New York: Incitement to Excellence

• Share

(7 of 10)

John and his twin David were born on Nov. 24, 1921, in a modest West Side Manhattan apartment. The addresses soon improved as Lindsay's father, a self-made man, rose to be vice president of a Wall Street investment banking house. When he died in 1962, George Lindsay left his family $700,000, to be divided among John and David, George Jr., now 45, and Robert, now 39 (a sister, Eleanor, drowned in her swimming pool last summer).

Busy Flower. Lindsay's mother, a Wellesley College graduate, was a promising young actress. She encouraged her children to take music lessons, sing in the church choir and participate in school plays. John was more ham than musician (he had a brief fling at the drums), retained an interest in the theater long after he grew up, capping his thespian career in 1960 with a small part as a Congressman in TV's The Farmer's Daughter.

John went to Manhattan's exclusive Buckley School, then to St. Paul's in Concord, N.H. There he played football (center), crewed, made the debating team. After graduation in 1940 and their first term at Yale, he and David got jobs as pages at the Republican National Convention; they were taken down to New York's city hall by a friendly city alderman and introduced to Fiorello La Guardia himself. "He had his glasses up over his forehead and seemed very busy," recalls Lindsay. "He seemed just like he was in the newsreels—fast and busy."

As World War II loomed, John took an accelerated course at Yale, graduated with a major in history in 1943 after only 31 months. His undergraduate thesis discussed "The Effect of Oli ver Cromwell's Religion on Politics," a theme that still intrigues him. "Cromwell," he argues, "carried things to an extreme—that was his weakness." Ex tremists were never Lindsay's heroes: among his favorite politicians he lists Lincoln ("because of his compassion"), Jefferson ("a Renaissance man"), Benjamin Franklin ("an effective plotter and planner"), Benjamin Disraeli ("a master in government")—as well as Teddy Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie.

Fiery Exit. During the war, Lindsay served aboard a destroyer in the Mediterranean and Pacific, came out in 1946 with a lieutenant's stripes and five battle stars. In his first civilian job, he worked as a bank clerk—until the day he spotted an approaching bank official and tried to hide an illicit cigarette in the wastebasket; it burst into flame and Lindsay quit (he also quit smoking). He enrolled at the Yale Law School, where he found himself a member of a sliverthin Republican minority. He recalls: "The Democrats were always hollering about things, and this made me feel even more Republican."

After law school, Lindsay signed on with a top Manhattan law firm at $3,600 a year; a senior partner was Bethuel Webster, a staunch Republican and onetime president of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, who imparted to the new junior a commitment to civil liberties. In just five years, an unusually brief testing period for a major law firm, Lindsay was named a full partner.