The Troubled Look

Peering around at a Times Square depopulated by the nationwide civil defense alert last week (see cut), New York's Mayor Robert Wagner appeared wan and haggard. Wagner recently underwent an operation for a nonmalignant tumor, but his troubled look could have had another cause. With his political future--and a possible third term--already clouded over by a canyon-sized Democratic split between Tammany Hall and Manhattan reformers, Wagner was grimly aware that Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller's State Investigation Commission was pawing over his old friendship with George Sanders, owner of a sightseeing ship line that operates from a city pier. One commission finding: Sanders paid "several hundred dollars" for Wagner's hotel suite political headquarters at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles last July. Outraged, Wagner denied that he had ever done any favors for Sanders (whose lease on the pier is not being renewed), charged that the probe was politically motivated. Cried he, in the classic phrase of the public official under fire: "It's a smear!"

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