The Conversion of John Lindsay

JUST after 9 one morning last week, a pair of registrars from the New York City Board of Elections were summoned to Gracie Mansion, the mayor's 18th century residence overlooking the East River. There John V. Lindsay and his wife Mary, both lifelong Republicans, filled in new voter registration forms, marked the circle for "Democratic Party" and signed their names.

With that long-awaited formality, Lindsay changed not only his partisan label but also, quite possibly, the shape of Democratic national politics. On the eve of the 1972 presidential campaign, he has injected himself as a glamorous presence into the more liberal reaches of his new party and as a long-shot possibility to challenge Richard Nixon a year from November.

Lindsay denied that his conversion automatically means he will seek the presidential nomination. But he declared in his announcement: "I'm firmly committed to take an active part in 1972 to bring about new national leadership." There is no question that Lindsay wants the presidency; there is only the question of when and how he should seek it. At 49, Lindsay last week took the first step in what amounts to a new political career, escaping from the Republican cul-de-sac in which he was trapped and eventually, he hopes, from the sooty horizons of New York City, which has a tradition of breaking its mayors' political careers.

The final decision, it was suggested amid some hilarity at Lindsay's press conference, came on a Utah mountaintop. Vacationing with his wife earlier this month, he telephoned Deputy Mayor Richard Aurelio from a riding stable and, the story goes, dictated the substance of his announcement. Actually, a very similar draft of the speech had been prepared by his staff weeks earlier.

Protracted Striptease. There was an air of anticlimax when he confronted the press in Gracie Mansion, for months of rumors about the change had given it the tedium of a protracted striptease. Nonetheless, the room was jammed with 17 movie and television cameras and dozens of reporters. It was a testimony of press interest in the mayor and, to his enemies, a confirmation of their charge that he is a creation of the media. In soft, matter-of-fact tones, Lindsay delivered a seven-minute recitation of his differences with the G.O.P. on issues and ideology. "In a sense," he began, "this step recognizes the failure of 20 years in progressive Republican politics."

No Illusions. Today, he said, "the Republican Party has moved so far from what I perceive as necessary policies for our city and for the country that I can no longer work within it." He gave a litany of urban troubles--"men without jobs, families without hope, indecent housing, blighted neighborhoods, crowded hospitals, crime, poverty, polarization." He excoriated the Nixon Administration for the continuing war and for a "retreat from the Bill of Rights" through censorship, wiretapping and the illegal arrests of Mayday demonstrators. Nixon, he said, refuses to impose wage and price controls to check inflation, ignores the poor while seeking a $250 million loan guarantee for Lockheed Aircraft. "I regret," he said, "that new directions cannot emerge from a Republican Party that has finally become a closed institution."

About the Democratic Party, Lindsay went on, "I have no illusions. But in contrast, the Democratic Party has sought since the travesty of 1968 to diversify and reform itself." Lindsay spoke, not very specifically, about his intention to "build a coalition that can work for peace and justice."

The Administration's Republican loyalists waved goodbye sarcastically. Said one party official: "He's always been a dirty word to us. A lot of Republicans are saying good riddance." Conservative William F. Buckley savored the moment: "I told him to do this six years ago. I suppose it takes him a long time to think."

Lindsay's conversion was far from an abrupt Pauline vision. He first ran for the House in 1958 as an insurgent Republican. Ever since, he has been a heterodox member of the party. In 1964 he refused to support the Goldwater-Miller ticket --although four years later in Miami, to his subsequent chagrin, he delivered one of the seconding speeches for Spiro Agnew. At that time he had better hopes for a Nixon presidency and did not anticipate the public role that Agnew would come to play.

Lindsay managed to coexist with the party during his first term as mayor, but when he ran for a second term, he was defeated in the city's Republican primary by voters who thought he behaved too much like a liberal Democrat. That was the beginning of his apostasy. Running on the Liberal and Independent lines, he won reelection, with just 42% of the vote, only because the Republican and Democratic candidates divided the more conservative ballots. Lindsay increasingly gave up any pretense of enduring Republican loyalties. He staffed his administration with former Robert Kennedy workers, and with others far to the left of his party's Nixonian leadership.

Bad Marriage. His relationship with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller has always had the quality of a disastrously bad marriage; the final separation came in the 1970 gubernatorial elections, when Lindsay supported the Democrat, Arthur Goldberg. This year, in an ugly legislative fight in Albany over the New York City budget, Lindsay and Rockefeller exchanged bitter insults, with the Governor contemptuously questioning the mayor's competence and finally appointing a commission to investigate the city's affairs.

Throughout his second term, Lindsay has been increasingly harsh on the Nixon Administration. A year ago or longer, he began seriously considering his switch to the Democrats. For months his aides, led by Aurelio, pressed him to make the change. With Nixon in the White House, Rockefeller in Albany and a Republican and a Conservative in the Senate from New York, they argued, he had no place to go.

Board of Deacons. The defection badly damaged the morale of liberal Republicans. Said California Congressman Pete McCloskey: "It gets lonelier and lonelier over here. We've already lost [former California Senator Thomas] Kuchel, [former Interior Secretary Walter] Hickel and [former New York Senator Charles] Goodell. Now Lindsay."

Among Democrats, the reaction was elaborately ambiguous. With his following among the young, minorities and the disenchanted, and above all his star quality--the word charisma keeps recurring--Lindsay in the long run seems an elegant addition to the progressive wing of the Democrats. More immediately he presents unwanted problems. Obviously the announced and unannounced presidential candidates do not welcome competition, and their greetings last week ranged from tepid to frosty. South Dakota's Senator George McGovern unkindly recalled the Agnew nominating speech. Washington's Senator Henry Jackson declared: "If you join the church one Sunday, you can't expect to be chairman of the board of deacons the next Sunday."

Lindsay's arrival prompted no deep fear in the camp of front-running Edmund Muskie, only a certain nervousness. If Lindsay enters the primaries, he will mainly damage the most liberal candidates--McGovern, Indiana's Birch Bayh. But, says one Muskie aide, "let's face it, he's got more charisma than anybody out there now."

Some Democratic officials fear that a Lindsay candidacy might provoke a schism on the left of the party, which could result in a fourth-party candidate that would divide the Democratic vote and ensure Nixon's reelection. But these Democrats argue that Lindsay has no chance for the nomination anyway.

There is, first of all, a strong reluctance among Democrats to award the highest prize to a newcomer whose transparently timed conversion leaves him open to a charge of opportunism. Only if Lindsay were to win impressively in the primaries and rank high in public opinion polls would the convention find him irresistible. And at the moment, the steeplechase of 23 state primaries beginning next March 7 in New Hampshire does not look inviting to Lindsay. Against a moderate like Muskie from neighboring Maine, New Hampshire would be unlikely to welcome Lindsay. In Florida, where the second primary will be held, Lindsay could expect to divide the liberal Miami votes with others such as McGovern and Bayh, but much of the rest of the state would be hostile.

One of Lindsay's worst problems would be the eight mandatory primary states where state officials place the names of all likely candidates on the ballot. Thus he could not pick only hospitable states to enter, unless he signed affidavits disavowing his candidacy. Aside from Wisconsin and possibly Oregon, the state where Lindsay might run best would be California, but its primary occurs so late, June 6, that he could be badly scarred before he even got there. To make a long primary drive, Lindsay would also have to raise a Rockefeller's share of campaign funds--a more difficult task, since Lindsay's defection has almost certainly cost him some of his wealthier Republican backers.

Show Me. There is also the intriguing question of Lindsay's image in the country at large. Some say his popularity increases in direct proportion to his distance from New York City. Yet he is still rather remote from the rest of the nation. In most of the South, he would be political poison for the Democrats. Says one Alabamian: "He's a New Yorker. That's like being from Red China." The Detroit News denounced Lindsay as "a political transvestite." Still, in California, which will provide nearly 10% of the delegates to the Democratic convention, a Field poll last May showed that Democrats like Lindsay better than anyone except Edward Kennedy. Professional politicians throughout the country are interested in his potential, but the general public still has a "show me" attitude. Part of his fascination is that he is almost preternaturally handsome and photogenic --the London Daily Sketch in a recent effusion called him "the sexiest man in the world"--and formidably charming as a campaigner. The new 18-year-old voters would doubtless be a rich source of power to him (see following story) as would blacks and other minorities.

But the city he has tried to govern for six years would haunt him. "If he can't run New York City," his opponents will repeat almost in chorus, "how does he expect to run the country?" It is almost impossible to say how much another mayor could have forestalled New York's deterioration, but the city, with its public-employee strikes, housing crises, power blackouts, accelerating crime and financial deficits, will be a heavy club in his enemies' hands.

Instinct. Some Democrats mutter, however, that Lindsay is the only politician who can make points out of chaos. He is the acknowledged leader of the nation's mayors in their fight for greater federal revenues to rescue the decaying cities. Lindsay says he plans to refute critics now by demonstrating that he can indeed govern New York City; he means also to use its problems as proof of a larger national crisis instead of evidence of his own incompetence.

If a presidential run does not look feasible this year, Lindsay might position himself to run for the New York governorship in 1974. From Albany, as leader of the New York delegation to the convention in 1976, the nomination might be accessible, assuming that Nixon is re-elected next year. If a Democrat wins in 1972, then presumably Lindsay would have to wait until 1980, when he would be only 58.

It is far likelier that Lindsay has no such grand design and is waiting to hear the national response to his party switch and listen to what his staff and his political instinct tell him in the next few months. Says Mary Lindsay: "I asked him the other day, 'Do you know where all this is leading?' He looked at me and said 'I don't know.' "

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