Another Chance

Four years ago, radiating hope and youthful vigor, Republican John Vliet Lindsay held out a promise to New Yorkers to rescue their grimy, glittering metropolis from decades of Democratic decline. "I'm running for mayor be cause the city is in crisis," he told voters in his first mayoral campaign. "The streets are filthy. We'll rip down the cruddy slums in this town. There is crime. And people are afraid."

Now, after three years of Lindsay rule, New York is still in crisis. The streets are filthy, more than a quarter of all housing units in the city is sub standard. The crime rate has jumped by more than 50%. People are no less afraid than before.

Last week, graying but as kinetic as ever at 47, Mayor Lindsay asked New Yorkers to give him four more years to try to bring the nation's unruliest city under control. Flanked by such Republican icons as former Governor Thomas E. Dewey and Mrs. Fiorello La Guardia, Lindsay announced his candidacy. "I run because too much, much too much, is at stake to abandon the effort my administration has begun," Lind say said. "I believe the tide of physical and spiritual decay has been turned."

He added a warning: "No matter who is elected, the years ahead will not be easy."

Ugly Rift. These are not the words of the enthusiastic reformer of yester year -- and for good reason. New York, the saying goes, is ungovernable. Yet the city, in some ways, is in worse shape today than it was under Lindsay's canny predecessor, Robert Wagner. Since Lindsay took office, the welfare rolls have doubled. Exorbitant rent increases have alienated and driven out middle-class whites -- although the may or recently forced a substantial cutback by threatening landlords with rent control. An explosive experiment in school decentralization has left an ugly rift in the Negro-Jewish ethnic alliance that brought Lindsay into office. The mayor's weakest point has been labor relations: teachers, transit employees, welfare workers, firemen, police and garbagemen have all struck the city or called slowdowns during his term.

He has made some progress, notably by putting the city's finances on a sounder basis, keeping the restive ghettos free of major riots, and reducing air pollution. Still, many of Lindsay's accom plishments have been in spirit rather than in substance.

While Lindsay's glamorous approach to governing has helped his national rep utation, his handling of day-to-day city administration has cut into much of his original support among liberals and independents. The mayor's most significant changes in procedure and style -- closer civilian surveillance of the police, his celebrated walks through tense ghetto areas, school decentralization -- have most heavily cut into his support among white, middle-class citizens, who feel that the blacks have been favored at their expense. Now Lindsay must face them at the polls. His strength has come mainly from outside his Republican Party's rank-and-file, who make up only 592,075 of the city's 2,773,500 voters. (In 1965, he headed a fusion ticket, with the endorsement of the Republicans and the city's small but influential Liberal Party.) He must first get past the hurdle of the June 17 Republican primary, the G.O.P.'s first in 28 years. Lindsay faces a serious challenge from a conservative state senator named John J. Marchi and from voluble Brooklyn Assemblyman Vito Battista. He also may be challenged on the Liberal line by Bronx Democratic Congressman James Scheuer.

Horde of Hopefuls. On the Democratic side, a horde of potential candidates has appeared, eager to get a crack at the apparently vulnerable Lindsay, but no serious threat has yet materialized. As usual, the Democrats tend to split their strength; so far, declarations have been made by a Viet Nam hardliner, two liberals, a conservative, and a handful of less identifiable aspirants. At week's end influential Democrats were urging ex-Mayor Wagner to make the race, in hopes of halting their party's lemming-like stampede. Wagner would threaten Lindsay's renomination on the Liberal line, which went to Wagner in two of his mayoral campaigns.

As for Lindsay, he may have all the makings of a presidential candidate, but in the meantime he has to stay alive in New York. Norman Frank, a declared Democratic candidate and public relations counsel for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, puts it in an amusing exaggeration. Says Frank: "He's the most popular mayor in the world--outside of New York."

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