ST. PAUL — Of all the whales at the Republican National Convention this week, Robert Wood Johnson IV, the billionaire heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and owner of the New York Jets, may be the biggest.
Mr. Johnson has long been a player in Republican politics — he was a Bush Ranger in 2000 and 2004, raising more than $200,000 in each election. He has personally given more than $1 million to Republican candidates and committees over the years.
But this year, he emerged as perhaps the party’s most coveted donor. In May, after turning his office into a war room for more than a month and making sometimes 50 calls a day, he orchestrated a fund-raiser in New York City that brought in $7 million in a single evening for Mr. McCain, by far the largest amount collected up to that point by a campaign that had been struggling to raise money.
But Mr. Johnson also clearly has his own agenda. Staffers on Capitol Hill credit him with playing a pivotal role in 2002 in pushing members of Congress, including House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, to allocate $750 million over five years for juvenile diabetes research.