New York: Incitement to Excellence

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Nude Shakes. Far beyond New York, there was wistful talk of Lindsay among Republicans hungry for a dynamic presidential candidate. Many noted the passing similarities between J.V.L. and J.F.K., a common legacy of grace and style, a clear-eyed toughness, a springy vigor. Lindsay is even handsomer than Kennedy, but admirers noted that they had the same quick toothy smile, the straight-spined athlete's stride. Lindsay has borrowed from Kennedy the poking forefinger to counterpoint his speeches. His campaign for the mayoralty was hung from the same "get things moving again" line as Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign.

During the early months of his campaign, Lindsay even went politicking at Brooklyn's Brighton Beach in bathing trunks, grinning and shouldering his way bare-chested through the crowds—just as President Kennedy had done on a California beach in 1962. Lindsay eventually carried his activities beyond the beach; he continued to seek hands to shake among a few startled citizens while he was nude in the dressing-room shower.

Like Kennedy, Lindsay is an avid yachtsman, an ex-Navy officer, a sometime Sunday touch-football player, a reader of Ian Fleming novels, the father of a son named John. Lindsay, too, is married to a handsome woman who attended Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn., and Vassar. Mary Lindsay, 37, has little else in common with Jackie Kennedy. Mother of four (Katherine, 14; Margaret, 11; Anne, 9; John Jr., 5), "Mare"—as John calls her—is more gregarious and much more at home in the jostle of politics than Jackie.

Mary claims absolute disinterest in the 9-to-5 life—"the little house with the white picket fence and the roses"—and she made dozens of campaign speeches for John (a chore that Jackie abjured). Mary usually says what she thinks—bluntly. Once, as she and some friends were scanning a fulsome magazine piece about her husband, she snapped: "That's not the man I sleep with!"

Hip ASP. But the comparison between Lindsay and Kennedy is misleading as well as invidious. Today, at least, Lindsay does not possess the late President's polish and poise, his gleaming wit and easy public charm. A more fundamental difference between the two men is that John Lindsay is comparatively a self-made man. He was not raised in a family that was grooming a son to be President, nor was he raised in multimillion-dollar opulence by a father filled with angry ambition and the sting of Boston's social rebuffs.

John Lindsay's parents were descended from pure-blooded WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants)—though, as Lindsay is fond of pointing out, "If you are really hip, the correct term is ASP; all Anglo-Saxons are white, so why be redundant?" His father, George Nelson Lindsay, was the son of a Scotch-Irish brickmaker from the Isle of Wight who went broke in 1884 and emigrated to New York. John Lindsay'? mother, Eleanor Vliet Lindsay, was the daughter of a Dutch-descended New Jersey carpentry contractor whose ancestors dated back to colonial times.