THE LINDSAY ADVENTURE

...Lindsay was presiding over a municipal government which O'Connor iiifelicitously but not wholly inaccurately described as a "Democratic administration...

...Johnson's own political lifetime...

...The Lindsay Adventure by JAMES A. WECHSLER Tn the early evening of January I, when Mayor John Vliet Lindsay stood in the open plaza of New York's ancient City Hall to deliver his inaugural address, the weather was almost implausibly mild, as if the municipal revolution he led had altered the seasons...

...in any case the portrait of Lindsay as "Rockefeller's boy" could only be damaging at a time when Rockefeller's prestige was sagging (partly for the wrong reasons, such as urgently-needed tax increases...

...I have been told this is a romantic view, unrelated to the...

...It would be a lively irony if New York's first Republican mayor in more than twenty years were to display the courage of suppressed Democratic convictions...

...it is my own belief that he must resort to a city income tax to finance the social program he has projected...

...He privately remarked one day shortly before his inaugural that he needed a police commissioner who could, on the day he took office, proclaim the principle of civilian review to restore the faith of Negroes and Puerto Ricans in the processes of law, and simultaneously offer reassurance to the apprehensive middle class...

...The truth is that Lindsay has arrived in a city groping for leadership and light...

...Costello and Robert Price, his astute, indefatigable thirty-three-year-old campaign manager, are deputy mayors...

...A certain measure of rivalry is inevitable, even at this stage...

...both are strong-willed and often headstrong...

...Lindsay swiftly sought to counter this condition by engaging in a talent hunt for men of distinction who would head the city's departments...

...Perhaps there was an excess of mutual suspicion in the relationship between the two men...

...There is serious question about the actual extent of his philanJAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and a regular columnist for that newspaper...

...Many sophisticated political observers were suggesting that the governor, who had long envisaged himself the prophet of modern Republicanism, did not relish additional rivalry, and would suffer no acute pain if Lindsay's career floundered in the morass of the city...

...Lindsay combines Wagner's essential decencies with a strong streak of resolution, a disdain for sloth and incompetence, a great reservoir of sheer physical energy, and a wisely fatalistic view of his own political future...

...He is a dedicated crusader for civil rights in a city where men of property (and those who wish they were) are coldly resisting the Negro upsurge...

...He was able, for example, to secure as his press aide—a position that often looms larger than the title—one of New York's most conscientious, crusading young journalists, Woody Klein, who had only a short time earlier abandoned a reporter's job for a more lucrative television post...

...The political fight-managers are freely forecasting that Kennedy will seize this interlude to try to mutilate the Republican of his own generation most likely to pose a threat to his own bid for national leadership...

...their success had especially infuriated those labor statesmen who had invested in Lindsay's defeat...

...As Lindsay, in a brave effort to mask any inner feelings of despair, spiritedly went through the rites of the inaugural, he received the blessings of eminent Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergymen...

...I suspect that John Lindsay ran for the mayoralty because he recognized that a party which nominated Barry Goldwater for the Presidency had no large immediate plans for him, and because he believed he could escape from the trap only by an extraordinary exercise of leadership in the nation's largest city...

...but it could be a competition of excellence rather than a street brawl...

...The origins of the estrangement are complex, but the frictions had steadily multiplied...

...The remark ran counter to the whole strategy and spirit of the Lindsay campaign, in which he had emphasized his resolve to serve as a truly "fusion" mayor, to seek re-election to the post four years from now because the rehabilitation of New York was a long-term project, and to eschew any active, aggressive Republican partisanship...

...Just fourteen hours before these ceremonies, and five hours after Lindsay had officially assumed office, the subways and buses of this tumultuous metropolis had been abruptly halted by Michael Quill's Transport Workers Union...

...Thus, while it was assumed that the amenities would be observed on the surface, Lindsay was reconciled to the notion that he could not look to Albany for unselfish, uninhibited support...

...Yet it is also conceivable that, in at least the foreseeable future, the reverse could occur...

...Most of New York's leading laborites, despite private misgivings about what many regarded as Quill's angry last hurrah, remained stolidly silent...

...Both possess a special appeal for young political activists...

...it is still going on and he has scored some successes...

...This could be the kind of stroke that would give Lindsay a special identity as a mayor willing to talk both dollars and sense to the people...

...rugged realities of political warfare...

...He is a civil libertarian in a city whose police force is riddled with Birchites...

...For Lindsay's breed of liberal Republicanism has been a major asset to the President in his record of legislative triumphs...

...There was a widespread sense that the governor, his own political fortunes fading, had little enthusiasm for the emergence of a young Republican "man of the future" at City Hall who might —if he chose to do so—even obstruct Rockefeller's bid for the gubernatorial renomination in the event that Senator Jacob Javits decided to challenge him for the job...

...But it rests on two entirely realistic propositions...

...Meanwhile, back at City Hall, Lindsay began his term with a "fusion" team quite different from the starting line-up he had visualized...

...His two top running mates—Timothy Costello, state chairman of the Liberal Party, and Milton Mollen, a renegade Democrat—had been defeated for the off-fices of Council President and Controller...

...Lindsay's relations with the Johnson Administration present another seemingly discouraging problem...

...The largest asset Lindsay brings to his debt-ridden office is an enormous degree of public good will, dramatically heightened by the circumstances under which he took office...

...Beyond all these considerations—the antagonism or apathy of entrenched sectors of the labor movement, the aloofness of Rockefeller, the Democratic orthodoxy of his top associates in the city government, the elusive-ness of superior talent—Lindsay confronts the enigmatic matter of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's role in the city's new era...

...Steeped in the lore of the Roosevelt era, Johnson undoubtedly recalls the close association between FDR and Fiorello La Guardia...

...Soon after Lindsay declared his candidacy, a journalist closely identified with Rockefeller reported that the governor was, in effect, subsidizing the Lindsay adventure...

...On the surface the two seem ordained for combat...

...In second-line positions there are growing numbers of young, dedicated attorneys who have signed up with Lindsay much in the fashion of the bright law school graduates who formed so large a part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "children's crusade" and who were similarly visible in John F. Kennedy's New Frontier...

...despite all the prophecies, New York may prove large enough to hold both men, and even provide a setting for cooperation between them in dealing with the infinite agonies of the city...

...But the disappointments have been numerous, and Lindsay has invested countless hours in a largely vain quest for help...

...The simplistic view is that Mr...

...J. Lee Rankin, former Soliciter General of the United States, agreed to leave an opulent law practice to serve as corporation counsel...

...That is hardly a formula for winning popularity contests...

...but certainly Lindsay had no reason to believe as he took office that Rockefeller was one of his dedicated rooters, or was disposed, in certain crucial areas affecting the state-city relationship, to make life easy for him...

...Certainly Lindsay represents no threat to the President for the duration of Mr...

...These are imponderables, subject to both political accident and human equations...

...New York's Central Trade and Labor Council, traditionally an adjunct of the Democratic Party, had opposed Lindsay's election and at least some of its dignitaries were quietly enjoying his predicament (although the strike itself was aimed at a non-profit city Transit Authority rather than an opulent corporate colossus, and its chief victims were those citizens, including many thousands of unionists, who do not employ chauffeurs...

...Perhaps he might have added that some of them were also reluctant to climb aboard what they regard as New York's sinking ship despite their esteem for the new commander...

...One is that any direct political contest between Lindsay and Kennedy is a matter of the long-range future, subject to many unpredictable events...

...The Democratic political target for 1965 in New York State is Nelson Rockefeller's gubernatorial seat...

...yet virtually every informed official with whom I have talked in the last decade has privately agreed that such a tax is essential...

...Over a luncheon table one day he named some of those he had sought to enlist (and the names covered many cities) and observed sadly: "Too many people are just too locked in by life—by families, pensions, habits...

...For at this moment of certification of a remarkable election victory which installed a Republican-Fusion candidate in the mayoralty of this Democratic city for the first time in more than two decades, John Lindsay might understandably have viewed himself as the loneliest man in town...

...both are clearly emerging as the most dramatic and significant figures within their parties in the state...

...The assumption that Lindsay will find Washington's atmosphere frigid when he seeks the Federal help so desperately needed by the city may prove to be a false parochial hope of the smaller men in New York's Democratic party...

...Lindsay's intelligence, integrity, and vigor are beyond dispute...

...Johnson's establishment will betray little enthusiasm for Lindsay's experiment in fusion government...

...This is not to say that his quest has been a futile one...

...his depth and creativeness now remain to be demonstrated in a setting that would quickly demoralize most men...

...First he runs against Abe Beame, and then against Mike Quill...

...No one can foretell the end of the Lindsay adventure...

...The City Council was overwhelmingly Democratic...

...in their places he found Frank O'Connor, an ambitious district attorney from Queens whose eyes are fixed on this year's Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and Mario Procaccino, an amiable humorist who has never been accused of any organizational infidelities...

...moreover, in their parallel Washington days, they had several acerbic encounters when Kennedy appeared before the House Judiciary Committee on which Lindsay was serving...

...Lindsay inherits a vast fiscal deficit, deep racial tensions, the anxieties of a crime-haunted community, and the resentments of underprivileged slum-dwellers...

...Robert F. Wagner was a well-intentioned, decent mayor whose largest sins were those of excessive gentleness and patience...

...His most recent book is "Reflections of an Angry Middle-aged Editor...

...But it was hard to detect any other favorable portent in the mild temperature...

...Thus this campaign is hardly likely to plunge him into any fierce rhetorical encounter with Kennedy, who will no doubt be jousting with Rockefeller if the Democrats ran produce a reasonably creditable candidate...

...Rockefeller's comment gave last-minute confirmation to the anxieties of wavering Democrats who, while intrigued by the image of a fusion administration in the La Guardia tradition, were tortured by the notion that they might be creating a Republican President...

...He has taken a long gamble...

...To the simple-minded all these factors seem to contain the elements of an epic political struggle, with bouts and rematches being staged at regular intervals...

...they say they want to be helpful but they just can't make a move...

...An eyewitness could not avoid wondering whether these earnest enlistments of divine aid would be meaningful solace to the recipient...

...As if to parody Lindsay's pledges of a city on the verge of great new motion in many directions, Quill had finally carried out his biennial threat to convert New York into a one-horse town, or, at best, a community overwhelmingly dependent upon a normally inadequate taxi fleet...

...Then, two days before the election which the pollsters by then agreed might hinge on a last-minute blunder in either camp, Rockefeller blandly announced on a television program that a Lindsay victory in this Democratic stronghold would almost surely transform the new mayor into a prospective Republican Presidential nominee...

...The transit strike—an irrational action launched despite the new mayor's plea for extension of the contract with assurances of retroactivity —seemed to symbolize the multitude of desperate troubles Lindsay had inherited...

...Certainly he is not an innocent...

...Regardless of what aid he can wrench from Albany and Washington, Lindsay still must find new revenues within the city...

...Lindsay has made it plain that he will not feel obliged to leave his manifold duties at City Hall to give his all for the governor...

...thropy...

...But the forty-four-year-old Republican maverick was alienated not only from a large body of the city's labor leadership...

...It was obviously his belief that such men—of varied political allegiances— would impart ah operational tone and direction that could not easily be vetoed by Democratic majorities...

...Yet they suggest that the balance sheet of probabilities is not wholly adverse to Lindsay...

...One veteran politico observed as the transit strike hit the "proud city" of which Lindsay spoke in his inaugural: "How lucky can a guy be...

...He is a WASP—a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant—ruling a city in which Cardinal Spellman's brand of right-wing Catholicism has long intimidated City Hall and its subdivisions...

...The other is that there can be abundant glory for both men in the massive mission of rehabilitating New York City, and that Kennedy's stature might well be enhanced rather than diminished by spirited collaboration in the effort...

...both are widely portrayed as ultimate Presidential contenders...

...His relations with Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller had been strained and fragile for many months...

...Yet this, too, may be a miscalculation...

...Yet in this effort, too, he soon encountered rebuff and frustration...

...if there are Democratic obstructionists who hope to make a hard voyage an impossible one, he will carry his case to the people promptly, as he did when the transit strike began...

...Lindsay's major labor backers were David Dubinsky and Alex Rose, the rulers of the Liberal Party which gave Lindsay his margin of victory in a memorably close contest...

...But he will enliven and perhaps even ennoble the politics of our time—no matter how bitterly the venerable leaders of the Grand Old Party and the Democratic loyalists resent his brash intrusion...

...No doubt this could happen...

...He was still looking for such a man as these lines were written in early January...

...Lindsay and his associates found it hard to believe that the nature of Rockefeller's tribute was either well-intentioned or guileless...

...He is a liberal Republican in a city where the GOP has long been a feeble, futile institution living off the crumbs of Democratic patronage designed to keep it docile and impotent...