THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (79 page)

In 1969 his greatest obstacle were union
strikes. “The unions tried to pick up the momentum they had lost
over the years,” Garth said. “Political activists took the lead in
the strikes. That’s when I developed the now famous slogan for the
Mayor’s campaign, ‘It’s the second hardest job in America.’

“With the Mets, he happened to be in the
right place at the right time. That picture of him getting doused
with champagne after (the) victory was priceless. I don’t think he
would have won re-election if he did not have the Met victory in
the World Series. We put out some ads that said, ‘If the Mets can
do it, New York City can do it.’ We played off the Mets’ victory to
help Lindsay. Along with the Jets’ victory, it could be the
greatest emotional moment in New York City history.”

“The Mets’ win was an enormous help to a
beleaguered Mayor,” said Jeff Greenfield. “All of us on Lindsay’s
staff understood the Mets were a big deal for the city, a really
big deal because it was, in many ways, a really tough time. I
joined John Lindsay’s staff the day the teachers’ strike began in
September 1968. One of the things to remember is that in addition
to the country having gone through all the turmoil since the
beginning of 1968, tensions in New York City were constantly at a
high point.”

“I think it probably helped the Mayor,” said
David Halberstam. “The Mets’ victory stayed with people longer. It
was such a complete surprise.”

“I don’t think there was any doubt about us
helping him,” said Tom Seaver. “Coming in the clubhouse, being in
the middle of the celebrations, getting doused with champagne, was
the best thing in the world for him.”

“I guess you could say that I was part of
Lindsay’s election team,” recalled Rod Gaspar. “That picture of me
dousing him with champagne must have got him a lot of votes. We got
him re-elected.”

“Sure,” said Robert Lipsyte. “He walked into
the clubhouse and it looked like he was one of the players. It
turned out to be great timing for him.”

Linday’s re-election did not usher in a new
golden era in New York City history. NYC continued to go down hill.
In 1975, New York City appealed to Republican President General
Ford for a Federal bailout of its financial debts. Ford took over
for Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace over the Watergate
scandal in 1974. He chose as his Vice-President the moderate
Republican from New York, Nelson Rockefeller.

When Ford declined to help New York, which
by that time was considered lost to the GOP, it engendered the
famous October 30, 1975
Daily News
headline, “FORD TO CITY:
‘DROP DEAD!’ ” David Berkowitz, the infamous “Son of Sam” serial
murderer, went on a violent rampage that terrorized the city
throughout the long, hot summer of 1977. It symbolized the
paralyzing nature of New York, politically and socially. The event
was re-captured in Spike Lee’s
Summer of Sam
and the ESPN
mini-series
The Bronx is Burning
.

Movies of the era reflected New York’s
gritty, dirty, crime-infested morass. They included
The French
Connection
starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider, then William
Goldman’s
Marathon Man
starring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence
Olivier.
Serpico
(starring Al Pacino) told the story of
N.Y.P.D. corruption. The old New York of polish, elegance, Wall
Street
panache
and Sinatra swank was gone, replaced by
immorality, drugs and unimpressive youth. It was the disco scene,
embodied by the self-parodying
Saturday Night Fever
,
starring John Travolta.
Saturday Night Live’s
Dan Akroyd
joked in a spin-off that it was “great to be young, stupid, have no
future and livin’ in Brooklyn.”

The place to be was Studio 54, a soulless
exercise in cocaine, me-firstism and angst. Plato’s Retreat, a
haven for swingers and orgy-goers, became all the rage. Abortion
was the preferred form of birth control. Christianity was
yesterday’s religion. Adhering to this philosophy, New York sunk
further and further into the abyss. It became a second-rate city,
overshadowed by Los Angeles, which was the future.

In the 1980s, a liberal Democrat named Mario
Cuomo was elected Governor of New York. A former baseball player at
St. John’s University, who played briefly in the Pittsburgh
Pirates’ organization, he was articulate and offered new ideas,
helping to rejuvenate his moribund party. In 1984 Cuomo delivered a
stirring keynote address at the Democrat National Convention in San
Francisco, elevating him to national status. He was a favorite
among his party’s Presidential contenders, but his waffling on the
issue of whether to run or not gave rise to a Southern moderate,
Bill Clinton. He filled the vacuum left by Cuomo in 1992 to run for
and win the Presidency.

Also in the 1980s, Democrat New York City
Mayor Ed Koch restored some semblance of order to the Big Apple,
mainly by playing to its basic, time-honored values. During a boom
time on Wall Street, he helped capture a sense that perhaps the
city could get back to where it was once was. Oliver Stone’s 1987
blockbuster
Wall Street
, starring Charlie Sheen and Michael
Douglas, had the unintended effect of glamorizing business and
Manhattan. Stone’s purpose was to depict big corporations as
corrupt, de-humanizing and illegal. In his view, capitalism was a
“zero sum game” where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
The idea that if, say in 1980 one rich man makes $1 million and a
working man makes $30,000; and that in 1985 the rich man makes $10
million while the working man now makes $60,000, was viewed by
Stone as the rich increasing their wealth over the working man. The
fact that the working man now makes $30,000 more than he did five
years earlier, the essential nature of the “rising tide lifts all
boats” philosophy, never occurred to Stone.

Apparently it did to his audience. They
loved the film, but not because of class envy or anti-capitalist
propaganda. They thought the idea that people could come to Wall
Street, work hard and achieve the good life was seductive. Many
pursued those dreams, avoiding the insider trading mistakes of
Sheen’s Bud Fox because there was plenty of moolah to be made just
playing by good old American rules.

Koch’s successor, David Dinkins, was a
complete joke who ran the Big Apple into the ground, but in 1993
Dinkins was challenged and beaten by the moderate Republican,
Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani was obviously Italian, a Catholic who
attended less-than-prestigious schools, eventually becoming a
prosecutor. In the 1980s, with the Mafia running the unions, the
docks and most of New York, Federal prosecutor Giuliani went after
them. He used a new wrinkle in Federal law, the Racketeering
Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act
(
RICO
),
which allowed him to
tie crimes previously “buffered” between perpetrators with their
obvious string-pulling Mob bosses.

At the time, John Gotti, who took over the
notorious Gambino “crime family,” was a celebrity as Al Capone once
had been in Chicago. Tooling around the city in his silk suits like
a movie star, he was a hero to some, a symbol of how far New York
had fallen. Giuliani broke up the Gambino organization and sent
Gotti away for life. He effectively dismantled organized crime in
such a way that it has never returned with the same force as in its
Godfather
heyday.

Being of Italian descent made Giuliani a
heroic figure of even greater stature. After ousting Dinkins,
Giuliani did over the next eight years what nobody ever considered
possible: he cleaned up New York City. Beefing up the police force,
not giving in to the unions, enforcing laws, removing bums and low
lifes, he turned Times Square into a destination again. He
established himself as the greatest Mayor the city had ever had,
including Jimmy Walker and Fiorello La Guardia.

In 2000, Giuliani declared his candidacy for
the U.S. Senate. His opponent was Hillary Rodham Clinton, the wife
of President Bill Clinton. She was a “carpetbagger” from Chicago,
Arkansas and Washington, D.C., a lifelong Cubs fan who tried to
pass herself off as a Yankees fan. During the campaign, Giuliani
was diagnosed with prostate cancer and forced to drop out. His
replacement, Congressman Rick Lazio, lost to Clinton. Had Giuliani
not come down with prostate cancer, he would have defeated Clinton
in easy manner.

When 9/11 hit, his inspired leadership
allowed the city to recover and he became known as “America’s
Mayor.” Giuliani recovered from prostate cancer, wrote a
best-selling book, and a movie about him starring James Woods
depicted him as a hero. In 2008 he ran for President of the United
States as a moderate Republican.

In 2001, business tycoon Michael Bloomberg
turned to the John Lindsay playbook, kind of. A Democrat, he saw
that he would not win the Primary in that party, so he switched to
the GOP, from whence he was able to capture a split vote. He has
maintained a business-friendly atmosphere in New York, in accord
with his own corporate affiliations, while holding the line as a
“law ‘n’ order” man in the Giuliani tradition.

New York’s image has improved, at least in
the opinion of most. It is no longer seen as a “Gumbah” town of
Mobsters (who according to HBO’s
The Soprano’s
are now
relegated to Jersey and small-time interests), sex addicts, coke
freaks and losers. It is a much more mainstream American city than
it was in 1969, when it was almost another country.

****

In some ways, the United States of America
has come full circle back to where we were in 1969.
First-year-of-his-first-term President Richard Nixon and National
Security Advisor Henry Kissinger observed the global landscape and
endeavored to shape it in the American image, using
realpolitik
methods honed for centuries in Machiavellian
Europe. It was not an idealistic approach. Rather, it was based on
acceptance of the impossible-to-avoid post-World War II fact that
America is the most powerful empire in history, and that U.S.
interests, whether one likes to admit it or not, are in the world’s
best interests.

Chief among these realities in 1969 was the
concept that Communism could not be allowed to spread. It was a
pervasive evil that, if left unabated, would hurt Europe and other
regions more than it would hurt the United States, whether Europe
or other regions knew or even cared. The U.S. was too powerful for
Communism to directly invade or influence our way of life, but we
needed to save the rest of the world from Communism even though the
world did not largely see it as the same threat as Nazi
Germany.

Almost like a slowly boiling pot that
suffocates those trapped within it prior to their actually feeling
the pain of the heat, somehow Communism was being allowed to kill
what would become 100 million human beings, yet the West did not
have the political will or courage to oppose it. Therefore,
reasoned Nixon and Kissinger, it would have to be defeated not
using World War II-style military force, but rather post-Napoleonic
political “self interest.” It was not sexy but it would work.

Over the next four years, at the Paris peace
talks and beyond, Nixon and later Secretary of State Kissinger
effectively pitted the Red Chinese against the Soviet Union. In
1972, Nixon opened diplomatic relations with China. A series of
agreements was worked out between China, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.,
ultimately strengthening America while weakening the two Communist
rivals.

The protestors saw none of Nixon’s political
maneuvering, demanding only an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam.
After the Kent State shootings of May 1970 especially, the Nixon
Administration knew that the country no longer could support the
sacrifices required for victory in Southeast Asia. They looked not
for the kind of victory that would be plainly evident on
battlefields, with peace treaties signed and soldiers coming home
to parades. Instead, they set in place a strategy in which the
victory would occur years down the road, when neither was in power
anymore.

Nuclear reductions and various other
treaties with the vying superpowers set the stage for the American
pullout from Vietnam in 1973. Nixon successfully orchestrated a
similar truce that maintained political hegemony for Saigon and
South Vietnam, much as Seoul and South Korea were maintained as
free from Communist North Korea since 1953.

Between 1973 and 1974, the Watergate scandal
hit. The Democrats, led by Senator Ted Kennedy, used Watergate to
gain political power in the 1974 midterms, then the 1976
Presidential, Senatorial and Congressional elections. Stripped of
power, forced to defend Watergate, then eventually resigning
office, Nixon’s strategies were not enforced. Instead of a South
Korea-style South Vietnam, the country was allowed to fall by the
Democrats. The Communists, seeing that the now-in-power Democrats
would not defend America’s ally, invaded in 1975. Between 1975 and
1979, they killed approximately 1.5 million people in Vietnam, Laos
and the infamous “Killing Fields” under Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot
in Cambodia.

While Nixon’s and Kissinger’s immediate plan
had not been carried out, they had effectively localized Communist
adventurism to the Third World. Despite setbacks, phase one of
their victory was complete. It was perhaps a case of naked
self-interest. The plan was based on the idea that American
strength needed to be maintained in large measure, or else all we
protected, not just pockets of the world like Southeast Asia, would
b endangered.

In 1976, moderate Democrat Jimmy Carter of
Georgia defeated Gerald Ford. Between 1977 and 1981, the country
experienced what Carter himself described as a
“malaise.”
It
was a period of political inaction, lack of idealism, lack of
patriotism, lack of morality, lack of sexual decency, lack of
religious conviction, lack of discipline, lack of goals, and
general poor quality. Clothes, hair styles, music, drug use,
cultural touchstones and attitudes of this period are looked back
upon as a laugh track of American history. While the 1960s
generation may have gotten it wrong, they at least
cared
.
The 1970s “Me Generation” was the least impressive in American
history.