Word: wagnerism
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...have just finished reading your story on Robert Wagner [Oct. 1]. It was a fine piece of writing, and strikes one like a breath of fresh air in this year's humid political atmosphere...
Turn to the Right. Washington was a wonderful but bewildering place for the Wagners. When they first arrived, says Bob Jr., the father "suggested we go up and have our first good look at the Capitol. We left the Mayflower Hotel and hit a pretty confident course, but we took a right instead of a left. Instead of getting to the Capitol, we ended up in Georgetown." That was probably the first and last time that Robert Wagner Sr. steered a course to the right: a New Dealer in principle before the New Deal was born in fact...
...Robert Wagner Jr. soaked up the lessons of practical politics too. He recalls the 1932 Senate race, when the Republicans nominated a distinguished Jew, George Z. Medalie, to run against his father. A Brooklyn Democratic leader feared for his heavily Jewish district-but he was equal to the occasion. He dug around until he found a picture of the Senator's German grandfather, a Lutheran minister whose full beard strongly suggested a rabbinical calling. A yarmulke (skull cap) was easily inked in; the picture received wide distribution among the district's Jewish voters. Then the district leader spread...
Dollars to Democrats. When Bob Wagner, as a boy, was hobnobbing with New York's great and near-great, Jack Javits was a skinny-legged Jewish kid on Manhattan's Lower East Side ("In New York State," he says, "that is like being born in a log cabin"). Of his boyhood, Javits recalls that "the most money I ever had was a penny-and that only on a special occasion." His mother, Ida Littman Javits, had been abandoned by her parents in Palestine and forced to start work at the age of six. Illiterate until she was past...
...last week, when Democrat Bob Wagner was still cautiously, methodically planning his campaign (which he will open formally this week), Republican Jack Javits was off and running. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, Jewish ritual forbade his riding in a car. He therefore set off on foot from the swank, twelve-room Park Avenue apartment where he lives with his strikingly handsome wife Marion and their three children (Joy Deborah, 8, Joshua Moses, 6, and Carla, 1). Exposing his conservatively tailored $200 suit to a driving rain, he walked across a twelve-mile radius on Manhattan...