NYC, Before the Dawn - 'The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York' - Review

National Review, Sept 17, 2001 by John Podhoretz

The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York, by Vincent J. Cannato (Basic Books, 702 pp., $35)

Twenty-eight years after he departed Gracie Mansion, John Lindsay is all but forgotten. Other than a single sad stab at a Senate race in 1980, the man who had served for eight tumultuous years as mayor of New York City quickly sank into obscurity to a degree shocking for a man who had once been one of the nation's most famous and glamorous politicians. You might almost consider Lindsay the political equivalent of a lava lamp or a Suzy Homemaker oven-a curio from the 1960s that now sells for a few bucks on eBay.

When he died last year at the age of 79, Lindsay proved a bit difficult to eulogize. The city he had run between 1966 and 1973 had become a much different place in recent years-a place happily free of nostalgia. In Lindsay's day, New Yorkers had little to go on but nostalgia. They spent a great deal of time recalling more glorious days when they could walk the streets safely at night and ride graffiti-free subways. In Rudy Giuliani's New York, people can again walk the streets safely at night and ride graffiti-free subways. Now memories of previous decades cause shudders rather than smiles.

It was during Lindsay's tenure as mayor that New York slid headlong into chaos, barbarity, and recklessness of all sorts-fiscal, behavioral, and moral. And everybody knows it, even those who once worked for Lindsay and would wish to believe their young idealism served a positive purpose. Most of them don't go as far as Henry Stern, the loose-lipped parks commissioner under both Giuliani and Ed Koch, who today dismisses Lindsay as a "radical dope." But there's no denying the city took 20 years to recover from the Lindsay administration. And it got itself firmly on the right track by electing a mayor who was everything Lindsay was not.

Rudy Giuliani is bereft of charm, is at daggers drawn with the leadership of the black community, and is detested by the liberal media. But Giuliani won't stand for disorder, he won't be bullied by race-baiters, he considers welfare a threat to the moral health of its recipients, and he doesn't think cops are more dangerous than criminals. And he has presided over a period in New York City that all but the most blindly left-wing acknowledge is a golden age.

So what could Lindsay's eulogists say on his behalf as they looked around town and saw nothing of value he had left behind? They were left to wax rhapsodic about his fantastic good looks (Lindsay was probably the most handsome American politician of the 20th century) and patrician mien, converting him into a kind of posthumous political himbo, a mix of Jack Kennedy and Austin Powers.

Just about the only positive sentiment offered on the late Lindsay's behalf was that he cared deeply about the suffering of New York's black population. Lindsay had walked ghetto streets in times of turmoil and thus kept New York from being torn apart the way other cities were in the late 1960s. "He made himself visible in all the minority communities," wrote a nostalgic Jack Newfield. "In a time when Newark and Detroit and Watts burned, New York did not."

Ah, but burn New York did, as Vincent J. Cannato reveals in his terrific and definitive work of modern urban history, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York. It didn't burn as severely as other cities, perhaps, but then the suffering residents of other cities didn't physically attack firemen when those heroic workers arrived to put out blazes set by rioters. In John Lindsay's New York, things got so bad for firefighters that their desperate union created an ad campaign with the unbelievable slogan: "You wouldn't fight a friend. So don't fight the fireman-he's your friend. Welcome him to your neighborhood."

Part of the reason Lindsay got unwarranted credit for keeping the streets calm was that he and his staff knowingly lied about how bad things were. That's one of the many eye-opening discoveries to be mined from Cannato's book. "On three separate occasions during the summer of 1967, certain areas of the city were in anarchy," Cannato writes. "Three people died and 45 were injured in July and one person died and 58 were injured in September."

Cannato notes that these were "riot[s] by most people's definition," yet Lindsay and his administration were always careful to use only the word "disturbance" to describe any breakdown of civil authority. Why? According to Cannato, in July 1967 President Lyndon Johnson had appointed Lindsay vice chairman of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Lindsay intended to make the most of this appointment to the panel, which came to be known as the Kerner Commission. He wanted to use it as a means to place urban issues at the top of the national agenda and push for increased federal spending on cities. But he believed that "as one of the most liberal members of the panel, if his ideas were going to carry any weight, there had to be no riots in the streets."