Urbane Renewal

THE CITY by John V. Lindsay, 240 pages. Norton. $5.95.

His first administration took office to the screeching brakes of an immobilizing transit strike. Thereafter the city lost half its major daily newspapers, endured a monumental garbage strike, suffered the paralyzing aftermath of a great snowstorm, and mourned the loss of numberless school days as a result of the worst school strike in U.S. history.

Thus it was that last year John Vliet Lindsay stood for re-election as mayor of New York City trailing clouds of trouble and portents of defeat. Everyone knows the doubly miraculous results. Running as a Liberal and Independent, Lindsay was both repudiated and reelected. Fifty-eight percent of the voters were against him. Yet he drew more support than either of the other candidates and emerged as a figure of national political consequence.

Now he has written a book. Perhaps unavoidably, most of the material in it is culled from speeches, position papers, office research. Yet to Lindsay's credit the mark of his personal syntax, the idiosyncratic cadences of his oral editorial style, glottal-stop through its pages. Touch this book and you may not touch a man, but you will certainly hear him talking.

Ultimate Problem. Along with a good deal of eclectic commentary, what finally emerges is the outline for a Northern alternative to the Southern strategies that have gripped both major parties in the presidential politics of the '60s. City halls are supposed to be political dead ends--the mayors of at least half a dozen major cities declined to run for reelection in 1969. But The City reveals that John V. Lindsay is still very much alive and plotting in the corridors of Gracie Mansion.

Lindsay develops his position by tracing the root of the country's urban ills back to the attitudes of the agrarian founding fathers, who viewed cities as more evil than necessary. The 19th century, he argues, further fostered the notion that national destiny lay in the virginal lands of the West rather than the vice-ridden cities of the East. By the 20th century, the idea had taken hold that cities were to be overtaxed and unrepresented. In the past three decades, Lindsay says, cities have received no significant federal funds to aid mass transit, though more than $60 billion has been earmarked for highways.

"The ultimate problem," says New York's mayor again and again, "is money --or rather, the problem of not enough money." To get enough money for the cities through tax sharing with state and federal governments, Lindsay acknowledges, would mean nothing less than a dramatic reordering of national priorities. His chief target is military spending: the $500 billion in defense contracts awarded the military-industrial complex since 1950, a $70 billion federal defense budget, and ultimately the war in Viet Nam, which he claims costs New Yorkers alone three times as much in annual taxes as the Government has ever spent in any one year on urban housing throughout the entire nation.

None of these statistics or arguments are startlingly new. Critics, moreover, have justly pointed out that there is more wrong with the mayor's methods and administration than lack of money. Nevertheless Lindsay is a pious pleader and a practical politician. He knows that one constituency can be defeated only by the threat of gathering a larger constituency. He is obviously fascinated by the idea of going to town, literally making political capital out of the basic issue of the cities.

More than once he cites the fact that 75% of the national population live in cities. And within these cities are what he describes as a "hidden nation" of wretched and increasingly pressured citizens, who are becoming more and more visible. Lindsay's views of dealing with this "hidden nation"--the constituency he seems to stand ready to champion, as opposed to Richard Nixon's Silent Majority of Middle America--are quite different from those of the present Republican hierarchy. Unlike an Agnew or a Mitchell, for example, he does not believe in repressive police policies and summary judicial measures: "Each new loss of liberty, as it fails to bring instant peace, will bring forth a call for the abrogation of another right, until the most brilliant document ever conceived for the protection of individuals becomes a shell--and crime and violence continue."

Lindsay offers an eloquent warning against the dangers of overreaction: "Surely some who demonstrate are thoroughly deplorable, seeking confrontation and hoping for a brutal response to win sympathy or gain an issue. That is why those who uphold the law must be wiser and calmer than those who seek to repudiate it. It was, after all, a mob that taunted, jeered, and physically provoked an armed force on our soil into what we now call the Boston Massacre --the British overreaction we now regard as an assault on ideas and freedom as much as on people."

Lindsay's civil-libertarian, anti-Viet Nam stance spreads over a base of cities almost like the old New Deal coalition. Whether it represents a danger to the Republican establishment or offers any permanent attraction to anti-establishment Democrats is hard to say. In any event, The City makes clear that Lindsay, perhaps the only powerful political figure on the national horizon who seems attractive to youth, is trying to keep his political options open while sounding a call for committed followers at the same time.

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