1946 race for Congress. He went on to defeat Wagner by nearly half a million votes. Although his term began on January 3, 1957, he delayed taking his seat in the U.S. Senate until January 9, the day the New York State Legislature convened, to deny Democratic Governor W. Averell Harriman the opportunity to appoint a Democratic Attorney General. Thus, on January 9, the Republican majority of the State Legislature elected Louis Lefkowitz to fill the office for the remainder of Javits's term. Upon taking office, Javits resumed his role as the most outspoken Republican liberal in Congress. For the next 24 years, the Senate was Javits's home. His wife had no interest in living in Washington, D.C., which she considered a boring backwater and so for over two decades Javits commuted between New York and Washington nearly every week to visit his "other" family and conduct local political business. In foreign affairs, he backed the Eisenhower Doctrine for the Middle East and pressed for more foreign military and economic assistance. Javits was re-elected in 1962 and 1968. Javits voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1968, as well as the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the confirmation of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court. He endorsed Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. 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 and supported, for example, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 but later turned against it. Javits also supported a single-payer healthcare system and coined the term "Medicare for all." 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. In 1966, along with two other Republican senators and five Republican representatives, Javits signed a telegram sent to Georgia Governor Carl E. Sanders regarding the Georgia legislature's refusal to seat the recently-elected Julian Bond in their state House of Representatives. The refusal, said the telegram, was "a dangerous attack on representative government. None of us agree with Mr. Bond's views on the Vietnam War; in