The Unmaking of a Mayor by William F. Buckley Jr

Author:William F. Buckley Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594038488
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2015-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

The next morning, at noon, the candidates assembled together with the two Marxist candidates for an hour’s television show sponsored by the League of Women Voters—a wild show, it turned out to be, in part because literally all the mayoralty candidates were foregathered, for the first and only time, including the Socialist Worker and the Socialist Labor. I took my place between Mr. Lindsay—and Mr. Beame. He turned to me and whispered: “Bill, I was really sorry about that business Friday. I mean, about that word. When I read the statement to the press, I actually left it out.” (Shades of Mr. Truman!) “Goddamnit, Mr. Beame,” I whispered back, “What kind of good could that do—the press release went out with ‘the word’ in it—all the papers and radio and TV ran it—‘concentration camps’—and I gave you hell for it last night at Queens.” “I know,” he said sadly, and went back to his notes.

I never before, or since, felt more keenly the benumbing cynicism of politics, and its devastating effect on people. My rage wasn’t at Abe Beame, who so clearly had yielded to a committee document, which he dumbly endorsed; but at what it had done to him to sign it, since he now felt constrained, because of an irrepressible decency, to whisper his apologies to his antagonist. I was wild with impotent indignation and only remember pledging that some day I would record, for those who care, that the transparent cynicism of all that concentration-camp talk was not called by a single one of the egregious metropolitan moralizers who were busy identifying the advent of John Lindsay with a better day, a cleaner day, for New York politics, stressing his moral and spiritual superiority over the little bookkeeper whose conscience was the only one that stirred during those final bitter days.

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