Former NYC Mayor Lindsay Dies

H I L T O N   H E A D   I S L A N D, S.C., Dec. 20 -- John V. Lindsay, the shirt-sleeved Ivy Leaguer who led New York City as mayor through the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s, is dead at 79.

Lindsay, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease and had two heartattacks and two strokes in recent years, died Tuesday night at alocal hospital. He had moved to a South Carolina retirementcommunity last year. No funeral arrangements were immediately announced.

A Paradox

Lindsay was a paradox — a liberal Republican, and a WASP graduate ofYale who had warm relations with the black community.

In time, some of those contradictions slipped away. Hisoutspoken opposition to the Vietnam War lost him his few friends inthe Republican Party, and he left it to become a Democrat.

Almost three decades after he left office, the Lindsay era isremembered as a time of activism, when a lanky, movie-star handsomemayor strode through ghetto streets to cool the passions of hotsummers.

But it also is remembered, fairly or unfairly, as the time whenNew York City’s spending habits got out of hand, setting the stagefor the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s.

Lindsay’s political career ended with the mayoralty. He made abrief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 and anunsuccessful bid for the Senate eight years later.

“John Kennedy once said, ‘Life isn’t fair.’ And he was right,”Lindsay said during his presidential campaign. “But that has neverstopped men from trying to make it fair.”

Lindsay had represented New York’s 17th Congressional District — known as the “Silk Stocking District” because of its Fifth Avenueand Park Avenue wards — for seven years when he ran for mayor in1965.

“I happen to be a Republican. I hope you won’t hold it againstme,” Lindsay told campaign audiences. His campaign posters andmaterials made little mention of his party in an overwhelminglyDemocratic city.