The Museum of the City of New York will open an ex hibit tomorrow called “America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York.” It celebrates his “efforts to lead a city that was undergoing radical changes and that was the center of the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.”
During his mayoral tenure (1966-1973), Lindsay presided over changes, all right — changes that ran the city into the ground: fiscally, economically and culturally. Any lessons to be learned, from the exhibit and from his mayoralty, should focus on what not to do.
John Vliet Lindsay (1921-2000) was born on West End Avenue, prepped at New Hampshire’s St. Paul’s School, graduated from Yale in 1943, served in the Navy and upon return to civilian life, graduated from Yale Law School. The 6’3″ blond, blue-eyed Lindsay was elected in 1958 to represent Manhattan’s Upper East Side “Silk Stocking” congressional district.
As the Republican-Liberal “fusion” candidate for mayor in 1965, Lindsay stated that he would “get as far away from the Republican Party as possible,” even agreeing to give the Liberal Party one third of all city jobs and judgeships.
The fledging New York Conservative Party nominated another Yale graduate, William F. Buckley Jr., as its candidate for mayor. Buckley charmed New Yorkers with his roguish wit and intellectual depth and drove the humorless Lindsay crazy.
Lindsay retaliated by employing typical liberal smear tactics, falsely calling Buckley a “Goldwater racist” who adhered to “a radical philosophy full of hatred and division and violence.”
Lindsay managed to win, but with only a 45 percent plurality.
In Lindsay’s first minutes in office, the Transit Workers Union called the first mass-transit strike in city history. It would be a test of the new mayor’s mettle, and the politically naive Lindsay failed — mostly because he approached the unions and their working-class members with an attitude of noblesse oblige.
Lindsay and his coterie of Upper East Side Boy Scouts had no clue about how New York City actually worked. Lindsay staffer Nancy Seifer noted the realization: “There was a whole world out there that nobody at City Hall knew anything about . . . If you didn’t live on Central Park West, you were some kind of a lesser being.”
While Lindsay deserves credit for calming the city during the ’67 and ’68 riots, he nevertheless had the knee-jerk reaction that the cause of the disorder was white racism. As vice chairman of President Johnson’s Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders, Lindsay was responsible for the introductory statement in the commission’s final report: “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
When Lindsay left office in December 1973, New Yorkers lived in a seriously declining city. As liberal journalist Murray Kempton observed: “[U]nder Lindsay, the air is fouler, the streets dirtier, the bicycle thieves more vigilant, the labor contracts more abandoned in their disregard for the public good, the Board of Education more dedicated to the manufacture of illiteracy than any of these elements ever were under Wagner.” And another liberal, Jack Newfield, quipped that Lindsay “gave good intentions a bad name.”
Lindsay’s greatest mayoral “legacy” was his social-welfare spending spree. In 1960, 4 percent of the population received welfare benefits. That number had doubled by 1965 and by 1969 had grown to 13 percent. Expenditures for welfare programs rose from $400 million in 1965 to more than $1 billion by the end of Lindsay’s first term. It became so easy to apply for welfare benefits that the Daily News called Lindsay’s welfare commissioner “Come and Get It Ginsburg.”
To pay for his spending spree, Lindsay used every imaginable financial gimmick. He increased nuisance taxes, water rates and sewer taxes and instituted the city income tax. In 1969, Budget Director Fred Hayes admitted: “We’re going broke on $6.6 billion a year.”
All the budgetary tricks, phantom revenues and capitalizing of expenses led to a situation in which 56 percent of locally raised taxes went either to debt service or to pension and welfare payments. Short-term debt, which in 1965 was $536 million, ballooned to $4.5 billion — 36 percent of total debt. By 1976, these abuses caused the financial markets to close their doors to the city and the state to take over the city’s finances, complete with a default-on-debt decree from the state Legislature.
“The rollovers, false revenue estimates and plain lies,” journalist Ken Auletta wrote, “have robbed taxpayers of literally billions through excessive borrowings to cover up excessive fraud.”
Mayor Lindsay proved that big, expensive, activist government not only failed to achieve expected social and financial equality but also created a permanent underclass — and bankrupted the nation’s largest city.
President Obama, who is attempting to do the same on a national level, should take heed.
George J. Marlin, the 1993 Con servative Party candidate for New York City mayor, is the au thor of “Fighting the Good Fight: A History of the New York Con servative Party.”