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

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

Javits grew up in a teeming Lower East Side tenement,[3] 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.

[7] 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.

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.

A strong opponent of discrimination, Javits also endorsed legislation against the poll tax in 1947 and 1949, and in 1954, he unsuccessfully sought to have enacted a bill banning racial segregation in federally-funded housing projects.

Unhappy with the witch-hunt atmosphere in Washington during the Cold War, he publicly opposed continuing appropriations for the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948.

As attorney general, Javits continued to promote his liberal agenda by supporting such measures as anti-bias employment legislation and a health insurance program for state employees.

His Democratic opponent was the popular Mayor of New York, Robert F. Wagner Jr.[4] In the early stages of that campaign Javits vigorously and successfully denied charges that he had once sought support from members of the American Communist Party during his 1946 race for Congress.

To promote his views on social legislation, he served on the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee for twenty years, most of that time as the second-ranking minority member.

Javits initially backed Johnson during the early years of America's involvement in the Vietnam War[4] and supported, for example, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 but later turned against it.

Also in 1964, Javits joined David Rockefeller to launch the non-profit International Executive Service Corps, which was established to help bring about prosperity and stability in developing nations through the growth of private enterprise.

[20][21] A supporter of universal health care, Javits in 1970 drafted a bill called "Medicare for All" that would have expanded the Medicare program to every American citizen by the end of 1973, while also giving the citizen a choice to opt-out, and alongside Clifford P. Case, John Sherman Cooper and William B. Saxbe, was one of four Republican co-sponsors of the Ted Kennedy-Martha Griffiths universal health care bill in January 1971.

[29] By 1970, his rising opposition to the war led him to support the Cooper–Church Amendment, which barred funds for US troops in Cambodia, and he also voted to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

[39] Among them were former President Richard Nixon, Governor Mario Cuomo and former Governor Hugh Carey, Mayor Ed Koch and former Mayor John Lindsay, Attorney General Edwin Meese, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Cardinal John Joseph O'Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, David Rockefeller, Victor Gotbaum, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.

[38] Other mourners included Senators Al D'Amato of New York, Gary Hart of Colorado, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, as well as former U.S. Representative Bella Abzug.

Few pieces of legislation bear his name, yet he was especially proud of his work in creating the National Endowment for the Arts, of his sponsorship of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974,[5] which regulated defined-benefit private pensions, and of his leadership in the passage of the 1973 War Powers Resolution.

[43] From 1973 to 1978, GovTrack ranked Javits as being to the left of noted Democrats like Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Edmund Muskie and Gaylord Nelson.

Javits also saw himself as being a descendant of the traditional Republicanism of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, all of whom supported a strong federal government.

He reached the position of Ranking Minority Member on the Committee on Foreign Relations while he accrured greater seniority than any New York Senator before or since (as of 2018[update]).

[46][47] Along with Dwight Eisenhower, he was among the first and most important statesmen in passing legislation promoting the cause of education for gifted individuals, and many know his name from the federal Jacob Javits Grants established for that purpose.

New York City's sprawling Javits Center was named in his honor in 1986, as is a playground at the southwestern edge of Fort Tryon Park.

[49] The United States Department of Education formerly awarded a number of Javits Fellowships to support graduate students in the humanities and social sciences until 2012.

A 1983 US Congressional Act established those awards in honor of Senator Javits as a longtime supporter of research into understanding neurological disorders and diseases.