The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975
Seymour P. Lachman and Robert Polner
Excelsior Editions
Hardcover, 229 pages, $24.95

America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York
Edited by Sam Roberts
Columbia University Press
Paper, 256 pages $29.95

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Jarrett Murphy
Jarrett Murphy
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In the 1996 cult classic "Kingpin," Woody Harrelson plays Roy Munson, an aging loser filled with regret over his squandering of great talent and high hopes. In one scene, someone makes reference to "getting Musoned." Harrelson does a double take. Munsoned? The other guy explains: "You know. Munsoned. To be up a creek without a paddle. To have the world in the palm of your hand and then blow it. lt's a figure of speech." Harrelson recoils at the realization that his name has become synonymous with failure.

From the time he left City Hall on New Year's Eve 1973 until his death in 2000, former Mayor John Lindsay was often confronted with a similar realization. Elected to City Hall in 1965 after three terms in Congress, the handsome, liberal Republican was hailed as "fresh when everyone else was tired." But after his two terms, and especially after the fiscal crisis that closely followed Lindsay's departure from office, he was held to personify everything that had gone wrong with New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Rising crime and welfare dependency, disinvestment and flight, racial polarization and fiscal irresponsibility.

Hugh Carey, the 91-year-old former governor, suffers a different problem. A Congressman who served as New York's governor for two terms and was considered a potential candidate for national office, Carey is an all-but-forgotten figure. While Lindsay's name is mocked, Carey's is rarely breathed. This is especially true in accounts of the fiscal crisis in which he played a courageous and central role. Credit is heaped on financiers like Felix Rohatyn and labor leaders like Victor Gotbaum for steering the city--and by extension the state--through. Carey escapes both blame and praise.

One-time colleagues in the House, both players in the drama of the fiscal crisis, the two politicians are also linked another way: Both embraced a higher, nobler form of politics than is familiar today, albeit with vastly different results.

Hope's aftermath

"America's Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York," which accompanies a dazzling exhibit on the Lindsay years which runs through October 3rd at the Museum of the City of New York, is not as detailed an examination of New York's 103rd mayor as Vincent Cannato's "The Ungovernable City." But where Cannato focused his conservative lens mainly on Lindsay's failures, the new collection of essays edited by the New York Times' Sam Roberts brings a less ideological and broader view.

Lindsay's reputation for weakening the police department--largely because of his support for a civilian review board, the losing side in a brutal referendum battle with the cop union--is challenged by Nicholas Pileggi. Yes, Linday's demanded that police use restraint. But this was coupled with a shift in strategy toward sending overwhelming numbers of blue shirts into the streets when disorder threatened. The more cops who showed up, the less likely that there'd be a reason for any of them to break out the batons. Linday's police department also embraced statistical approaches to crime-fighting, and the mayor fought for and won a fourth shift of cops on the street.