In politics, timing is everything. At least that’s how it must have appeared to John V. Lindsay, the charismatic and debonair mayor of New York City, forty years ago this summer when he quietly began fueling speculation that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972.
In the midst of a relatively mild recession and an escalating war in Vietnam, his timing couldn’t have been better, or so it seemed.
A kind of political nomad after winning reelection to a second term as mayor of America’s largest city on a Liberal Party fusion ticket in 1969, Lindsay’s name was included in a Gallup Poll in July 1970, showing the New York mayor only seventeen points behind President Nixon in a three-way match up with Alabama’s George C. Wallace, who was again expected to mount a third-party candidacy for the White House.
By that fall, Lindsay-for-President Clubs had been organized in several large cities across the country and it wasn’t long after that before attorney Sid Davidoff, Lindsay’s administrative assistant, and deputy mayor Richard Aurelio, who had successfully choreographed Lindsay’s 1969 reelection campaign, set up an office with a small staff and began traveling around the country promoting the idea of a Lindsay Presidency.
After nearly a year and a half of speculation, Lindsay finally declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in late December 1971 — only four months after switching parties.
In abandoning the Republican Party a few months earlier, Lindsay accused the GOP of dividing the nation “by class and race and age.” Reminiscent of today’s anti-bailout fervor, Lindsay also savaged the Nixon administration and lawmakers on Capitol Hill for ignoring the plight of the poor while giving $250 million in loan guarantees to the ailing Lockheed Corporation, the giant defense contractor then fighting for its life after its engine supplier, British-owned Rolls-Royce, was forced into government-appointed receivership after encountering financial difficulties.
“The richest country the world has ever known refuses to so shape its course that its children can be taught, its sick healed and its environment cleansed,” said Lindsay during an August 12 morning press conference at New York’s Gracie Mansion.
“The most troubling development,” concluded Lindsay in announcing that he was switching parties, “has been the government’s retreat from the Bill of Rights” — the tapping of telephones without court order, military agents spying on private citizens, and the arrests of thousands of antiwar activists without legal authority.
He declared his candidacy for president in Miami a few months later.
Most Democrats knew that Lindsay would eventually take the plunge, but not everyone enthusiastically welcomed him into the party. “We believe in the right of redemption,” quipped U.S. Sen. Henry M. Jackson of Washington, another Democratic presidential aspirant. “But if you join the church on one Sunday, you can’t expect to be the chairman of the board of deacons the following Sunday.”
George S. McGovern, the party’s eventual nominee who was deeply worried that the New York mayor would cut into his support among the party‘s progressive antiwar constituency, was quick to point out that Lindsay had given Spiro Agnew’s nominating speech in 1968 — a charge Lindsay could hardly deny. “Yeah, I did,” he acknowledged. “And as Fiorello La Guardia once said, ‘When I make a boner, it’s a beaut.’”
Lindsay’s break with the Republican Party had started long before he began thinking of running for president. He had always downplayed his Republican affiliation; his campaign posters and brochures usually made no reference to his party. “I happen to be a Republican,” he was fond of telling his audiences. “I hope you won’t hold it against me.”
The GOP, on the other hand, was happy to see him leave. “He’s always been a dirty word to us,” chortled one Republican leader. “A lot of Republicans are saying good riddance.”
Having posted a respectable showing in the January 29 Arizona caucuses where he had campaigned for only three days — defeating front-runner Ed Muskie in Phoenix and finishing ahead of McGovern while picking up six of the state’s 25 delegates — Lindsay skipped the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary on March 7 and concentrated most of his effort on the delegate-rich primary in Florida a week later.
Trying to dispel the notion that the New York mayoralty was a political graveyard, Lindsay went for broke in Florida.
Given the state’s large population of transplanted New Yorkers, Florida appeared to be a seemingly ideal environment for Lindsay’s amply-financed campaign, which briefly lit up the Florida sky like a spectacular Fourth of July fireworks display, only to extinguish just as quickly.
Arriving in the Sunshine State with great expectations and plenty of money for advertising — courtesy of a handful of deep-pocketed supporters, including Indiana industrialist J. Irwin Miller, who reportedly pledged $2 million to his campaign — Lindsay planned to spend $400,000 in the state, much of it earmarked for television commercials produced by David Garth, the campaign’s savvy media guru.
Though they never expected to defeat the immensely popular George Wallace in a southern primary, Lindsay’s aides privately predicted that the idol-matinee mayor would receive about twenty percent of the vote in the state’s March 14 primary, enough to catapult him past the party’s other liberal contenders and into serious contention for his newly-adopted party’s presidential nomination.
The 50-year-old New York mayor, whose wavy blond hair was just starting to show a hint of silver, announced his candidacy at a crowded and sweltering news conference at Miami’s Dupont Plaza hotel on December 28 — approximately ten weeks before the primary.
In a speech crafted in part by former Bobby Kennedy speechwriter Jeff Greenfield, Lindsay condemned the Nixon administration “as a clubhouse for privileged power at home and the parade ground for juntas and generals around the world.”
Adopting a stridently populist tone, he also said the nation needed a President who has “felt firsthand the anguish of imposed scarcity — who has been forced to choose between teachers in our schools and doctors in our hospitals, between cleaning our rivers and caring for the sick — because the funds we need are drained away into a mindless war and into the pockets of the few.”
George McGovern, the party's eventual nominee, was worried about Lindsay's candidacy.
Portraying himself as a Washington outsider, Lindsay also took a swipe at his Democratic rivals, describing them as trapped in “a Capitol closed to the ordinary citizen, but open to bankrupt corporate giants, foreign dictators and to those wealthy enough to buy privileged protection with campaign cash.” He didn’t mention any of his opponents by name.
“In 1972, someone must speak for the America that Washington has ignored,” he said — an obvious dig at four of his five main rivals then serving in the U.S. Senate.
Lindsay wasn’t exactly embraced by Floridians. “I came here to get away from that guy,” complained a former New Yorker. Moreover, within minutes of declaring his candidacy, airplanes were buzzing over South Florida beaches with “Dump Lindsay” banners reportedly paid for by property owners in Forest Hills, New York, who were fighting the mayor’s proposal for low-income housing in their community.
Lindsay’s rivals for the Democratic nomination weren’t exactly happy to see him in balmy Florida either. “If I lived in New York and had all the troubles the mayor has,” needled McGovern, “I think I’d come to Florida, too.”
“Scoop” Jackson, who had also skipped the New Hampshire primary and was about to embark on a Harry Truman-style barnstorming tour of north Florida, also added his two cents. “I would say he’s a slow learner,” quipped the hawkish Jackson, who was gambling on a strong showing in the state. “It took him twenty years to learn that he is a Democrat.”
Eleven candidates crowded Florida’s presidential primary ballot that year, including 1968 nominee Hubert H. Humphrey and presumed front-runner Ed Muskie, whose campaign staff was badly divided on whether or not they should make an all-out effort for the state‘s 81 delegates.
Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to wage a serious campaign for the presidency, polled 43,989 votes in the Florida primary.
In addition to Wallace, Muskie, Humphrey, McGovern, Jackson and Lindsay, Shirley A. Chisholm — the peppery 98-pound Brooklyn congresswoman who believed she could win a large share of the state’s African-American vote — also actively stumped in the March 14 primary. Chisholm’s candidacy was a blow of sorts to the Lindsay campaign, which reportedly had been led to believe that she wouldn’t actively campaign in Florida.
Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy, Indiana Sen. Vance Hartke, powerful House Ways and Means chairman Wilbur D. Mills of Arkansas, and Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, who tried unsuccessfully to remove his name from the Florida ballot, didn’t actively stump in the state.
With Wallace heavily favored, it was really a battle for second place — and survival.
Realizing that it would be an uphill struggle, Lindsay and his supporters were optimistic. “In America, a candidate without a chance has a chance,” asserted state Senator Edmond J. Gong of Miami, chair of Lindsay’s Florida campaign. “This is particularly true in Florida.”
Despite such early optimism, the Florida primary turned out to be a disaster for Lindsay. “Rarely has so eloquent a spokesman for so profoundly important a cause presided over so blundering a political campaign,” wrote historian Theodore H. White.
Lindsay hadn’t even arrived in the state when Miami Mayor David Kennedy, a stocky and balding politician who rarely picked losers and talked endlessly about the need for “new leadership” while glowingly referring to Lindsay as “a man ahead of his time,” inexplicably endorsed former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the old and tired warhorse who was again interested in seeking his party’s nomination.
Lindsay, who had promised the Miami mayor a prominent role in his national campaign, was stunned by Kennedy‘s November 16 endorsement of Humphrey, who wasn’t even a declared candidate at the time.
Until unexpectedly endorsing Humphrey, the ambitiously shrewd 37-year-old mayor appeared to be in Lindsay’s corner, introducing him to the influential Tiger Bay Club in Miami in October, flying with him to St. Petersburg, and later arranging for the New York mayor to address the Florida League of Cities.
Everyone on Lindsay’s staff had just assumed the young mayor of Miami would run the campaign in Florida, giving their glamorous candidate a real shot at a solid second or third-place finish.
But Kennedy, as it turned out, had serious reservations about Lindsay’s chances nationally. “If Lindsay is going to be a serious candidate,” he said bluntly, “he has to get to know the leaders of the Democratic Party all over the country.” Given Lindsay’s recent conversion to the party and his perilously late start, Kennedy said that he didn’t feel Lindsay had enough time to accomplish that imperative.
Despite that disappointment, the boyish-looking mayor campaigned feverishly, risking virtually everything on Florida. He spent so much time in the state that some New York residents began wondering if he was still the mayor. Some were downright nasty about it. “The city wouldn’t suffer if he never came back,” quipped the New York Daily News.
In the end, Lindsay’s make-or-break strategy in Florida didn’t pay off. His extravagant and glossy media campaign failed to pay dividends while his antiwar, pro-busing and relentless attacks on Wallace were an anathema to voters in the northern part of the state, leaving him fighting for scraps with Humphrey, McGovern and Chisholm in the state‘s more liberal enclaves of South Florida.
George C. Wallace captured 75 of Florida's 81 delegates.
carried 43 of the state’s 67 counties against Nixon and Humphrey as a third-party candidate in 1968, never came to fruition. In fact, his only debate during the primary was a low-key appearance with McGovern on a local television program on the eve of the election, a debate in which the two candidates virtually agreed on every issue.
Lindsay continued to hammer Wallace throughout the campaign, asserting that the feisty Alabamian was “running around frightening people on the question of busing, on the question of fairness and rightness.” He was convinced that Floridians would repudiate the Alabama governor.
On March 14, Lindsay polled a hugely disappointing 82,386 votes, or 6.5 percent, while finishing behind Wallace, Humphrey, Jackson and Muskie and barely ahead of McGovern, who spent less than a week in the state after scoring a surprising second-place showing in New Hampshire seven days earlier.
Wallace won the primary with more than 526,000 votes, or nearly 42 percent, while capturing 75 of the state’s 81 delegates to the Democratic national convention.
Coupled with Lindsay’s perceived desertion of their city, the Florida shellacking was more than most New Yorkers could bear.
“The handwriting is on the wall,” said Brooklyn Democratic chief Meade Esposito, a longtime ally of the mayor. “Little Sheba better come home.”
Lindsay, however, stubbornly refused to withdraw from the race and limped, hemorrhaging, into Wisconsin’s April 4 primary to make his final stand.
Despite his dogged determination, America’s failed dreamer finished sixth in that contest — garnering a relatively inconsequential 75,579 votes out of nearly 1.2 million votes cast — before finally calling it quits.