New York: Incitement to Excellence

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By the end, his voice was cracked and harsh, his eyes as hollow as his campaign coffers. Yet even as New Yorkers streamed to the polls, John Vliet Lindsay loped urgently from block to block, borough to borough, croaking a threnody that had become as familiar and unique to the streets of New York as the carp of cab drivers or the yawp of fire trucks:

I'm running for mayor because the city is in crisis. The streets are filthy. We'll rip down the cruddy slums in this town. There is crime. And 125,000 teen-agers roam the streets with no jobs, no schooling. New York is the heroin capital of the world. And people are afraid.

For six months, Congressman Lindsay had exhorted fellow New Yorkers to make "our city great again, the Empire City of the world." He shook his fist in the air as he shouted into a hand microphone:

My goals for our city are high goals, and they will require brains, action, sweat, talent and muscle. Our program should be as big as our problems. Other cities have done it. Pittsburgh did it with air pollution. Chicago did it with crime. San Francisco is doing it with mass transit. Detroit is doing it with housing and schools. We can do it too!

Above all, the fair-haired young Republican urged his audiences to take their destiny out of the hands of the arrogant Democratic machine that had fed on the city for 20 years. In synagogues and soda fountains, from the scabrous tenements of Harlem to the polluted beaches of Sheepshead Bay, between blintzes and pizza, chop suey, knishes, pretzels and foot-longs, he remonstrated:

The bosses who run city hall don't have vision. They don't care. Either go back with the machine, the same tired clubhouse crowd, or vote for independent, unbossed reform.

To the Democratic fat cats, "this Lindsay" was a freak, a Park Avenue big talker, a silk-stocking boy. Their candidate, City Controller Abraham David Beame, 59, a mild, mite-size (5 ft. 2 in.) party hack, was admittedly no giantkiller, but he comfortably fitted the mediocre mold to which they were accustomed. Few believed that cynical New Yorkers would be moved by the eager idealism and outraged accusations of this Lindsay—the towering (6 ft. 3 in.), wavy-haired Republican whose improbable good looks and earnest eloquence plainly marked him a do-gooder and an amateur by Tammany's hard-eyed standards.

The hacks could be forgiven for never having heard of Lochinvar or Childe Roland. But they should have known from his record that John Lindsay was no dilettante but an accomplished and courageous politician. He had been a superb trial attorney, so good that he had received glowing praise from Justice Felix Frankfurter for his presentation of a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. He had proved himself to be one of New York's alltime champion vote getters in his 17th Congressional District. He was one of the toughest, go-it-alone independents in Congress, a top House expert on civil rights legislation—and a thorn in the side of his own party regulars.