Jacob Javits

Jacob Koppel Javits (May 18, 1904 – March 7, 1986) was an American lawyer and politician.

During his time in politics, he represented the state of New York in both houses of the United States Congress.

A member of the Republican Party, he also served as the state's Attorney General.

Generally considered a liberal Republican, he was often at odds with his own party.

A supporter of labor unions, Great Society and civil rights, he played a key role in the passing of civil rights legislation.

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, then in 1923 he enrolled in the New York University Law School from which he earned his LLB in 1926.

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 M. Nixon of California.

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.

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, which was supporting the mayoral campaigns of Fiorello H. La Guardia.

In 1933, Javits married Marjorie Joan Ringling, daughter of Alfred Theodore "Alf" Ringling of Ringling Brothers Circus fame.

They had no children and divorced in 1936.

Deemed too old for regular military service when World War II began, Javits was commissioned in early 1942 as an officer in the U.S. Army's Chemical Warfare Service, where he served throughout the war and reached the rank of lieutenant colonel.

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.

After the war, he became the chief researcher for Jonah Goldstein's unsuccessful 1945 bid for mayor on the Republican-Liberal-Fusion ticket.

He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946 and served in that body until 1954.

In the House, Javits supported President Harry S. Truman's Cold War foreign policy and voted to fund the Marshall Plan.

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.

In 1947, he married Marion Ann Borris with whom he had three children.

He served from 1947 to 1954, when he resigned his seat to take office as New York State Attorney General.

During his first two terms in the House, Javits often sided with the Truman administration.

For example, in 1947 he supported Harry Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Bill, which he declared to be antiunion.

He defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. in the 1954 election for Attorney General of New York, and defeated Democrat Robert F. Wagner Jr. in the 1956 United States Senate elections.

In the Senate, Javits supported much of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs and civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

He voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution but came to question Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War.

To rein in presidential war powers, Javits sponsored the War Powers Resolution.

Javits also sponsored the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which regulated defined-benefit private pensions.

An opponent of the War in Vietnam, he drafted the War Powers Resolution in 1973.

Born to Jewish parents, Javits was raised in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

He graduated from the New York University School of Law and established a law practice in New York City.

During World War II, he served in the United States Army's Chemical Warfare Department.

Outraged by the corruption of Tammany Hall, Javits joined the Republican Party and supported New York Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia.

In 1980, Javits lost the Republican Senate primary to Al D'Amato, who campaigned to Javits's right.

Nonetheless, he ran in the general election as the Liberal Party nominee.

He and Democratic nominee Elizabeth Holtzman were defeated by D'Amato.

Javits died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1986.

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, 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.