WESTSIDER JOHN LINDSAY
International lawyer
7-1-78
It was said of John Kennedy that he was too young and too active a man to retire immediately after the presidency. Had he lived to serve two full terms, he would have been 51 upon leaving office. How he might have spent the remainder of his career is difficult to guess, but it's likely that he would have ended up doing work very similar to what John Lindsay does today.
A comparison between the two men is hard to escape. Both were war heroes. Both rose to power aided by their personal magnetism — Kennedy to the nation's highest office at 43, Lindsay to the nation's second toughest job at 44. Both gave eloquent speeches, aimed for high ideals, and made controversial decisions that brought plenty of criticism from within their own ranks.
Lindsay, now an international lawyer, has changed little in appearance since he stepped down in 1974 after eight years in City Hall. The brown hair has turned mostly grey, and the lines in the face are slightly more pronounced, but when he's behind the desk of his Rockefeller Plaza office, his lean, immaculately dressed, 6-foot-3-inch frame resting comfortably in a huge leather swivel chair, he still looks like a man who is very much in charge.
He is a partner in the corporate law firm of Webster and Sheffield, which he first joined in 1948. "This is a firm of about 75 lawyers," he says in a soft, lyrical voice. "We're general practice. … I'm back into corporate law, and there's a fair amount of international work which takes me abroad quite a bit — largely representing American businesses overseas. A lot of my work is done in French. I'm handling a complicated matter involving imports to this country, and a complex arrangement involving offshore oil exploration and drilling. Real estate transactions. The purchase of oil. A matter in Australia. Municipal counseling for a city in Colorado … "
The international situation is beneficial to New York these days, says Lindsay, because "parts of the Western free world have a bad case of the jitters. Europeans particularly, and also many people in the Middle East, feel that this is a more stable place to invest their capital."
Leaning back, with his feet propped up on another chair, he elaborates on foreign affairs: "I think Carter's plane deal in the Middle East escalated tensions rather than reduced them. It's not a foreign policy to sell arms in the Middle East. I think Americans have an obligation to spell out what our foreign policy is."
Except for a few public speaking engagements, Lindsay has devoted nearly all his attention this year to the practice of law. "I used to spend a little time with Good Morning America on ABC, but I dropped it in January because of the pressures of this office," he says. "Recently I did a pilot for public television. It's a small documentary that shows cataclysmic events in world history — mostly from World War II — and at the same time, shows what was going on in America. … It might be turned into a series of documentaries."
Because he served four terms as congressman for Manhattan's Silk Stocking district, Lindsay is generally associated with the East Side, but actually he was born on the West Side's Riverside Drive in 1921. One month after graduating from Yale in 1943, he enlisted in the Navy and served for the next three years, taking part in the Sicily landing and the invasion of the Philippines on his way to earning five battle stars.
Two years after leaving the service, he received his law degree, and seven years after that, in 1955, his abilities impressed U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell so much that he made Lindsay his executive assistant. In 1958, Lindsay ran for Congress and won, quickly establishing himself as a tireless worker for the rights of refugees. Lindsay was an early supporter of the Peace Corps and a prominent member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Soon after leaving Gracie Mansion, John and his wife Mary and their children settled down on the West Side near Central Park. "I feel very strongly that the park is for people, and not for special interest groups," he says. "We introduced bicycling on weekends, and when I retired from government we had a major plan to restore all of Central Park."
The reason he first got involved in politics, says Lindsay, was because "out in the Pacific on lonely nights, after hearing the news of the death of good friends, I made a determination that one day I was going to try to do something. I was determined that we weren't going to have war again."
In regard to his years as mayor, Lindsay makes the simple statement that "I did my best of a very tough job and I have no regrets about it. I look ahead to the future."
But what will the future bring? Would he consider running for office again?
"That's a tough question, Max," he replies. "I know there's a lot of talk with some of my friends about the Senate in 1980. I don't take that lightly. … Right now I'm not making any plans to run. … But you just don't know, because life does funny things, and I also think there's a big vacuum out there now — second-rate politics everywhere.