John V. Lindsay, tall, charismatic and with an aristocratic bearing that belied just how little money he had in his bank accounts, was the Mayor of New York at this time. Since January 1, 1966, he had served as the city’s first Republican Mayor since Fiorello La Guardia. A wonderful book—The Cost of Good Intentions— shows us how hard he and others involved in New York’s liberal experiment tried, who the brilliant young people he surrounded himself with were, and why by the time of Mayor Edward Koch it all had turned out the way it did.
After the death of Bobby Kennedy, to Breslin, he was a remaining hope. It was July 2, 1968:
The temperature in the streets of Harlem had just gone under 100 for the first time all day, and the smells came out of the basements and the tenement hallways and the garbage cans alongside the stoops. . . . It is here, in the Harlems of New York . . . that John Lindsay puts up his body, and he was standing at the curb of 137th Street, dressed in a polo shirt, unpressed slacks and brown loafers. He was looking at the open hallway and broken windows of a deserted tenement.
A gray haired woman pulled at his arm.
Lindsay pulled his arm away and declined to go look at this building’s basement. He had seen enough of these in the past months. He heard the woman say that what came out of that basement was killing her block and he made sure his staff took a note.
This mayor, Breslin notes, had prevented violence twice, personally, in just the past couple of months. Once, a Housing Police officer had shot a youth in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A protest meeting was being held. “It was not going to be a marching protest,” Breslin writes. Lindsay showed up unannounced. “To give justice when it has not been given to you,” Lindsay told the angry crowd, “is greatness.”
This is the third summer that Lindsay goes onto the streets of New York to try and prevent violence. One man walking is an insane way for a city to conduct business. And Lindsay knows the great danger. But in the end, in July, in 100 degree heat it is the only thing that can be done.
When you looked at Lindsay looking up at the faces in the wide open tenement windows, Breslin says, you were looking at the only major politician in America “who can do this with the poor.”
“Look at what has happened since last year,” Lindsay was saying. “They had had a King murdered, a Kennedy murdered and a cutback from Congress. Now the campaigns. Can’t you just see it? Humphrey and Nixon. Not just now, August, and through the fall. But all beyond it, right through January until the inauguration. Nothing. All that time and nothing for them at all. Where do you channel the frustrations?” . . .
The trouble of the cities can be found in the country’s political lineup. When everybody wants something new, the two major parties intend to run two former vice presidents. When Richard Nixon talks about life in the 60s he sounds like a dog playing the piano.
By now the Tet offensive was over. More than 2,000 US soldiers had been killed between January 31 and the end of March. April was King. June was Bobby. War-crazed and realizing he had lost America, LBJ, the incumbent, on March 31 announced he would not seek reelection. And now the police in the City of Chicago where the Democratic Convention would be held in the last week of August were preparing to work twelve-hour tours and learning to use gas masks at roll call. When it was over—after the barbed wire came down, the tear gas dissipated, the 12,000 cops working 12 hour shifts, the 6,000 soldiers, six thousand national guard troops and the FBI and Secret Service, had gone home—it was Nixon and Humphrey.
The TV anchorman, Eric Sevareid, described Chicago as a tourist spot second only to Prague, where a brief liberalization, the “Prague Spring,” had just been crushed by Warsaw Pact troops.
Breslin attended the convention for the Post but his best writing on it came after he left the paper, in a New York magazine piece he wrote in the aftermath:
Hubert Humphrey against Richard Nixon. In a political year that started last November, with John Kenneth Galbraith standing up at Cambridge, Mass. and introducing to a crowd, “My great friend, my dear friend, Eugene McCarthy”; in a year that went through the wet streets of New Hampshire, the night in Bobby Kennedy’s apartment in New York, the shopping centers in Indiana . . . in the year of the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles; in a year like this we wind up with two former vice presidents running against each other. This is what the convention system has done to us.