Why Lindsay Failed As Mayor
Weisman, Steven R.
Why Lindsay Failed as Mayor by Steven R. Weisman New York Mayor John V. Lindsay, illuminated by floodlights on the steps of City Hall, delivered his first inaugural address on New Year’s Day,...
...He barely speaks out at home on the issues that he used to deal with dramatically and head-on, such as education...
...No one, not even Lindsay, denied that Wagner had been a deft administrator...
...The origins are found in the growing demand for “community control” of schools and the liberal response of Lindsay, who, with the help of his friend, McCeorge Bundy, and the Ford Foundation, created three experimental community school districts in disadvantaged areas of the city...
...The attitude has not faded away-Lindsay’s new deputy mayor, Edward K. Hamilton, is a management expert who never lived in the city before 1970, when he came from Washington to be budget director...
...In one of the first official assessments of the new mayor, Quill described Lindsay as “a juvenile, a lightweight, and a pipsqueak...
...A second problem with the new approach was that the experts never told how all their proposals were to be carried out...
...I remember when he got those reports-they told him the snow was being cleared...
...Lindsay tended to believe that once he and his advisers decided on a new way of doing things he could just give the order and it would be done...
...Instead, a President establishes policy, much of it carried out by others...
...Only after trying to see why, can one begin to decide whether Lindsay deserves to be chief strategist in the White House...
...In a city nearly 75 per cent Democratic, he was the first nonDemocrat elected mayor since Fiorello LaGuardia in 1934, He entered office a dashing patrician and cultivated political figure, but his image was not the only fresh contribution...
...He has applied this technique at the federal level by using the National League of Cities to lobby for more urban funds from the federal government...
...But it is also true that he gets along with unions in part because of past generosity...
...Grasping the Obvious Yet management science proved to be far from perfect...
...The teachers’ strike was not about wages, but the organization of the school system...
...Why, with all of Lindsay’s appealing heroism, does New York’s government today seem more sluggish than it ever has...
...Jesus, what an embarrassment...
...Especially in labor relations, Lindsay has learned to negotiate and has won important productivity clauses in some new contracts...
...What distinguishes his last two or three years as mayor is that Lindsay has made almost no new initiatives, nothing that might risk touching off the ire of the city’s truculent populace or its stubborn bureaucracy...
...Though Lindsay emerged from the transit crisis with an enhanced reputation as a combatant for clean government, it is clear in retrospect that the strike hinged more on his imperious attitude than on any issues as he defined them...
...When opponents demanded that the John V. Lindsay Associations be registered as political clubs, his office insisted disingenuously that they were apolitical “civic improvement” groups...
...In the midst of this backsliding at home, Lindsay’s presidential campaign is indulging in the Kennedy-like rhetoric of yesteryear, promising a new kind of presidency, and suggesting by implication that the opportunities for major domestic changes will be easier for him to seize in Washington...
...And in Queens, the city’s mi d d le- cl ass suburban borough, mounds of snow clogged the streets, even the main ones...
...The magic of the Mayor’s popular triumphs over unions dissipated the next year in a strike by the city’s 60,000 teachers-the worst crisis New York has faced under Lindsay because it fanned racial tension into open violence and created an ugly atmosphere of discord that has not completely receded today...
...the use of zoning incentives for imaginative land development...
...The mayor has never been able to stop the city’s downward spiral...
...Then his moves to restrain the police gave rise to charges that he was “handcuffing” them and harassing them with his own aides...
...and even new pollution codes, which have reduced the air’s sulfur dioxide content...
...Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused Lindsay’s request, and an agreement was finally reached...
...There are those who say that the past is past, that one must look freshly at who Lindsay is today, and at the grinding stresses of a presidential campaign that ought to let any aspirant’s natural characteristics come to the surface...
...Wagner and his huge bureaucracy functioned on the same wavelength...
...All of this proved to beleaguered New Yorkers that at least their city has class...
...Lindsay’s speech was a call to greatness and renewed respect for government, but the transit union president, Michael J. Quill, was not inclined to heed the plea...
...Today, more than six years later, Lindsay’s rhetoric is still stirring, but the sense of a city paralyzed remains...
...Cases that need attention have a greater chance today of getting lost in the bureaucracy...
...No, he is running for President, he says, because he has been “in the trenches,” while other aspirants have been pontificating in the safety of the Senate...
...they limited the use of scooter patrols...
...Lindsay’s unique congressional constituency-with its glittering skyscrapers, corporate energy, and bustling affluence-encouraged independence, not party loyalty...
...The root cause of the crisis was that the relation of these districts to the larger school structure was unresolved...
...Since then, he’s tripled it...
...He always had something that people in the GOP weren’t supposed to have -glamor and good looks-so he was mentioned as a presidential candidate even when he was a congressman from Manhattan...
...And no one who remembers the “power brokers’’ of a few years ago can take too much comfort in that approach...
...He had been close to party politics since childhood, when his father, a U. S. Senator, was a leading advocate of labor causes...
...Not until the strike reached catastrophic proportions did he finally negotiate seriously with the unions...
...The figures showed the streets would be 85 per cent cleaner in six months...
...the creation of special districts, like the one that preserves the theaters in Times Square...
...Given such a gloomy prospect, there would seem to be little support for Lindsay’s claim that his job “in the trenches” has made him more qualified to be President...
...The same kind of blundering surfaced in other agencies...
...A hundred local teachers walked out in sympathy, and they, too, were fired...
...Communication with the lower-level bureaucrats had broken down...
...But here again, the Mayor’s public relations moves have been at least as important, for the upper class has loved most all his street closings, his droll “happenings” in the city parks, and his patronage of the arts...
...Instead of seeing that the teachers had legitimate grievances in a complex situation, the Mayor forfeited his own role as mediator by denouncing them as lawless, unscrupulous enemies of New York City...
...More important was his’ notion of the mayor’s job and how he wanted to change it...
...Most important, he has been the active beneficiary of the Great Society’s panoply of programs for summer recreation, job training, housing, health care, and extra city services for those trapped in the slums...
...Lindsay won reelection with 42 per cent of the vote through an unusual coalition of poor blacks and Puerto Ricans, and the city’s upper-income groups, particularly Jewish...
...The problems of being mayor are overwhelming, his campaign people conclude...
...First the voters repealed the Mayor’s Civilian Review Board...
...Today, Lindsay may have acquired, as his advocates insist, just the right sensitivity to both the need for change and the needs of those who oppose change...
...There were no manuals on how things worked...
...Any bureaucracy is a tangle of loyalties to bosses, unions, subordinates, political parties, and individual careers-not just to the man on top...
...In his own city council, he has made stiffer laws for regulatory agencies, particularly in environment and consumer protection...
...Lindsay’s improvements looked good on paper, too...
...The problem stemmed in part from flaws in the original analysis, but mostly from a crucial oversight of the fact that the men would still do the same amount of work each day unless motivated to do more...
...In 1969, the Mayor announced that despite the “tightest budget to date,” he would have to cut summer job programs, school lunches, and services in hospitals, libraries, and museums...
...He also convinced Lindsay to increase the use of such private outside consultants as the RAND Corporation, the California think-tank that helped McNamara design weapons systems...
...The mayor of New York is the first national politician since the Kennedys to be at least partially credible in projecting the image of political hero...
...He’s credible because his heroism stems from a crisis-“the urban crisis...
...Talking Down the Middle For the middle class, however, a great variety of ingredients, real and imagined, kept things simmering...
...Political Bunions Lindsay’s predecessor, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., had operated in the traditional manner of big-city Democratic mayors, like Richard Daley in Chicago, in his use of patronage, persuasion, and general finesse to keep things running smoothly...
...Mayor Wagner had gone to Yale, like Lindsay, but he grew up in city government and entered City Hall with an almost intuitive sense of the terrain-a sense that Lindsay has only recently begun to develop...
...Lindsay’s hero is not Franklin, but Theodore Roosevelt, the activist President with a vision of a new nationalism who saw the presidency as a “bully pulpit...
...The caseworker system was loaded with difficulties, but the new one only worsens them because it leaves no one person responsible for a single recipient’s problems...
...He needed the strike threat to force a compromise on his union...
...Though the city’s poor blacks and Puerto Ricans are in the same desperate condition they’ve always been in, Lindsay’s efforts for them have been significant...
...Nothing more dramatically illustrates his difficulties in this regard than Lindsay’s clumsy dealings with labor...
...Lindsay, for one, concluded that city government had grown tired and clubby with Wagner’s “power brokers,” that it had lost its capacity to handle what everyone was now calling “the urban crisis,” and that it was not equal, especially, to the bold new tasks he had in mind...
...Services have continued to decline, division has classes, and there have been unending crises...
...His retreat was not a sacrifice of a good idea to narrow political considerations...
...I am the Mayor,” he once snapped to a raucous group of reporters who surrounded his limousine, “and you have an obligation to treat me with respect...
...Then the Mayor ventured out to tour the area...
...For years, Mike Quill, president of the Transport Workers Union, had made something of a tradition of his pre-New Year’s Eve strike threats...
...Why Lindsay Failed as Mayor by Steven R. Weisman New York Mayor John V. Lindsay, illuminated by floodlights on the steps of City Hall, delivered his first inaugural address on New Year’s Day, 1966, in an atmosphere of promise and movement...
...Like a Vietnam war strategist in Washington, Lindsay had erected an in telligence-gathering system that neglected people and failed, in the end, to work until it was too late...
...Quill always inflated his demands,” says one man close to the negotiations...
...We had it all figured out,” says a former Budget man...
...A few days later, after a meeting with the city’s comptroller, $79.7 million was suddenly “found” to stave off the cuts...
...When Lindsay announced the phaseout in one neighborhood, residents there protested and forced him to back down...
...In another instance, Lindsay failed to take action with regardto the growing number of welfare families placed in rundown, sleazy hotels until one family was placed in the Waldorf-Astoria, resulting in unfavorable national publicity...
...As he spoke, the city was frozen in paralysis...
...But for all the real efforts, Lindsay’s more decisive accomplishment has been intangk ble: he has demonstrated his commitment by walking the city’s squalid streets and talking to community leaderssurely more effective than any programs in keeping the ghettos cool...
...That morning, millions of people were stranded as 33,000 transit workers walked off their jobs, bringing subways and buses to a halt...
...America in 1972 is not New York in 1966, to be sure, but it can be seen today that Lindsay is trying to corral more voters-people from the small towns and suburbsinto his scheme of things by uniting everyone against the “power centers” in Washington...
...No President can succeed without an ability to deal with people, no matter how promising his stance...
...In New York, he recruited dozens of young generalists to examine and quantify problems in depth, turning the production of each year’s budget into a year-round analytic process, known as Program Planning Budget System, or PPBS...
...And it helped the city’s uniformed services-police, fire, and sanitationto reshuffle manpower and equipment to increase productivity...
...In fact, Hayes came from Washington and the war on poverty, where he had implemented “systems analysis” techniques first introduced by McNamara in the Pentagon...
...And if the Mayor wanted to learn the current status of a school, a library, or a police precinct nearing construction, his aides had to call public works, or the budget bureau, or the purchase department or the legal department, and ask if they had the papers...
...The huge settlement had national impact...
...Among other things, Lindsay’s problems show that, for Americans weary of a government overly attentive to selfish interest groups, a switch to government that ignores those interest groups can be a bold new shift to disaster-the hazards therein would not seem to be mitigated by “scientifically” correct solutions purveyed by sophisticated, throbbing public relations machinery...
...Though he won with middleclass support in 1965, by 1969 they had turned against him...
...Once again, the Mayor emerged with a political victory masking a costly settlement...
...To his credit, Lindsay has improved in a few respects...
...In these perceptions, Lindsay was in the political tradition of the Progressive movement of the turn of the century...
...Steven Weisman is a reporter for The New York Times A Bronx Camelot In his own view, Lindsay’s candidacy offers a shift from eight years of cynical manipulation in the White House, just as John Kennedy offered an antidote to eight years of sterile leadership under President Eisenhower...
...The truth is even worse,” says one Lindsay aide today...
...In other respects, Lindsay has become a more sophisticated user of management science, with an understanding that, as Deputy Mayor Hamilton puts it, “there are a lot of slips between the cup and the lip, even when you’ve designed the cup...
...It’s worse than it ever was, but the experts will never know why...
...With all his emphasis on scientific management, Lindsay has nonetheless realized that much of his effectiveness depends on old-fashioned imagemaking...
...That tactic worked no better within his own government than it did with the labor unions...
...What also became clear in his earliest days was Lindsay’s magisterial conception of his own office, a sense that his authority and superior perspective permitted him to monopolize the political process, and that because he was the mayor, everyone else had to defer to his point of view...
...That assumption created a political vacuum for decision-making where human nature played no part...
...The evidence ought to suggest the contrary, but it hasn’t-not to Lindsay, nor, indeed, to any of the Democratic aspirants who are calling for sizeable changes in the American economy and social structure...
...A consultant,” grumbled one commissioner, “is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is...
...While his rivals boast about what they’ve done, Lindsay may be the only politician in America to get anywhere by viewing his own record with alarm...
...That first summer, he learned that City Hall had no permanent lines of communication to New York’s tension-filled ghettos, though scores of agencies dealt with the ghettos every day...
...For each project, the staff produced a giant organization chart depicting New York’s bureaucratic obstacle course: it took 71 steps through 10 different agencies just to order a desk or a garbage truck for the Model Cities program...
...With his view that bargaining was a concession to the “power brokers”“They know who they are,” he saidLindsay could not politically afford a settlement that even looked like a backroom deal...
...Unlike almost every other congressman in America, he never had to worry about getting defense contracts or federal bonuses to fuel the economy back home...
...It was also a mistaken upperclass bias, which Lindsay acknowledges today, to select no middle-class neighborhoods for the experiment...
...Washington, not New York, they say, is where Lindsay’s leadership can make a difference to the city, and to other cities and suburbs, too...
...In 1968, Lindsay and Hayes established a new city unit, the Project Management Staff, a trouble-shooting group of 40 roving analysts who took on dozens of specific projects to push through the city red tape...
...Nothing could be more unfair...
...Though the Mayor has improved recently, few labor leaders, including Lindsay’s allies, feel completely comfortable dealing with him even today...
...Lindsay entered office promising to “trim the fat” from the city’s public relations budget...
...Like most city workers, Wagner was a Democrat...
...Outlays for welfare and antipoverty programs increased, but the problems they sought to attack mounted even faster...
...Eventually he had them register...
...It produced important Lindsay innovations-a massive test of children for lead-paint poisoning, a new bureau to handle parking violations, and a program that puts addicts on methadone...
...One report by systems analysts in the police department suggested a reduction of the city’s 77 police precincts as an efficiency move to free more patrolmen for street duty...
...and third, an increased projection of his own presence, to heighten everyone’s awareness of his government in the hope that people could feel they were part of the process...
...The storm had caused something in New York to snap...
...From the beginning, no one had bothered to define the powers of the local boards, and Lindsay and Bundy misjudged the stakes that certain other parties had in the situation, particularly the city’s powerful, largely Jewish teachers’ union...
...To run his government and advance himself politically, Lindsay now makes more deals with the machine Democrats (sometimes leaning to them, rather than the reformers, for patronage) and has set up dozens of neighborhood “task forces” to insure that local complaints are heard quickly...
...More than modifying his concept of leadership to correct the failures of his mayoralty, Lindsay has deferred further action, waiting to apply the techniques that failed in New York to the larger office of the presidency...
...The storm, the worst in eight years, arrived with unforeseen strength and shut the city down...
...The Housing and Development Administration, the city’s first superagency, became so unwieldy that mismanagement festered in a program of city loans for slum rehabilitation and then broke into a scandal, mostly because it escaped the attention of the otherwise preoccupied housing chef...
...In light of George Reedy’s comments that the occupational hazard in the White House is that a President is easily blinded to the role others play in the political process, Lindsay’s own failures sound an ominous note to his candidacy of President...
...He also secured a pioneering state revenuesharing program by lobbying with other mayors from his state...
...In the end, the teachers won, returning to work on their own terms...
...Lindsay stumbled worst over this problem with his sanitation department, where Budget Bureau analysts measured garbage on the curbs and pored over figures on production and manpower before they proposed changes of garbage truck routes and the use of much bigger trucks...
...The following summer, Lindsay misjudged the teachers’ willingness to fight for their jobs, and he did nothing to resolve the dispute...
...Despite his improvements, Lindsay is still very much instinctively the man he always was...
...We didn’t even realize ourselves that the money was there...
...In 1965, Lindsay’s campaign slogan was: “He is fresh and all the others are tired...
...He has even established his own political associations to dispense patronage and favors in return for campaign funds...
...Like the Progressives, the Mayor felt that modem government needed to replace the discord of clashing special interests with a new harmony of shared purpose...
...I sat there in Lindsay’s office the day after the storm,” says former Budget Dire.ctor Hayes...
...He learned that the work of many departments overlapped, so that one agency might be planning apartments for land already slated for a new road, simply because there was no official information center...
...With a sprawling federal bureaucracy, a stubborn factionridden Congress, ,and a multitude of powerful special interests across the country, things will be even harder...
...Disloyalty among his own civil servants finally hindered Lindsay’s ability to run New York...
...His first tangle with a city unionin New York’s 12-day transit strikeset a pattern that held for years...
...Hayes, a nervous, intense professional with a clipped mastery of facts who became the Robert McNamara of the Lindsay administration...
...Thousands were stranded at airports, on bridges, and on highways...
...finally, by threatening a strike, they prevented him from assigning men to a new shift at peak crime hours except on a voluntary basis...
...One assistant recalls: “If you were building a new police station, you’d go to the engineers in Public Works and say, ‘Why do you wait for the architects to finish before you start?’ They’d say, ‘Well, we have to wait for the plans.’ So we’d say, ‘Why don’t we get a duplicate set of plans?’ No one had ever thought of that before...
...nor as a liberal Republican, a minority member of a minority party, was he ever expected to produce legislation...
...Within weeks after the election, the men were pulled back, their overtime cancelled...
...The Project Management Staff was successful in key areas: it helped cut 100 weeks from construction schedules for police, fire, and library projects and slashed dozens of weeks from the time it had taken to plan sewers and parks...
...Days went by and still the streets were impassable...
...These are the instincts, probably, of any professional politician...
...former DeDutv Mavor Richard A.-Aurelio Fiorello LaGuardia, another progressive Lindsay hero, had a chatty radio show and once, during a newspaper strike, read the Sunday funnies to the city’s children...
...He has consulted them for urban renewal and instituted “open enrollment” in the City University...
...Nothing illustrates the basis of their hostility better than Lindsay’s dealings with the police...
...There was also no formal way for Lindsay to keep tabs on his giant government to see exactly what it was accomplishing...
...The vilification he met as residents gathered by the snowdrifts to boo, jeer, and call him names was something Lindsay never expected and had never before encountered...
...Robert McNamara faced the same problem in the Pentagon when his experts designed a swing-wing bomber or strategy for the war that was very logical-on paper...
...Eventually, Lindsay aroused such antagonism in the department that he had to close his eyes to mounting corruption for fear of tipping things over the edge and spurring a full-scale department revolt...
...He refused to play the game of negotiations because it clashed with his ideas about his office...
...But that judgment would be less than fair, too...
...And yet he appeals to those outside of the urban problem because of his Kennedyesque combination of idealism, tough pragmatism, and commitment to modern government with scientific techniques to help run it...
...second, a reliance on a McNamara-style “scientific” management, the one method of administration that, in his view, would provide the incontrovertible facts for people of all persuasions to reach the same conclusions...
...The heads of lower departments retained their titles of “commissioner,” and the Mayor didn’t help when he frequently overruled a superadministrator in favor of his subordinate...
...Shoveling Out But there was a more important event for Lindsay’s career in 1969-a 15-inch snowstorm in February that served as a catalyst for all his woes, creating the chemistry for one of his most serious political blowups...
...I am the Mayor...
...But his 1 1 th-hour settlements, looking like hard-won union triumphs, were really triumphs of public relations...
...By 1966, however, riots and revolt besieging American cities seemed to undermine all the old ways of doing things...
...Living up to their reputation for generosity, New Yorkers blame everything on the mayor...
...The Mayor’s manipulation of his image reached its height during the 1969 reelection campaign when he placed hundreds of policemen and sanitation men on overtime at great cost and then pointed proudly to reduced crime and cleaner streets...
...John V. Lindsay, 1966 ~~ Lindsay’s congressional career had taught him little of the need for subtle bureaucratic maneuvering, for understanding an opponent’s self-interest, or for the great patience required in a sprawling government...
...He may have, but it’s unlikely...
...Another reported that the peak hours of the Staten Island Ferry are the morning and evening rush hours...
...Nothing changed except the statistics...
...He has pushed through the Republican-dominated state legislature important new taxes, including one for commuters, and bills creating such new agencies as the city’s OffTrack Betting Corporation, its Housing Development Corporation, and its Health and Hospitals Corporation...
...He also thought he could use the new management techniques to run the city by circumventing the bureaucracy he distrusted...
...New taxes were imposed one after another-a bank tax, an income tax, a commuter tax, a stock transfer tax, higher real-estate taxes-but the quality of life in New York City has never seemed more bleak, its government never more sluggish, wasteful, and finally even helpless...
...By the same token, wealthier New Yorkers, particularly the young and those living in Manhattan, have appreciated Lindsay’s real “good governmen t ” style achievements- the improvement of architectural design for public projects...
...The way Lindsay’s staff sees it now, the money was hidden from him by his own bureaucrats...
...Years of pent-up middle-class frustrations over welfare, taxes, crime, and neglect poured out...
...The police union, miffed at Lindsay for his intervention and anxious to set him up as a convenient target, fought his basic manpower changes: they blocked one-man patrol cars...
...Lindsay clearly believed in “scientific management”the notion that, as Walter Lippman wrote in 19 14, “as the modern world can be civilized only by the effort of innumerable people, we have a right to call science the discipline of democracy...
...In an interview, he said: “How the hell this city ran before 1965 is just not that clear to me...
...Experts agree that the final settlement cost the city twice what Quill would have agreed to at the outset...
...The resentment mounted as Lindsay surrounded himself with outsiders who knew little of the way New York ran before they got there and who were oblivious to the established, entrenched bureaucracy...
...There were no statistics on welfare, leaving officials to guess, for instance, how many recipients were actually employable...
...The strike began in the spring of 1968, when the school board in the black Brooklyn slum of Ocean HillBrownsville abruptly dismissed 10 white teachers in their district...
...The ethnic whites-the cabbies, the hard-hats, and clerks, New York’s own tax-paying “silent majority”-voted for Lindsay’s two undistinguished opponents...
...One of the great myths about city government is that the ‘bld pros,” the organization party regulars and the patronage seekers, were skillful, adept managers of city affairs...
...Perhaps the presidency might be more suited to his role as a moral leader than the mayoralty-it could hardly be less suited-especially if that’s what Americans want this year...
...Also, the President’s ability to embody moral authority isn’t hampered, as it is in New York, by a broad responsibility to deliver services...
...There were no manuals!’, a Lindsay aide said recently...
...And since Lindsay all along insisted on circumventing the bureaucracy with his new breed of experts, it is not surprising that the city’s regular employees-the ones ultimately responsible for carrying out the orders-would respond with less than complete loyalty to their mayor...
...For one thing, the Mayor’s staff saw an illusion of progress just because they were receiving their reports and organization charts...
...You see the paper piling higher and higher on people’s desks,” says one caseworker...
...John V. Lindsay, in The City, 1970 h Because of his mandate, his campaign and his commitment, and perhaps because he fervently believed his campaign rhetoric, Lindsay wanted to be a great mayor, and that meant bringing government into what he saw as the modern era...
...Today, of course, Lindsay gets the blame for cops on the take...
...Facing his bureaucracy for the first time, Lindsay quickly found reinforcement for his skepticism...
...Though many reports were helpful, others told little that wasn’t already known...
...Lindsay’s tenure was to test these approaches, each reasonable in the abstract, but each one containing the seeds of his failures...
...In 1967, Lindsay once again refused to recognize the politics of union leadership...
...The major conclusion of one 75-page consultants’ report on traffic patterns in the Bronx, the city’s northern borough, for example, was that traffic tends to flow into Manhattan in the morning and out at night...
...It used computers to analyze data from all agenciesa computer was even fed data from the city’s 503 tennis courts to set fees adjusted to each court’s use...
...In this role, Lindsay has excelled, despite many frustrations...
...On the other hand, to the degree that Lindsay and his special brand of leadership could have made a difference, it has all too often failed to do so...
...More critically, middle-class alienation spread to those thousands of civil servants on whom Lindsay depended without really knowing it...
...and his inability to see decisions being made led him to think no one was making them...
...They also apply to the presidency and illuminate something about the nature of all political authority, including the various types of national leadership being offered this year by the other presidential candidates...
...The man who had urged a bombing halt in North Vietnam on the basis that the bombing only stiffened Hanoi’s will to resist, wanted to call out the National Guard to break a strike by garbage men...
...By this time, the ante had been raised and the Mayor was reluctant to intervene because he feared race riots in Brooklyn if the blacks were defeated...
...But the Mayor also went beyond the conventional use of image-making to project himself to two distinct income and social groups in the city-the upper arid lower classes-with the result that those in the broad middle felt neglected by his government and alienated from him personally...
...Six months passed and there we were, looking at the same filthy streets...
...If I were writing a book, it would be about the importance of a politician’s image...
...Certainly, he’s proud of many things, but not even Lindsay claims to have led New York City out of the darkness...
...Crippling strikes shut down the schools and allowed tons of garbage to rot uncollected in the streets...
...It was sound logic to coordinate the assortment of 50 departments into a dozen “superagencies,’’ but once it was done, few things changed and some even got worse...
...Actually, his settlements were never that generous...
...A final, rather tragic illustration is found in the city’s recent move to cut costs at its welfare centers by eliminating the caseworker, who now sees the welfare recipient for special problems only...
...There was no precise city-wide picture of the garbage problem-no one could clearly demonstrate why some streets were dirtier than others...
...His high-handedness was a disruptive factor that prolonged the strike...
...Confronting these problems, Lindsay made two deductions: his difficulty in establishing what was going on persuaded him that nothing, indeed, was going on...
...The rest of America may find it amusing that Lindsay was blamed for a snowstorm, but the blame for the way the city handled it was legitimate...
...He was horrified to find that he had no early-warning system to detect potential crises...
...If a garbage man in Brooklyn had bunions, they used to say, Bob Wagner’s feet hurt...
...He retreated because his experts’ solution had overlooked an important fact: fear of crime has been as harmful to New York as crime itself, and attention must be paid to both...
...He built his reputation on lofty public statements, and so Lindsay came of age in a political dream world, where government was something one talked about in pure, abstract terms...
...Today the Mayor has begun to learn the lesson, and he carefully cultivates the department, attending regular meetings with foremen, deputies, and district coordin a tors . A Good City-On Paper ~ The chief inadequacy of management science, however, lies in its assumption that every consequence and detail of each proposal can be measured...
...For those who, like Brod.er, lament that American politics has been deadened by its obsession with consensus, the candidacy of John Lindsay may seem like a breath of fresh air...
...The trouble is that he has not always pulled it off too well and has suffered a damaging loss of credibility as a result, particularly among members of New York’s middle class...
...Then the staff worked at eliminating some of the steps...
...A pragmatic reason for Lindsay’s turning to “management science,” then, was simply to get information on his desk...
...No one believed those words more than Lindsay himself...
...Newspapers wrote of Lindsay’s “fiscal magic” and other politicians lambasted him for fomenting an “artificial crisis” with “scare tactics...
...In his early years, Lindsay tended to talk down to the middle class, almost as if he saw them as the enemy-as late as 1969, he was denouncing his opponents as racists and bigots...
...These have been the principles of six Lindsay administration years in New York, where Lindsay’s entry into office was an explicit challenge to the broken politics that preceded him...
...The labor leaders he considers his allies acknowledge that they must denounce him in public to have any credibility among their memberships...
...The storm had caused two things to collapse: not just the middle class’s hold on itself, but the whole managementscience superstructure that was supposed to run the city so effectively...
...One other role played by the President is worth considering-that of de facto legislator...
...Much of the Mayor’s appeal to these two groups resulted from acts of real substance on the part of the Lindsay administration...
...In September it was too late, and teachers all across the city refused to work...
...It has prevented him in the end from dealing effectively with adversary and ally alike, even within his own bureaucracy...
...And the obstacles he stumbled over are not found exclusively in the job of mayor...
...Lindsay saw Quill’s tactics differently...
...But in the final analysis, Lindsay’s own personality, illustrated by his sweeping but unrealistic conception of the office he now holds, is aloof and mechanical, not to say occasionally hermetic...
...Three instruments were to characterize Lindsay’s new approach to public office: first, a strong sense of himself as the moral leader...
...Probably the worst and most insensitive move Lindsay made was to place an abrasive, pushy, 26-year-old aide, just out of Harvard Law School, as City Hall’s liaison with the police department, one of New York’s subtlest and most complex bureaucracies...
...Lindsay has a weekly television show, where his guests range from the mayor of Yonkers to the mayor of Jerusalem, with a lot of show-biz folks in-between...
...PPBS On Broadway The best way to see management science is through one of the Mayor’s most important appointments-his first budget director, Frederick O’R...
...He has substantially toned down his moral obtrusiveness-his defense of a lowincome housing project in the white middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills has been firm but not supercilious...
...Last December, David S. Broder wrote in The Washington Monthly that a major source of President Johnson’s failure was that his consensus politics amounted to little more than the “lowest common denominator” of what different factions could accept...
...But Lindsay is obviously squeamish about employing such old-fashioned tactics...
...John Lindsay worked his way up through the stodgiest and most accepted Republican ranks-Yale, a Wall Street law firm, the Young Republicans, the 1952 Eisenhower campaign, and Eisenhower’s Justice Department...
Vol. 4 • April 1972 • No. 2
