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!"