How fucking cool is this guy?
With the sort of impulses generally imputed to teenagers in their early rather than late teens, I tore this photograph of John Lindsay out of New York Magazine in 2008 and kept it in a drawer for several years, taking it out occasionally as a model to show barbers — “I want to be like that!”
Not that I knew all that much about the dude until more recently.
John Lindsay was the last proudly, charismatically liberal leader of New York, and while he inherited a fiscal mess and truculent municipal unions, his mayoralty—from 1965 to 1973, just as New Yorkers were being mugged by reality (and muggers)—did a lot to make old-school liberalism synonymous with namby-pamby profligacy and incompetence.
–Kurt Andersen, 2008
Former New York mayor John Lindsay gave Florence Henderson crabs during a one-night-stand while the actress was married, she admits in her memoir.
NY Daily News, 2011
John V. Lindsay, the debonair political irregular who represented Manhattan’s Silk Stocking district on the East Side for seven years in Congress and was a two-term mayor of New York during the racial unrest, antiwar protests, municipal strikes and other upheavals of the 1960’s and early 70’s, died late Tuesday night at Hilton Head Medical Center, near his home in Hilton Head, S.C. He was 79.
…
An athletic, buoyant man most of his life, Mr. Lindsay spent his final years in a vale of adversity. Two law firms with which he was associated went out of business. He underwent heart surgery and collapsed in public twice. At times, he had no pension or health insurance. The riches evoked by his patrician manner turned out to be illusory, and he and his wife, Mary, lived for years in a one-bedroom apartment.
NYT Obit, December 21, 2000
A fitting end for a WASP.
The Horizon! 