Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,461

This is the grave of John Lindsay.

Born in 1921 in New York, Lindsay grew up wealthy but not super elite levels of wealthy. Still, he got to go to the private schools and then Yale, blah blah blah. He graduated in 1943 and then immediately joined the Navy, being named a gunnery officer. He was a lieutenant and won five battle stars for his work both in Sicily and then the Pacific. Lucky he never got shot. After the war, he definitely wanted decompression time and unlike most veterans, he had the money to play around for awhile. He became a ski bum basically and this at a time when skiing wasn’t really a big deal in America.

But none of that lasted long. He had a career to think about. He got his law degree from Yale in 1948 and started at an elite firm the next year. He met his wife Mary while at the wedding of George Bush’s sister Nancy, where he was an usher and she a bridesmaid. So that’s the kind of family we are talking about here. He started getting involved in politics (with her raising the children and supporting him of course, this is how things worked then in a sexist society). He was president of the New York Young Republican Club in 1952, then went to Washington to work with Attorney General Herbert Brownell in the Eisenhower administration. With the administration’s support, he ran for Congress in 1958 and won the elite district centered in the Upper East Side.

But Lindsay was more a Republican by class and training than a true believer. His actual beliefs were rooted in mid-20th century liberalism, albeit of the paternalistic variety. He supported Medicare, among other things. He also was a player in the established of HUD, the NEA, and the NEH. These are good things. He was one of only two votes in Congress against a bill to allow the federal interception of mail from communist countries. He was a real protector of free speech and had no tuck for obscenity legislation. So to say the least, Bob Taft and Barry Goldwater did not think Lindsay was a Republican. But Lindsay was still a rich Yalie and he held many of the same pro-business politics that would be at the core of this particular type of country club Republican.

In 1965, Lindsay decided to run for mayor of New York and he won. This was the election when William F. Buckley decided to put his putrid face on the ballot on the Conservative Party ticket but it probably only helped Lindsay. But he faced an immediately unique challenge. He took office on January 1, 1966. That same day, the Transport Workers Union went on strike. TWU leader Mike Quill then took Lindsay and beat him like a rented mule. Lindsay, he did not care for Quill. The union leader had always worked out good deals with Robert Wagner without ever having to go on strike. Lindsay wanted a fight. So he got one. He rejected Quill’s demands. And Quill was ready to show the new mayor who was in charge.This made Lindsay look pretty weak. It didn’t help that Quill died right as the strike ended.

Lindsay also had to deal with the racial upheaval of the late 60s, with the effective war between the United Federation of Teachers and Black Power activists in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville ticket that led to significant tensions between Black and Jewish New Yorkers continuing for a very long time. Lindsay did not handle this well at all. He had created the situation after all through his decision to give complete local control of the schools to the local school boards. He knew he screwed that one up too and always regretted his actions here. There were other labor troubles too–a 9 day sanitation strike in 1968 made for a very dirty city. Then in 1971, an AFSCME strike that included sewage treatment plant workers led to raw sewage being dumped into the water. It was a bad time. There was also the hard hat riots in 1970, when the city’s construction workers decided to beat the shit out of the hippies on Wall Street.

Lindsay was pretty committed to civil rights. He walked right into Harlem after Martin Luther King’s assassination and helped prevent rioting there. He was on the Kerner Commission that Lyndon Johnson proceeded to ignore after the report came out. He was one of the most influential people on that committee too and helped write the report personally. Then there was Frank Serpico coming out with all the corruption in the NYPD. Lindsay formed a reform commission and the cops basically declared war on him, as they would with Bill DeBlasio four decades later.

But god he had a rough time. He was kind of inept, yes. He was an elite liberal Republican in a time of both racial and labor upheaval. But when the 1969 blizzard hit and the city couldn’t get the snow cleared even after a week, he became heavily disliked, especially in the more distant neighborhoods of Queens that really suffered. He was seen as inept and out of touch. In 1969, he even lost the Republican nomination (more of Buckley’s doing here). But running on the Liberal Party ticket, he managed to win without it, largely thanks to a coalition of rich white Manhattanites and strong connections in the Black communities in Harlem, Brooklyn and The Bronx.

Still, it’s hard to come to any conclusion that Lindsay was actually good at being mayor. He had a lot of crises but….he kind of botched them all.

Lindsay knew he had no future in New York politics as a Republican, so he became a Democrat and then wanted to be president in 1972. He actually did well in Arizona, coming in second in their caucus, but then after bombing in the Florida primary, he was finished. He quit after doing terrible in Wisconsin.

So after all this, Lindsay became a host on Good Morning America, of all damn things. Well, he was always better on TV than he was at governing. He tried to run for the Senate as a Democrat in 1980, but only finished third in the primary.

Then he actually ended up legitimately poor. He had bad health at the end of his life, including Parkinson’s, which sucks. He had blown through most of his money and he didn’t even have health insurance by the 90s. Rudy Giuliani, in one of the only times in his despicable life that he did a good deed, gave a couple of meaningless posts to Lindsay so he would have health insurance. He was able to move to a retirement community in South Carolina, where he died in 2000. He was 79 years old.

John Lindsay is buried in Memorial Cemetery of Saint John’s Church, Laurel Hollow, New York.

“Funny” story about this grave visit. It happened last month, on that day when it rained 7 inches in New York. I was in town to see some rock and roll (Old 97s 30th anniversary show! Drive By Truckers opening!) and the next morning all hell broke loose. I was reminded of something however, which is that if you don’t give a shit about being drenched, it really doesn’t bother you that much. However, driving in that between various cemeteries was…….well, let’s not do that again.

If you would like this series to visit other bad mayors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. A 1999 book listed Chicago’s Big Bill Thompson as the worst mayor in American history and Jersey City’s Frank Hague as second. Naturally enough, they are both in their respective cities. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here. And this is Los Angeles week so if you want to support me collecting an insane amount of graves and continuing this series for a good long time, it’s a good time to help out!