New York: Mayor’s Nest

In his nearly three years as New York City’s mayor, John V. Lindsay has seemed to lead a charmed life. Taking office after an upset victory, he was immediately faced with a prolonged subway strike that might have broken almost anyone else. Fortunately for him, New Yorkers accepted it—as they tend to accept all man-made disasters—as well as a garbage strike that made the city’s streets look like Saigon’s. Nor were New Yorkers particularly troubled when some of Lindsay’s aides began to desert him, or when scandals erupted that would have tarnished the administration of a less magical mayor.

Against all debits, Lindsay has two major accomplishments to his credit. He gave the city a sense of excitement, pride and stylish fun. And while other U.S. cities were torn by riots, Lindsay could cool Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant by strolling through their streets, meeting their inhabitants and keeping in careful touch with their problems. But last week his lucky touch seemed to be failing for the first time.

His troubles stem from his decision to carry out swiftly the state legislature’s directive to set up pilot projects for decentralized control of the public schools. Lindsay collided head-on with the autocratic school system, and especially with its dug-in unions of teachers, principals, supervisors and custodians. One measure of their power is the fact that in the past five years, only a handful of New York City’s 60,000 teachers have been fired for cause. By last week all of them were at war with the mayor (see EDUCATION).

Tennis for H.I. Lindsay found himself hung up between the need to placate the suspicious, entrenched municipal employees and the need to fulfill the newly awakened aspirations of Negroes and Puerto Ricans. Parents of whatever background or color simply wanted their children back in school, and increasingly blamed the mayor for not making this possible at once.

Lindsay has remarkable powers of survival, and he may recover from this crisis too. But for the present, he seems to have isolated himself and to have misjudged the temper of the unions. Ignoring police warnings of risk, the mayor persisted in filling a speaking engagement in Brooklyn only to be routed by a hostile audience stacked with striking teachers and angry parents. The city’s Central Labor Council threw its full support behind the teachers, poured 40,000 people into a demonstration at City Hall. The mayor tried to take out his frustrations in tennis, explaining to a newsman: “I had to get rid of my H.I. —that means ‘hostility instincts.’ ” At week’s end came yet another threat to the mayor’s authority—and a fresh supply of H.I.: the police force began a slowdown in an effort to win higher wages.