The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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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