Incitement to Excellence

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By the end, his voice was cracked and harsh, his eyes as hollow as his campaign coffers. Yet even as New Yorkers streamed to the polls, John Vliet Lindsay loped urgently from block to block, borough to borough, croaking a threnody that had become as familiar and unique to the streets of New York as the carp of cab drivers or the yawp of fire trucks:

I'm running for mayor because the city is in crisis. The streets are filthy. We'll rip down the cruddy slums in this town. There is crime. And 125,000 teen-agers roam the streets with no jobs, no schooling. New York is the heroin capital of the world. And people are afraid.

For six months, Congressman Lindsay had exhorted fellow New Yorkers to make "our city great again, the Empire City of the world." He shook his fist in the air as he shouted into a hand microphone:

My goals for our city are high goals, and they will require brains, action, sweat, talent and muscle. Our program should be as big as our problems. Other cities have done it. Pittsburgh did it with air pollution. Chicago did it with crime. San Francisco is doing it with mass transit. Detroit is doing it with housing and schools. We can do it too!

Above all, the fair-haired young Republican urged his audiences to take their destiny out of the hands of the arrogant Democratic machine that had fed on the city for 20 years. In synagogues and soda fountains, from the scabrous tenements of Harlem to the polluted beaches of Sheepshead Bay, between blintzes and pizza, chop suey, knishes, pretzels and foot-longs, he remonstrated:

The bosses who run city hall don't have vision. They don't care. Either go back with the machine, the same tired clubhouse crowd, or vote for independent, unbossed reform.

To the Democratic fat cats, "this Lindsay" was a freak, a Park Avenue big talker, a silk-stocking boy. Their candidate, City Controller Abraham David Beame, 59, a mild, mite-size (5 ft. 2 in.) party hack, was admittedly no giantkiller, but he comfortably fitted the mediocre mold to which they were accustomed. Few believed that cynical New Yorkers would be moved by the eager idealism and outraged accusations of this Lindsay--the towering (6 ft. 3 in.), wavy-haired Republican whose improbable good looks and earnest eloquence plainly marked him a do-gooder and an amateur by Tammany's hard-eyed standards.

The hacks could be forgiven for never having heard of Lochinvar or Childe Roland. But they should have known from his record that John Lindsay was no dilettante but an accomplished and courageous politician. He had been a superb trial attorney, so good that he had received glowing praise from Justice Felix Frankfurter for his presentation of a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. He had proved himself to be one of New York's alltime champion vote getters in his 17th Congressional District. He was one of the toughest, go-it-alone independents in Congress, a top House expert on civil rights legislation--and a thorn in the side of his own party regulars.

Cruel Parody. If the Democratic proconsuls dismissed him, New York voters did not. In the last two weeks of the campaign, it became obvious that they were listening to John Lindsay. They were moved and impressed. And long after midnight on election night, John Vliet Lindsay wearily mounted a platform in the grand ballroom of Manhattan's Hotel Roosevelt to thank the people of New York City for electing him mayor.

It was a stunning victory. Not since Fiorello La Guardia's last election in 1941 had a Republican captured city hall. Lindsay defeated Beame 1,166,815 to 1,030,711 votes in a balloting pattern that crisscrossed party lines, ethnic prejudices and religious blocs all over town.

The upset was a monumental personal achievement for Lindsay and a triumph for Republican Party moderates throughout the U.S.--particularly in the cities that have long been unchallenged Democratic fiefdoms. Said G.O.P. National Chairman Ray Bliss: "His victory is phenomenal."

Inevitably his critics said of Lindsay, as La Guardia's foes had said of the Little Flower, that he was a bigmouthed opportunist. Yet on the littered sidewalks and traffic-blocked streets where he campaigned, his words rang only too true. New York in 1965 seemed a cruel parody of its legend. Compared with the sparkling, sophisticated city hymned by Cole Porter and Scott Fitzgerald, the world-admired paradigm of urbanity and elegance, New York seemed a shiftless slattern, mired in problems that had been allowed to proliferate for decades.

Its air was foul, and so were its surrounding waters--and there was barely enough water to drink. Its slums rotted away undisturbed, its new apartment buildings and public housing were as shoddy as rapacity and bureaucracy could make them. The city was deep in hock and going deeper; interest on its debt alone was $1.4 million daily--more than the cost of police, fire and sanitation services combined. More and more, it was a place where only the very rich and the welfare-dependent poor could afford to live. Its crime rate was rising as inexorably as its traffic slowed down. East Side, West Side, male and female prostitutes seemed like shades of prewar Berlin. Even the fabled skyline had lost much of its old majesty. As Architect Edward Durell Stone lamented: "If you look around you and you give a damn, it makes you want to commit suicide."

More Than a Theory. Lindsay blamed New York's decline on retiring Mayor Robert Wagner, an upright but tired administrator who all too often governed by procrastination for twelve years. Certainly the city's bureaucracy was lethargic. Yet it was New Yorkers themselves who were fundamentally to blame, for it was only because of their shoulder-shrugging indifference to the city's problems that feckless politicians flourished. Lindsay's greatest single achievement during the campaign was to pierce that self-defensive wall. The words of one of John Lindsay's heroes, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., seemed curiously relevant as he set about reawakening the imaginations and consciences of the city's 7.5 million people. "It is said that this manifesto is more than a theory, that it was an incitement," wrote Holmes in a 1925 U.S. Supreme Court decision. "Every idea is an incitement." Until the campaign, there had been few enough ideas about rescuing the city. The wonder was that anyone of Lindsay's talents should want the chore. Lindsay had no illusions about the job. Often during the campaign he told an anecdote about boarding a train bound from Washington to New York and seating himself in a car full of stony-faced men with their arms folded across their chests. "Who are they?" Lindsay asked the conductor. "They're patients going to an insane asylum," said the trainman. "Where are you going?" "To New York to run for mayor," said Lindsay. "Then," replied the conductor, "you stay right here."

The Action. But Lindsay is an activist, a man who loves a rough-knuckled challenge. "I could stay in the security of the House," he mused as he began his mayoralty campaign. "But the action today is in the streets of the cities." To win his way into the thick of that action as mayor of New York, Lindsay had to thread through a maze of obstacles. Not least were the style and manner that the clubhouse politicians derided. He is perennially tanned from yachting and skiing, Episcopalian-reared, Ivy League-educated, and every inch of his frame is stamped with the mark of American aristocracy. On street corners, where politicians have immemorially paraded as common men, he seemed, to say the least, out of his element.

And there was the Republican label. Lindsay's congressional voting record was more liberal than that of many Democrats (Americans for Democratic Action gave him an 84% "right vote" rating in the House for 1963-64). But there was the inescapable fact that registered Democrats in New York City outnumber Republicans by an overwhelming ratio of 7 to 2. With an icy pragmatism that offended many G.O.P. members, Lindsay played down his party label. "I am a Republican," he declared, "but New York City must have an independent, nonpartisan government." So saying, he lined up a Democrat and a Liberal Party man for his fusion ticket. Both lost.

Rasputin-Like. Another critical threat to Lindsay was the intervention of William F. Buckley Jr., Roman Catholic editor of the National Review, who had never before run for office. Buckley's announced objectives were to give some visibility to the Conservative Party and to establish it as a more effective force than the Liberal Party, which had helped push Lindsay's bandwagon. Buckley, the wittiest of the candidates, began to enjoy himself, and before the campaign was over it was obvious that his objective was to defeat Lindsay. In the end, he had nothing but his quips to console him, for he mightily aided Lindsay's cause by drawing thousands of Catholics away from Beame.

Plainly, Lindsay needed an extraordinary campaign organization. He got it, thanks to his own hardheaded analysis of the battlefield and the brilliant backroom masterminding of his campaign manager, Robert Price, 33, a blue-jowled, Rasputin-like Bronx Republican. G.O.P. Senator Jacob Javits, a magic name in New York's Jewish districts, came on as campaign chairman. Money flowed in from the Rockefeller family, New York Herald Tribune President Walter Thayer, and from purses farther west--notably from Tire Tycoon Leonard K. Firestone in California and Food Magnate H. J. Heinz II in Pittsburgh. In all, the Lindsay campaign cost close to $2,000,000 and, as usual, wound up in debt.

Price arranged for a 42-room headquarters suite in the Hotel Roosevelt, rented 117 neighborhood store-front offices throughout the city, organized some 30,000 fresh-faced young volunteers to staff telephones and ring doorbells. They were an exuberant, collegiate-looking gang, some of them Jewish youngsters whose yarmulkes at his rallies blended exotically with the brightly ribboned straw boaters of the "Lindsay Girls."

The bright-looking students, flocking around Lindsay as if his first name were Vachel, were the most obvious departure from the usual hack-packed New York mayoralty-campaign headquarters. But, beyond that, there was a notable shortage of G.O.P. professionals, big or little. To blur his party markings, Lindsay had asked all Republicans of national consequence to stay away. "I don't need officialdom to build me up," he said. "I don't think the public will vote for me just because a distinguished person says they should."

Grievance & Isolation. All the same, few political campaigns in memory--with the possible exception of the Kennedys'--have produced quite so exotic a cast of supporters and swingers. Among the Lindsay helpers were Actor Henry Fonda, Light Heavyweight Boxing Champion Jose Torres (a Puerto Rican), Singers Sammy Davis Jr., Liza Minnelli and Ethel Merman, Authors Norman Mailer and Paddy Chayefsky, Broadway Producers George Abbott and Hal Prince, ex-Baseball Star Jackie Robinson and Boxer Suear Ray Robin son, Comedienne Phyllis Diller and CORE Leader James Farmer.

The making of the mayor was also powered by batteries of mechanical equipment. A two-way short-wave radio system was hooked up between the hotel headquarters (code name: "the Mansion") and cars used by Bob Price ("Adolf") and Lindsay ("Benjamin"--for Disraeli). And there was "the gripe line," a special number on which New Yorkers could log their complaints; 6,000 did.

Lindsay covered every corner of the city, usually perching on a sound truck to shout his messaees. He came me ticulously briefed for each neighborhood, referred familiarly to its specific problems--the need for a playground, a subway stop, new school facilities. Always Lindsay damned the Wagner administration for its isolation from the people. "The mayor ought to be in intimate touch with the blood and guts of the city," he cried. "There won't be a person hurt or frightened but we'll know it at city hall." He promised a batch of neighborhood mayor's offices (one for every 250,000 people) throughout the city to receive grievances.

J.V.L Y. J.F.K. Lindsay attacked Wagner for failing to get $15 million in federal aid because he had filed the papers either too late or not at all. And he made it eminently clear that as mayor he would get as friendly an ear in the White House as any Democrat. Whenever he was heckled about his Republicanism, he brandished a pair of pens, noting that they were bill-signing bestowals from Lyndon Johnson in gratitude for Lindsay's help in pushing through medicare and the Voting Rights Act this year.

Lindsay ran scared all the way--and properly so. In contrast, the Beame team's campaign was a study in machine-made overconfidence. Abe Beame made little effort to woo undecided voters, seemed happy only among people that he knew were on his side. One evening in late October, while Beame was beaming at a $100-a-plate banquet for Democrats (menu: brandy-flavored bisque of Mississippi crawfish, filet mignon perigourdine, string beans saute amandine, bombe glacee Americana, petits fours), John Lindsay's dinner was a gulped ham sandwich between one curbstone speech and the next.

To help the "amiable bookkeeper," as Jacob Javits called Beame, Hubert Humphrey contributed kind words and one full day's campaigning. Bobby Kennedy turned up in New York now and then, sardonically informed one gathering that the Democrats are "the party of Roosevelt, Truman, John F. Kennedy . . . and Huey Long!"

President Johnson came up with a strong endorsement, weakly delivered. It didn't help. The voters gave Lindsay 46% of their ballots, Beame 40.6% and Buckley 13.4%. Buckley had hoped to demonstrate a resurgence of conservative Republicanism, but he drew his most potent support from normally Democratic Irish, Polish, Italian (and Catholic) areas. Though Abe Beame held out the promise of becoming New York's first Jewish mayor, the usually Democratic Jewish vote went heavily for Lindsay--particularly in upper-income neighborhoods.

Though Beame lost, both of his ticket partners came through. Popular Queens District Attorney Frank O'Connor, 55, who is aiming to run for Governor next year, was elected city council president. And Mario A. Procaccino, 53, Italian-born son of a shoemaker, was elected controller.

Lindsay's win was not the only post-Goldwater revival triumph in New York last week. The G.O.P. recaptured the state senate, won six upstate mayoralties, and elected Kenneth Keating, who had been dumped from his U.S. Senate seat last fall by Bobby Kennedy, to a Superior Court judgeship by 2,000,000 votes.

Nude Shakes. Far beyond New York, there was wistful talk of Lindsay among Republicans hungry for a dynamic presidential candidate. Many noted the passing similarities between J.V.L. and J.F.K., a common legacy of grace and style, a clear-eyed toughness, a springy vigor. Lindsay is even handsomer than Kennedy, but admirers noted that they had the same quick toothy smile, the straight-spined athlete's stride. Lindsay has borrowed from Kennedy the poking forefinger to counterpoint his speeches. His campaign for the mayoralty was hung from the same "get things moving again" line as Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign.

During the early months of his campaign, Lindsay even went politicking at Brooklyn's Brighton Beach in bathing trunks, grinning and shouldering his way bare-chested through the crowds--just as President Kennedy had done on a California beach in 1962. Lindsay eventually carried his activities beyond the beach; he continued to seek hands to shake among a few startled citizens while he was nude in the dressing-room shower.

Like Kennedy, Lindsay is an avid yachtsman, an ex-Navy officer, a sometime Sunday touch-football player, a reader of Ian Fleming novels, the father of a son named John. Lindsay, too, is married to a handsome woman who attended Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn., and Vassar. Mary Lindsay, 37, has little else in common with Jackie Kennedy. Mother of four (Katherine, 14; Margaret, 11; Anne, 9; John Jr., 5), "Mare"--as John calls her--is more gregarious and much more at home in the jostle of politics than Jackie.

Mary claims absolute disinterest in the 9-to-5 life--"the little house with the white picket fence and the roses"--and she made dozens of campaign speeches for John (a chore that Jackie abjured). Mary usually says what she thinks--bluntly. Once, as she and some friends were scanning a fulsome magazine piece about her husband, she snapped: "That's not the man I sleep with!"

Hip ASP. But the comparison between Lindsay and Kennedy is misleading as well as invidious. Today, at least, Lindsay does not possess the late President's polish and poise, his gleaming wit and easy public charm. A more fundamental difference between the two men is that John Lindsay is comparatively a self-made man. He was not raised in a family that was grooming a son to be President, nor was he raised in multimillion-dollar opulence by a father filled with angry ambition and the sting of Boston's social rebuffs.

John Lindsay's parents were descended from pure-blooded WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants)--though, as Lindsay is fond of pointing out, "If you are really hip, the correct term is ASP; all Anglo-Saxons are white, so why be redundant?" His father, George Nelson Lindsay, was the son of a Scotch-Irish brickmaker from the Isle of Wight who went broke in 1884 and emigrated to New York. John Lindsay'? mother, Eleanor Vliet Lindsay, was the daughter of a Dutch-descended New Jersey carpentry contractor whose ancestors dated back to colonial times.

John and his twin David were born on Nov. 24, 1921, in a modest West Side Manhattan apartment. The addresses soon improved as Lindsay's father, a self-made man, rose to be vice president of a Wall Street investment banking house. When he died in 1962, George Lindsay left his family $700,000, to be divided among John and David, George Jr., now 45, and Robert, now 39 (a sister, Eleanor, drowned in her swimming pool last summer).

Busy Flower. Lindsay's mother, a Wellesley College graduate, was a promising young actress. She encouraged her children to take music lessons, sing in the church choir and participate in school plays. John was more ham than musician (he had a brief fling at the drums), retained an interest in the theater long after he grew up, capping his thespian career in 1960 with a small part as a Congressman in TV's The Farmer's Daughter.

John went to Manhattan's exclusive Buckley School, then to St. Paul's in Concord, N.H. There he played football (center), crewed, made the debating team. After graduation in 1940 and their first term at Yale, he and David got jobs as pages at the Republican National Convention; they were taken down to New York's city hall by a friendly city alderman and introduced to Fiorello La Guardia himself. "He had his glasses up over his forehead and seemed very busy," recalls Lindsay. "He seemed just like he was in the newsreels--fast and busy."

As World War II loomed, John took an accelerated course at Yale, graduated with a major in history in 1943 after only 31 months. His undergraduate thesis discussed "The Effect of Oli ver Cromwell's Religion on Politics," a theme that still intrigues him. "Cromwell," he argues, "carried things to an extreme--that was his weakness." Ex tremists were never Lindsay's heroes: among his favorite politicians he lists Lincoln ("because of his compassion"), Jefferson ("a Renaissance man"), Benjamin Franklin ("an effective plotter and planner"), Benjamin Disraeli ("a master in government")--as well as Teddy Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie.

Fiery Exit. During the war, Lindsay served aboard a destroyer in the Mediterranean and Pacific, came out in 1946 with a lieutenant's stripes and five battle stars. In his first civilian job, he worked as a bank clerk--until the day he spotted an approaching bank official and tried to hide an illicit cigarette in the wastebasket; it burst into flame and Lindsay quit (he also quit smoking). He enrolled at the Yale Law School, where he found himself a member of a sliverthin Republican minority. He recalls: "The Democrats were always hollering about things, and this made me feel even more Republican."

After law school, Lindsay signed on with a top Manhattan law firm at $3,600 a year; a senior partner was Bethuel Webster, a staunch Republican and onetime president of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, who imparted to the new junior a commitment to civil liberties. In just five years, an unusually brief testing period for a major law firm, Lindsay was named a full partner.

Paranoiac Urge. Lindsay had been active in Manhattan politics since his return from the Navy in 1946. He was elected president of the city's lively and influential Young Republican Club in 1951, became city wide co-chairman of Youth for Eisenhower the following year. Says Jack Wells, an old New York G.O.P. hand who was campaign director for Governor Rockefeller in 1964: "If a man doesn't have that paranoiac urge for politics, you might as well forget about him. John got that feeling soon."

Lindsay also had a passion for the law, and in 1955 he got a break that allowed him to indulge both loves. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who had known of Lindsay's politicking, invited the young Manhattan lawyer to come to Washington as his executive assistant. Lindsay made solid contacts with all the members of Eisenhower's Cabinet, helped draft civil rights legislation for the Justice Department, and soon rose to be one of its bright young stars. But then, back in Manhattan's 17th District, the Republican incumbent was in danger of losing, and Lindsay's friends pleaded with him to run in the 1958 primary. With Herb Brow-nell's blessing, the young lawyer headed home for his first campaign.

He approached the game of politics like a big-leaguer from the start. From headquarters at the Hotel Roosevelt, he organized a district-spanning telephone canvass, attracted hundreds of the bright-eyed young volunteers who have figured in every subsequent Lindsay campaign. Though local G.O.P. leaders strongly supported his opponent, Lindsay easily won his primary and was elected to Congress with a comfortable 53.9% of the vote. Richard Nixon carried the district with a bare 50.8% in 1960, while Lindsay rolled up 59.8% of the vote against his Democratic opponent; in 1962 he won 68.7%. In 1964, while Lyndon Johnson's juggernaut was crushing nearly every other Republican in the state, Lindsay crashed through with 71.5% of his district's vote, the biggest margin logged by any G.O.P. Congressman in the nation.

Loner. From the start, Lindsay's career on Capitol Hill was marked--or, many think, marred--by his defiance of the Republican leadership. His first year in Congress, he was the only member of the House to vote against a bill broadening the Postmaster General's powers to seize obscene mail, observing that the bill placed the "full burden of proving innocence on the mailer." He ignored the Republican line by voting in favor of key Democratic bills. In the past session of the 89th Congress, he voted with the House Republicans only 6% of the time.

As far as the minority leaders were concerned, Lindsay's most unforgivable breaches of party discipline were in -1961 and 1963, when he supported the Kennedy Administration's moves to lessen the power of the House Rules Committee, thus clearing a legislative bottleneck created by a conservative coalition. It was a costly point of principle for Lindsay. He had long coveted a position on the House Foreign Affairs Committee; after his 1963 vote, Minority Whip Leslie Arends of Illinois told the rebel: "Boy, I never saw a man talk himself off the Foreign Affairs Committee so fast in my life."

"No Tool." Lindsay's major assignment was on the Judiciary Committee, where he compiled a solid record. He helped draft the 1964 civil rights bill, then labored as one of its four floor managers to get it passed. He was also a major force in getting the 1965 voting rights bill approved. Lindsay backed Indiana's Charles Halleck last January in his losing battle against Michigan's Gerry Ford to retain the House minority leader's post, hoping to strike a bargain that would open the way to key positions for his brand of liberal Republicans. Nevertheless, Ford has high respect for him. "He is a good advocate, a good lawyer," says Ford. "He was not just a tool of the extreme civil rights people. In any area where John would participate, he was knowledgeable and effective."

His effectiveness was particularly evident midway through his mayoral campaign, when he came out with a batch of well-researched--if occasionally uto-pian-sounding--"White Papers" defining his proposals for "the City of Tomorrow." It was not clear where all the money would come from, but his ideas mostly made sense. Among them:

-CRIME. To counter the city's never-ending crime--a theft every three minutes, an assault every twelve, a rape every six hours, a murder every 14--' Lindsay proposed to enlarge the police force and build a "massive mobile patrol system" by doubling the number of patrol cars; a squad car would patrol each block in high-crime areas every two minutes.

-NARCOTICS. He urged 24-hour surveillance of every known pusher, earlier identification of teen-age users, community clinics for those seeking advice, a city hospital exclusively for addicts.

-HOUSING. To aid the more than 1,000,000 New Yorkers who live in rotting tenements outlawed more than 70 years ago, Lindsay proposed creation of a new Department of Housing Maintenance to put teeth in the housing codes, and advocated a "vast community-improvement program" that would take advantage of available federal funds to boost middle-income apartment construction and slow the flight of middle-income families to the suburbs.

-TRAFFIC. To speed subway travel, he proposed construction of several new lines, triple-tracking, and staggered working hours for New Yorkers. As for auto traffic, he suggested expansion of cross-town express routes, priority lanes for busses and trucks, more municipal parking facilities, and relocation of the city's cargo docks so that freight-laden trucks would no longer burden Manhattan streets.

-CITY FINANCES. A five-point program that included Pentagon-style cost-analysis techniques, bold tax revision, and expansion of the city's economy to create 200,000 new jobs and thus broaden the tax base.

Power & Glory. To run the metropolis--let alone build the City of Tomorrow--New Yorkers pay their mayor $50,000 a year. The job is a Sisyphean symphony in bureaucracy, chronic lists of incomplete projects, a populace crying 24 hours a day for the mayor's time. Many of its most worrisome aspects are out of the mayor's control. The most horrendous is the ever-lengthening welfare bill which will come to nearly half a billion dollars this year, and is rising at the annual rate of $75 million as more and more unskilled newcomers crowd into the city.

Nonetheless, many New Yorkers consider the mayor's duties to be increasingly anachronistic--inevitably involved in such a flood of ceremonial and political functions that the actual management of the city has been left to a timid bureaucracy. It has become a New Yorker's cliche that the mayor is powerless to halt the city's decline. In fact, recent charter revisions have given the mayor of New York extraordinary new executive powers, which the outgoing administration did not utilize to best advantage.

Power is no more than the capability for achievement, it does not exist on its own. If Mayor Lindsay can employ his power to run the city as a modern-minded chief executive and not merely as its complaint bureau and top politician, he may well stir pride and kindle civic interest among New Yorkers. If he succeeds, he will not only restore the glory that was New York but immensely enhance its national political standing.

Fortunately, he is an ambitious man, and his choice of domicile may ultimately be the White House rather than Gracie Mansion. At any rate, after spending an exhausting six months devoted to learning about the problems of the city he will lead, John Lindsay no longer talks as if his aim is a single, candidacy-building term in city hall. "It will take eight years to do what has to be done," he said quietly last week. "If my record is good after one term, I would hope I could get reelected. I want to be a good mayor."

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