Part 34

A comparison between the two men is hard to escape. Both were war heroes. Both rose to power aided by their personal magnetism -- Kennedy to the nation's highest office at 43, Lindsay to the nation's second toughest job at 44. Both gave eloquent speeches, aimed for high ideals, and made controversial decisions that brought plenty of criticism from within their own ranks.

Lindsay, now an international lawyer, has changed little in appearance since he stepped down in 1974 after eight years in City Hall. The brown hair has turned mostly grey, and the lines in the face are slightly more pronounced, but when he's behind the desk of his Rockefeller Plaza office, his lean, immaculately dressed, 6-foot-3-inch frame resting comfortably in a huge leather swivel chair, he still looks like a man who is very much in charge.

He is a partner in the corporate law firm of Webster and Sheffield, which he first joined in 1948. "This is a firm of about 75 lawyers," he says in a soft, lyrical voice. "We're general practice. ... I'm back into corporate law, and there's a fair amount of international work which takes me abroad quite a bit -- largely representing American businesses overseas. A lot of my work is done in French. I'm handling a complicated matter involving imports to this country, and a complex arrangement involving offshore oil exploration and drilling. Real estate transactions. The purchase of oil. A matter in Australia. Municipal counseling for a city in Colorado ... "

The international situation is beneficial to New York these days, says Lindsay, because "parts of the Western free world have a bad case of the jitters. Europeans particularly, and also many people in the Middle East, feel that this is a more stable place to invest their capital."

Leaning back, with his feet propped up on another chair, he elaborates on foreign affairs: "I think Carter's plane deal in the Middle East escalated tensions rather than reduced them. It's not a foreign policy to sell arms in the Middle East. I think Americans have an obligation to spell out what our foreign policy is."

Except for a few public speaking engagements, Lindsay has devoted nearly all his attention this year to the practice of law. "I used to spend a little time with Good Morning America on ABC, but I dropped it in January because of the pressures of this office," he says. "Recently I did a pilot for public television. It's a small documentary that shows cataclysmic events in world history -- mostly from World War II -- and at the same time, shows what was going on in America. ... It might be turned into a series of documentaries."

Because he served four terms as congressman for Manhattan's Silk Stocking district, Lindsay is generally associated with the East Side, but actually he was born on the West Side's Riverside Drive in 1921. One month after graduating from Yale in 1943, he enlisted in the Navy and served for the next three years, taking part in the Sicily landing and the invasion of the Philippines on his way to earning five battle stars.

Two years after leaving the service, he received his law degree, and seven years after that, in 1955, his abilities impressed U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell so much that he made Lindsay his executive assistant. In 1958, Lindsay ran for Congress and won, quickly establishing himself as a tireless worker for the rights of refugees. Lindsay was an early supporter of the Peace Corps and a prominent member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Soon after leaving Gracie Mansion, John and his wife Mary and their children settled down on the West Side near Central Park. "I feel very strongly that the park is for people, and not for special interest groups," he says. "We introduced bicycling on weekends, and when I retired from government we had a major plan to restore all of Central Park."

The reason he first got involved in politics, says Lindsay, was because "out in the Pacific on lonely nights, after hearing the news of the death of good friends, I made a determination that one day I was going to try to do something. I was determined that we weren't going to have war again."

In regard to his years as mayor, Lindsay makes the simple statement that "I did my best of a very tough job and I have no regrets about it. I look ahead to the future."

But what will the future bring? Would he consider running for office again?

"That's a tough question, Max," he replies. "I know there's a lot of talk with some of my friends about the Senate in 1980. I don't take that lightly. ... Right now I'm not making any plans to run. ... But you just don't know, because life does funny things, and I also think there's a big vacuum out there now -- second-rate politics everywhere.

********

WESTSIDER ALAN LOMAX Sending songs into outer space

9-17-77

On August 20, when the Voyager 2 spacecraft blasted off for a trip beyond the solar system, it carried on its side a unique record player and a single phonograph record. Included on that record are 27 musical selections that the New York Times has called "Earth's Greatest Hits." If, someday, extraterrestrial creatures play the record and enjoy it, they will be most indebted to the man who chose 13 of the songs -- Westsider Alan Lomax.

That Alan's advice should be so highly respected by a committee that spent eight weeks choosing the other 14 songs is a testimonial to his musical reputation. Ever since he became head of the Folk Music Archives of the Library of Congress at age 20, Alan has devoted his life to the preservation and study of international folk music. Following the footsteps of his late father, musicologist John Lomax, Alan has taken his recording equipment to six continents in search of the rapidly disappearing musical treasures of the world.

I finally caught up with Alan and met him for an interview on a Friday evening at his office/apartment on West 98th Street. One room, I observed, was lined wall to wall with tapes and record albums. Another was filled with music books, a third with computer readouts, and a fourth with movie films.

Alan's foremost interest right now is cantometrics -- the science of song as a measure of culture. Recently he published a book titled Cantometrics: A Method in Musical Anthropology. Accompanying the volume are seven cassette tapes. The songs are arranged in an order that will teach the student to interpret their general meaning without knowing the language.

"When you learn the system, you can understand any music," said Alan. "We analyzed 4000 songs from 400 societies around the world. Out of that study has come a map of world music." He then showed me a musical chart of Europe, the Far East, and Indian North America. Thirty seven aspects of the music, including rhythm, volume and repetition, had been analyzed by a computer to make a graph.

"Each aspect of the music," said Alan, "stands for a different social style. It's like the guy who says, 'I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.' It means that kind of music stands for his background and what he believes in."

Alan played a tape for me containing a Spanish folk song, an Irish jig and a song from Nepal, explaining some of the elements as the music was playing. "By the time you've heard two or three tapes," he said, "you get used to the world standards of music. In primitive societies, he added, "everybody knows the same things about everything, so being specific is a bore, and repetition is what they like. You don't impose your boring accuracy on everyone. By the same token, primitive people find it much easier to sing together than, for example, New Yorkers of different backgrounds. In the latter case," said Alan, "everybody starts singing at a different tempo, like six cats in a bag. But if you take people who live together and work together, it's like clouds rolling out of the sea."

Alan was not impressed with the 1976 movie Bound for Glory, about the life of American folk singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie during the Great Depression. The movie ends with Woody leaving Hollywood for New York to perform in a coast-to-coast radio show. The man who hosted that show was Alan Lomax.

"We collaborated on a number of things," recalled Alan. "It was an enormous pleasure. He was the funniest man that ever talked. And he was so quick. That's what was wrong with the movie. Talking with Woody was like playing a game of jai alai. He was a deeply passionate person, and tremendously gifted. He got up in the morning and wrote 25 pages before breakfast just to warm up."

Though Alan can sing and play the guitar, he does not regard himself as a performer but rather as a "funnel" for other musicians. During the 1940s he helped launch the careers of people like Burl Ives and Pete Seeger by providing them with songs and putting them on the radio. "We set out to revive the American folk music in 1938, and by God we did it," said Alan. "By 1950 it was a national movement."

Alan spent the next 10 years of his life in Europe, where he produced a definitive 14-album collection of international folk music. Then he moved back to the U.S. and settled on the Upper West Side, where he has lived for the past 15 years. His residential apartment is located two blocks from his office.

Besides his research in cantometrics, done in cooperation with Columbia University, Alan is now preparing for publication a study on international dance movement and its relations to society. Energetic, jovial, and looking considerably younger than his years, Alan has no doubts about the lasting value of his work.