Book excerpt: Paul O’Dwyer runs for U.S. Senate and House as an anti-war candidate

Paul O’Dwyer, an attorney from a politically active Irish family, became well-known and admired by his principled stances against war and discrimination on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation.

Born in County Mayo, Ireland, O’Dwyer arrived in New York City at age 17 in 1925 and as an adult lost several elections before becoming president of the New York City Council in 1973.

“An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O’Dwyer,” which was published on May 15 by Cornell University Press, portrays O’Dwyer as a model for people who want to “improve fallible democracies.”

Written by Robert Polner, a public affairs officer at New York University, and Michael Tubridy, a freelance writer, this excerpt comes from Chapter 10, “The Liberated Area of City Hall,” picks up after O’Dwyer lost the U.S. Senate general election to Republican Jacob Javits in 1968 and the Democratic Party primary for U.S. Senate in 1970.

From An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O’Dwyer, by Robert Polner and Michael Tubridy, a Three Hills book published by Cornell University Press. Copyright (c) 2024 by Robert Polner and Michael Tubridy. Used by permission of the publisher.

O’DWYER BEGAN his post-1968 path back to city hall after a third try for Congress in 1970, when he sought the late Robert Kennedy’s former Senate seat, held by the Rockefeller appointee Charles Goodell, a Republican from Jamestown. Already notorious among friends and loved ones for his inattentive driving, Paul was admitted to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan with abrasions and a possible concussion after a four-car crash on the Henry Hudson Parkway en route to a Democratic executive committee meeting on March 12. Dusting himself off, he returned to the primary race against Richard Ottinger. But his luck did not improve: he came in second in the Democratic primary behind the largely self-funded congressman from Rochester. Ottinger and Goodell, both liberals, each fell short in November, defeated by James Buckley, the standard-bearer for the eight-year-old Conservative Party. (James was the brother of William Buckley, the editor of the National Review, with whom Paul occasionally corresponded.)

Paul felt he could respect the success of James Buckley’s third-party, pro-war campaign because, unlike Richard Nixon, candidate Buckley did not mince words. But the victory appeared to have a broader significance, signaling New York State voters’ disenchantment – not just with liberal Republican Establishment politicians but also with Democratic candidates who supported court-ordered busing to desegregate education, former president Johnson’s War on Poverty, and the feminist push for enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment. As Buckley aptly put it late in life, his victory proved that “conservatives had appeal not only to Republicans, but to what would be later be labeled Reagan Democrats.”

As the political center shifted rightward, O’Dwyer remained as committed as ever to the left, supporting organized as well as unorganized labor, a continued war on inner-city poverty, and changes in police practices (public hearings by the Knapp Commission would soon reveal enormous amounts of corruption in the New York City Police Department [NYPD]). In February 1972, he called on the liberal New Democratic Coalition to endorse Eugene McCarthy for president, though the dove’s encore candidacy proved brief.

Another portent of reaction in New York politics came less than two months before the Senate primary election. It was sparked by an early morning rally in the Wall Street area by more than a thousand college students upset over the Kent State shootings four days earlier and Nixon’s recent announcement of a US invasion of neutral Cambodia. Enraged by the protesters, hundreds of New York construction workers chanted “America, love it or leave it!” as O’Dwyer and other speakers gave brief speeches. The laborers muscled into the rally, startling people on the congested sidewalk, who pulled back or joined the fray. One hundred or so of the enraged laborers made their way up Broadway to city hall, where a US flag flapped at half-mast in memory of the four Kent State students slain by National Guard troops at a peaceful protest of the war. Fearing that the city’s government seat would be overtaken, a deputy mayor, Richard Aurelio, returned the flag to full-mast. The mob broke up. But President Nixon in time welcomed the “Silent Majority” combatants to the White House, along with Peter Brennan, the president of the building trades’ union. Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, told the speechwriter Pat Buchanan to “put someone on the New York senate race” and start “really playing this up.” Charles Colson, a White House aide, secretly organized “hardhat support” for James Buckley. Brennan and the head of the city’s firemen’s union and other city labor leaders pitched in.

White Catholic ethnic groups in the construction union were not necessarily more supportive of Nixon’s “Vietnamization” than Democrats with white-collar jobs. But they were more and more willing to vote for a Conservative or Republican, as was the Irish American Brennan. Their positions lined up with those of George Meany, the longtime anticommunist leader of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations and, despite some policy differences, a Nixon backer since 1970.

O’Dwyer departed from the “Hardhat Riot” unhappy but unscuffed. In the June primary, he collected 302,000 votes to Ottinger’s 366,000, losing to him overall but faring better than his opponent in New York City. Two other candidates, the former JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen, the state party leaders’ designee, and congressman Max McCarthy, brought up the rear.

Since Nixon’s victory over Humphrey in 1968, O’Dwyer had sought to soften the disappointment that overtook some of his progressive allies. He had, for example, managed to distill at least a modicum of encouragement from the disastrous Chicago convention. Contributing an essay to a collection titled Law & Disorder, he stressed that the New York delegation had voted 148-42 for a strongly worded peace plank, that New York and even Virginia had “voted to eliminate racism from the party,” and that “the day of the Daleys” – and urban bosses – was “finished.” But others who were sympathetic to the Democratic Party were less sanguine, having seen Democrats warring with one another on the streets and in the amphitheater. Murray Kempton’s lengthy piece on the convention, published in the Saturday Evening Post a few days before Nixon’s election, did not pull hope from despair. The headline appropriately read, “The Decline and Fall of the Democratic Party.”

-----

AFTER HIS SUCCESS in the city council race, Paul with his successful ticket mates stood on the steps of city hall on January 1, 1974. Wearing a mink coat, Bess Meyerson – the first Jewish Miss America, in 1945, who served as the consumer affairs commissioner in the Lindsay administration – was the mistress of ceremonies. The newly minted mayor, (Abe) Beame, sixty-eight, a former city budget manager and comptroller, offered an understated speech, asserting that he wanted New Yorkers to believe in their city again. (Harrison) Goldin, thirty-six, a former state senator, was dramatic. He reached his arms toward the sky.

Many New Yorkers watching the ceremony were no doubt dubious, however, perceiving city hall as indifferent to neighborhood-centered concerns, whether due to the delayed snow-plowing in the “outer boroughs” after a paralyzing February 1969 storm or the spread of graffiti, robberies, and shootings.

Under the day’s overcast skies, O’Dwyer offered the audience a poetically seasoned ode to unsung heroes.

“Always in New York, in all of the lives that have been lived, or will be lived, always there will be a man swinging on a rope through the flames in the sky in order to save the lives of six people,” he declared. “Always there will be a woman in a musty meeting hall suffering insults through a night as she pleads the unpopular cause of the afflicted and the helpless and the powerless.”

In accordance with public expectations, this was the new mayor’s signature moment to introduce himself. He had failed to achieve a 40 percent plurality against Herman Badillo of the Bronx in the Democratic primary but overwhelmingly won a runoff and easily defeated the Republican John Marchi. A stalwart, five-foot-two friend of labor and organization man, Beame could have been mistaken for the owner of a corner deli and was stylistically almost the opposite of the more dashing, six-foot-four John Lindsay, who preceded him.

Born in London to Polish Jewish refugees who had fled Warsaw, Beame was raised on the Lower East Side of New York and cultivated by the same powerful Brooklyn Democratic clubhouse that had supported Bill O’Dwyer to magistrate and district attorney when it was led by Frank Kelly (the boss John McCooey’s successor after his death in 1934): the Madison Club. Beame began his gradual climb gathering petition signatures door-to-door for candidates in service to the Brooklyn Democratic leader and state assemblyman Irwin Steingut. When Beame reached the pinnacle of city power, he was a decade and a half Lindsay’s senior and a graduate of City College, while Lindsay, a WASP, had gone to Yale.

Beame’s aspirations for the mayoralty appeared to go no further than to display financial competency. His campaign motto was simple: “He knows the buck.” Lindsay, in contrast, had striven to address racial inequality and urban poverty writ large and grew to be distracted by his presidential ambitions.

During his rocky second term as mayor, Lindsay switched from Republican to Democrat and ran for president, failing miserably in short order. Hooted at by critics from both parties who blamed the city’s problems on his liberalism, Lindsay evoked Paul’s sympathy, laid out in a five-page personal letter written in February 1973. O’Dwyer’s note to the then mayor centered on the experiences of his older brother when he had faced the choice of running for reelection or not. He referred to Bill’s decision to run for a second term. “Disastrously,” Paul wrote, Bill had listened to the then Democratic boss Edward Flynn of the Bronx and to the Brooklyn borough president John Cashmore when they both told him that they were getting too old to mount a lesser-known replacement candidate in the 1949 primary (Flynn would die in 1953, Cashmore in 1961). But the party leaders forgot the favor Bill paid them not long after he coasted on his popularity to a new term, the letter read.

“Prosecutors, seasoned and novices, will seek to use your betrayers as accusers and will not hesitate to create corroborating testimony,” O’Dwyer warned Lindsay. “The writer has had the experience of witnessing the very butler of Gracie Mansion threatened with a jail sentence if he did not supply manufactured testimony.”

A city leader, then, had to appreciate when it was time to exit from center stage.

“I truly hate to write to you along these lines,” O’Dwyer continued, “but I saw it all personally. I witnessed a gentle, decent, cultured and sensitive human being undermined and torn to tatters, because one day in Gracie Mansion he made the wrong decision. Along in the fray he was wounded and the wolves who formed part of the pack found their lust could not be contained. It took my own skills and energies to save him from complete disaster.”

The advice struck a tone of concern and sincerity, but Paul risked being ignored as he had not been a consistent Lindsay supporter. In 1967, Lindsay had dismissed O’Dwyer as his special counsel to the Board of Estimate when Paul filed a lawsuit against city hall and the mayor on behalf of transit workers to preserve bus and subway funding in a show of independence Lindsay found grating. Nor had O’Dwyer supported Lindsay’s presidential campaign (when the mayor had faced continual heckling from Forest Hills residents upset about a low-income housing development planned for the middle-class neighborhood). And Paul had not endorsed Lindsay for president but rather Brooklyn’s US Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman ever to serve in Congress. At that time, many allies from the McCarthy-for-President campaign of 1968 were coalescing around the anti-Vietnam war senator George McGovern of South Dakota. But Paul was upset that McGovern failed to support even a watered-down version of a congressional resolution that criticized British security policies in Northern Ireland. (One press release issued by Paul’s American Committee for Ulster Justice [ACUJ] expressed his pique, beginning, “No matter how bellicose senator George McGovern has been about world conditions, this would-be President has lost his tongue when it comes to wholesale slaughter, prison torture, and the internment-without-trial policy of the British in Northern Ireland.”) McGovern exhibited not merely overcommitment to a longtime US diplomatic ally but “duplicity,” he fumed.

In the end, Lindsay followed the advice, whether consciously or not, exiting center stage at the close of his second term, “an exile in his own city” in one journalist’s words.

On January 7, 1974, O’Dwyer sounded just as sincere in wishing Beame well while making his first appearance before the city’s legislative body as its president. But he also used the occasion to underscore “the loss of 270,000 manufacturing jobs here in the last several years” and the “annual drain on the city treasury of over $1 billion.” He ended by asking darkly, “At what point does this bloodletting stop?”

In November of that economically uncertain year, the liberal Brooklyn congressman Hugh Carey won the race for governor, celebrating to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s official campaign song, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Ironically, two months later – exactly one year after Paul’s opening council address – Carey delivered his first State of the State speech amid an unprecedented state financial debacle, the looming collapse of the state Urban Development Corporation, a Rockefeller creation dating from better times. “Now the times of plenty, the days of wine and roses, are over,” the Democratic governor pronounced in the televised address.

City hall’s appreciation of Carey’s somber assessment and warning was yet to materialize, except inside the forty-story Manhattan Municipal Building. There, an astute member of Goldin’s staff detected a disjuncture between the city government’s incoming tax revenues and outflowing operating costs as a seismologist foretells an earthquake. The budget analyst, Steve Clifford, came to work each morning wearing a dashiki and pulling on a cigarette. Poring over the city’s past and present balance sheets in the early months of 1974, he noticed successive years of dubious accounting methods and increasingly heavy reliance on high-interest short-term loans as well as long-term capital bonds, typically reserved for construction and repair costs, to pay the city’s monthly operating bills.

In the middle of a national recession that had been triggered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo, Clifford pointed out to his colleagues in the comptroller’s office, neither Albany nor Washington was likely to increase aid to the city, though the New York metro area generated far more federal tax revenue than any other region of the country. The analyst typed a memo to Goldin. “I see no alternative to the city’s fiscal problem,” he wrote, “other than a painful recognition that we are seriously overcommitted.”

He banged out a follow-up memo to Roy Goodman, a Republican state senator on the East Side, concluding impiously, “This city is fucked.”

He titled the missive “The Fiscal Crisis.”