Former NYC 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 local hospital. He had moved to a South Carolina retirement community last year.

No funeral arrangements were immediately announced. Lindsay was a paradox - a liberal Republican, a WASP graduate of Yale who had warm relations with the black community.

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 he 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 City's spending habits got out of hand, setting the stage for the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s.

Both Abe Beame and Ed Koch, the men who followed Lindsay as mayor, criticized his administration for its handling of the city's financial affairs, comments Lindsay later called "obscene."

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 the 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.

In what was an overwhelmingly Democratic city, Lindsay's campaign posters and brochures used to make scant reference to his membership in the GOP.

He wasn't afraid to talk about it and sometimes told campaign audiences: "I happen to be a Republican. I hope you won't hold it against me."

Lindsay's time as mayor was full of crises: strikes by transit workers, 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, too. He persaded the hostile, Democrat-controlled City Council to put money into the Model Cities program. He reorganized city 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 the hippies and talking intently with blacks and Hispanics - a 6-foot-4 vision of calm.

His activism on behalf of minorities lost him some votes among the white middle class and also helped push him towards making the switch from the GOP to the Democratic Party.

A big influence was his feeling that he had little in common with the Nixon administration, which he accused of "writing off the cities."

In his later years, Lindsay 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's Good Morning America, and wrote a politically-themed novel, The Edge.

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