Dynamos

WHEN NEW YORK City had its election in November, the Democratic candidates--Harrison J. Goldin, Paul O'Dwyer, and Abraham D. Beame--swept the three citywide positions, controller, city council president, and mayor. In some ways, it was an interesting ticket. Harrison J. Goldin had first run for controller four years before. "Vote for Harrison J. Goldin," his shopping bags in 1969 recommended. "He's a young dynamo." Goldin did not use this slogan in 1973. Maybe he thought his performance in '69 showed that voters don't like youth. In the year of the energy crisis, maybe he was afraid someone might take him at his word and plug him in. Goldin did his best to exude energy during his inaugural address, though, punching the air as though he hoped to grow up to be Muhammad Ali and setting a new city record for irrelevant Biblical quotations in a single speech. But it just wasn't the same, somehow, Goldin had become an old dynamo.

O'Dwyer is another old dynamo, a civil-rights and peace activist from way back who'd been losing elections regularly for 20 years before November. O'Dwyer has not run into major scandal yet, but Beame started running into problems right away.

One of his campaign aides, an insurance salesman named Seymour Terry, the sort of nuts-and-bolts politico New York newspapers generally label "a veteran of the West Side political wars," started Beame's administration off with a bang. Terry sent a letter to his insurance customers informing them that his new position as the city's director of special programs would undoubtedly mean "even greater benefits" for them than they'd had in the past. When The New York Times published the letter, Terry acknowledged that it had been poorly worded. Beame asked Terry to resign. That was only the beginning.

A couple of days later, it turned out that David Dinkins, a one-time assemblyman Beame had picked to be New York's first black deputy mayor, had paid no personal income tax for four years. "I haven't committed a crime," Dinkins explained. "What I did was fail to comply with the law." "I did not seek to evade payment of taxes," he continued, "but I neglected, I failed to file." "I see no comparison with Mr. Terry," he added, sharply.

Beame's next choice to be New York's first black deputy mayor was Joseph L. Galiber, a state senator and law partner of Mario Biaggi. Galiber made it as far as the swearing-in ceremony. As Galiber's anxious friends and family milled around, Beame dramatically revealed that his appointment was under reconsideration because he'd apparently accepted illegal corporate contributions during his unsuccessful campaign to be the Democratic nominee for controller. Galiber said he'd applied the money to worthwhile community projects, but Beame's fuller-scale investigation turned up some other stuff which wasn't disclosed but which persuaded Galiber to withdraw his name.

So New York's first black deputy mayor is Paul Gibson Jr., formerly a vice-president of American Airlines. So far, no one has asked Gibson to resign, although Sunday's New York Times reported that his getting only "liaison" responsibilities with the Office of Contract Compliance, which tries to make sure that construction projects employ some black workers, had touched off "intensive debate."

BEAME's difficulties in finding honest officials, at least according to The Times, stemmed in large part from the fuss people have made about the Nixon administration's corruption. "A heightened sensitivity to political ethics in the year after Watergate" meant Beame had to make assurance doubly sure, The Times explained, if he didn't want to face New York's aroused and angry people. After all, the Nixon administration's crimes have included five years (so far) of the Indochina war, from the ground war to the Christmas bombing to the secret bombing of Cambodia to building General Thieu's torturous prisons and continuing to finance his attacks on areas he doesn't control. And five years (so far) of subversion of democracy at home, from the Mayday internments to Kent State to bribing the Pentagon Papers judge to letting complaint monopolies even more alone than usual to bugging the opposition's headquarters to ignoring or defying the courts and the Congress. Not to mention all the rest of it.

With all this going on, it wouldn't seem too surprising if The Times's theory of an outraged citizenry were right. It wouldn't seem too surprising if people became so sensitive to political ethics that they demanded even more than just income taxes from their elected officials. It wouldn't seem too surprising if they got together and threw Nixon out and replaced his administration with a decent government.

Of course, this hasn't happened so far, but if The Times is right, it isn't for lack of feeling. After all, though few journalists have seen fit to mention it, some organizations lately have been models of propriety. Only last week, for example, the Freshman Council threw out an election for the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life because two candidates had unknowingly broken the rules of the campaign by advertising themselves too actively. "Freshmen," said one of the offending candidates in a Crimson ad, "Vote: Neil Gross. Good O1' Gross is Great." With a little luck, the author of this advertisement may someday become a young dynamo, or maybe an old dynamo, as the case may be. It may be the year after Watergate, but the longest journey begins with a single step.