LINDSAY’S PROMISE. THE DREAM THAT FAILED. A PERSONAL ACCOUNT.

By Woody Klein ’51. New York:The Macmillan Co., 1907. 349 pp. $6.95.

The present Mayor of New York is a charismatic figure with the trajectory of his career in national politics by no means yet clear. Woody Klein ’51, socially conscious housing expert, via journalism, found himself John Lindsay’s public relations man for the first portion of Lindsay’s administration. Presumably Lindsay saw in him a bright, eager “young man” who could enhance the image of the new reform administration by word and deed. Shades of Lincoln Steffens and the reform movement of the 1900s, “throw the rascals out!”

Lindsay was clearly not going to have his hand in the till [although one of his boys did later] and a background of St. Paul’s School and Yale certainly seemed to qualify him for a pattern of elegance, education, sophistication, and intelligence. If the liberals, plus John, plus the ethnics, could not whip up ways to improve New York within the present framework, no one could. According to Klein’s final judgment, it looks almost as if no one can!

“From the armpit of the tortoise” in which the press secretary existed, he learned that handsome John was not too intelligent, rather petulant and vain, with his eye on the big chance, and somewhat inept as a politico—missing a number of significant chances in putting together the complex and temporary mosaic of warring groups neces- sary to get something done.

One more reinforcement has been added by this book to the sad realization that probably no one can manage the City of New York within the present administrative framework chivied by modern veto groups and confrontation politics; even “good guys” fail, despite the “best” backgrounds America can give. (It is even more unlikely that anyone can run the 18,000,000 New York metropolitan area portion of Bowash [Bos- ton to Washington] megalopolis.) Klein’s lively book is basically upsetting in its ultimate message of gentle pessimism and gnawing doubt.

Editor of the two-volume Taming Megalop- olis and an authority on city planning, Mr.Eldredge is Professor of Sociology, Dart-mouth College.