it may not be the Oval Office, but Jimmy Smits's place of business at El Sendero Productions, his production company on the third floor of the Animation Building at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, is a spacious and immaculate reflection of a man who wields some power in his industry. On one wall is a painting of Smits in one of his early film roles, starring (along with Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck) as a Mexican general descending into madness in Old Gringo. On another hangs a framed portrait of his role model in the entertainment business, the late Raul Julia. Sitting on a table in the center of the room are a few items from his most recent foray into the public consciousness--a placard and a couple of political buttons touting the Santos/McGarry presidential ticket.

Dressed in a light gray sweater, blue jeans, and black loafers, Smits, MFA '82, leans back on his chair's hind legs. For a guy who, in two days time, will be named leader of the free world-- at least in the eyes of the 8.4 million viewers who will tune in for the results of a fictional election on "The West Wing"--he seems eminently relaxed as he muses on the moment when he was asked to run for president.

"John said all the right things," he says, referring to John Wells, the NBC program's executive producer. It was during the summer of 2004 that Wells flew from Los Angeles to New York to chat with Smits, who was playing the love-torn Benedick in a Shakespeare in the Park production. In the midst of Much Ado About Nothing, this was something.

They spent a couple of nights talking about the power of television, about the political process, about the need to galvanize the youth of America, and about a particular story arc Wells was considering. Jed Bartlet, the show's fictional president (played by Martin Sheen), was nearing the end of his term. "The West Wing" was looking for a new statesman. In what would be the last two seasons for the long-running drama, which broadcast its final episode in May, the show would focus on the promise of a new beginning. And Wells wondered: isn't it time to put a Latino on the ticket?

"He really wanted to see what the dynamic would be of having a Latino character who got into the political arena out of a pure sense of doing good," says Smits.

The actor wasn't sure this was a path he wanted to pursue. Should he join a show entering its sixth season? Hadn't he just signed a deal to develop a new show on ABC? But there were other factors to consider, too. Like Shakespeare's Benedick, Smits admits to a certain amount of cynicism. But unlike Benedick, he has no lack of self-knowledge. He knew full well the potential significance of such a move, having been inspired only days earlier by a speech at the Democratic National Convention by U.S. Senator-to-be Barack Obama (who, like Smits, boasts a mixed heritage). On the other side of the political aisle, Alberto Gonzales was on the verge of being named the nation's first Hispanic attorney general, and Cuban émigré Carlos Gutierrez would soon be named secretary of commerce. In a world where perceptions spawned by pop culture can generate new realities, why not take it one step further, presenting a Latino commander in chief to awaken America to very real possibilities?

"I thought long and hard," Smits says. "But I can show you letters and e-mails I received from people in the business who heard about it, and they all said the same thing: You have to do this. You have to do this."

The funny thing is, Smits already had a political agenda of sorts, a mission that might be best described as embodying and enabling the breadth of the Latino experience.His devotion to his roots manifests itself in myriad ways. There he is, serving as grand marshal of the Puerto Rican Day parade in New York City, hosting a Latin music segment of the Grammy Awards, and listening to that same music at the Conga Room, a Los Angeles-area nightclub in which he is an investor. There he is, too, sitting for a roundtable discussion with students from Cornell's Latino Studies Program, hosting a PBS series about how second-generation Hispanics are adapting to American society, and shouting "Viva la educación!" while snipping a ribbon at a ceremonial opening of the ASPIRA Youth Leadership Charter School in North Miami.

In his film career, Smits has taken on multidimensional characters that allowed him to explore his heritage. After his turn as a Chicago drug kingpin in the 1986 Billy Crystal vehicle Running Scared, he has tried to avoid the stereotyped gardener- or-gangster roles given to Latino actors. Later parts have ranged from a Cuban refugee faced with personal and political dilemmas (Little Havana) to the title character in a made-for-TV remake of The Cisco Kid to a military veteran slowly embracing responsibility in Mi Familia, an intergenerational saga examining the triumphs and tragedies of a Mexican-American family. And then, of course, there was Senator Bail Organa, Viceroy of Alderaan (and Princess Leia's adoptive father), in Star Wars episodes II and III. It may not have had the gravitas of some of his other parts, but, as Smits once joked on the PBS talk show "Speaking Freely," "you have to have a Latino in space."

Still, his most resonant characters have been small-screen heroes who were morally grounded and who transcended ethnicity. As Victor Sifuentes on "L.A. Law" (for which he was nominated for six Emmy awards, winning in 1990), he was a high-powered defense attorney with a heart. As detective Bobby Simone on "NYPD Blue" (five Emmy nominations, one Golden Globe), he was a sensitive cop with a heartbreaking personal history. As presidential candidate Matt Santos on "The West Wing," he created a character trying to strike a balance between ambition and family, politics and principle. Each of the roles, he insists, was less a revelation than an evolution.

"What's interesting about episodic TV is that it kind of lives and breathes from episode to episode. So the writers get to see the dynamic of the performer, and they get to add more of what that performer is bringing to that particular character," says Smits, who--trivia collectors take note--was Don Johnson's original partner in the "Miami Vice" pilot, but was killed off in the first fifteen minutes.

The roles turned Smits into a sex symbol. In 2002, TV Guide named him one of the Fifty Sexiest TV Stars of All Time (he was number seventeen, right behind Dean Martin, Jennifer Aniston, and Linda Evans). But one might argue that it was his characters' inner beauty--consciencedriven and complex--that captured the hearts of the viewing public. Smits is committed to giving other Latino artists the opportunity to reveal that multidimensional aspect of themselves and their culture, and ten years ago he figured out how to best accomplish the task.

In 1996, while campaigning for Bill Clinton in San Antonio, Smits had a conversation with fellow actor Esai Morales about how to get Latinos into positions of power. That dialogue led to other discussions with Morales, Brazilian actress Sonia Braga, and attorney and political consultant Felix Sanchez. The result was the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts (NHFA), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit created to advance the presence of Latinos in the entertainment industry. The NHFA focuses on fostering talent through education and building a network of young professionals with shared heritage and aspirations. Funded by corporate and private donations, the Foundation offers graduate scholarships (totaling more than $850,000 over the past decade) for Latino college students at programs with pipelines into the entertainment industry, such as the University of Southern California, Yale School of Drama, and Columbia School of the Arts.

The NHFA's mission includes a push to have the television industry reflect demographics--Hispanics make up about 14 percent of the U.S. population but only a small piece of TV's primetime mosaic. Sanchez, who serves as chairman of the NHFA, insists it isn't only about the quantity of roles, but the quality as well. "We really want to see a more complex, threedimensional, and contemporary portrayal of Latinos," he says. "We want to show that Latinos have achieved the American dream--more than the American consciousness realizes."

Historically, Latino actors have often had to choose from well-worn character types--the sassy housekeeper, the defiant gang member, the Latin lover. By promoting Latinos in front of and especially behind the camera with mentoring workshops, internships, and scholarships in fields ranging from stage and film directing to costume design and business administration, the NHFA hopes to shatter those stereotypes. Smits's career, from Cornell to fictional candidate, is essentially a standard to which the Foundation aspires. "Jimmy has been so fortunate to play these characters that are giants in the worlds they live in," says Sanchez, who is CEO of TerraCom, a public relations firm in the nation's capital. "There's a tremendous amount of integrity, generosity, insight, compassion, and determination. It's clearly who he is."

Smits was the oldest of three children, and, according to his birth certificate, he was "Jimmy" from the get-go.His father Corneles (a factory manager originally from Dutch Guiana, now Suriname) and his Puerto Rican mother, Emelina, raised their family in various New York City neighborhoods. But amid this peripatetic upbringing, it was another move that played the biggest role in developing what Smits calls his "Latino-ness."

When Smits was nine, he moved to Ponce, Puerto Rico, with his mother and sisters (his father remained in New York) to be closer to his grandparents. Ancestral or not, it was a foreign land to a kid from the Bronx. "It was an identity thing," he recalls. "They would call us 'Yankee' and stuff like that because we spoke primarily English."

Smits talks of a having a void in his knowledge of American culture as a result of his two-year residence in Puerto Rico. The British Invasion? He was listening to bomba and plena. "Gilligan's Island"? He was more concerned with survival on his own, unfamiliar isle. But he also refers to the period as his "wonder years," a time when he learned the language and rhythms and culture and history of his maternal ancestors, all a source of pride for him four decades later. "Although it was traumatic for a kid, I look back now and a large part of my identity was cemented, I guess, from that time," he says.

Upon returning to New York, this time to Brooklyn, Smits discovered the joys of theater while participating in junior high school musicals. Later, he became transfixed by forays into Manhattan to watch professional performers--in particular, Raul Julia and James Earl Jones."Raul had a Puerto Rican background," says Smits. "He had a pronounced accent, but he was still able to do all the classic plays. And James Earl Jones had a speech impediment at one time, yet he was doing Shakespeare and Shaw. The fact that they were 'minorities' didn't hamper them in the least, and their performances gave me permission to aspire."The NHFA, Smits notes with pride, now presents an annual Raul Julia Award for Excellence to the person or organization that most advances its mission.

In high school, Smits encountered another clash of cultures, as time restraints forced him to choose between football and the drama club. He chose the latter, and his moment of validation came when a group of his former teammates attended the final play of the school year and,much to his surprise, responded with a sincere ovation. "They came and supported me and didn't throw tomatoes," says the sixfoot- three Smits, who at age fifty-one still looks as if he could handle himself between the hash marks.

However, his family took a bit more convincing. By seventeen, Smits had fathered a daughter, and while his grandparents helped with childcare he worked his way through Brooklyn College. (Smits would later marry his girlfriend, Barbara, and have a son; the couple have been divorced for more than two decades, but he maintains a long-distance relationship with his now-grown children. He also has a long-term romance with actress Wanda de Jesus.) Smits was one of the first in the family to pursue higher education, let alone a graduate degree, so his parents viewed schooling in understandably practical terms-- even when he earned his BA in drama from Brooklyn and gained admission to Cornell's master's program for theater. "Their whole frame of reference was: this means you can teach drama in college, right?" says Smits.

When Smits arrived on campus for the two-year MFA program, he was "one of the sweetest people you ever knew," says Stephen Cole, associate professor in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance. As an actor, however, he was somewhat raw."He came in with little methodology, little craft, and a lot of talent," says Cole. "He was used to whisking through a role on instinct, which is what he did for a while. Then we took that away from him. He labored the first year, getting rid of old habits, which is what the first year is supposed to be about."

In Cornell's MFA program (since replaced by a BFA program), there were never more than a half-dozen students accepted each year, so the training was intense. "The primary idea of casting MFA people in plays was to help their progress, whether they were suited for the role or not," recalls Cole, who co-founded the Ithaca Repertory Theater (now the Hangar Theatre), where Smits often performed. Smits's ethnicity was a non-factor in casting, says Cole, except once, when he played Petruchio in a production of The Taming of the Shrew set in revolutionary Mexico.

"The wonderful thing about the program at Cornell--and programs like it around the country--was that it became monastic in a lot of ways," says Smits. "You're just eating, drinking, sleeping whatever part of the theater or music you're involved in."He occasionally chafed at seeing his old audition-mates earning small roles on TV while he was busy studying text analysis and mime and dance. "I'm at the ballet barre at seven in the morning at Cornell, and I'm wondering, Did I do the right thing by coming here? Because I just saw my friend on 'Hill Street Blues.' But it gave me tools I could use, in terms of how to approach a role."

In contrast to his first stage appearance on the Hill (as the nearly silent Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Smits capped his Cornell experience by playing one of the most challenging roles in theater--the lead in George Bernard Shaw's four-and-a-halfhour masterpiece Man and Superman. "He graduated ready," says Cole.

a quarter-century later, Smits still contends nothing can be more beneficial to an aspiring actor than broad-based schooling. "Always be prepared" is his mantra, and, as evidenced by the mission of the NHFA, he believes preparation is fed by a graduate education, and talent is enabled through formal training. But, he admits, it is the networking advantages in the process that are the key to opportunity in what may be the ultimate who-youknow industry.

"When I talk to young people in school, I can't in good conscience say, 'If you get a graduate education in theater arts, you're going to be successful in our business,' " he says. "It doesn't work like that because there are so many factors that you're not in control of. But I can talk about my experience, which was that an arts education expands your horizon in so many ways that it can only add to what you're going to be as an artist."

Smits doesn't hesitate to roll up his sleeves to further the NHFA's efforts, but he also understands that his celebrity makes him, to a large extent, the face of the organization. So he has been known to hold a press conference with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, for instance, or phone prospective donors who have ignored calls from others. In these efforts, his role on "The West Wing" has been a powerful resource. Being taken seriously is a constant challenge for activist actors who yearn to be more than photo ops and political props, and Smits says that his role as a faux candidate has been "a total civics lesson for me."

Esai Morales has called his longtime friend the "Abe Lincoln of Latinos" for snagging a stint as a presidential candidate (the irony being that there has always been a Latino president on "The West Wing," as Martin Sheen, a longtime NHFA supporter, was born Ramon Estevez). But Smits's admirers point out that he brought at least as much to the role as the role brought to him. Cole, the acting coach, contends the role fit Smits "because he projects that kind of humanity and authority and gravitas." Sanchez, the political mentor, claims that Smits was believable as a would-be president because "he came to it with a keen understanding of political life."

Indeed, Smits has long impressed observers in the nation's capital. In 1997, Capital Style magazine described him as "the best example of a new breed of activist celebrities who are coming to Washington armed with information, media polish, and attitude."Which is not to say that there is a nonfiction political role in Smits's future.While acting on "The West Wing," he decided to limit his political contributions to the financial, rather than the rhetorical, arena--to allow "space between the character and the actor."

Cyndi Schiebe '76, PhD '87, who used to drive Smits to rehearsals at the Hangar Theatre when she was the props master and he was one of the lead actors, contends we should not underestimate the power of popular entertainment. Schiebe is now an associate professor of psychology at Ithaca College, where she directs the Center for Research on the Effects of Television and leads a media literacy initiative called Project Look Sharp. Among the 15,000 hours of program content in her archives is every episode of "The West Wing," which, she says, is a good example of how people relate to fictional characters. "Anytime something allows people to imagine what a certain kind of scenario is like, I think it makes people feel more comfortable with an idea," she says. "I would certainly suspect that having Jimmy Smits on 'The West Wing' as a viable and appealing and smart candidate for president would make people more comfortable with the notion of a person of color as a candidate."

Comfortable enough, in fact, that in November 2005, following a live debate between Matt Santos and Senator Arnold Vinick (the Republican presidential candidate played by Alan Alda), Zogby International pollsters asked 4,492 would-be voters, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, which candidate they would put in office. Santos won in a landslide. The result might say much about Smits (he had the overwhelming support of female fans), but it also speaks to the viability of a Latino on the ticket.

Perhaps the line between fantasy and reality isn't as distinct as one might assume.When Smits was on "L.A. Law," fans would approach him about legal matters, and Latinos would tell him he was the reason they pursued a law degree. So maybe it's not surprising that the Chicago Tribune, a newspaper that hasn't endorsed a Democratic presidential candidate since Horace Greeley in 1872, declared "MATTHEW V. SANTOS FOR PRESIDENT" in a tongue-in-cheek editorial last December.

Although heartened by the reaction to his make-believe candidacy, Smits remains well aware that there can be a chasm between small-screen acclaim and big-picture attitudes regarding Latinos. And there are times these days when the actor can indeed sound much like an ambitious public servant. "I think things are improving in terms of where our place is in the American scheme," he says. "But while I'm on TV doing this fictional character who's running for president, I'm watching television and I see people talking about this immigration bill, and there are code words that they use--'aliens' and such. And I'm thinking, something's not right. There's stuff to do."

In seven seasons, BRAD HERZOG '90 never missed an episode of "The West Wing."