August 12, 2006
Big City, Small World Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 AM EST It’s a small world, after all. (Who said that?) Until I read his fascinating post on the 1977 New York mayoral election, I had no idea that John Steele Gordon once worked for Rep. Herman Badillo, whose candidacy I completely overlooked in my prior post. Two things worth pointing out: First, not one, but two contributing editors to American Heritage Magazine were working for mayoral candidates in 1977. Mr. Gordon was press secretary to Herman Badillo, and Harold Holzer, the noted Lincoln scholar and frequent contributor to American Heritage, was press secretary to Bella Abzug. In Jonathan Mahler’s book, which I recommended to readers in my earlier post, Holzer is quoted extensively. It’s clear he admired Abzug’s politics, but he pulled few punches in describing her personality. She seems to have been a singularly unpleasant person to deal with. Second point, and I wonder if Mr. Gordon will agree: Herman Badillo’s real moment was in 1969 when, as Bronx borough president, he finished a very close second to city comptroller Mario Procaccino in the Democratic mayoral primary. In a divided, five-way field that also included former Mayor Robert Wagner, Rep. James Scheuer, and the novelist Norman Mailer, Procaccino—a moderate Democrat with very little imagination and even less rhetorical flourish—squeezed out a razor-thin victory. Had 35,000 very foolish, radical-chic Manhattanites voted for the real progressive in the Democratic primary (Badillo), rather than the court jester (Mailer), history would have been different. Had he been nominated, it’s quite likely that Badillo would have defeated the incumbent mayor, John Lindsay, who was exceedingly tall, exceedingly handsome, exceedingly charismatic, and exceedingly bad at being mayor of New York. Though he was well-intentioned and entirely sincere about the cause of racial justice, Lindsay failed at many of the basic jobs a mayor must do—for instance, when his administration famously botched its response to the 1969 winter blizzard, leaving most roads in Queens covered in snow for two weeks. Lindsay managed to win by painting Procaccino as a backlash Democrat in the George Wallace mode. This was a clever ploy to win back the Jewish vote. At the time, Jews composed 25 percent of New York’s population but 30 percent of its electorate. Though city Jews were very liberal, they were also furious with the mayor over his support of black community activists during the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville school controversy; furthermore, large pockets of outer-borough Jews were just as furious as their non-Jewish neighbors with the mayor’s inept management of city services. Lindsay, who ran on the Liberal line, mercilessly portrayed Procaccino as a conservative bigot. In fact, Procaccino was fairly moderate. By national standards, he was probably a liberal. He pledged to establish a cooperative day-care system for welfare mothers and blasted the mayor for opposing a program to help wean drug addicts off heroine by providing free access to methadone. “I’m the same progressive Democrat today that I was 25 years ago when La Guardia appointed me [to city government],” he told members of his party. But Procaccino was born with his foot in his mouth. Editorial writers relished his every rhetorical gaffe, as when he told a hostile audience in Harlem, “My heart is as black as yours.” He also coined the term “limousine liberal,” claiming that the same left-wing Democrats who were deserting him for John Lindsay had forgotten that being progressive and being tough on crime were not mutually exclusive. Lindsay ultimately won reelection because 44 percent of Jewish voters held their noses and voted for him. Had the race been a three-way match-up between Badillo, Lindsay, and the Republican candidate, John Marchi, it’s possible—even likely—that Badillo would have emerged the winner. Lindsay simply would not have been able to scare enough liberal Jewish voters away from the Democratic ticket. Think of all that could have been. New York could have blazed a new trail by electing the first Latino mayor of a major city. The city would have benefited from four, perhaps eight, years of smart, progressive leadership. And Mr. Gordon, after serving a term or two as press secretary to the mayor, would have become either a nationally prominent campaign consultant or a fabulously wealthy New York public relations man. Counterfactual history is sometimes bittersweet.
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