The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York - Hardcover

Cannato, Vincent

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465008437 ISBN 13: 9780465008438

Publisher: Basic Books, 2001

Synopsis

Vincent Cannato takes us back to the time when John Lindsay stunned the New York political scene and rode into Gracie Mansion with a liberal Republican agenda, a WASP sensibility, and movie-star good looks. When Lindsay became mayor of New York in 1966, he was seen as a White Knight, the last best hope for a stagnant, troubled city. At the height of his popularity, leading politicians of both parties, including Nelson Rockefeller and Bobby Kennedy, feared the growing cult of personality surrounding him. Lindsay ended his second term, however, conquered by racial, financial, and economic crises. With peerless authority, Cannato explores how Lindsay Liberalism failed to save New York, and, in the opinion of many, left it worse off than it was in the mid sixties.The Ungovernable City is also the story of an American city-perhaps the American city-during a crucial period in twentieth-century history. And all the while, Mayor John Lindsay found himself asking the same questions that Cannato explores: Is New York City governable? How much can the mayor of any large American metropolis really accomplish?

About this title

About the Author:

Vincent J. Cannato received his Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University. He has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, the Weekly Standard, and The Washington Post. He is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and has taught history at the University of Maryland. Cannato is an expert in New York City history and spent several years giving walking tours of the city.

From Publishers Weekly:

"[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 ... 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.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0465008437
• ISBN 13: 9780465008438
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 720