to Reason, a book he is now updating for distribution to some 20,000 key politicians and editors as a kind of campaign manifesto. "And if 'business' is understood as being something infinitely more than a collection of managers, including also investors, workers, consumers and farmers --all of whom draw sustenance from the function of business--there is nothing narrow-minded about it. 'Business,' properly understood, is so central to every aspect of our civilization that Republicans should proudly announce that they are indeed 'the party of business.' "
His quarrel with the Republican right wing is a matter of priorities as well as ideals. Javits is convinced that the conservatives' fealty to states' rights "all too often means in practice denouncing the Federal Government for trying to do too much--while in effect sustaining the right of the states to do nothing at all." Yet, he argues, "there is much to be done that, in the terms of Lincoln's principle of government, the people cannot do for themselves and that a people's government must lead in undertaking."
Javits is a compulsive leader and ini tiator. Last week, breaking a longstanding rule of neutrality in primary contests, he sent a telegram of support to moderate Republican William J. Casey in his contest for New York's Nassau County congressional nomination against Goldwaterite Steven B. Derounian. "I can't even vote for Casey," said the Senator. "But when Goldwater said Casey was a phoney, I felt I had to make a statement."
His statement is a pretty fair summation of what he believes is at stake in his own bid for national office. "The issue involved is of critical importance," he said, "for the struggle within the Republican Party is between a type of conservatism which can disable the party from being really national and a progressive viewpoint which can make the party eligible for a national mandate."
By Javits' lights, California's G.O.P. Gubernatorial Candidate Ronald Reagan comes close to representing that kind of debilitating conservatism, but he is ready and willing to be convinced otherwise. When Reagan visited Washington last week, Javits made a point of meeting him, addressing him as "Ron" and beaming when the actor reciprocated with the compliment, "Senator, I met your lovely wife."
Crumbs into Cakes. Of course, there may be reason to wonder why a politician with any thought for his future would even want a place on the next G.O.P. national ticket. To be sure, Viet Nam and a skittish economy may considerably erode Lyndon Johnson's strength by 1968, and there are politicians who believe that the President's personal unpopularity could lead to his defeat. To Javits, whether Johnson is beatable or not is irrelevant. As he sees it, the G.O.P. is obliged to put up a strong fight if it is to lay a base for 1972 and, more important, if it is to retain its vigor as a major party.
Though the nomination may thus be a prize of dubious worth, Javits pursues it with no less vigor for that reason. After all, throughout his career the G.O.P. has handed him crumbs, and he has invariably turned them into seven-layer cakes.
When the party first nominated him for Congress in 1946, it was in a West Side Democratic stronghold that had not elected a Republican since 1920. When the party nominated him for state attorney general in 1954, he was given scant chance against a Democrat whose name had special magic in New York --Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. He was the only Republican winner on the state ticket. When Javits sought the senatorial nomination in 1956, the party's conservatives did their best to block him. He finally got the nomination, after Millionaire John Hay Whitney issued an ultimatum: if the party rejected Javits, it could cross Whitney's gilt-edged name off its contributors' list. That time Javits had to run against another Democrat with a famous political name in New York, Robert F. Wagner Jr., and again he won.
Proudest Possession. Not too long ago, Jack Javits might have deemed himself fortunate indeed to have gotten even crumbs. Reared on the abrading edge of self-sufficiency, he was the second son of Morris Jawetz, a former Talmudic scholar in what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Ida Littman, daughter of a ne'er-do-well traveling salesman from Vienna who abandoned his family. Morris' proudest possession--about his only one--was his name; he traced its origin to a Biblical family of scribes that lived at Jabez (/ Chronicles 2: 55) near Jerusalem. He changed its spelling after arriving in the U.S. in 1890.
Unable to make good in the new world as a tailor, Morris worked as a janitor for three scrofulous tenements in Manhattan's teeming Jewish ghetto. His stipend: $33 a month and a free two-bedroom flat. He also served as a ward heeler, working under an Irish saloonkeeper who gave him money before every election to distribute (at $2 a head) to tenement dwellers who promised fealty to the Democratic ticket.
Red-Hot Socialist. Jack was born on May 18, 1904, as a recently installed wooden plaque on the grimy, six-story, red-brick building at 85 Stanton St. attests. (Beneath Javits' name someone has scrawled "Nigger Lover.") Until his bar mitzvah at 13, Jack slept in the same bed with his brother Ben, now 71. "Our relationship was that of father and son," says Ben, who tried to teach Jack all he knew; to the vast annoyance of Jack's wife, he is still trying. For a time, Ben was, in his words, "a red-hot Socialist" who railed on street corners against the system that was crushing his father. Today, as a well-to-do lawyer, he is closer to Goldwater in his economic philosophy, has written a number of books with titles like Make Everybody Rich and Be a Capitalist or Be Damned.
Long, Red Curls. Jack, a quiet, neat child with long, red curls, began working at eleven, helping his mother sell crockery from a pushcart. After graduating as senior class president from Manhattan's George Washington High School, he worked as a lithographic-supply salesman and a bill collector, attended New York University's law school at the same time, passed his bar exams in 1927. In that, year was born Javits & Javits, a firm specializing in bankruptcy and corporate reorganization, with Ben the inside man and Jack the eloquent trial lawyer. Jack, who set up his own firm when he entered politics, is now worth roughly $1,000,000, earns $30,-000 a year as Senator and another $35,000, after taxes, from his Park Avenue law office.
Vacationing at Murray Bay, Canada, in 1933, Jack met and married Marjorie Ringling, an adopted daughter of the circus Ringlings and an aspiring actress. Within three years, they were divorced. Says Javits: "I guess we were too young. She was a Catholic and I was a Jew, and that had something to do with it."
Fourth Reich. During World War II Jack served in the Army's chemical-warfare branch, was discharged as a lieutenant colonel in 1945. A Republican since joining Fiorello La Guardia's home club in 1932, he immediately got himself appointed research chief for the G.O.P.'s New York City mayoralty candidate, Jonah Goldstein, who was roundly whipped by Bill O'Dwyer. As a reward for his labors, the party offered Javits the nomination for Congress in the 21st District, an exceptionally HIerate, sophisticated--and Democratic--area which had attracted so many German-Jewish refugees from Hitler that part of it was nicknamed "the Fourth Reich." Espousing a resoundingly liberal line, Javits upset his closest competitor 46,897 to 40,652 in a three-way race.
Challenged in 1948 by Democrat Paul O'Dwyer, the mayor's brother, Javits flooded the district with pamphlets, a comic book that showed him disarming a deranged gunman and saving the neighborhood (pure fantasy), even a brochure in Armenian for the handful of voters who spoke the language. He won by a bare 1,873 votes. It was never quite as harrowing again. In 1950, his margin rose to 29,255, and in 1952 to 42,229.
Javits kept his constituents happy by faithfully representing their views. He voted against Taft-Hartley and the House Un-American Activities Committee, became an eloquent defender of the European Recovery Program. Though he sided with the G.O.P. about 62% of the time during his freshman term, he voted with the Democrats on most key issues. In the next Congress, his record of party regularity dipped to 27% .
First Since Coolidge. After his smashing 1952 victory, Javits decided that it was time to move up. He put himself forward for the 1953 mayoral race, was rudely slapped down by the G.O.P.
powers. But the next year, against F.D.R. Jr., he racked up the biggest overall vote (2,590,631) in the entire U.S. Beating Mayor Wagner for the Senate in 1956, Javits won by 458,774 votes, but lost New York City by 442,278. He never let that happen again.
Up for re-election in 1962, Javits was opposed by James B. Donovan, the Kennedy candidate who had made the headlines as chief negotiator of the deal by which Fidel Castro traded 9,700 Bay of Pigs prisoners for $53 million in drugs and foods. Javits won by 980,000 votes--again, he was the biggest winner anywhere in the U.S.--and became the first Republican since Calvin Coolidge to carry New York City.
Stakhanovite Squirrel. The Manhattan liberal and the Vermont Tory have almost nothing else in common. Nor is Javits exactly a spiritual heir of the late Senator whose office he now occupies. Suite 326 of the Old Senate Office Building used to be Robert A. Taft's lair, but its new appointments scarcely reflect the tastes of the man who was known as "Mr. Republican." Busts of John F. Kennedy and Albert Einstein adorn the current occupant's office. So does a Larry Rivers impressionistic landscape of Manhattan's Second Avenue, a scene so remote from the pastoral America of Taft that it might as well be a moonscape.
As a legislator, Javits resembles a Stakhanovite squirrel. He is a member of five committees and, at latest count, 19 subcommittees, and the chances are that he knows more about what is going on in each of them than any other member, including the chairman. Michigan's Romney refers to him as "the busiest man in the Senate," and the label fits. Much of his time goes into what he calls "our unseen work": the unheralded, rarely acknowledged chore of shepherding a bill through subcommittee, committee, and finally the full chamber.
Though no law bears his name, Javits' legal experience and debating skill have left their imprint on countless bills, including such landmark legislation as Medicare (he offered an amendment covering those without Social Security) and the 1965 Voting Rights Act (he and Bobby Kennedy got through an amendment that emancipated New York's Puerto Rican population by waiving literacy requirements in English for Spanish-speaking Americans who have attended U.S.-flag schools). Javits makes no obeisance to the titular authors of the laws he has helped to shape and enact. "I really pulled that one off," he says, or "I did an excellent thing setting that up."
In an institution where verbosity is a virtue, Javits is probably the greatest virtuoso of them all--at least since Hubert Humphrey departed. "He knows the facts on everything," says Marion--and he can summarize them in a few thousand choice words at a moment's notice. Back in 1961, Javits was orating on an immigration bill that he considered unjust when Rhode Island Democrat John Pastore tried to gain the floor. "Let me finish," pleaded Javits. Pastore looked up at the chamber's high ceiling, rolled his eyes dramatically and moaned: "The Senator never finishes."
When he isn't talking, Javits is thinking. He is one of the most prolific idea men in politics, with a range of interests and enthusiasms that would defy an indexer. He has sponsored a thriving private-enterprise plan for Latin American development (ADELA) and is trying to launch similar ventures for Greece and Turkey. He is chairman of the NATO Parliamentarian's Economic Committee and an oft-heard advocate of greater political and economic cooperation within the Alliance. He speaks regularly and perceptively on the problems of Germany and of Viet Nam. On the domestic scene, he is an authority on issues ranging from Medicare to middle-income housing, civil rights to civic beautification, the arts to the sciences. New Yorker Javits can even wax oracular about agriculture. "Ask him something about apple-growing," says New York State G.O.P. Treasurer Bill Pfeiffer, "and you would think he had been growing them all his life."
Empty Seat. When in Washington, Javits is up and about in time to reach the House gym soon after its early morning opening, spending 15 minutes in the pool or working out at paddleball or handball. If he can find a partner, he plays tennis, but he may soon run out of partners; in excellent trim (he weighs 175 Ibs., claims to be 5 ft. 10 in. tall, but appears to be at least an inch shorter than that), he is a tough, agile player who gives no quarter. Saunaed, showered and stretched, Javits slides into his dark beige Mustang convertible (license plate MBJ-1 for his wife) and zips off to the Senate, whose own gym does not open until 10. By that time, Javits has usually met several delegations, sat in on a committee hearing and dictated any number of letters to the pretty secretary who trots at his side through the Senate corridors.
From two to five times a week Javits commutes from Washington to New York. Last week, for example, he was in Manhattan for a cafe society Shakespeare Festival revel (see MODERN LIVING), flew down to the capital early the next morning. The Senator's heavy travel schedule is wearing and inconvenient, though it suits Marion, who refuses to live in Washington. After enduring the capital for a few months when he was a freshman Congressman, she fled back to Manhattan and has lived there ever since. "Washington," she said, "is a factory town."
Marion Ann Borris Javits, 21 years the Senator's junior, was born in a Jewish slum in Detroit, moved to The Bronx after her parents were divorced when she was ten. She graduated from high school with honors in speech, soon afterward decided "to try Hollywood for a minute." The minute lasted for a couple of years, but she never made it as an actress, and at 20 she returned to make the rounds of the New York producers while working at odd jobs "for carfare and stockings." One of the jobs took her to the research department of Jonah Goldstein's 1945 mayoral campaign, and there she met Jack Javits.
"We had three dates," she says, "but he seemed suspicious. He'd had bad experiences with, uh, ladies of the theater." After he was elected to Congress, Marion dropped him a note to congratulate him. He began dating her again, and they were married in 1947.
The Javitses have three children: Joy, now 17 and a senior at Dalton School, who after graduating plans to spend this summer with her father in his two-bedroom apartment at 4000 Massachusetts Avenue as an unsalaried "intern" for Rhode Island's Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell; Joshua, 16, a Riverdale Country School junior who will be going off to London for the summer with his mother; and Carla, 10, a precocious fifth-grader at Dalton.
Kooky Like a Fox. In political circles, particularly, Marion is regarded as the eccentric, flighty antithesis of her earnest husband. While Government interests her peripherally because it is her husband's life, her real concerns are art, literature and the theater. "She drives him crazy and his staff up the wall," says a Washington friend of the Senator's. "She is terribly disorganized. Her idea of whom he should see before going to Viet Nam was Actor Hugh O'Brian and Columnist Jimmy Breslin!" Withal, admits the friend, "she is a warm and lovable woman with deep feeling for Jack and their children."
To other acquaintances, Marion is kooky like a fox. A shrewd art spotter (and haggler), she has furnished their $150,000, twelve-room Park Avenue coop with a couple of Venards, a Man Ray sculpture, a Guardi, a Pol Bury kinetic, a Yaacov Agam (her newest and proudest acquisition), and some superlative samples of pop and op.*In the library of the Javitses' Park Avenue place there also hangs a striking, feline oil of Marion by Boris Chaliapin. The mouth is sensual and slightly parted, the eyes tigerish and burning bright. But why, the startled subject asked on seeing the finished portrait, why on earth the golden arrow through her head? "Normally," came Chaliapin's cryptic reply, "when you shoot someone with an arrow, he bleeds. With you, the arrow only changes to gold."
Escape. The Senator--as Marion always refers to him--bleeds only on those rare, agonizing occasions when he is caught without book, paper or audience. Even while accompanying Son Josh to a baseball game, Javits surreptitiously scans the briefcase in his lap. His hard-cover reading currently includes Winston Churchill's The Second World War and Andre Maurois' Disraeli --books that, for him, come close to escapism.
Javits' knowledgeable, purposive mien wins him the respect of many who abhor his philosophy--and generous support from those who share it. To raise funds for his 1962 campaign, 20 luncheons were held at New York's 21 Club, each for 24 persons. If the tab was high, the take was higher: $250,000 from the 480 guests. His financial backers are a wildly diverse group--thanks in part to Marion's standing in artistic-intellectual-entertainment circles. They have comprised a mint of Rockefellers, a socko of showbiz moguls from MCA's Jules Stein to the late Billy Rose, a tussle of tycoons that include Schenley's Lewis Rosenstiel and Seagram's Bronfman family, Macy's Jack Straus and Gimbel's Bernard Gimbel, Heinz Foods' H. J. Heinz II and Consolidated Foods' Nathan Cummings (see U.S. BUSINESS).
Teddy Rooseveltian. The Senator is repeatedly asked how a man of his liberalism can fit within the G.O.P. In conversation last week the question came up again, and Javits said: "My thinking is Lincolnian rather than Jeffersonian, Teddy Rooseveltian rather than Franklin D. Rooseveltian. Besides, I have a greater sense of advocacy of business than most Democrats."
To Javits, the battleground from now on will inevitably be in the big cities. Too often, he feels, the American view of politics is obscured by a gossamer veil of Jeffersonian romanticism carried over from a day when the idealized American was a frontier farmer.
"Those Republicans who are not willing to make a fight for the big cities," says Javits, "are in effect saying that they mean never to win a presidential election in modern times." As proof, he notes that Dwight Eisenhower carried 25 of the nation's 36 biggest cities in his 1956 landslide, Jack Kennedy took 22 in 1960--and Barry Goldwater a scant six in 1964. "Republicans can indeed win in the cities," Javits argues, "if they are forceful, energetic and imaginative enough to offer programs to tackle and solve the problems of the cities." John Lindsay proved as much in winning New York City's mayoral race --with tireless help from Javits.
Unwise Ardor. If Javits were indeed to win the G.O.P. vice-presidential nomination, what impact might he have? Conservatives, mostly south of the Ma-son-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi, argue that he would hurt the party. Actually, while he would no doubt hurt their feelings, it is hard to see how he could help but help. "His liberality bothers me," said Denver County G.O.P. Chairman John Wogan Jr., but he felt impelled to add: "Since the purpose is to win, we might have to take him." "Let's face it," said New Mexico's Republican Gubernatorial Candidate David Cargo. "Even in New Mexico, 70% of the population is now urban. Javits would add something important to the national ticket."
Javits' vote-getting talent in urban areas would be a big help in California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania--which among them carry a whopping 202 of the 270 votes needed for election.
George Romney evidently thinks so. As the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, with only Richard Nixon a serious rival, he has embraced Javits with a degree of ardor that some party pros consider unwise so early in the game. For, though Romney and Javits may look to many Midwestern Republicans like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Romney is well aware that he enjoys nowhere near as progressive a reputation as Javits does in the populous East. "Romney's got to get that Eastern liberal-Establishment to win," one of his aides admits candidly. "Javits is the key to that. Javits can bring in that vote."
Two-Year Mission. Much as he craves the chance, New York's senior Senator will not be seriously hurt if he never gets it. The important thing to him is to help the G.O.P.'s moderates and liberals hold their own for a few more years. By then, a whole crop of bright young Republicans will have matured--Oregon's Mark Hatfield, Rhode Island's John Chafee, Ohio's Robert A. Taft Jr., Washington's Daniel Evans, and Illinois' Chuck Percy, to name a few--and be ready to take over. "My political mission for the next two years is clear," he says. Win or lose, that mission is to hold in trust for tomorrow those ideals that in Jacob Javits' view can revivify the Republican Party and return its candidate to the White House.
-- Her latest fad, shared by TIME Cover Artist Robert Vickrey, who painted her husband against a background of black and white squares, with an X in each white square to symbolize the ballot, Jack Javits' favorite art form.
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