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