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