The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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opponent in New York City in his successful bid for re-election as Governor), the Republican mayoral candidate in New York City polled 15.4 per cent of the total vote, or less than 2 per cent more than the Conservative Party polled in 1965.
If there was a single conference held by Republican leaders during the winter or spring of 1965 devoted to the subject of whether the Republican Party might amass a series of positions around which to base an opposition to continuing Democratic rule, that session is unrecorded. There were conferences aplenty, most of them in the weeks before the first of March, devoted to the question whether John Lindsay should himself run. As of March 1, Mr. Lindsay, according to the accounts of his biographers,11 had decided not to, on the grounds that the odds against him were insuperable. Subsequently, after a breakfast meeting with Mr. John Hay Whitney from which he left feeling considerably more resourceful, and after an exhortatory barrage of letters, telegrams, etc., that followed upon a planned leak by his manager, Mr. Robert Price, to the effect that Lindsay was wavering, Lindsay decided that New York did indeed deserve to be saved, and cast his die: but always on the strict understanding that, like his Republican predecessor Mr. La Guardia, he would be running not as a Republican but as himself. His own words, given at a press conference, were that he desired it to be “clear to the whole world” that he was running for Mayor “as Lindsay” rather than as a Republican. The whole world, as we shall see, did not get the message, but the New York swing vote did, and of course, it remains to be decided who was deluded, the Republican Party or the Democratic electorate.
For instance, Messrs. Peter Maas and Nick Thimmesch, writing on January 2, 1966 in New York, the magazine of the Sunday Tribune, in which they delivered what is commonly accepted as the official Lindsay view of the chronology of the mayoralty campaign.
I shall be devoting attention to the dilemma of the Republican Party, in New York City and nationwide, and see no purpose in any anticipation of the argument. What should be stressed at this point is that in the spring of 1965 the high morale of the Republican Party had nothing to do with the prospective exhilaration of a confrontation between two different approaches to municipal government. It was all along assumed that Mr. Robert Wagner would be running for re-election, and the prospect of yet another, redundant term was viewed with despair by many politically and morally energetic men, who, though they found it difficult to criticize the Mayor’s general ideas about governing New York, consolidated around the position that a change in personnel was drastically overdue. Later, when Mr. Wagner pulled out, thus guaranteeing that someone other than himself would be the next Mayor—whether Mr. Lindsay or Mr. Abraham Beame, or Mr. Paul Screvane, or Mr. Paul O’Dwyer, or Mr. William Fitts Ryan—the pro-Lindsay coalition I speak of shifted to the derivative position that whereas, to be sure, Mr. Wagner would personally disappear, and presumably with him the awful fatigue of his administration, the point now became to replace Wagner with someone formally unattached to the Democratic Party. Therein—not in a new set of ideas about municipal government but in his person, and in his unalignment—lay the prospects for a refreshed New York, most of Mr. Lindsay’s supporters would be saying. It became more difficult to advance that line after Mr. Lindsay sought, and secured, the backing of the Liberal Party, whose iron hold on Mr. Wagner had been manifest, thus renewing formal ties which (the argument had run) Lindsay would be unencumbered by. And then, to add to the difficulties, after one of the most exhaustive searches in political history, Mr. Lindsay designated as his Comptroller—a Democrat, Mr. Milton Mollen, a much-censured associate of Wagner (for whom he had served as Housing Commissioner), whose prestige was at a lower ebb even than Mr. Wagner’s. The columnist, Murray Kempton, who had contributed to Lindsay the slogan, “He is fresh, everyone else is tired,” although he stopped short of outright disaffection, commented acidly that his jingle had been composed “before Congressman Lindsay decided to begin our municipal rebirth by borrowing his candidate for Comptroller from Mayor Wagner. So it must be amended to say that Congressman Lindsay is not only fresh but, when necessary, he can be downright impudent” (New York World-Telegram, August 26, 1965).
But the doctrine held together—even if, intellectually, it was at this point bursting at the seams—that John Lindsay was a free agent. And then, when Mr. Beame was designated at the primary as the Democratic candidate, his placid defense of the status quo and his unbemused affiliations with the Democratic bosses reinvigorated the notion that Mr. Lindsay was uniquely independent.
It is, finally, interesting to recall that the weary Mr. Wagner had only four years before been freshly remandated—as the “reform” Mayor who, by extraordinary moral exertion, had freed himself from the bosses, whom indeed he had roundly denounced in 1961, succeeding to re-election as the quintessentially emancipated man. Nobody quite knew what exactly had happened to the reformist momentum that had buried the bosses, and even though Mr. Wagner never did reunite with them, somehow daisies did not spring up on the pavements of New York. It transpired that New York City government without Carmine De Sapio was not noticeably better than it had been with Carmine De Sapio: indeed, to judge from the crystallization of the discontent, New York was a great deal worse after one unboss-ridden term than after the two boss-ridden preceding terms. The reformers’ new kick, at least during the period of the Democratic Primary, was the humorless ideologue Mr. William Fitts Ryan; and when he fell, the mantle went to John Lindsay. The Republicans were increasingly maneuvered into the position of believing in John Lindsay qua John Lindsay, as their shriveled justification for their original enthusiasm (he is untied to the people who tied up Wagner) gave way under the weight of one after another entanglement with the same old crowd: the same organization, the same personnel, the same ideology.
2. The Idea of Fusion 2. The Idea of Fusion
When Fiorello La Guardia left City Hall in 1945 he proclaimed, with characteristic self-appreciation, that thanks to himself, “partisan politics, dishonesty, graft, selfishness, favoritism, have been entirely abolished.” (By contrast, the Son of God’s tenure was a bust.) But allowing for political hyperbole, La Guardia had, it was generally agreed, accomplished the principal mission for which he had been picked by the Fusionists, which was to liberate New York from a city government which had come to view politics as a form of commerce. The good feeling the name of La Guardia popularly evokes is in part owing to his personality—it was La Guardia’s color that made his reign so lastingly impressive. But for the serious minded, his name suggests high standards of public service.
He gave Fusion a very good name, in the best tradition of his predecessors Seth Low and John Purroy Mitchel, and it thereafter became a part of a happy legend that those who go beyond their own political parties are the most desirable candidates for municipal office. John Lindsay was to stress repeatedly the nonpartisan nature of his own candidacy, assiduously cultivating the air of transcendence that devolves to a candidate too big for any single party.
In 1933, when New York City government had been so greatly discredited by the Seabury investigations, a Fusion group looked hard for a candidate who would be anti-Tammany Hall, period. Actually, neither La Guardia nor—later—John Lindsay was “above” parties. They disdained only those servile relationships to political parties which, on public analysis, tended to diminish their appeal as idealists. La Guardia, who fought savagely for the Fusionists’ endorsement (even as Lindsay maneuvered hard for the Liberal endorsement), had been the reluctant choice of the Fusionists in part because of his unorthodox mien, in part because he was formally a Republican; and it was doubted that a candidate who suffered the liability of that connection could, in a town registered four to one Democratic, beat the Democrats. The Fusionists desired to beat the incumbent with practically anybody at all, and the candidate’s own social and political views were held to be utterly immaterial. What mattered were personal integrity and the ability to reform the administration of the city. This was fusion not in behalf of a set of social positions about government but in behalf of elementary reform. For a generation, the political professionals called the civic-minded men who went in for that kind of thing, Goo-goos.22 The Goo-goos of 1933 were determined to rescue New York, caring not at all about the ideological list of the man they were determined to make