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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."