The Unmaking of a Mayor

Buckley entered the race to guarantee that conservative views would be represented in a campaign otherwise fought between two liberals. John Lindsay, the Republican nominee, was 'as liberal as a man can be' and had secured the endorsement of the Liberal Party; Abe Beame, the Democrat, offered no substantive alternative. Buckley believed the two-party system presupposed an adversarial relationship that had vanished in New York. His campaign was a 'paradigmatic' effort to inject genuine debate on crime, welfare, taxes, and race into a race where both major candidates agreed on fundamentals.

Buckley used 'goo-gooism' to describe a non-ideological reform movement that reduced politics to questions of honest and efficient administration, exemplified by Mayor La Guardia's shrug that 'the only question is honest and efficient administration.' Buckley argued this was a evasion: the real problem was not the quality of candidates but a 'frozen ideology' that prevented fundamental questions from being asked. Managerial competence, he contended, could not substitute for a substantive debate about the direction of the city, and the 'goo-goo' approach merely preserved liberal orthodoxy while appearing above politics.

The Unmaking of a Mayor is not a conventional campaign memoir. About half of its 341 pages consist of reprinted campaign documents—editorials, letters, position papers—in an effort to produce a faithful record of the campaign's intellectual content. Buckley's nimble dissection of urban ills constitutes what reviewers called 'an excellent primer of conservative thought.' The book reads as part journalism, part political essay, and part polemic, with Buckley's wit and self-awareness preventing it from becoming a self-pitying account of defeat. He even opens with the acknowledgment that no one had previously written a whole book about losing an election.

Buckley diagnosed crime, narcotics, welfare dependency, traffic congestion, housing shortages, and educational failure as the core afflictions of 1960s New York. His prescriptions included more police on the beat, work requirements for able-bodied welfare recipients, congestion pricing for traffic, and tax credits for private school enrollment. Several of these ideas, dismissed as reactionary at the time, were implemented decades later—congestion pricing by Mayor Bloomberg, welfare work requirements in the 1996 federal reform, and expanded school choice programs. A reviewer in 2015 noted that Buckley 'was a man way ahead of his time' on urban policy.

Buckley's proposals for welfare reform and relocation centers for hard-core welfare cases were denounced as racist, though New York Times reviewer John Leo noted that liberal figures like Paul Goodman had offered similar suggestions without controversy. The Lindsay campaign, Buckley charged, deliberately projected his ideas to Jewish voters as calls for 'concentration camps,' a tactic Lindsay, Javits, and Beame later apologized for. Buckley's strongest support came from working-class Catholic ethnic voters, the 'Reagan Democrats' of a later era. His biographer Fred Siegel argues the campaign revealed Buckley's discovery that his arguments were most cordially received among voters the Republican establishment had written off.

The evidence is mixed and contested. Buckley received 341,000 votes, and the Conservative Party surpassed the Liberal Party in New York state the following year, gaining the coveted third line on future ballots. His brother James Buckley was elected U.S. Senator from New York on the Conservative line in 1970. But Buckley himself acknowledged that his candidacy may have cost Lindsay the election—Buckley drew heavily in Republican Assembly districts, and Lindsay won by only 102,000 votes. Conservatives, as the New York Times review noted, 'will have to live with the possibility that they put Mr. Lindsay in office.'