Someone to blame
AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON
New York—Mayor Lindsay has had one of those disastrous years inescapable for any politician condemned to share the disasters of the ordinary life of his citizens. His Watei. Commissioner, a young man who, if his ante- cedents were not too elevated, had married into Republican stock impeccably stuffy enough to seem to guarantee his immunity from the usual corruptions of Democratic government, confessed to having been a Mafia agent in receiving a bribe on a reservoir contract.
His schools were closed for three months by a strike of the teachers' union, and the air of his city remained afflicted by residues of the slanging match 'between some of the Jews who represented a majority of the teachers under attack and some of the Negroes who repre- sented a majority of the parents attacking. There were New Yorkers hitherto unaffected by their city's tendency towards hysteria who now believed that the Mayor was the instru- ment of a scheme by his own rich white Anglo- Saxon Protestant minority to distract the attention of the poor Negroes from its own sins by diverting its hostility to the lower-middle- class Jews.
Last week the city was borne down by a fifteen-inch snowfall, and collapsed into an immobility quite beyond the Mayor's adminis- trative capacity to restart it at anything like a normal rate of recovery. There were imme- diate complaints that he had cleaned up Man- hattan for the benefit of the banks and had left the white lower middle class to suffer an- rescued in boroughs such as Queens. By the weekend, there was a final example of the in- different hostility of his civil service to the direction of the Mayor who commanded it and the citizen it served: the operator of a municipal snowplough was indicted for ex- torting $100 from its residents for cleaning a block in Queens.
You would think, under all these blows of circumstance, that, when the Mayor puts aside his public face and talks quietly about his life, he would take on the look of a man who has sat too long beside the pithead waiting for the bodies to be brought up. Yet he turns out to be marvellously cheerful, engaged with his troubles but at the same time gay about them. -There is no sign of that loss of con- fidence in oneself which is revealed as much by the, man who talks too much about his successes as by the man who talks too much about his -failtires_ He is no longer a beginner in municipal affairs: he has become a pro- fessional; and the way a man shows that he is a professional in these matters is by the absence of self-pity.
His trips to Washington are an immense refreshment because they are a continual in- struction in the comparative soundness of New York's mental health. Washington is hysterical where New York is merely alarmed: 'Except for one or two dreary assemblies I spent most of the inauguration talking to people I used to know in the Congress. And all they'd talk about was crime in the streets. I asked them how the Speaker was and they'd answer as briefly as they could and then say, "That re- minds me of all our muggings." '
He understands now that Washington is peculiarly afraid of real life because it has never had any local government to remind it of real life: 'I went down last week trying to shake the plum tree a little and had lunch with the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. He asked me for suggestions about Washington; and I said, look, it'll be a long time before you can do anything for these people, but, while you're waiting, the one thing you can do is to make a real fight for home rule. Then, when something terrible happens, people will have someone to blame.'
For Mr Lindsay has learned that the one great use of a mayor is to be someone to blame. He was in Brooklyn last week talking to that borough's Republicans, who are his enemies in everything except formal party affiliation. Early in the pleasantries, he mentioned the talk that he might seek re-election again. He was encouraged by a very few claps. He paused and waited. He was waiting for the boos. They came at last, almost as though commanded and with some expression. And John Lindsay smiled; he enjoys the sound of his enemies. He has come to enjoy not least of all in his city the pure exuberance of its bad manners.
Mr Vito Genovese is dead; and, by all accounts, his authority as boss of bosses of the Mafia has passed, peacefully and constitutionally, to a Mr Thomas Eboli. There is, of course, the usual gossip about plots to reverse the suc- cession; Mafia studies are the only branch of our political journalism where the motives of liberal statesmen are judged and assayed with the detached contempt taught us by the pamphlets of Marx and the diaries of Trotsky.
Mr Genovese is a loss for the poor state of New Jersey which could claim no other man of affairs taken seriously by great num- bers of Americans. The 'Honored Society' is a surprisingly orderly one by now; we have become a nation whose elected leaders are murdered more frequently than its gangster chiefs. Genovese died in the federal prison in Atlanta where he had been confined since 1962; such was the awe of his reputation that the very government which had arrested him contimed admirin* to say that he was managing his affairs from his cell under its very nose.
New Jersey could not easily give up the illusion that his rule still ran, particularly be- cause it was so hard to imagine any rule except his. In 1965, the Republicans of Nose' Jersey based their entire gubernatorial cam- paign on the refusal of Rutgers University to discharge Eugene Genovese, the marxist his- torian. They covered the state with 'Oust Genovese' stickers.
But, highly respected as Eugene Genovese is in the American Historical Association, no one in Northern New Jersey had ever heard of any Genovese save Vito. All sense of ordered government had been carried to Atlanta with him and, when the Republicans raised the cry 'Oust Genovese,' his bereaved electorate assumed that, by some providential redress of justice, Vito Genovese had been given his reward of a high policy position, and that at last they had a friend in the Governor's office. The Democrats won with the highest vote iq their history.
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