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.