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, 2000 -- 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.

A Challenging Mayoralty

His race against Abraham Beame — the city comptroller, andLindsay’s ultimate successor — and William F. Buckley Jr. caught thecity’s imagination.

He issued a series of carefully researched “white papers” oncrime, narcotics, housing, traffic and city finances. His charismaand can-do spirit won young activists to his cause, and he capturedthe endorsement of the then-influential Liberal Party.

“He is fresh and everyone else is tired,” columnist MurrayKempton wrote, and the line became a Lindsay campaign theme.

He won, and on the first day of his administration, in themiddle of a bitterly cold winter, the transit workers went onstrike for 13 days. It became a personal battle with transit leaderMike Quill (Quill called him “Mr. Linsley”), and by all accountshe lost.

It was the first of a series of disasters to befall the 103rdmayor of New York: Strikes by teachers, garbagemen, cabdrivers,bridge operators, newspapers and even policemen. Snowstorms thatleft Queens buried. Transit fares that rose from 15 cents to 50cents. Welfare rolls that increased by 117 percent. Policecorruption. A water commissioner, James Marcus, who went to jailfor taking kickbacks.

Through it all, Lindsay faced sniping from his fellow Republicanmoderate, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who named a commission toinvestigate the city government. During one bumpy ride throughQueens, Rockefeller said, “If I had holes like that in statehighways, I’d be impeached.”

To those who said the mayor’s job was near-impossible, Lindsayresponded, “What do they mean by ‘near’?”

Many Accomplishments

But there were accomplishments, too. He persuaded the hostile,Democratic-controlled City Council to put money into the ModelCities program. He reorganized city government, bringing scores ofagencies together into 10 super-departments. He hired bright, young“urbanists.”

“What was dared and done in New York was watched and followedall around the country,” said Peter Goldmark, Lindsay’s chief ofstaff who went on to head the Port Authority of New York and NewJersey and later the Rockefeller Foundation.

In the years when Newark, Los Angeles and other cities burned,New York remained relatively untouched, and Lindsay was givencredit. He championed programs for the poor and opened satelliteoffices to work with minority youth, including one in Harlem.

The mayor would appear unexpectedly in shirt sleeves onrubbish-littered streets, drinking beer with hippies and talkingintently with blacks and Hispanics — a 6-foot-4 vision of calm.

But his activism on behalf of minorities lost him some votesamong the white middle class. His relations with the Jewishcommunity were strained by his advocacy of school decentralization,which was opposed by the predominantly Jewish teacher’s union.

When he ran for re-election in 1969, he lost in the Republicanprimary. But as the Liberal candidate he beat Republican Sen. JohnMarchi and Democrat Mario Procaccino in the general election.

He would never again run as a Republican. Though he seconded thenomination of Spiro Agnew for vice president at the 1968convention, he soon found he had little in common with the Nixonadministration. “They were writing off the cities,” he said.

In 1971, he switched his registration to Democrat. “It hasbecome clear,” he said, “that the Republican Party and itsleaders in Washington have finally abandoned the fight for agovernment that will respond to the real needs of most of ourpeople — and those most in need.”

A year later, he made a bid for the Democratic presidentialnomination but dropped out after being soundly defeated in theFlorida and Wisconsin primaries. He ran for a U.S. Senate seat in1980, but lost in the Democratic primary to Elizabeth Holtzman.

A Run for Congress

John Vliet Lindsay and a twin brother were born Nov. 24, 1921,in Manhattan, two of five children of an investment banker. He waseducated at St. Paul’s School at Concord, N.H., and YaleUniversity.

He served as a Navy gunnery officer in World War II and rose tolieutenant. He received his law degree from Yale in 1948 butinterrupted his law practice in 1955 and 1956 to serve as executiveassistant to U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell.

In 1958, he bucked the Republican organization to run forCongress in the city’s 17th District and won; in each of the nextthree elections he won larger majorities. In 1964, his margin was90,000 votes even though the Democratic president, Lyndon B.Johnson, took three out of four votes in his district.

In later years, Lindsay was a still-handsome but somewhat sadfigure; he practiced law, and talk of a political comeback arosefrom time to time. He responded with anger when Beame and Edward I.Koch — another congressman from the 17th District who became mayor— blamed him for the city’s troubles.

“It was obscene,” he said.

His staunchest booster was his wife Mary, a Vassar graduate hemarried in 1949. The couple had four children — Katherine, Margie,Anne, and John Jr.

Lindsay served as a special, unpaid trade representative for thecity, a board member of Lincoln Center and chairman of the board ofthe Vivian Beaumont Theater until 1991.

The theater and show business were longtime passions. As mayor,Lindsay dazzled Tonight Show audiences with his wit, and drewhuzzahs for his song-and-dance routines at the annual Inner Circledinner staged by political reporters.

In 1974, he appeared in the Otto Preminger film Rosebud. Healso worked as a correspondent for ABC’s Good MorningAmerica, and wrote a novel, The Edge, which never made thebest-seller lists.