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Jewish World Review Dec. 26, 2000 / 29 Kislev 5761
Philip Terzian
Lindsay was a tall, strikingly handsome, patrician Republican with a WASPish
self-confidence not seen in New York politics since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. He had been
elected mayor just a few months before in a memorable three-way race among a dreary Tammany
Democrat (Abraham Beame) and William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of National Review. The Buckley
candidacy was only a half-serious enterprise -- when asked what he would do if he won, the
candidate responded, "Demand a recount!" -- but the collapse of the old Democratic machine was
serious business. As Murray Kempton said of Lindsay, "He is fresh and everyone else is tired."
Lindsay's death the other day, in his eightieth year, reminds us how much has happened in
the intervening decades. By the end of his first four-year term, New York politics had been
turned upside-down. Not only was Lindsay denied renomination by his own Republican party (he
ran on the Liberal ticket) but the Buckley-style challenge to his candidacy came from the Left:
That was the year when Norman Mailer ran for mayor, and Jimmy Breslin for president of the City
Council. To say that, in the America of 1969, things had fallen apart, the center was not
holding, and mere anarchy was loosed upon the world, would be an understatement. Four years
later Lindsay staggeredout of office, to be succeeded by -- Abraham Beame.
What happened? Well, obviously, the New York Republican party of Lindsay's youth had been
transformed, and he not only formally became a Democrat in 1972, but ran for president as a
Democrat that same year. Both gestures were disasters. Estranged from his old home, and an
object of suspicion in his new surroundings, Lindsay's once-promising political career ended in
anticlimax. Or something close to disgrace. The year he left office (1974) was not too long
before New York City hovered on bankruptcy; and while Abe Beame paid the electoral price three
years later, the bulk of the blame was showered on John Lindsay.
Lindsay was, essentially, a casualty of conventional wisdom. When he became mayor, the
Great Society was in flood tide, and federal programs and cash were guaranteed to cure social
ills. Having been greeted with a massive transit strike on the day he was sworn into office,
Lindsay dedicated his years in office to giving New York's powerful public-employee unions
everything they demanded -- and more -- to the detriment of New York's taxpaying residents. He
proved singularly adept at funneling federal funds from Washington to the five boroughs, and
jumped at the chance to play Father Bountiful.
"People would grab him and hold him and kiss him," recalled his housing authority chairman,
Walter Washington, later the District of Columbia's first mayor-commissioner. "He would visit
areas hardly any others would tend to visit -- the Lower East Side, Harlem and Brooklyn. And I
saw people just trying to touch his garment .... He gave people a feeling of belonging and
hope." One obituary tribute mentioned Lindsay's "palpable presence on the city streets,
appearing in shirt sleeves, mingling with hippies and black and Hispanic residents with equal
charm and naturalness."
The problem, of course, was that Lindsay's attention was effectively distracted from the
bulk of his constituents, who were neither hippies nor black nor Hispanic. nd as we have since
learned, some trillions of dollars later, an expanding welfare state is no substitute for
economic opportunity or personal responsibility; and in fact, always make things worse. We have
the benefit of hindsight, to be sure, and Lindsay was only following the experts' advice.
One of those experts, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has just retired from the Senate, full of
age and honors. At about the time things were going sour for Lindsay, and New York was
essentially governed by Vic Gotbaum, the local AFSCME boss, Moynihan had the good sense to get
out of the social welfare business and turn his attention to foreign affairs. By the time
Moynihan scraped into the U.S. Senate in 1976, poor Lindsay was exiled from New York politics,
and Moynihan could beat the drum for his own discredited policies from the safety of the Senate
chamber. When Lindsay died last week, forgotten and impoverished in Hilton Head, S.C., Moynihan
surrendered his seat to another expert in social policy, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And the beat
goes
12/20/00: Cooling down
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