John Lindsay and the Republicans

...A recent Harris Poll showed that like the more prominently mentioned GOP contenders, Lindsay is running ahead of Mr...

...What he succeeded in doing was to insure Lindsay's election...

...None of the prospective Republican nominees has been on record for so long with so perceptive an awareness of the dead-end quality of our Vietnam position...

...Garelik is a key to the story...

...But Lindsay didn't crack, although he had some bad public and private moments...

...The command of the New York police force, like many others, had long been considered a private preserve of the Irish—perhaps deservedly so because so many who serve are of Irish descent...

...Richard Nixon's talent for self-destruction has been abundantly demonstrated in California...

...Instead he expressed his understanding for the unease and unrest of a generation shadowed by war and groping for meanings in life...

...If he were to be remembered for more than the courage of the positions he took on such causes of minimal popularity as fastidious devotion to the Bill of Rights, he would have to find new terrain...

...His regime could not have begun in a more melancholy setting—a transit strike that paralyzed the city for twelve days, as if the very subways themselves were serving notice on the new boy in town (or the "Christian," the "Boy 13 Scout" or "Young Sir Galahad" as he was variously described by the cynical political reporters and their old friends in the old crowd) that he had undertaken what was truly a mission impossible...

...My answer is that, in a country facing the Presidential election prospect of a Johnson-Reagan or Johnson-Nixon combat, the vision of a Lindsay-Kennedy contest has the quality of a bright dream...

...the futile sniping of the organization Democrats has only enhanced Lindsay's stature...

...For many years he served in lower echelons, but he had come to know Alex Rose during the latter's battle against gangsterism in the needle trades...

...In his reveries this backroom gentleman wondered aloud why the Republican managers lacked the wisdom to recognize that Lindsay's qualifications as a successor to Lyndon Johnson were distinctive and superior...

...But the question would not be in the national air if Lindsay had not decisively reversed the drift of his first months in city office and steadily established what must be called an authentic image...

...A personal footnote: I am frequently taxed in public assemblages by those who express bafflement at my affirmative view of both John Lindsay and Robert F. Kennedy...

...Settlement of the strike merely shifted the spotlight to the larger crises he had inherited—most of all the fiscal ordeal of a municipality that had too long delayed its days of reckoning and to which Lindsay broke the harsh news of tax increases...

...Out-of-state men who might have been tempted by Federal posts and the salons of Georgetown associated with them could find little enchantment in the littered sidewalks of New York...

...Lindsay personally visited the scene, facing an audience which he whimsically (and with some accuracy) addressed as "Berkeley East...

...Indeed, there were undoubtedly those who maliciously viewed the triumph as finally sealing his fate...

...He happens to be a Jewish egghead, university-trained, who almost fortuitously chose police work...

...during the mayoralty campaign, Lindsay was questioned on street corners about the war and his answers were blunt...

...Buckley's vote was unexpectedly and impressively large, but it was most heavily drawn from right-wing Catholic areas of Democratic enrollment...

...As a congenital gambler on political miracles, I can visualize no parlay more fascinating than one that projected McCarthy and Lindsay as the ultimate choices of their party conventions...

...With Rose's counsel, Lindsay "discovered" Garelik...

...he has steadfastly resisted the Vietnam escalation...

...The basic elements in that image are that of a man who has proved that New York City, while still manifestly unhealthy and even unruly on many levels, is not unmanageable...

...yet Lindsay's ability to communicate with most of these campus rebels (to the chagrin of the bumbling college president who walked out before the question period began) was illustrative of his gift for imparting dignity to dis-sidence and thereby differentiating it from self-indulgent sound and fury...

...To a certain degree this was an act of quiet desperation...

...They were impressed by both Lindsay's style and his substance and, being mayors, they were naturally not overwhelmed by the knowledge that no President had ever been born in the mayoralty...

...He had become, in short, a "loner," as respected and articulate as legislator as he had been as lawyer, but destined more for a footnote in the Congressional archives than for any large role...

...In domestic terms, Lindsay's own Administration has offered almost a model-city example of how to minimize the angry estrangement and isolation of minority groups that threatens any dream of rational progress...

...Reagan's "law-and-order" preachments may stir the soul of smug suburbia at the cocktail hour, but Lindsay has so far shown that a large amount of order can be achieved without the punitive and inflammatory uses of "law...

...Lindsay had steadfastly avoided the image of a young man in a hurry, but he faced the obvious prospect of becoming the middle-aged man going nowhere...

...All this experience had little to do with the making of a mayor...

...Mayor Lindsay had to prove himself and part of the process was to take the fire...

...his emergence was in part the product of the animosities between Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Senator Jacob Javits...

...But Kenneth Keating (later to be defeated by Robert F. Kennedy) showed no disposition to abdicate his Senate seat...

...Nothing could have been more striking than the contrast between Lindsay's breaking of the sound barrier and Ronald Reagan's debacle in a somewhat similar encounter with rebellious students...

...Lindsay refused to be intimidated by the grousing and grumbling of some of the old-line officialdom (and responded with equal firmness when the disaffected tried to incite Leary against Garelik...

...Among his earliest acts was the drafting from Philadelphia of Howard Leary as police commissioner...

...His margin is smaller than the others but surely this is extraordinary recognition for a man whose doom had been so widely pronounced when he took office...

...Yet no man could seem to thrive and grow in the mayoralty of New York unless he had both unusual hidden resources of physical strength and a philosophical fatalism about personal advancement...

...Lindsay lost the skirmish but won the war...

...But whatever chagrin may have been privately felt by those who had permitted him to indulge in the vanity of what they were sure was a losing exhibition (and Governor Rockefeller may have been among them) they saw little reason for consternation in Lindsay's victory...

...As I wrote in these pages a month after he took office, Lindsay was "a civil libertarian whose police force is riddled with Birchites," a "liberal Republican in a city where the GOP has long been a feeble institution living off the crumbs of Democratic patronage," a passionate advocate of civil rights "in a city where men of property (and those who wish they were) are coldly resisting the Negro upsurge" and finally he was "a WASP ruling a city in which Cardinal Spell-man's brand of right-wing Catholicism has long intimidated City Hall...

...Even Lindsay's admirers fretted nervously during that first year...

...His steady rise in esteem among the voters of the so-called "silk-stocking" district (he won by 7800 votes in 1958 after an insurgent primary and by 91,000 in 1964 when he campaigned as an anti-Golclwater Republican) did nothing to entrench him in the favor of the Old Guardsmen who dominate the GOP Congressional establishment...

...They also pragmatically agreed that, in the event of any outbreak the crucial tactical response was the concentration of a maximum of manpower and the application of a minimum of force...

...into his hands...

...Deep down this was the way he convinced them that he did care...

...What could have been a bitter recitation ended in an ovation...

...his deep doubts about Vietnam were voiced early and clearly...

...After war service in the Navy and the private practice of law, Lindsay campaigned for General Eisenhower in 1952 and was subsequently named an assistant in the Justice Department by Attorney-General Herbert Brownell...

...On a national scale he has increasingly been viewed as an eloquent voice of the cities...

...Six years afterward he was in Congress...

...On the two issues that, at this point, seem likely to dominate the 1968 campaign, Lindsay surely merits more serious attention than Reagan...

...His popularity with the Republican hierarchy on Capitol Hill was hardly enhanced when he joined with the Kennedy Administration in moving to curb the powers of the ancient Republican-Dixiecrat coalition that had so long used the Rules Committee to bury liberal legislation...

...It is at this point that the question—"Why Not Lindsay in W— may be relevantly re-introduced...

...The atmosphere of turmoil was heightened by Lindsay's prompt attempt to carry out his campaign pledge for creation of a civilian police review board and for reorganization of the Police Department itself...

...If the matter is to be debated in terms of on-the-job training, neither Reagan nor Senator Charles Percy of Illinois can offer any competing claims of large significance...

...Robert Price, the young, skilled manager of Lindsay's campaign, had far greater gifts for the machinery of political mobilization than for the statecraft of what Lindsay genuinely viewed as a fusion city government...

...But if the Percy candidacy (for which Lindsay has expressed a preference) is deemed pragmatically relevant despite his open conflicts with Everett Dirksen, it is hard to see why Lindsay should be considered unpresentable...

...But if air pollution still strangles many citizens, the change in the atmosphere is unmistakable...

...As a young attorney he had the valuable guidance of Bethuel Webster, a distinguished member of the bar and an enlightened champion of freedom...

...it was tacitly understood that Leary in turn would name Sanford Garelik as his chief inspector...

...The crucial turning point—although it was not apparent at the time—may well have been Lindsay's handling of the police problem, and the corollary issue of "violence in the streets...

...Despite all the transparent disclaimers, Ronald Reagan is clearly a leading contender for the Republican nomination...

...He avoided any sententious review of events in which few people—including the college officialdom—had distinguished themselves...

...he was apparently disposed to let the Republicans stage their usual pro forma campaign under the banner of a little-known if amiable gentleman named John Gilhooley...

...he seemed to be extending an outstretched hand...

...William F. Buckley, Jr., whom Oliver Pilat has so aptly characterized in a forthcoming book on the Lindsay campaign as "a snob with mob appeal," accepted the designation of New York's Conservative Party in a frenetic effort to insure the defeat of his fellow Yale man, John Lindsay...

...His personal appeal — a kind of Ivy League Lincolnism— has been amply demonstrated...

...There are, of course, obvious and perhaps devastating answers to the question—"Why Not Lindsay in '68"— and they will be explored at the end...

...Lindsay told Nat Hentoff in an interview: "There are a lot of lonely people in this city...

...Now nearly two years have elapsed, and the small miracle has become increasingly discernible...

...They reflected judgments solemnly reached and they were consistent with a generally critical view of Ruskian ritualism...

...Among small-minded Democrats and congenital disbelievers in serious change, one could hear the complacent murmur: "People are beginning to appreciate good old Bob Wagner...

...Once upon a time I thought it would occur in 1972...

...I first read it in a dispatch in The Christian Science Monitor after the Conference of Mayors last June...

...The incident was a parenthetical one in the life of New York...

...For there can be no doubt that the police, placed on the defensive by the review board drive, were more disposed than ever to disprove charges of bigotry and random ruth-lessness in dealing with the growing Negro and Puerto Rican populace...

...There were internal bickerings and ructions...

...perhaps this suggests he lacks the desperate inner drive—or compulsiveness—that alone could make a 100 to 1 shot an authentic possibility...

...yet he was plainly boxed in...

...The suspicion is inevitable that Lindsay's liberalism has an uncompromising aspect that sets him apart from other so-called "moderates...

...The fantasy—if that is what it is— of a Lindsay nomination in 1968 was also promoted in an imaginary interview with a politico called "Bailey Unruh" in The New Yorker...

...George Romney's misfortunes as a campaigner need hardly be elaborated...

...seems absurd to many, it is only because they have come to view the Republican Party as the captive of a Goldwater faction still determined to rule or ruin, and perhaps fatally afflicted with a will to lose...

...You know, I could hear people say 'that cat's crazy comin' in here now, he'll get killed'—but this was their highest tribute," Rustin observed...

...quite the reverse...

...The most serious objection of the "realists" to a Lindsay candidacy at this juncture is that he has no mobile machine in his party and that his maverick behavior in Washington mortally wounded such Congressional eminences as Gerald Ford and Melvin Laird...

...The ultimate weapon was Lindsay himself, walking the streets of troubled areas, exposing himself to personal hazard and refusing to flee under fire...

...At first they said he couldn't win, and the initial polls were discouraging...

...Can I run my fingers through your hair without embracing you...

...But such bureaucracies of inheritance inevitably resist intrusion...

...there seemed, rather, reason to fear that we might be witnessing the breaking of a man...

...the Democratic reform bloc has been unable to find any real vulnerability in his Administration...

...For both men recognized that the perils of ghetto explosions could not be met with old-fashioned methods and old nightsticks...

...he acquired some notable prizes, but he also met many rough rebuffs from men on whom he had squandered valuable hours in hot, vain pursuit...

...He spent much of his time in a massive talent-hunt, more in the manner of young President John F. Kennedy than of a mayor...

...He had served in Congress since 1958 with conspicuous distinctions...

...John Lindsay and the Republicans by JAMES A. WECHSLER As he approached the midpoint of his four-year term in New York's City Hall, the case of forty-six-year-old John Vliet Lindsay had assumed many intriguing dimensions...

...In 1940, at the age of nineteen, he was serving as a page boy at the Republican National Convention where Wendell Willkie so dramatically moved on to the national stage at the age of forty-eight...

...In his boyhood he had been stirred by the fusion mayoralty of Fiorello La-Guardia...

...Once again, as when he initially captured the GOP Congressional nomination eight years earlier in a district long represented by arch-Tory Frederic Cou-dert, Jr., Lindsay had upset the form chart...

...Far from being fatally bruised and rendered politically extinct by the ordeal of City Hall, Lindsay has slowly achieved national stature...

...Johnson...

...I should also add that, as this article is completed, there are apparently well-founded reports that Senator Eugene McCarthy will valiantly challenge President Johnson in the Democratic primaries...

...But again the restless resentment and rivalry of a fellow-Republican played JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and a featured columnist for that paper...

...Readers of The Progressive may recall two articles on Kennedy published in this magazine in 1965...

...in January, 1966, he was inaugurated as the 103rd mayor of New York...

...He faced a surly, hostile, Democratic-ruled City Council (his own running-mates for president of the Council and controller were defeated even as he won) ; the plans he proposed for sweeping reorganization and coordination of the city's aged government structure quickly met Democratic sniping and obstructionism...

...In remembrance of that period his first press secretary, an independent, idealistic reporter named Woody Klein (who was unjustly blamed for too many of Lindsay's troubles with the jaded fraternity of political writers) has written: "I view the early months of the Lindsay Administration as crucial, exciting and—inevitable...

...He argued only that the protester should weigh whether he knew what he wanted, or whether he was striking out blindly...

...Even Governor Rockefeller, apart from other problems, suffers deeply from his failure to face the issue of Vietnam in any straightforward language (and Lindsay was alone among top New York political figures in meeting the church-state issue involved in the recent battle over repeal of the so-called Blaine Amendment...

...Lindsay's special preoccupations were civil rights and civil liberties, as well as an independent, Stevensonian stance in foreign policy...

...What circumstance makes Reagan so plausible a candidate and seemingly bars Lindsay from major consideration...

...The city's labor leadership—with the exception of David Dubinsky, president emeritus of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Rose, and a handful of others—retained its old Democratic ties (and even Dubinsky's successor, Louis Stulberg, seems disposed to play Democratic games...

...Javits had long contemplated making the race himself...

...Lindsay had no major background as an administrator—or as a political operative...

...Perhaps more important, the phrase "Why not Lindsay for President in '68" has begun to infiltrate political dialogue and commentary...

...those who querulously ask why New Yorkers like Lindsay became Republicans must always be reminded that LaGuardia was a more inspirational figure than most of the hacks who dominated Tammany Hall for so many decades...

...In the beginning Lindsay had likened his campaign to an effort to "climb Niagara Falls...

...In retrospect it seems almost hard to believe that Lindsay was able to prevent disintegration and demoralization in his own ranks...

...I think the signs now suggest that 1968 may be the critical year for both men...

...For reasons both personal and political, Rockefeller found no discomfort in the occupancy of the mayoralty by a Democrat...

...It may well be that he has deferentially agreed to let Richard Nixon try his weary hand in two or three primaries, with the assurance that Nixon will become a Reagan man if the bid fails...

...the Javits mayoralty move died from want of Rockefeller love, and Rockefeller himself was plainly planning to seek to retain his governorship in a campaign of "vindication" for himself and his new bride...

...It was a matter of history that his nomination by the Republicans (swiftly seconded by the Liberal Party) had been largely a political accident...

...He was ahead of his time and a lonely voice in expressing skepticism and concern about our Vietnam involvement...

...In Bayard Rustin's view, nothing made a deeper impression in Harlem and other lower-depth areas than Lindsay's personal presence at explosive moments—a dramatization of his pledge to give the city a "visible government...

...certainly all the surface circumstances seemed to contain the elements of his doom...

...A somewhat comparable if lesser illustration of Lindsay's personal chemistry—and charisma—occurred this autumn after a series of tumultuous clashes on the Brooklyn College campus as a result of a collision over naval recruiting...

...that the problem of the adversary relationship between minority groups and the police was a deep source of potential trouble...

...Certainly it will be said that two years of the mayoralty is a brief interval, and that progress on some levels remains tortuously slow...

...Yet perhaps his largest achievement is in imparting the belief that he really cares about the underprivileged in whose name so many political fakers have spoken so often...

...in the phrase columnist Murray Kempton used when Lindsay was running for mayor (and which was widely echoed) "he's fresh and everyone else is tired...

...The Leary-Garelik combination heralded a momentous change in police patterns of behavior...

...Too often he was told that his intentions were clearly honorable but that the task he had undertaken was hopeless...

...In any intimate chronicle of that period, the grace, wit, and stoicism of Mary Lindsay (who was simultaneously bringing up four children) may receive more generous notice than the wives of many public men merit...

...The referendum on a civilian review board was another fortunate coincidence...

...Amid the haggling, Lindsay confounded many inside and outside his party by making himself available...

...There was a deepening conflict between Price and Alex Rose, the Liberal Party tactician on whom Lindsay had also leaned heavily during the battle for office, and who made no secret of his distaste for Price's precocity...

...Rarely, one might say, has the new mayor of any city been surrounded by so many influential figures joyously anticipating the moment when he would fall on his face...

...The new police set-up was firmly established...

...At the time such words were spoken they were hardly dictated by a careful reading of the polls...

...He is a man for whom retirement from public life seems to hold no psychological terrors...

...If the question "Why Not Lindsay in '68...

...he alternately would say "Negotiate" and "Get out if we can...

...There are enigmatic notes in the Lindsay story...

...The Monitor's man reported that he had heard some variation on that theme from many of those in attendance at the sessions...

...But there was another decisive factor in the success of Lindsay's effort to achieve two cool summers by creating a new relationship between the police and the people...

...who has communicated a sense of his own capacity—and audacity—in confronting crises large and small...

...his eyes were prematurely fixed on the national landscape and he had small patience with a certain fastidiousness of principle that seemed to afflict his old friend, the new mayor...

...Underlying this clash of personality was the question of the degree of Liberal Party representation, and, in the vulgar word, patronage, in the victorious coalition...

...So he decided to run for the position identified by all the cliche-analysts as a graveyard of hope—the mayoralty of that sprawling, chaotic, turbulent amalgam of five large cities called the City of New York...

...who has displayed an extraordinary faith in the proposition that, after listening to the political schemers and dealers, frequently the wisest thing to do is what you believe is right...