Former NY Mayor Lindsay Dead At 79

John V. Lindsay, the shirt-sleeved Ivy Leaguer who led New York City as mayor through the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s, is dead at 79.

Lindsay, who suffered from Parkinson's disease and had two heart attacks and two strokes in recent years, died Tuesday night at a hospital on Hilton Head Island, S.C., said Sharon Holliman of the Island Funeral Home. He had moved to a South Carolina retirement community last year.

Lindsay was a paradox: a liberal Republican, a WASP graduate of Yale who had warm relations with blacks.

In time, some of those contradictions slipped away. His outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War lost him his few friends in the Republican Party, and he left it to become a Democrat.

Almost three decades after Lindsay left office, the Lindsay era is remembered as a time of activism, when a lanky, movie-star handsome mayor strode through ghetto streets to cool the passions of hot summers.

But it also is remembered, fairly or unfairly, as the time when New York's spending habits got out of hand, setting the stage for the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s.

"His contribution was infusing a spirit into young people to go into government," ex-Mayor Edward I. Koch said. "He brought a sense that the government belonged to the people."

Lindsay's political career ended with the mayoralty. He made a brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 and an unsuccessful bid for Senate eight years later.

"John Kennedy once said, `Life isn't fair.' And he was right," Lindsay said during his presidential campaign. "But that has never stopped men from trying to make it fair."

Lindsay had represented New York's 17th Congressional District, known as the "Silk Stocking District" because of its Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue wards, for seven years when he ran for mayor in 1965.

"I happen to be a Republican. I hope you won't hold it against me," Lindsay told campaign audiences. His campaign posters and materials made little mention of his party in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

His race against Abraham Beame, the city comptroller, and Lindsay's ultimate successor and William F. Buckley Jr. caught the city's imagination.

He issued a series of carefully researched "white papers" on crime, narcotics, housing, traffic and city finances. His charisma and can-do spirit won young activists to his cause, and he captured the endorsement of the then-influential Liberal Party.

"He is fresh and everyone else is tired," columnist Murray Kempton wrote, and the line became a Lindsay campaign theme.

He won, and on the first day of his administration, at the start of 1966, transit workers went on strike for 13 days in the middle of a bitterly cold winter. It became a personal battle with transit leader Mike Quill (Quill called him "Mr. Linsley"), and by all accounts he lost.

It was the fist of a series of disasters to befall the 103rd mayor of New York: Strikes by teachers, garbagemen, cabdrivers, bridge operators, newspapers and even policemen. Snowstorms that left Queens buried. Transit fares that rose from 15 cents to 50 cents. Welfare rolls that increased by 117 percent. Police corruption. A water commissioner who went to jail for taking kickbacks.

Through it all, Lindsay faced sniping from his fellow Republican moderate, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who named a commission to investigate the city government. During one bumpy ride through Queens, Rockefeller said, "If I had holes like that in state highways, I'd be impeached."

To those who said the mayor's job was near-impossible, Lindsay responded, "What do they mean by `near'?"

But there were accomplishments. He persuaded the hostile, Democrat-controlled City Council to put money into the Model Cities program. He reorganized government, bringing scores of agencies together into 10 super-departments. He hired bright, young "urbanists."

"What was dared and done in New York was watched and followed all around the country," said Peter Goldmark, Lindsay's chief of staff who went on to head the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and later the Rockefeller Foundation.

In the years when Newark, Los Angeles and other cities burned, New York remained relatively untouched, and Lindsay was given credit. He championed programs for the poor and opened satellite offices to work with minority youth, including one in Harlem.

The mayor would appear unexpectedly in shirt sleeves on rubbish-littered streets, drinking beer with hippies and talking intently with blacks and Hispanics, a 6-foot-4 vision of calm.

But his activism on behalf of minorities lost him some votes among the white middle class. His relations with the Jewish community were strained by his advocacy of school decentralization, which was opposed by the predominantly Jewish teacher's union.

When he ran for re-election in 1969, he lost in the Republican primary. But as the Liberal candidate, he beat both Republican and Democrat candidates in the general election.

He would never again run as a Republican. Though he seconded the nomination of Spiro Agnew for vice president at the 1968 convention, he soon found he had little in common with the Nixon administration. "They were writing off the cities," he said.

In 1971, he switched parties. "It has become clear," he said, "that the Republican Party and its leaders in Washington have finally abandoned the fight for a government that will respond to the real needs of most of our people and those most in need."

A year later, he made a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination but dropped out after being soundly defeated in the Florida and Wisconsin primaries. He ran for a U.S. Senate seat in 1980, but lost in the Democratic primary to Elizabeth Holtzman.

John Vliet Lindsay and a twin brother were born Nov. 24, 1921, in Manhattan, two of five children of an investment banker.

He served as a Navy gunnery officer in World War II and rose to lieutenant. After getting a Yale law degree in 1948, he practiced law and briefly served as executive assistant to U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell in the mid-'50s.

In 1958, he bucked the Republican organization to run for Congress in the city's 17th District and won; in each of the next three elections he won larger majorities. In 1964, his margin was 90,000 votes even though the Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, took three out of four votes in his district.

In later years, Lindsay was a still-handsome but somewhat sad figure; he practiced law and served on the board of Lincoln Center.

The theater and show business were longtime passions. As mayor, Lindsay dazzled "Tonight Show" audiences with his wit, and drew huzzahs for his song-and-dance routines at the annual Inner Circle dinner staged by political reporters.

In 1974, he appeared in the Otto Preminger film "Rosebud." He also worked as a correspondent for ABC-TV's "Good Morning America," and wrote a novel, "The Edge," which never made the best-seller lists.

His staunchest booster was his wife, Mary, a Vassar graduate he married in 1949. The couple had four children: Katherine, Margie, Anne and John Jr.

No funeral arrangements were immediately announced.