John Vliet Lindsay was an American politician and lawyer.
37 Facts About John Lindsay
2.
John Lindsay was a regular guest host of Good Morning America.
3.
John Lindsay served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from January 1959 to December 1965 and as mayor of New York City from January 1966 to January 1974.
4.
John Lindsay switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party in 1971, and launched a brief and unsuccessful bid for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination as well as the 1980 Democratic nomination for Senator from New York.
5.
John Lindsay was born in New York City on West End Avenue to George Nelson John Lindsay and the former Florence Eleanor Vliet.
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John Lindsay grew up in an upper-middle-class family of English and Dutch descent.
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John Lindsay attended the Buckley School, St Paul's School, and Yale, where he was admitted to the class of 1944 and joined Scroll and Key.
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John Lindsay obtained the rank of lieutenant, earning five battle stars through action in the invasion of Sicily and a series of landings in the Pacific theater.
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Back in New York City, Lindsay met his future wife, Mary Anne Harrison, at the wedding of Nancy Walker Bush, where he was an usher and Harrison a bridesmaid.
10.
John Lindsay was a graduate of Vassar College and a distant relative of William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison.
11.
That same year John Lindsay was admitted to the bar, and rose to become a partner in his law firm four years later.
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John Lindsay began gravitating toward politics as one of the founders of the Youth for Eisenhower club in 1951 and as president of The New York Young Republican Club in 1952.
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John Lindsay went on to join the United States Department of Justice in 1955 as executive assistant to Attorney General Herbert Brownell.
14.
John Lindsay was an early supporter of federal aid to education and Medicare; and advocated the establishment of a federal United States Department of Housing and Urban Development and a National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities.
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John Lindsay was called a maverick, casting the lone dissenting vote for a Republican-sponsored bill extending the power of the Postmaster General to impound obscene mail and one of only two dissenting votes for a bill allowing federal interception of mail from Communist countries.
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John Lindsay voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and 1964, the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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In 1965, John Lindsay was elected Mayor of New York City as a Republican with the support of the Liberal Party of New York in a three-way race.
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In 1968, in an attempt to decentralize the city's school system, John Lindsay granted three local school boards in the city complete control over their schools, in an effort to allow communities to have more of a say in their schools.
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The episode left a legacy of tensions between African-Americans and Jews that went on for years, and John Lindsay called it his greatest regret.
20.
John Lindsay served on the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission.
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John Lindsay maximized publicity and coverage of his activities on the commission, and while other commissioners made inconspicuous visits to riot-damaged sites, John Lindsay would alert the press before his fact-finding missions.
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However, in New York City, John Lindsay traveled directly into Harlem, telling Black residents that he regretted King's death and was working against poverty.
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John Lindsay is credited with averting riots in the city with this direct response, even as other major cities burned.
24.
John Lindsay showed his support for New York's African American community through his administration's sponsorship of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which is documented in the 2021 music film, Summer of Soul.
25.
John Lindsay traveled to Queens, but his visit was not well received.
26.
Procaccino, who ran to John Lindsay's right, went on to coin the term "limousine liberal" to describe John Lindsay and his wealthy Manhattan backers.
27.
The wife of Rocco Laurie, one of two city police officers who were murdered by Black revolutionaries in 1972, specifically stated that she did not want John Lindsay to attend her husband's funeral that year.
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John Lindsay attracted positive media attention and was a successful fundraiser.
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John Lindsay did well in the early Arizona caucus, coming in second place behind Edmund Muskie of Maine and ahead of eventual nominee George McGovern of South Dakota.
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John Lindsay's poor showing in Florida effectively doomed his candidacy.
31.
Rev Al Sharpton has said that he still remembers John Lindsay having walked the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem when these neighborhoods were doing poorly economically.
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John Lindsay fought to transform the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board from an internal police-run department, into a public-minded agency with a citizen majority board.
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In 1975, John Lindsay made a surprise appearance on The Tony Awards telecast in which he, along with a troupe of celebrity male suitors in tuxedos, sang "Mame" to Angela Lansbury.
34.
John Lindsay presented the award for Best Director Of A Play to John Dexter for the play Equus.
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John Lindsay was active in New York City charities, serving on the board of the Association for a Better New York, and as chairman of the Lincoln Center Theater.
36.
In 1998, a park in Brooklyn, John Lindsay Triangle, was named in his honor, and in 2001, the East River Park was renamed in his memory.
37.
John Lindsay was featured on a poster picture with Governor Rockefeller at the groundbreaking of the former World Trade Center in the city history section of the Museum of the City of New York at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street.