(4 of 10)
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.