New York

HE IS fresh and everyone else is tired" — the quote is from the columnist Murray Kempton, and the posters around New York do indeed show a smiling John Vliet Lindsay, “fresh” yet seasoned at forty-three, a candidate with varied appeal for teen-agers, mothers, and arbiters of the intelligentsia like Kempton. He is handsome, earnest, formidable, deceptively casual; well cast in the New York City political role which demands folksiness of a Republican establishmentarian, a role most recently practiced by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. In the poster, and frequently in fact, Lindsay is in shirt sleeves as he strides through a street of tenements and sells himself to the city’s skeptical voters.

He has made the sale four times before in Manhattan’s seventeenth congressional district, which is called Silk Stocking but embraces uptown and downtown slums as well as Republican Park Avenue. Every two years since 1958 he has doubled his majority there, though Democrats now outnumber Republicans in the once solidly GOP district. In 1964 he rode home with a 91,000-vote margin, the biggest Republican congressional winner in the country. He won as affable John Lindsay, refusing to endorse Goldwater and Miller and outpolling them two to one. And so, ironically, it was liberal Republican John Lindsay whose rugged individualism in the Goldwater year of 1964 paid off in 1965. For he did well for himself last year, and the party, in search of a phoenix amid the ashes, had to come to him.

Remember Lucky Lindy?

Lindsay has one of the big political necessities — luck. He is a tough man who has worked out the difficult formula for winning as a “nice guy,” a formula that at key points in their careers has eluded liberal Republicans such as Charles Percy, Nelson Rockefeller, and William Scranton. More “glamorous” than that breed, not as pious as some of them, he is also quickly compared with the Kennedy brothers, a contrast which annoys his friends. “He’s more of a person,” says a Washington reporter who has known him over the years, “more inner-directed than the Kennedys, no family steamroller, no millions. . . . All he’s got is himself.”

His luck became more ephemeral last spring and summer. At first there seemed to be every reason — feuds, factionalism, the threat of war abroad — for goodwill in search of a hero to continue to flow in his direction, for lack of any other. One was reminded of Scott Fitzgerald’s 1931 words about Charles A. Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic four years before: “In the Spring of 1927 something bright and alien flashed across the sky. A young Minnesotan who seemed to have nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams.”

However strong the disaffection in the air, and whatever the various reasons — that Kennedy was loved and Johnson is not, that the Johnson Administration has not managed to prove to its intellectual and academic critics either valid intentions or achievements in Vietnam or in the Dominican Republic, that the more frivolously sardonic aspects of “pop” art and journalism in New York, from Andy Warhol to Tom Wolfe, have the tone not of fun or critique, but of decadence — whatever the effect of all this, Lindsay was not hurt, for he was a pleasant diversion.

The newspapers were specific and rapturous, especially the New York Herald Tribune, which takes its liberal Republicanism seriously. Lindsay, they said, had the knack of fusing assets and building coalitions. He was a Republican who could carry Democrats disgusted with their own party’s intramural war games, eager to vote for “integrity” and “independence”; and he performed ably in Congress.

He can win, the press chorus continued, now joined by New York Republican leaders, not used even to the bother of pondering how to win against a three-to-one Democratic registration margin (2.1 million Democrats to 700,000 Republicans). And so it went: the city is in chaos, crisis, decline; Lindsay is “the best news since La Guardia.”

“The candidate,” as Lindsay’s staff of tough professional lawyers and press men and amateur volunteers calls him, might well have paused to consider the politician with whom he was being compared. A WASP Republican for all his independence, Lindsay’s contrasts with the bombastic Fiorello La Guardia (“there is only room for one demagogue in this Administration, and I’m the one”) are not auspicious.

La Guardia knew full well how to be a demagogue and was more than merely a plausible figure in Congress. He was a “radical” leader and labor hero, responsible, along with Senator George Norris of Nebraska and other Republican-Progressives, for much legislation that anticipated New Deal statutes. As a rebel Republican, closer really to the Progressives of the West and Midwest, he was a free agent in New York, and his ties to labor were closer and stronger than those of the Democrats he beat in 1933. With his Italian and Jewish ancestry and command of six languages besides English, he constituted his own melting pot and balanced ticket.

However hearty a fellow Lindsay is, his mayoralty campaign wall not be as rough and tough as La Guardia’s first successful one or as manipulated by cryptic well-wishers in the White House. La Guardia won in 1933 with gangster support (which he later disowned) and by effectively pinning an anti-Semitic charge on the candidate Franklin Roosevelt had ordered entered in the race to split the Democratic vote away from Tammany Hall. By 1937, when La Guardia came up for re-election, FDR had made him the New York City outpost of the New Deal.

Outraged, or just tired?

Strictly speaking, Lindsay is running for mayor for geographical reasons: the alternative New York routes onward and upward are currently closed off by the incumbencies of Governor Rockefeller and Senator Jacob Javits. But there is a riddle to Lindsay’s contradictory campaign, which stresses “freshness” but disdains the cry of “throw the bastards out”; it is the riddle also of the electorate Lindsay seeks to govern. New York is tired — it has certainly grown tired of Mayor Robert Wagner, as the mayor acknowledged when he read the polls and withdrew to brood and groom. But is the city more than tired? Is it outraged? That is the question.

It is not likely that simple “freshness” can beat a merely “tired” status quo. The mayor is always waging a two-front war for prerogative and power to manage the city’s budget; the hitherto upstate-dominated legislature hammers at him from Albany in the north, and the independently elected city council and board of estimate hammer at him from the south at City Hall.

One might even ask, Is there really a mayor of New York? And do the voters like it this way? Kcmpton the archskeptic suggested such a Catch 22 interpretation on the eve of the mayor’s withdrawal from the race in June. In the same breath with his salute to Lindsay’s freshness, Kcmpton attempted to describe New Yorkers’ worldly, if perverse, passive identification with the mayor’s Mickey-Mouse shadowplay politics: “Wagner’s mixture of resignation with enjoyment of his life is a very New York combination: the notion that New York cannot be governed has become almost a point of civic pride.”

There is no doubt that Lindsay has provided apolitical delight in the big town. It can be seen and heard in the midst of the crowds he collects on his daily walking and speaking tours of the borough neighborhoods. He is natural and effective at walking and greeting, less effective at talking. “He looks to be an actor, not a politician,” purred a woman in Brooklyn one day in August, “a lovely man”; “I touched him, I touched him,” cry autographhunting teen-agers.

But another lady sounded what may be the more dominant mood of New York: “I’m a very ardent Brooklynite. Every time I go awav and come back to the city it’s dirtier; terrible. . . . I’m a Democrat, but I would have voted for Lindsay against Wagner. Now so much has happened, I don’t know.”

Reform, yes; Republican, no

The key word is “Democrat.” By force of tradition, because of Tammany, A1 Smith, Roosevelt, La Guardia, Herbert Lehman, for whatever reason, there is neither Republican force nor tradition in New York. Reform, yes; Republican, no. The lady in the Brooklyn street is thus not so far from a very different sort of voter, the urbane Manhattan reform leader who says almost fanatically, “We’ll show up Lindsay for what he is: a Republican!”

The post-La Guardia reform movement in New York is a collection of young middle-class amateurs who are quite professionally Democratic, and Fabian. Fusion, to these Democratic reformers, is a cryptoRcpublican or purely ad hominem phenomenon, and when the man around whom it has formed fades from the scene, the Republicans try to inherit “fusion.” But the reformers in the end return to the Democratic fold.

These reformers have worked hard to build their clubs throughout Manhattan and the Bronx; they don’t like Lindsay’s “good government” rhetoric about dispensing with the “clubhouse approach” to municipal government, and they expect Lindsay, if he wins, to be appropriated by the national Republican Party rather than by Johnson. Lindsay has won no active help from the Democratic reformers, but he is counting on some votes from them.

Lindsay and his advisers seem to think that the best way to overcome his Republicanism is to put a Democrat on the ticket with him, and not merely a Democrat but one from that same status quo that Lindsay believes the voters do not altogether reject. So he took as his ticket’s candidate for city comptroller the Wagner regime’s housing administrator, Milton Mollen. This move, instead of projecting anti-clubhouse “fusion,” merely blurred the contrast between the “bastards” and those who would throw them out, while at the same time earning Mollen the label of turncoat for abandoning City Council President Paul Screvane, the status quo, Wagner-approved candidate. Lindsay, then, has failed either to raid the status quo to his advantage or to exploit the goodwill of Democrats prepared to vote for him against the status quo.

The maladroitness of this schizophrenic strategy was apparent in Lindsay’s campaign talks during the summer. After quieting down The Alibis, his throbbing teen-age rock ‘n’ roll band one typical day, he began his appeal, reasonably and with charm: “They said it couldn’t be done, that you couldn’t run a Fusion campaign in this city and win. Well, we’ve got one, and we’re going to win, and restore confidence to the city.” “How,” came the back-row heckler’s cry, “with Mollen?” Laughter.

The question was really unanswerable, and Lindsay’s private rationale to reporters (“He’s a very able civil servant I’ve elevated to the political level”) was as lame as it was defensive. Nor did the “positive” offensive strategy work that day with the crowds in Brooklyn and Queens.

John Lindsay of Yale, Yale Law, and the Yale Corporation was telling his several hundred listeners at each block he stopped on, “We must restore confidence, tone, and quality to the city . . . quality, tone, standards — and no more rudeness; let’s have an end to rudeness and being impolite to each other. . . .” (No response) “Isn’t that good . . . ?” (No response) “If we can put a man on the moon, can’t we run our own cities?” (Heckler: “No!”) Lindsay, seeming to fall more and more into the vulnerably bland Park Avenue pose which the Democrats have unsuccessfully tried to pin on him in the past, struggled on: “We don’t want people fearing, discouraged, frustrated, walking around with their heads held down. . . .” (Heckler, exaggerating a languid Park Avenue accent, “Go, Jawn!” Laughter.)

Winner loses

New York seems the prisoner this year of its third-rate politics, not unlike the politique du pire of the French Fourth Republic, in which no one can win, or govern if he does win, and so tries instead to hurt his worst enemy by aiding his secondworst enemy. In so fluid and balkanized a situation, factions do not remain stable; maneuvering becomes the politician’s raison d’être, with no time to be spared for governing. Few Democrats who wish Lindsay well expect him to do well if elected. A reform leader, assuming in July that Lindsay would beat any Democrat, predicted, “Lindsay will run the city from the UN or someplace, being a world figure. He won’t let this city destroy his career.”

A regular organization leader was more succinct: “Lindsay’ll be out of here so fast you won’t see him for dust. People ought to be thinking about the second spot on the ticket whoever’s city council president is going to be the next mayor if Lindsay wins.” Status quo loyalists are not alone in arguing that New York’s hope lies not the way of Lindsay and glamour, but toward Washington and the new Department of Urban Affairs, and in a city regime with the muscle and connections to lobby for federal aid that the state government in Albany will not or cannot provide.

For Wagner has allowed the city’s stagnant politics and its stagnant government to breed with each other. The factions he has manipulated to preserve his balance of power include the technicians as well as the hacks, and some of the top technicians live in neighborhoods, as Comptroller Abe Beame does, where the local leaders are powerful. The technicians and the local leaders tend to work to further each other’s careers.

As cynics foresaw in 1961, when Wagner left his original sponsor, the ex-Tammany boss Carmine de Sapio, in order to embrace “reform” and run against “bossism,” the two city government products he took as his running mates, Beame and Paul Screvane, have inherited the political legacy of Wagner’s strategic artifices and contrived alliances.

Screvane, the onetime sanitation worker, sanitation commissioner, deputy mayor, a sort of municipal Horatio Alger who has graduated to sunlamp tan, cigarette holder, and arrogant, stagy gestures and intonations, is the epitome of the civil servant as Turkish bath statesman; he was the candidate of the bankrupt Wagner receivership. Abe Beame, tough and Runyonesque, adroit in justifying his defense of the city budget against what he is now free to call Wagner’s “irresponsibility,” the civil servant as “little guy,” was the candidate of the anti-Wagner regulars.

Anti-status-quo candidate

So with Lindsay settling into his “positive” campaign and Screvane lamely trying to wrap himself in the curious mantle that attempts to embrace the status quo as well as reform (really the Mayor’s ritualistic gestures toward reform), it was inevitable that by August the antiWagner, anti-status-quo candidate should be not Lindsay but little Abe Beame, firing at the city’s deficit financing and lowered credit rating and the mayor’s deal with Rockefeller to raise and expand an unpopular sales tax — all situations for which he shares responsibility as comptroller.

The list of indictments of the Wagner-Screvane-Beame administrations which Beame or Lindsay or anyone else could make is endless, if endlessly complex: the city has been unable to finance or administer programs to meet crisis situations in housing, education, welfare, employment, race relations, transit, or city upkeep. A drought is on, the air is foul, traffic jams up on avenues precisely because the stoplights have been carefully staggered. The World’s Fair was an expensive, sick, two-season joke.

By primary time in mid-September, a Democratic closed-shop alfair, one could hear two judgments: that the apathy was so thick you could cut it with a knife, and that Abe Beame would either be the next mayor of New York or the reason why a scarred, roughed-up Paul Screvane would not be.

The most devastating judgment on New York, however, was made in Washington. All through the spring and summer various Democrats tried to persuade the President to intervene in New York, help Wagner, help somebody, stop Lindsay, stop the New York labor chieftains’ Liberal Party from consummating an impressive endorsementfor-patronage exchange with Lindsay. When Wagner was aching to run in the spring, he was counting on Johnson’s help, but Johnson made it clear to his aides that he considered Lindsay a better and more dependable anti-Kennedy force than the shifting, self-protective Wagner. It was Wagner, after all, who in 1960 reportedly broke commitments to Johnson and Adlai Stevenson to join the same Kennedy forces, whom he saw as threats to his suzerainty in 1964 and whom he now courts to ensure himself a shot at the governorship in 1966. Johnson refused even to talk about New York with his intimate friend of thirty years, Ed Weisl, who last year became New York’s Democratic national committeeman.

Events in the works, therefore, such as the Liberal Party’s deal with Lindsay, were permitted to take their course. But the President continued to hear that he had to “stop” Lindsay. For those who had not received his message, he confided around and about that the New York Democratic Party was in too much of a mess to mess with, that Lindsay’s election would force the Gold water wing of the GOP even further into retreat, and that he had a new form of protection for his interest in New York anyway in the person of Arthur Goldberg.

Goldberg, it was tidily spilled to some top Washington reporters, was to be responsible to the White House as ambassador to war-torn New York as well as to the United Nations. In January, at the height of the battle for legislative control in Albany, a Kennedy warrior was quoted as saying, “Remember one thing — the greater the shambles, the easier it is to pick up the pieces.” With his Goldberg ploy, Johnson stuck a keep-off sign on the shambles. Thus he tacitly suggested as well that such a move was necessary because John Lindsay is not destined to be to the Great Society and New York what Fiorello La Guardia was to the New Deal and New York.