A POLITICAL LIFE

Via The New Yorker a string of anecdotes focusing on the mayoral term, linked by interviews with New York potentates, knotted with editorial tribute . . . Lindsay, it is noted, combines a greater intellect than you might think with an ability to "communicate with Negroes and Puerto Ricans on a nonverbal level." The prefatory biography presents the soul-searching English history enthusiast behind the industrious, independent Congressman. The chronicle of the mayoral years shows Lindsay sighing, laughing, racing to four-alarm fires, wincing at the GOP convention, etc. Hentoff quotes not only the requisite bigoted and anti-Lindsay cabby but young mothers in the park avowing that the Mayor has wrought "a feeling that change is possible." There is little description and less analysis of fiscal questions apart from their demands on Lindsay's schedule; the education battles are played down; strikes are viewed in terms of Lindsay's determination to defend the public interest; there isn't even much about relations with Rockefeller. Hentoff's own clashes with Lindsay are limited to reports of touch football and a deferential objection to police intervention at Columbia. It is hard to say how much the sycophantic tone owes to campaign-puff intentions, how much to a tendency Hentoff acknowledges, then indulges, to idealize Lindsay as a "Last Puritan" Yankee-aristocrat politician of principle.