John Lindsay: At the Core, Legacy Still Counts

On a stifling summer night years ago in Manhattan, a tall, gray-haired man and his wife climbed aboard a bus chugging up Broadway. It was quickly apparent that few of the passengers recognized former Mayor John V. Lindsay, a man who had governed New York City for eight tumultuous years.

He was a handsome, charismatic figure, a Republican maverick who gained national attention as a champion of urban America in the 1960s and ‘70s. But the Big Apple and other cities changed dramatically in the decades after he left City Hall, and the liberal beliefs Lindsay embodied soon became as unrecognizable as the man sitting quietly at the back of the bus.

The former mayor died in December of complications of pneumonia and Parkinson’s disease.

Yet Lindsay’s controversial legacy--a battle to improve the lot of the city’s poor, even if it came at the expense of the white middle class--continues to influence New York City’s political life.

Nearly 30 years after the mayor left office, there are signs of a Lindsay revival here. While some offer glowing assessments of him, others are critical of a public official who set out to save the city but ended up as a “splendid flop,” according to longtime New York columnist Murray Kempton.

The reexamination springs from many sources: A new book by historian Vincent Cannato, “The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York,” has sparked an intense local debate over the Lindsay years. There have been ruminations by pundits left and right over a colorful era when the mayor opened up Central Park to love-ins and his aides--hoping to empower the poor--deliberately increased the number of people on welfare.

Last year, hundreds packed a municipal auditorium to debate: Was John Lindsay the worst mayor of 20th century New York? And back in July, current Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani ran into unexpected flak from community groups over his efforts to get a large park on the Lower East Side named after Lindsay.

At first glance, it’s hard to see the relevance of Lindsay’s liberal track record in modern New York. Most of the mayoral candidates this year talk about crime and local spending. After eight years of Giuliani’s conservative Republican administration, Lindsay’s activist government on behalf of the less fortunate has become a distant memory. The L-word, for liberal, once the credo in this heavily Democratic town, is decidedly out of fashion.

But if Lindsay’s passing marked the end of a certain kind of urban liberalism, it also has sparked a dialogue over the future of New York and other cities, according to historian Thomas Kessner. The former mayor’s legacy, viewed through the prism of the Giuliani years, is at the heart of an ongoing debate over urban America.

“When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor, he was running as the anti-Lindsay candidate,” Cannato said. “He was basically taking on 30 years of entrenched liberal policies that John Lindsay exemplified better than any other mayor. And in many cases he’s succeeded.”

The changes are startling, and not all New Yorkers like what they see.

While many applaud New York’s plunging crime rate, minority leaders are angered over alleged police brutality. Giuliani has slashed welfare rolls, yet critics worry about the city’s welfare mothers whose eligibility will expire later this year. The mayor’s tough management style wins plaudits, but some yearn for a more inspirational brand of leadership.

As New York ponders which way to turn, friends and critics are invoking Lindsay’s memory, either as a decent man who tried to do the right thing for the poor or a naive patrician who almost bankrupted the big city.

Lindsay, a well-heeled GOP congressman from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, ran as a reform candidate in 1965 against a Democratic establishment that had been running the city since the end of World War II. He promised to clean up corruption, streamline government and tackle urban poverty.

He won a close race and basked, for a while, in adoring publicity. New York’s photogenic mayor made the covers of Time and Life magazines, and he became a leading liberal voice for the rebuilding of America’s cities.

But traumatic events soon overtook him. Lindsay had to deal with a crippling public transportation strike on his first day in office; his administration borrowed heavily to finance day-to-day expenses and flirted with fiscal disaster; he backed economic programs to aid blacks and Latinos but ran afoul of white ethnic voters outside Manhattan who felt threatened.

Crime began escalating, and New York police corruption became a national scandal. A public school strike exposed ugly tensions between black activists and Jewish educators. Lindsay pushed for integrated housing in white neighborhoods, only to spark a firestorm of protest. When he switched to the Democratic Party and ran for president in 1972, the mayor drew little political support. Amid growing unpopularity, he left City Hall in 1973.

Lindsay worked briefly as an ABC-TV commentator but then began a gradual slide from public view. Unlike former Mayor Edward I. Koch, who has prospered with a stream of books, television shows and newspaper columns, Lindsay fell on hard financial times and did little to burnish his legacy.

“To this day, when you mention Lindsay’s name to a lot of people in Queens and Brooklyn, you get a nasty response,” said political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. “His name is synonymous with white flight to the suburbs and a sense among some whites that New York didn’t care about them.”

“Let us not be so generous about who it was he was confronting,” said Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who was Lindsay’s human rights commissioner. “These were not just folks who wanted to make sure that everything remained stable. These people [white ethnics] said, ‘Not a one of them [blacks] in this neighborhood.’ It’s difficult to find an accommodation with that.”

Beyond civil rights issues, Lindsay tried to decentralize city government and empower neighborhood organizations. Those who remember this chuckled recently when a community board on the Lower East Side--the kind of group that Lindsay championed--voted against the plan to name a park in his honor.

A final assessment of Lindsay’s legacy could be years away. But the ex-mayor had at least one effect on New Yorkers’ daily lives that requires no historical validation.

On the night he rode the bus in 1993, Lindsay was quiet and withdrawn. But then he told his wife: “You know, I air-conditioned the subways.”

“You did, dear,” she answered.

“I air-conditioned the buses too,” he said, as she patted his arm.

Moments later, the Lindsays got off and disappeared into the crowd.