Jacob K. Javits

Jacob K. Javits, who served New York in the United States Senate for 24 years and became one of the most respected and influential political figures in the nation, passed away in 1986 at age 81. In 2000, the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel (the “College”) inducted him as an In Memoriam Fellow.

The son of immigrants, he was born into abject poverty in New York City in 1904. As a child, he helped his family sell dry goods from a pushcart in the street. Despite the challenges of poverty, he became president of his class at George Washington High School. While taking night courses at Columbia University, the future senator worked testing pipes at a factory in Elizabeth, NJ and selling printing supplies. He graduated from New York University School of Law in 1926. He and his brother Ben then formed the firm of Javits & Javits.

During World War II, he volunteered to work as a civilian in the Army's Chemical Warfare Department in Washington. Commissioned as an officer in 1942, he traveled overseas to help plan the invasions of Europe and Japan. By the time he left the Army in 1945, he had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel and had earned the Legion of Merit, an honor awarded for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services and achievements.

In 1946, the future senator began his political career by running for an Upper West Side seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that a Republican had not held for more than two decades. He won, and after four terms as a House member, ran in 1954 for New York State Attorney General. Given little chance to defeat the Democratic candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., he won again. Two years later, he was elected to the United States Senate. Widely regarded, by admirers and detractors alike, as one of the most intelligent, industrious, and effective members of the Senate, he served for four terms. In a poll conducted by Congress Watch, a Ralph Nader organization, Capitol Hill aides voted Senator Javits the brightest and second most influential member of the Senate.

In 1967, Senator Javits introduced his first pension bill. That year, opposition to the bill was widespread and vocal. Corporate America called it "socialist" regulation, and the banks took the same view. Many labor unions believed that the proposed pension reforms would destroy the actuarial soundness of their pension plans.

In a comprehensive review of the early versions of pension reform bills, the September 1974 issue of “Nation's Labor” attacked Senator Javits on a personal level: "To sum up—there was not a single major interest group that favored the entire package of reforms. Javits was a dreamer, a voice in the wilderness, an impractical do-gooder who didn't understand the needs of the economy at all. In theory—sure—everybody was for safety and security for the working man; just as everyone's for motherhood. But practically nobody saw the Javits proposals as any solution to anything. Far more saw it [sic] as the dissolution of everything the funds had built."

In his 1981 autobiography, the former senator succinctly described the almost complete lack of political support for federal pension reform: “As we started drafting a new bill, I began to hear from trade unions, pension trustees, banks, insurance companies, actuaries, and people who set up pension plans. Most of the business people advised me to stay out of the issue; they said it was a can of worms that would cause me endless trouble and alienate my friends and supporters, and I should just lay off.”

Although pension reform had almost no conventional political support, Senator Javits doggedly made pension reform his mission. Worker support for reform increased. The media carried mushrooming reports of widespread worker alienation, including incidents of rampant absenteeism and deliberate worker sabotage in automobile assembly plants and elsewhere. Worker dissatisfaction stemmed not only from monotonous and highly impersonal factory and office routines, but also from what some workers derisively dubbed broken promises of the private pension system, i.e., the so-called “horror stories” associated with workers devoting their entire working lives to an employer and then losing their pensions because of lengthy vesting schedules or severely underfunded pension plans.

Senator Javits believed that both the complaints about unfair pension plans and the dehumanized work routines stemmed from the same source: out-of-date management thinking about the employees' role in private enterprise. In his view, the insistence of business leaders that only lengthy vesting schedules would ensure the retention of valuable and experienced workers did not square with the high degree of labor mobility that hallmarked modern industrial life. By adhering to such outmoded views, he believed, business actually undermined the attractiveness of private pensions to workers and thereby eroded the value of a key incentive for employee retention. Senator Javits concluded that reform of the private pension system was essential to revitalize American capitalism and the economy.

Because he believed it was the right thing to do, Senator Javits persisted in relentlessly pushing forward pension reform legislation against all odds and potentially to his political detriment.

And he knew exactly how to achieve his goal. He charged future College Fellow Mike Gordon, then on the Senator’s staff, to energize the grassroots demand that Senator Javits believed necessary to overcome the interests that were opposed to extensive federal regulation of pension plans. Mike conceived the brilliant strategy of organizing Senate Labor Subcommittee hearings around testimony that highlighted the “broken promises” arising out of the private pension system. Hearing reports in the media, the American public in turn communicated to their representatives their outrage at the many cases of workers who had spent a lifetime with one or two companies only to retire without pensions.

Ultimately, Congress listened to their constituents. Remarkably, the Senate voted 85-0 and the House 407-2 in favor of the passage of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”).

After his retirement from public service in 1981, former Senator Javits remained active. Known for his dedication to public service and courage in the face of personal adversity in his later years, he once remarked, “You must remember, my own philosophy is that you don't belong only to yourself. You have an obligation to the society which protected you when you were brought into the world, which taught you, which supported you and nurtured you. You have an obligation to repay it.” Consistent with this mantra, he served as an adjunct professor of public affairs at Columbia University's School of International Affairs. In addition to teaching, he continued to travel to Washington, spending several days a month there as an adviser to Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr. and to some of his former colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

During the last years of his life, he received numerous accolades. The federal government's largest office building in New York State, the 41-story tower at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, was formally renamed the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in his honor in April 1981. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a medal awarded annually since 1945 to Americans who made exceptionally meritorious contributions to the nation. He was named the 1983 recipient of the Charles Evans Hughes Gold Medal, named for the former Chief Justice of the United States, in recognition of courageous leadership in governmental, civic, and humanitarian affairs. In December 1984, New York City's new convention center was named the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center of New York.

When asked about his legacy, he replied that he hoped to be remembered for his participation in changing the outlook of the country. Elaborating, he named three legislative measures for which he had been a strong advocate: the War Powers Act, which limits the ability of a president to make war without Congressional approval; the law establishing the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, which provides federal funds for cultural projects; and ERISA.

Upon Jacob’s passing in 1986, then President Reagan said:
"Throughout his many years in the Senate, Jacob Javits was known for his intellect, for his integrity, for his dedication to the people of New York and the nation and for the sheer joy he took in every day of his work. Jacob Javits remained to the end a man in love with life."

Photo Source: The Decade Book, American College of Employee Benefits Counsel 2000-2010