Javits was born to Jewish parents, Ida (née Littman) and Morris Javits, a descendant of the 18th-century rabbi Jacob Emden who was known as the Ya'avetz, which was later anglicized to Javits. Javits grew up in a teeming Lower East Side tenement,[3] and when not in school, he helped his mother sell dry goods from a pushcart in the street and learned parliamentary procedure at University Settlement Society of New York.[6][4] Javits graduated in 1920 from George Washington High School, where he was president of his class. He worked part-time at various jobs while he attended night school at Columbia University,[2] then in 1923 he enrolled in the New York University Law School from which he earned his LLB in 1926. He was admitted to the bar in June 1927 and joined his brother Benjamin Javits, who was nearly ten years older, as partner to form the Javits and Javits law firm. The Javits brothers specialized in bankruptcy and minority stockholder suits and became quite successful. In 1933, Javits married Marjorie Joan Ringling, daughter related to Alfred Thedore "Alf" Ringling, one of the Ringling brothers of the Ringling Brothers Circus fame. They had no children and divorced in 1936. In 1947, he married Marian Javits with whom he had three children. Deemed too old for regular military service when World War II began, Javits was commissioned in early 1942 as an officer in the United States Army's Chemical Corps, where he served throughout the war and reached the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Political career
In his youth Javits had watched his father work as a ward heeler for Tammany Hall, and he had experienced firsthand the corruption and graft associated with that notorious political machine. Tammany's operations repulsed Javits so much that he forever rejected the city's Democratic Party and in the early 1930s joined the Republican-Fusion Party and the New York Young Republican Club,[7] which was supporting the mayoral campaigns of Fiorello H. La Guardia. After the war, he became the chief researcher for Jonah Goldstein's unsuccessful 1945 bid for mayor on the Republican-Liberal-Fusion ticket. Javits's hard work in the Goldstein campaign showed his potential in the political arena and encouraged the small Manhattan Republican Party to nominate him as their candidate for the Upper West Side's Twenty-first Congressional District (since redistricted) seat during the heavily-Republican year of 1946. Although the Republicans had not held the seat since 1923, Javits campaigned energetically and won. He was a member of the freshman class, along with John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Richard Nixon of California. He served from 1947 to 1954, when he resigned his seat to take office as Attorney General of New York.
In 1954, Javits ran for Attorney General of New York against a well-known and well-funded opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. Javits's vote-getting abilities carried the day, and he was the only Republican to win a statewide office that year. As attorney general, Javits continued to promote his liberal agenda by supporting such measures as anti-bias employment legislation and a health insurance program for state employees.[8]
U.S. Senator
In 1956, Javits ran for U.S. Senator from New York to succeed the retiring incumbent DemocratHerbert H. Lehman. His Democratic opponent was the popular Mayor of New York, Robert F. Wagner Jr.[4] In the early stages of that campaign Javits vigorously and successfully denied charges that he had once sought support from members of the American Communist Party during his 1946 race for Congress.[9] He went on to defeat Wagner by nearly half a million votes. Although his term began on January 3, 1957, he delayed taking his seat in the U.S. Senate until January 9, the day the New York State Legislature convened, to deny Democratic Governor W. Averell Harriman the opportunity to appoint a Democratic Attorney General. Thus, on January 9, the Republican majority of the State Legislature elected Louis J. Lefkowitz to fill the office for the remainder of Javits's term.[10]
Upon taking office, Javits resumed his role as the most outspoken Republican liberal in Congress.[11] For the next 24 years, the Senate was Javits's home. His wife had no interest in living in Washington, D.C., which she considered a boring backwater and so for over two decades Javits commuted between New York and Washington nearly every week to visit his "other" family and conduct local political business. In foreign affairs, he backed the Eisenhower Doctrine for the Middle East and pressed for more foreign military and economic assistance.[8] Javits was re-elected in 1962 and 1968.
In 1966, along with two other Republican senators and five Republican representatives, Javits signed a telegram sent to Georgia Governor Carl Sanders regarding the Georgia legislature's refusal to seat the recently elected Julian Bond in their state House of Representatives. The refusal, said the telegram, was "a dangerous attack on representative government. None of us agree with Mr. Bond's views on the Vietnam War; in fact we strongly repudiate these views. But unless otherwise determined by a court of law, which the Georgia Legislature is not, he is entitled to express them."[23][24]
By the end of 1967, Javits was becoming disenchanted with the Vietnam War[25] and joined 22 other senators[8][26] in calling for a peaceful solution to the conflict.
In 1965, Javits appointed Lawrence Wallace Bradford Jr. as the Senate's first African-American page.[27] In 1971, Javits appointed Paulette Desell as the Senate's first female page.[28]
By 1970, his rising opposition to the war led him to support the Cooper–Church Amendment, which barred funds for US troops in Cambodia, and he also voted to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Increasingly concerned about the erosion of congressional authority in foreign affairs, Javits sponsored the War Powers Resolution in 1973,[29] which limited to 60 days a president's ability to send American armed forces into combat without congressional approval.[30]
Despite his unhappiness with President Richard Nixon over the Vietnam War, Javits was slow to join the anti-Nixon forces during the Watergate scandal of 1973–1974. Until almost the very end of the affair, his position reflected his legal training: Nixon was innocent until proven guilty, and the best way to determine guilt or innocence was by legal due process. His position was unpopular among his constituency, and his re-election in Watergate-tainted 1974 elections over Ramsey Clark was by fewer than 400,000 votes, a third of his 1968 margin of victory. During his last term, Javits shifted his interests more and more to world affairs, especially the crises in the Middle East. Working with President Jimmy Carter, he journeyed to Israel and Egypt to facilitate the discussions that led to the 1978 Camp David Accords.[31][32]
Javits served until 1981; his 1979 diagnosis with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease)[29] led to a 1980 primary challenge by the comparatively lesser-known Long Island Republican county official Al D'Amato, who received 323,468 primary votes (55.7 percent) to Javits's 257,433 (44.3 percent). Javits's loss to D'Amato stemmed from Javits's continuing illness and from his failure to adjust politically to the rightward movement of the Republican Party.[citation needed]
After the primary defeat, Javits ran as the Liberal Party candidate in the general election. His candidacy split the Democratic base vote with U.S. Representative Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn and gave D'Amato the victory by a plurality of 1%. Javits received 11% of the vote.[33][34]
Javits used his office to advance ideas that furthered the policies even of Democratic presidents. In the fall of 1962, he proposed to a group of NATO parliamentarians that multinational corporations jointly create a new kind of investment vehicle to promote private investment throughout Latin America. He intended his idea to complement President John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. Two years later, some 50 multinational corporations formed the Adela Investment Company, much as Javits had proposed.[41]
Throughout his career in Congress, first in the House and later in the Senate, Javits was part of a small group of liberal Republicans that was often isolated ideologically from their mainstream Republican colleagues, and he was a staunch supporter of labor unions and civil rights movements. One scoring method found Javits to be the most liberal Republican to serve in either chamber of Congress between 1937 and 2002.[42] From 1973 to 1978, GovTrack ranked Javits as being to the left of noted Democrats like Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Edmund Muskie and Gaylord Nelson.[43] Although he frequently differed with the most right-leaning members of the Republican Party, Javits believed that both parties should tolerate diverse opinions, rejecting the idea that they should share only one point of view. Javits also saw himself as being a descendant of the traditional Republicanism of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, all of whom supported a strong federal government.[44]
In an essay published in 1958 in the magazine Esquire, Javits predicted the election of the first African-American president by 2000. Javits sponsored the first African-American Senate page in 1965 and the first female page in 1971. His liberalism was such that he tended to receive support from traditionally-Democratic voters, with many Republicans defecting to support the Conservative Party of New York.
Javits played a major role in legislation protecting pensioners, as well as in the passage of the War Powers Act; he led the effort to get the Javits-Wagner-O'Day Act passed. He reached the position of Ranking Minority Member on the Committee on Foreign Relations while he accrured greater seniority than any New York Senator before or since (as of 2018[update]).[45][46] Along with Dwight Eisenhower, he was among the first and most important statesmen in passing legislation promoting the cause of education for gifted individuals, and many know his name from the federal Jacob Javits Grants established for that purpose.
The National Institutes of Health awards the Senator Jacob Javits Award in Neuroscience to exceptionally talented researchers in neuroscience who have established themselves with groundbreaking research. A 1983 US Congressional Act established those awards in honor of Senator Javits as a longtime supporter of research into understanding neurological disorders and diseases.[50]
In his memory, New York University established the Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professorship in 2008.[51]
Electoral history
U.S. House of Representatives, New York 21st District[33]
^"Recess appointments" by the Governor in case of a vacancy in the offices of either the State Comptroller or the State Attorney General are now forbidden. To fill the vacancy, the State Legislature must convene and elect somebody. See Art. V, § 1 State Constitution.
^National Health Insurance Proposals: Hearings, Ninety-second Congress, First Session on the Subject of National Health Insurance Proposals. Part of 13 Parts (October 19 and 20, 1971)
^"Georgia House Dispute". Congressional Quarterly. 24 (3): 255. January 21, 1966. Retrieved March 27, 2017.
^"Jacob Javits - Central Synagogue". "He also traveled to Israel and Egypt with President Carter, opening up discussions that ultimately led to the 1978 Camp David Accords."
^Nation: Trustee for Tomorrow: Republican Jacob Javits; TIME, June 24, 1966
^Boyle, Richard; Ross, Robert (July 26, 2009). Mission Abandoned: How Multinational Corporations Abandoned Their First Attempt to Eliminate Poverty. Why They Should Try Again. Robert Ross. pp. 1–6. ISBN978-0615317373.
^Poole, Keith T. (October 13, 2004). "Is John Kerry a Liberal?". legacy.voteview.com. University of Georgia. Archived from the original on May 26, 2017.
^Hubert Humphrey, former Senator of Minnesota, GovTrack
^Our Divided Political Heart,
The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent; E.J. Dionne, E.J. Dionne Jr., 2012
^Javits's successor, Al D'Amato, served 3 terms (18 years), and Chuck Schumer, if he completes his 2016 term in 2023, will tie Javits's record of 24 years. "Schumer topples D'Amato in New York Senate race". cnn.com. November 3, 1998. "Charles Schumer has bested three-term Sen. Alfonse D'Amato in New York's Senate race."
.svg){kind=small}
.jpg)
