The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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perhaps not quite the year in which to tell New York conservatives that they alone must not vote according to their lights.
1. 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.
2. Said, by some, to trace back to “Good Government Boys.”
3. Because Moses was opposed to proportional representation (against which Seabury, in his final years, finally turned); and because Moses was an Al Smith man. Seabury always resented Smith because, he believed, Smith had edged him out of the Presidency. (Seabury was convinced he could have beaten Hoover in 1928.)
4. La Guardia Comes to Power, 1933 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965).
5. Ibid., p. 40.
6. A few conservatives around the country, having become convinced that the Republican Party is for some reason metaphysically useless, have been trying, and will probably continue to do so, to establish Conservative Parties in every state of the Union, looking forward to a national party. They do not recognize that the essential precondition for such state parties is the pre-existence of an equivalent party on the left. It requires the special provocation of a successful left-splinter party to justify direct pressure from a fourth party on the GOP. The Liberals, for the most part, well satisfied with the policies of the Democratic Party, have not felt the necessity to found third parties outside New York, and in all probability will not do so in the foreseeable future. The possibility of a national third party, like Henry Wallace’s and backed by roughly the same people for roughly the same reasons, is something else again.
7. I have never seen a better one-sentence statement of the problem.
8. The far-outers, in addition to Messrs. Mahoney and O’Doherty, included Joseph H. Ball, former Senator from Minnesota; Charles Edison, former Democratic Governor of New Jersey and Secretary of the Navy under FDR; Devin Garrity and Alex Hillman, New York publishers; Professors Thomas Molnar, Charles Rice, and Sylvester Petro; journalists Suzanne La Follette, Frank Meyer, William Rickenbacker, and George Schuyler; and New York attorneys Godfrey Schmidt and Thomas Bolan.
9. Leo Egan in The New York Times, March 12, 1962:
The emergence of a militant conservative movement in New York State is raising serious political problems for Governor Rockefeller and other Republican leaders. Depending on how these problems are resolved, they could have a major impact on elections and government in the state for many years to come. In many respects the problems Republicans now face are similar to those that confronted Democrats two and three decades ago when the liberal movement, which gave rise to the American Labor Party and later the Liberal Party, was cresting. The solutions reached then have plagued the Democrats ever since.
Essentially, what the leaders of the new Conservative movement would like (and they have made no secret of it) is a political position in relation to the Republican party comparable to that now held by the Liberal Party in relation to the Democrats.
As things now stand, a Democratic candidate for statewide office in New York has only a remote chance of winning unless he gets a Liberal Party endorsement. [The Republicans] are opposed to letting any minority group get any similar veto power in the choice of Republican statewide candidates. For this reason their strategy with respect to the conservative movement is likely to be exactly the opposite of that used by the Democrats when they faced the liberal problem. . . . Instead of helping the Republican conservatives attain legal status, the Republican leadership can be expected to use all means at its command to prevent them from achieving this status. . . . Possible stratagems include full use of all the intricacies of the election law; first to prevent the new group from getting the signatures needed to put its candidates on the ballot, and second to prevent it from obtaining the 50,000 votes for Governor needed to achieve legal status.
10. Three years later, State Chairman Daniel Mahoney called on the Governor to declare February 13, 1963, the third anniversary of the founding of the Conservative Party, “Greater Citizen Participation Day,” in “lasting commemoration” of the Governor’s noble and generous attitudes towards dissenting political opinion.” The Governor was not amused.
11. Which figures sounded, two years later in 1964, like the Good Old Days Department. Rockefeller’s 1965 budget called for spending 94 per cent more than the Harriman Administration had spent.
12. An interesting essay could be written on Madison Square Garden and politics. It is the symbol of Big Time—and it is greatly feared, because the mere fact of its use is a taunt to the New York press, which can be counted on to remark the empty spaces, if there are such; and the resulting effect can be greatly demoralizing. The professionals tend to avoid Madison Square Garden as being too risky. New York conservatives have had good luck with it—SRO twice during 1964 for Senator Goldwater, and once in 1962 by the Young Americans for Freedom. But the effort required to fill the Garden is enormous, as also the expense of publicizing the event and trying to lure into it the twenty thousand needed to appease the unoccupied-seat counters. In 1962, the Conservative Party, alone among the political parties, rented the Garden. In 1965, none of the Mayoralty candidates did. The Garden, as a matter of incidental intelligence, rents for ten thousand dollars per night.
13. 118,768 was the original figure reported the day after the election. The final count, however, was 141,000.
14. Which Governor Rockefeller denounced, on July 14, 1963, in the most sundering terms, as “every bit as dangerous to American principles and American institutions as the radical left”—a thunderbolt he did not trouble to direct only at supporters of, let us say, Robert Welch, but at supporters, in general, of Senator Goldwater. The conservatives, Rockefeller went on, “utterly reject the fundamental principles of our heritage,” and desire to “subvert the Republican Party itself.” Perhaps overcome by the general momentum, he went on to anathematize, while he was at it, the Kennedy Administration as responsible for the “unprincipled opportunism [that] has captured the Democratic Party.”
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