New York: Incitement to Excellence

(10 of 10)

Power & Glory. To run the metropolis—let alone build the City of Tomorrow—New Yorkers pay their mayor $50,000 a year. The job is a Sisyphean symphony in bureaucracy, chronic lists of incomplete projects, a populace crying 24 hours a day for the mayor's time. Many of its most worrisome aspects are out of the mayor's control. The most horrendous is the ever-lengthening welfare bill which will come to nearly half a billion dollars this year, and is rising at the annual rate of $75 million as more and more unskilled newcomers crowd into the city.

Nonetheless, many New Yorkers consider the mayor's duties to be increasingly anachronistic—inevitably involved in such a flood of ceremonial and political functions that the actual management of the city has been left to a timid bureaucracy. It has become a New Yorker's cliche that the mayor is powerless to halt the city's decline. In fact, recent charter revisions have given the mayor of New York extraordinary new executive powers, which the outgoing administration did not utilize to best advantage.

Power is no more than the capability for achievement, it does not exist on its own. If Mayor Lindsay can employ his power to run the city as a modern-minded chief executive and not merely as its complaint bureau and top politician, he may well stir pride and kindle civic interest among New Yorkers. If he succeeds, he will not only restore the glory that was New York but immensely enhance its national political standing.

Fortunately, he is an ambitious man, and his choice of domicile may ultimately be the White House rather than Gracie Mansion. At any rate, after spending an exhausting six months devoted to learning about the problems of the city he will lead, John Lindsay no longer talks as if his aim is a single, candidacy-building term in city hall. "It will take eight years to do what has to be done," he said quietly last week. "If my record is good after one term, I would hope I could get reelected. I want to be a good mayor."