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Commentary By Brian C. Anderson

Right Man, Wrong Time: Book Review of "The Unmaking of a Mayor" by William F. Buckley

Cities, Culture New York City, Culture & Society

Buckley knew his platform stood little chance in New York. When asked what he’d do if elected mayor, he quipped: ‘Demand a recount.’

In 1965 New York City was in crisis. Crime and drug abuse were rising alarmingly—murder was up more than 30% since the beginning of the decade, and, by some estimates, as many as 80,000 addicts lived in the city. More than 500,000 people were on welfare. Traffic clogged the streets, choking the air with pollution. Businesses and residents were fleeing to cheaper and safer locations in the suburbs.

The two leading candidates for mayor that year—Brooklyn DemocratAbraham Beame and Republican Rep. John Lindsay (the eventual winner)—proposed nearly identical solutions for the city’s woes, including higher taxes, ramped-up social spending and more federal aid. To William F. Buckley Jr., the 39-year-old editor of the feisty, conservative magazine National Review, which he had launched a decade earlier, this approach was doomed to fail. Indeed, it would only worsen the crisis, since misguided liberal policies were largely to blame for New York’s plight.

New York’s Conservative Party, which had been founded in 1962 by activists and politicians frustrated with the let’s-be-just-like-the-Democrats direction of city and state Republicans, were looking for a candidate to challenge Beame and Lindsay. Without giving it much thought, Buckley offered himself up, and the party embraced him.

The neophyte politician knew that he had zero chance of winning. When a reporter asked what he’d do if elected, he quipped: “Demand a recount.” But he believed he could run a “paradigmatic campaign,” injecting fresh ideas into the debate. “The Unmaking of a Mayor”—published the year after the election and now re-released with a foreword by Buckley aide Neal Freeman and an afterword by Joe Scarborough to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the campaign—is Buckley’s insightful and witty chronicle of his run.

The Conservative Party and Buckley hoped to discredit Lindsay as a Republican standard-bearer. Like Buckley, Lindsay was tall, handsome and Yale-educated, and he had become a darling of the press, which heralded him as presidential timber. The ArizonanBarry Goldwater, the GOP’s nominee in 1964, had lost in a historic landslide, and Lindsay was an East Coast Republican in spades. He loved big government and redistributive taxation, refused to take the threat of internal Communist subversion seriously, and had declined to endorse Goldwater. Lindsay’s super-liberal congressional district—Manhattan’s Upper East Side—sheltered “probably the densest national concentration of vegetarians, pacifists, hermaphrodites, junkies, Communists, Randites, clam-juice-and-betel-nut eaters; plus, also, a sprinkling of quite normal people,” Buckley observed. A national Republican Party made over in Lindsay’s image would render conservativism in U.S. politics dead on arrival—exactly what the New York Times and other “lords spiritual,” as Buckley called them, wanted.

Buckley’s recommendations for New York’s regeneration were substantive and radical. Crime was his biggest concern. Soft-hearted judges and political pressure kept putting wrongdoers back on the street, and police found themselves cast as racist oppressors. This demoralized the cops and empowered the thugs. You couldn’t walk from Harlem to the Village “without standing a good chance of losing your wallet, your maidenhead, or your life,” Buckley wrote. Lots more officers on the beat were needed, “enjoined to lust after the apprehension of criminals even as politicians lust after the acquisition of votes.”

Buckley was an early enthusiast for work requirements for able-bodied welfare recipients. Complex rent regulations and union-inflated labor costs strangled the supply of affordable living space, he argued; lift those burdens on the market and housing would abound. The city had to welcome commerce, not tax and harass it out of town. As for New York’s suffocating traffic, that could be eased by charging people more if they drove into the city (congestion pricing, as it’s called). Buckley even wanted to push a tax-credit plan to help more students enroll in private schools—but the Conservative Party thought it was too risky, and so he shelved it.

The Conservative candidate’s sharp performance in the debates elevated him to 18% in the polls. After trying to ignore him, Lindsay and Beame turned to demagoguery. “If the Buckley point of view, which is negative and backward, were ever to achieve ascendancy,” Lindsay warned, “it would literally mean that the streets would be totally unsafe, instead of fifty per cent unsafe, the way they are now.” Buckley’s proposal to quarantine drug addicts in health centers until they were cured—narcotics were like a plague infecting the city and had to be treated as such, he believed—became a plan to set up Nazi-style “concentration camps” in his opponents’ campaign rhetoric. The press for the most part dutifully repeated these calumnies, leaving Buckley “wild with impotent indignation”—reminding him that politics and rational debate don’t always, or even often, go together.

A late surge pushed Lindsay decisively past Beame. Buckley got a respectable 13% of the vote, drawing significant support from blue-collar voters—Reagan Democrats avant la lettre. But Buckley’s contention that Lindsay would further wreck New York proved all too accurate. By the time Lindsay’s two terms were over, the mayor, who turned Democrat in 1971, had presided over a massive explosion in crime (from 836 murders in 1965 to 2,040 murders in 1973), the swelling of welfare rolls to more than one million recipients, and a 90% increase in city spending, setting the stage for Gotham’s near default in the mid-1970s.

Buckley’s ideas would be central to New York City’s astonishing turnaround under Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, with crime beaten to historic lows and welfare rolls cut by two-thirds. Many worry that these gains could be lost under Bill de Blasio, the city’s most liberal mayor since Lindsay. And perhaps it will be left to future mayors to unleash the housing market and implement congestion pricing, among other Buckley proposals ahead of their time.

This piece originally appeared in  The Wall Street Journal.

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Brian C. Anderson is the editor of City Journal, the cultural and political quarterly published by the Manhattan Institute.

The Unmaking Of A Mayor

By William F. Buckley Jr.
Encounter, 467 pages, $18.99

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal