Читать книгу The Unmaking of a Mayor - William F. Buckley Jr. - Страница 13

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Lindsay, Spring 1965 Lindsay, Spring 1965

JOHN LINDSAY ANNOUNCED that he would run for Mayor on May 13, 1965, after months of brooding about it. His decision was interesting at various levels. Obviously, it was interesting to Lindsay himself. It was interesting, also, to New Yorkers. And interesting, besides, to the Republican community throughout the country.

It is generally agreed that the final impetus to Lindsay’s decision was provided by Rockefeller, when he announced, on May 4, 1965, that he would seek re-election as Governor in 1966. Lindsay’s extraordinary showing in his 1964 re-election campaign as Congressman for the Seventeenth Assembly District (he got 71.5 per cent of the vote) had given rise to the comment that here was a political comer, and so the question inevitably followed, to what? The Presidency of the United States, of course (“The District’s Pride—The Nation’s Hope” had been his political slogan during the Congressional campaign); but, presumably, to somewhere in between first. His difficulty lay in a juxtaposition of inconvenient timetables and formidable adversaries. Senator Robert Kennedy would not be up for re-election until 1970; and to wait five long years for the opportunity to run against Robert Kennedy would hardly argue the political sagacity one expects from the nation’s hope. He might have waited until 1965 to oppose Jacob Javits in the primary, but such a move, though technically available to him, was out of the question by reason not only of political prudence (Javits had won his own re-election in 1962 by a majority of over one million votes), but of ideological consanguinity. Lindsay’s big hope was that Nelson Rockefeller would decide against running to succeed himself as Governor in 1966. When Rockefeller publicly announced that in fact he would run, Lindsay was left without any prospective avenue for advancement until, at the earliest, 1970; and even then, only on the assumption that Rockefeller did not win in 1966 and that, if he won, he would not seek yet another term.

Shortly before Rockefeller’s disappointing announcement, Lindsay had proclaimed (on March 1) that “after long and deep thought, I have decided to adhere to my decision not to seek the nomination of my party for the mayor of New York City. Many considerations have led me to this conclusion, including Congressional responsibilities and national legislation of great interest to my district and to me.” Rockefeller’s subsequent announcement (we have it from Lindsay’s biographers), caused Lindsay to decide that, after all, his Congressional responsibilities could wait yet awhile, pending the liberation of New York City.

Lindsay’s announcement was interesting to New Yorkers because here was someone who might actually hope to beat Wagner. The early polls showed him running slightly ahead of Wagner in popularity. Lindsay’s prowess as a vote-getter had been established, and the general aura that hung over him suggested that, win or lose, here would be a campaign easily distinguishable from the routine Republican attempt to capture City Hall.

I have never seen any evidence that the general excitement caused by Lindsay’s announcement issued from any well-wrought expectations by the thinking community of the effect Lindsay’s victory might have on the future of New York City, other than the general Goo-gooism of it all—running out the rascals, beating the Democratic machine, that kind of thing. Preliminary editorial comment stressed (a) Lindsay’s personal attributes, (b) Wagner’s fatigue, (c) the desirability of a change, (d) Lindsay’s flamboyant liberalism. But nowhere does one find any public identification of Lindsay with a set of ideas designed to deliver New York from the succubi that had been emaciating the city. The exhilaration centered on Mr. Lindsay as first-rate political horseflesh; nothing more. In the Republican community there was a considerable twitter because, finally, there loomed a prospective Republican victor for the second highest administrative position in the land, and the Republican Party, locally and nationally, ached for any portent of rejuvenation after the great defeat of 1964.

The spoilers, inevitably, asked: What are Mr. Lindsay’s credentials as a Republican?

1. Lindsay as Republican 1. Lindsay as Republican

The official position, in American politics, tends to be that a politician is, no questions asked, a legitimate member of whatever party he runs under the banner of, if he wins. As far as the Republican National Committee was concerned, Lindsay was a Republican if only because that is what he had listed himself as being, and had run regularly for re-election as. Very soon after Lindsay announced that he would run, he was publicly adored by Ray Bliss, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and General Eisenhower and Richard Nixon and other prominent Republicans offered their active support (which Lindsay was, however, careful not to invoke). On purely organizational grounds, it was always that simple—as simple as Governor George Wallace’s attempt, in the spring of 1964, to run in the Democratic primaries of Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland, against Lyndon Johnson. As a Democrat of record, Governor of the State of Alabama, he had every right to enter the Democratic primaries even in states whose official Democrats were united in passionate opposition to the principles of George Wallace.

Lindsay fared better than Wallace. Wallace was repudiated by important members of his own party—Lindsay was not. It is interesting that even without official Democratic support Wallace succeeded in winning 34 per cent, 30 per cent, and 43 per cent of the Democratic primary vote in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland, respectively. It is inconceivable that he would have succeeded in doing so had he not run as a Democrat; even as Lindsay—to be sure without official Republican opposition—ran, or rather was listed, as a “Republican.”

Lindsay is a Republican largely as a matter of baptismal affirmation, even as Wallace is, congenitally, a Democrat. Affirmations are not, of course, enough: it is required that they be ratified by a constituency. The constituency’s powers in these matters are, however, largely nominal, of special interest to the locality, but of no necessary interest to the national party. Alabama’s overwhelming certification of George Wallace as a Democrat is hardly binding on the Democratic Party of, say, California; indeed, Wallace has been a negative concern of the Democratic National Committee, which runs pell-mell from any implication that Wallace is a representative Democrat. The relationship between the locally certified Democrat and the national Democrat is, in other words, a matter for negotiation. It is a relationship warm or cool depending on whether the local Democrat has plowed fresh political ground, suggesting extra local means of strengthening the party. Orval Faubus of Arkansas confounded the national contumely of 1957—when he refused to permit the integration of Little Rock schools, yielding only to force majeure (ironically, a parachute division led by General Edwin Walker)—by winning re-election after re-election as Governor. But he did not, by his local successes, impress the national Democratic Party, within which he was a continuing, though hardly disabling, embarrassment.

In other words, although a politician is ex officio a member of the party whose designation he runs and wins under, he is not, simply in virtue of his local success, a mainstreamer within his party. In Lindsay’s case, his public positions have been, roughly speaking, as far removed from the GOP’s as Wallace’s have been from the Democratic Party’s. In addition, it would be impossible to demonstrate that his successive re-elections to Congress were in any way the result of his nominal Republicanism. Perhaps the very first time around, when he fought in a Republican primary (in 1958) and, having won it, secured the formal endorsement of the Republican Party, he might be said to have been dependent on his party’s endorsement. But having once become a public figure in his own right, he did not need organizational Republican help—any more than he sought it. For one thing, being tapped by the Republican organization in New York City is not to be compared with marrying the boss’s daughter. A Republican endorsement in New York will prop you up, but you need to walk alone. What else can be expected in a city over three to one Democratic? Even in Lindsay’s own Congressional district, the registration is seven to five Democratic.

Lindsay’s home district is probably the most fabled in the United States. It shelters not only just about all the resident financial, social, and artistic elite of New York but also probably the densest national concentration of vegetarians, pacifists, hermaphrodites, junkies, Communists, Randites, clam-juice-and-betel-nut eaters; plus, also, a sprinkling of quite normal people. It is, as I have noted, preponderantly Democratic, although it has a perverse tradition of going “Republican”—indeed has done so uninterruptedly ever since 1937. In that year Bruce Barton (of Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn; author of The Man Nobody Knows) was elected Congressman, and although he was a firebrand tory, utterly opposed to the New Deal, he was uproariously popular, even while pledging to devote himself to the repeal of one obsolete law each week, and firmly opposing entry into the Second World War. He was, indeed, the Barton of Roosevelt’s “Martin, Barton, and Fish,” the big political anti-doxology of the late thirties. Barton stepped out of the Seventeenth and ran for the Senate in 1940, lost, and was succeeded by Republican Joseph Clark Baldwin, every bit as liberal as his predecessor had been conservative—so much so that in 1944 Republican Boss Tom Curran flatly refused to endorse him for re-election. Baldwin was enraged. “They said that I did not represent the Republicans in the district. My opinion is to the contrary. They want me on the line on reactionary measures, and I won’t do it. You can’t be elected by reactionaries in my district. There are only 29,000 Republicans. I was elected [in 1944] with 73,000 votes, which means that some 50,000 independents voted for me.” He finished his lament with a wonderful sentence: “For years you had to be a reactionary to get nominated in the Republican Party and a liberal to get elected.” Not quite accurate, considering that his predecessor was Barton, and his successor would be Frederic Coudert, who, in the characterization of the historian of the Seventeenth Congressional District, Caspar Citron,¹¹ “will remain in history as the prototype of the arch-conservative on both the economic and foreign fronts.” Baldwin contested Coudert in a primary and was drastically (five to one) beaten.

Caspar Citron, John V. Lindsay and the Silk Stocking Story (New York: Fleet, 1965).

Coudert lasted six terms, winning his last one by the slimmest of margins. He withdrew partly as a matter of general fatigue, partly because Lindsay had more or less made it plain that he would, if necessary, challenge him in a primary contest; and Coudert, already resentful over the frequency of Congressional elections, did not want yet another political contest on his agenda.

It would certainly appear, from the heavy Democratic registration plurality, that the Seventeenth District is irretrievably liberal, though the fact of Barton’s election, and more recently of Coudert’s, does not appear to make the district’s bias absolutely conclusive, unless it is held that the district forever after consolidated, after Coudert’s last term, into liberalism. To be sure, in 1961, as the result of redistricting, the area was enlarged, with the result that a greater number of registered Democrats were drawn into it. At any rate, Coudert’s diminishing pluralities and Lindsay’s increasing pluralities would appear to suggest that a Barton-Coudert Republican would not have much of a chance in the Silk Stocking District at this point. Lindsay’s successor Republican, Theodore Kupferman, ran on a platform which his opponent, the liberal Democrat Orin Lehman, was forced to concede did not differ in any interesting particular from his own.

It is inconceivable to suggest (a) that Mr. Lindsay would have been denied the Democratic designation in the Seventeenth had he at any time, formally renouncing the GOP, desired it; or (b) that his successively increasing pluralities would have been other than still greater, had he been running as a Democrat. What would have been missing is, of course, the piquancy, so stimulating to the jaded taste, that someone of Lindsay’s views should call himself a Republican. The squares who pause to wonder why it is generally said with relish that someone is a “Lindsay Republican” and with disrelish that someone is a “Byrd Democrat” are gloriously unaware of the implications of the Zeitgeist.

Even so, the factual question necessarily arose: What kind of Republican was John Lindsay? I say necessarily, because however often it seemed desirable to parochialize the New York race (“I am not running as a Republican,” Lindsay said over and over again, “I am running as Lindsay”), he made no discernible efforts—and, to be fair, could not very easily have done so—to discourage the picture of himself as the New Image of the national Republican Party. His friends and admirers simply wouldn’t permit it. “ . . . One of these years,” a political writer had forecast at the Republican Convention in 1964, “you may see Lindsay at a convention as the candidate.” A gossip columnist had reported that President Johnson and Senator Kennedy exchanged, in 1965, woeful speculation as to which of the two was fated to be Lindsay’s next adversary. A trustee of Vassar College presented Lindsay to a Vassar audience as a man “we fervently hope is a President of our country in the making.”²² Miss Inez Robb has called him “a sure Presidential contender in the seventies—if the traditional [sic] Republican Party is to be saved.” Robert Ruark cabled from Spain [!] that “the Republican Party is starving to death for men of Lindsay’s caliber. . . . He is a statesman, young or not, and should be around for a lot of years as Congressman, Governor, who knows? Maybe President.” David Dubinsky, chiding Harry Golden for his refusal to support Lindsay during the campaign, published in full-page advertisements (see chapter X), his open letter to Golden: “Suppose we elect Lindsay as Mayor of New York City. What lesson does this teach to the other Republicans elsewhere who also would like to be elected? They must conclude that the way for a Republican to get elected is to act like Lindsay. . . .”

The “political writer,” “gossip columnist,” and “trustee of Vassar College” are quoted anonymously in Daniel E. Button, Lindsay, a Man for Tomorrow (New York: Random House, 1965).

It was a matter, also, of Lindsay’s own stated ambitions for the Republican Party. “We,” he had said on November 6, 1964, to the Wednesday Club of the House of Representatives, which is composed of liberal Republicans, “are among the Republicans who will have to rebuild the Republican Party out of the ashes. We hope we can work with other moderate groups throughout the country to return the Party to the tradition of Lincoln.”

In a word, the appeal to Fusion-for-New York, together with a sort of intellectual pledge by everyone in the country to disregard the national repercussions of a Lindsay victory, was always unrealistic. If Lindsay won, Republicans in Ohio and California would not be permitted to pass off his victory as meaningless, as merely a triumph of Goo-gooism in a jaded municipal situation. The opinion-making press, which would herald Lindsay’s victory as charting the road ahead for a resurgent Republicanism, would not permit it, for one thing. In this sense those Democrats who all along insisted that a victory for Lindsay in New York would work to “Republican” advantage were technically correct; correct in predicting that the Republican Party would inevitably take heed of Lindsay’s showing in New York and attempt to profiteer on it. The help-Lindsay-and-you-help-the-Republican-Party objection to Lindsay was superficial only when uttered by highly ideologized liberals—Harry Golden, for instance, and a few members of the Liberal Party—who refused to reflect that, after all, if the Republican Party could be brought to fashion itself after Lindsay, their cherished dogmas would have little to fear from any aggrandizement of the Republican Party.

During his early days in Congress (1958 to 1960, and to some extent even in 1962), John Lindsay did take a few positions, or more precisely did make a few utterances, which had appeal for conservatives—a fact that suggests, as his progressive voting record formally documents, that during his stay in Congress he moved toward, rather than began at, that position of extravagant compliance with the liberal orthodoxy which finally made him a hero, in 1965, to the Liberal Party, to the New York Post, and to The Nation. For a while, for instance—though his voting record never reflected this concern—he used to talk worriedly about the necessity for fiscal restraint. Which, as is recorded, the editors of The New York Times at one point dryly doubted he really, truly, ever really worried about. He once defended Eisenhower on one of those occasions when the President was in one of his frugal moods. “[Eisenhower’s] policy is sound,” he declared, “even though it is painful and possibly unpopular to insist upon paying for what we get.” And again, “The President is correct in insisting upon the Congress’s paying for the programs it enacts; spending should be according to priorities of national needs, and pork-barrel approaches to legislation must be avoided.”³³

D. E. Button, op. cit.

When John Kennedy became President, John Lindsay was, by contemporary—and certainly by posthumous—standards, positively irreverent. “The President,” he said on the eve of the Vienna summit meeting in 1961, “will now meet with Khrushchev after disavowing personal diplomacy. He will continue to dole out give-aways after calling for national sacrifice. He will now affirm both a growing economy and a healthy picture in defense after causing gloom and despair with his campaign appraisals. This kind of ambivalence demands our scrutiny.” (The demanded scrutiny was not forthcoming.)

On another occasion he actually reminded President Kennedy of the “vigorous support [JFK had promised] of those long-overdue economy reforms [which] would be heartening to every American taxpayer.” And, in a general blast which he would not for the world have recalled during the ’65 campaign, he charged during the summer of 1962 that “the trouble in Washington today is that the President has never learned how to be President. He thinks he’s still running. There is a difference between being a perpetual candidate and being the President of the United States. . . . The fact that he hasn’t been able to get his program through his own heavily Democratic Congress [through no fault of Mr. Lindsay’s], indicates that the Congress recognizes [sic] more public relations than substance in the President’s efforts. If we were treated to less personal image-making, and more concern about basic problems and their sensible solution, we would have better government.”⁴⁴ That statement was clearly not composed by Lindsay’s campaign manager Robert Price, whose efforts during 1965 combined the two imperatives, that Lindsay be identified as a Kennedy Democrat (“For seven years,” his principal flyer during the 1965 campaign divulged, “he has represented New York in Congress, where he has supported the programs of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson”), and that Lindsay’s opponents be cast in the role of opponents of better government.

D. E. Button, op. cit., p. 106.

Lindsay had gone on, on that highly forgettable occasion in 1962, to criticize Mr. Kennedy for using tactics which Lindsay was so assiduously to emulate in his own campaign for Mayor: “I blame the Kennedy family for much of it [paralysis in government]. It’s gotten so that if you’re against the Kennedy family, you’re against progress. You can’t discuss these things. The party line in the House of Representatives is that if anyone proposes a different or deeper or better approach to, say, the Kennedy civil rights program, then he’s against civilization. I don’t think the Kennedys realize how much they’re shutting off debate.” Indeed.⁵⁵

“If I should win the mayoralty of New York it means something important in the country. . . . Mr. Buckley is running against me for precisely [the] reasons [that] his people ran against me last year, in 1964, when I stood for Congress and stood independently and would not support Mr. Buckley—Mr. Goldwater—and Mr. Buckley as a matter of conscience and they tried to destroy me then. They try to destroy us now and the pincer attack, I tell you, is a very dangerous thing because it means that New York City stands the chance of not having a new start simply because a vote for Mr. Buckley is a vote for Mr. Beame . . . most of the advice I received when I decided to run for Mayor was not to run; they said, Mr. Lindsay, if you run you will cut yourself off; New York City can’t be governed and worse than that, they will chop you to pieces and if you are elected to Mayor you can’t resolve the problems of New York City, and they said it is a dead end. I say New York is the greatest city in the world. . .” (CBS, TV, Sept. 26, 1965)

For the benefit of the curious, I list in the Appendix B section a brief description of twenty-one bills passed by the Eighty-seventh and Eighty-eighth Congresses, concerning which there are these common denominators: (a) that they were overwhelmingly endorsed by Democrats and overwhelmingly opposed by Republicans; and (b) that John Lindsay was among the tiny minority of Republicans—they ranged from five to thirty-four—who made their passage possible. Lindsay voted with the Democrats, to effect the passage of measures which would not otherwise have passed, a total of thirty-one times. As such, he was runner-up among liberal Republicans in the frequency of his fealty to Democrats-in-a-jam—second only to Congressman Seymour Halpern (New York), who voted thirty-four times with the Democrats. In the Eighty-seventh Congress (1958–1960), he voted with the Democrats, on the critical issues that divided the two parties, 59 per cent of the time. In the Eighty-eighth Congress (1960–1962), he voted with them 78 per cent of the time. During his final session in Congress, he earned a rating of 87 per cent from the Burke’s Peerage of United States Liberalism, the Americans for Democratic Action’s annual score sheet (which rated him as dependable a liberal as over one-half of House Democrats). On several occasions he voted with a small minority of Democrats for measures uniquely identified as liberal, thus locating himself within the left-most faction of the Democratic Party.

As I say, the attachment to liberal policies was progressive. He voted 31 per cent of the time with the Democrats in 1959, 60 per cent in 1964—during which period the Democrats themselves grew, by commonly accepted standards, more liberal. The (conservative) Americans for Constitutional Action have their own poll—the obverse, pretty much, of the ADA’s—which revealed that the median Republican voted with his party 86 per cent of the time on issues of importance to conservatives. On those occasions, Lindsay voted with the party 21 per cent of the time. The range of his votes with the liberal bloc in Congress is merely suggested by: his vote to pack the Rules Committee with liberals designated by President Kennedy, so as to ease the passage of liberal legislation (passed, 217–212); his vote to authorize the President to purchase one hundred million dollars’ worth of United Nations bonds, in defiance of the Republican insistence that loans be barred until the United Nations General Assembly adopted the World Court’s opinion on financial obligations of members; his insistence that President Kennedy should not resume H-bomb testing until after obtaining the approval of the United Nations; his vote with the majority against the reduction of foreign aid (208–198); his vote with the majority against prohibiting subsidies on agricultural products shipped to Communist nations (187–186); his sponsorship along with a small minority (29) of a bill to abolish, in effect, the House Committee on Un-American Activities; his votes against the reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine, against the extension of the provisions of the Sedition Act to Americans abroad, in favor of the abolition of loyalty procedures in defense industries. Lindsay was one of the handful of Congressmen in either party who refused to sign the annual statement by the Committee of One Million opposed to the admission of Red China to the United Nations (for which stand he was explicitly rebuked by his own New York Young Republicans⁶⁶); who expressed public sympathy for the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy; who opposed a Constitutional Amendment to permit prayer in the public schools; who voted to increase the minimum wage law, against an alternative suggestion that it be raised, yes, but not to such an unrealistic level; who joined in the liberal attack on the Central Intelligence Agency, in company with those who blamed it for the fiasco in the Bay of Pigs; who favored the so-called Princeton Plan for compulsory integration of the public schools. . . . Apostasy on any one or even more of these issues hardly detaches a man from the Republican Party. But the accumulation is sufficient to justify this generality, that any political technician, presented pseudonymously with John Lindsay’s voting record, would, on the basis of existing voting patterns, pronounce that the Congressman in question was, inferentially, a fairly regular Democrat, with a discernible bias to the left.

The New York Times, March 10, 1961.

None of the above is particularly interesting except inasmuch as it plants the categories. It only remains to examine the quality of John Lindsay’s thought, to probe his semipermanent digressions from Republican orthodoxy in search of the new role for the Republican Party; to examine the bearing of his thought on the municipal problems of New York City; and, of course, to draw the lessons from it all for the national Republican Party and the two-party system.