The Unmaking of a Mayor

John V. Lindsay was elected mayor of New York City in 1965. But that year’s mayoral campaign will forever be known as the Buckley campaign. “As a candidate,” Joseph Alsop conceded, “Buckley was cleverer and livelier than either of his rivals.” And Murray Kempton concluded that “The process which coarsens every other man who enters it has only refined Mr. Buckley.”

The Unmaking of a Mayor is a time capsule of the political atmosphere of America in the spring of 1965, diagnosing the multitude ...