New York: Incitement to Excellence

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Paranoiac Urge. Lindsay had been active in Manhattan politics since his return from the Navy in 1946. He was elected president of the city's lively and influential Young Republican Club in 1951, became city wide co-chairman of Youth for Eisenhower the following year. Says Jack Wells, an old New York G.O.P. hand who was campaign director for Governor Rockefeller in 1964: "If a man doesn't have that paranoiac urge for politics, you might as well forget about him. John got that feeling soon."

Lindsay also had a passion for the law, and in 1955 he got a break that allowed him to indulge both loves. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who had known of Lindsay's politicking, invited the young Manhattan lawyer to come to Washington as his executive assistant. Lindsay made solid contacts with all the members of Eisenhower's Cabinet, helped draft civil rights legislation for the Justice Department, and soon rose to be one of its bright young stars. But then, back in Manhattan's 17th District, the Republican incumbent was in danger of losing, and Lindsay's friends pleaded with him to run in the 1958 primary. With Herb Brow-nell's blessing, the young lawyer headed home for his first campaign.

He approached the game of politics like a big-leaguer from the start. From headquarters at the Hotel Roosevelt, he organized a district-spanning telephone canvass, attracted hundreds of the bright-eyed young volunteers who have figured in every subsequent Lindsay campaign. Though local G.O.P. leaders strongly supported his opponent, Lindsay easily won his primary and was elected to Congress with a comfortable 53.9% of the vote. Richard Nixon carried the district with a bare 50.8% in 1960, while Lindsay rolled up 59.8% of the vote against his Democratic opponent; in 1962 he won 68.7%. In 1964, while Lyndon Johnson's juggernaut was crushing nearly every other Republican in the state, Lindsay crashed through with 71.5% of his district's vote, the biggest margin logged by any G.O.P. Congressman in the nation.

Loner. From the start, Lindsay's career on Capitol Hill was marked—or, many think, marred—by his defiance of the Republican leadership. His first year in Congress, he was the only member of the House to vote against a bill broadening the Postmaster General's powers to seize obscene mail, observing that the bill placed the "full burden of proving innocence on the mailer." He ignored the Republican line by voting in favor of key Democratic bills. In the past session of the 89th Congress, he voted with the House Republicans only 6% of the time.

As far as the minority leaders were concerned, Lindsay's most unforgivable breaches of party discipline were in -1961 and 1963, when he supported the Kennedy Administration's moves to lessen the power of the House Rules Committee, thus clearing a legislative bottleneck created by a conservative coalition. It was a costly point of principle for Lindsay. He had long coveted a position on the House Foreign Affairs Committee; after his 1963 vote, Minority Whip Leslie Arends of Illinois told the rebel: "Boy, I never saw a man talk himself off the Foreign Affairs Committee so fast in my life."