"[Being mayor is] like being a bitch in heat. You stand still and you get screwed, you start running and you get bit in the ass," wrote John Lindsay in his 1976 roman à clef, The Edge.
Elected in 1965, Lindsay was an unlikely mayor of the Big Apple: a liberal Republican and a Yale graduate, he was good-looking, sophisticated, patrician and Protestant, in contrast with former mayors who, modest in background and appearance, more closely resembled the average working New Yorker. Cannato's biography—as much about New York, postwar electoral politics and "the decline of the city and the crisis of liberalism" as it is about Lindsay himself—portrays a politician who valued reform over party lines, intelligence over cant, and who ultimately failed (some claim spectacularly) with the best intentions. Lindsay's mayoral career was a political obstacle race: on his first day in office, the city's transit workers went on strike; within months, to ward off a dire financial deficit, he instituted a city income tax; in the summer of 1967, racially charged riots broke out citywide and Lindsay battled the police over a civilian review board. Then, in 1968, antiwar protestors took over Columbia University, which was already at war with its neighboring black community. Lindsay weathered these fights with some success, was elected for a second term, became a Democrat and then found that his career was over. Cannato, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, has written an exhaustive and nuanced, compulsively readable narrative, salted with measured, on-target judgments. By far the best work to be done on Lindsay, this biography is an important contribution not only to the literature on New York City but to the broader fields of urban and political studies. (July 1)
