The years of the Lindsay administration (1966–1973) coincided almost precisely with the height of the anti–Vietnam War movement. Indeed, in the summer of 1965, as Lindsay was out campaigning for his first term, anti-war demonstrators burned their draft cards in front of the induction center on Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan, while war supporters rallied in Times Square to “Support Our Boys.” Lindsay, who had opposed the war in Congress, argued that the US military build-up in Southeast Asia drained needed resources from cities like New York and was a waste of precious national resources.

+++ caption/credit

+++ caption/credi

New York provided a national stage on which leaders on the issue came to be heard. This, along with the growing local movement, created a public-order challenge for the Lindsay administration, which they handled by emphasizing a strategy of negotiation, compromise, and efforts to avoid confrontation. For excample, when Dr. Benjamin Spock, an outspoken opponent of the war, joined the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Stop the Draft Week, in 1967, Lindsay aides tried to avert disorders by arranging places where demonstrators could assemble and worked to establish a protocol for how arrests could be carried out without incident. Critics of the administration charged that the mayor's own sympathy with the anti-war movement was actually encouraging disorder.

+++ caption/credit

By Lindsay’s campaign for a second term, he had made the war a central theme of his campaign. One of his commercials in 1969, five years into the full-blown conflict, made his position clear. “This is Mayor Lindsay. New Yorkers send three billion dollars every year to the war and another six billion to the war machine. That’s more than our entire city budget and you and I have to tell them to stop. Because we are not only sending them money, we’re sending them our sons.” In 1972, he would put himself forward as the anti-war candidate for president.

+++ caption/credit

+++ caption/credit

Lindsay’s position provoked the opposition. On October 15, 1969, Vietnam Moratorium Day, the flag at City Hall was lowered to half-mast and a vigil was held on the steps of City Hall. A Queens City council member, Matthew Troy, was so angered by this official gesture that he climbed up and raised the flag again himself. Plans were also made to lower the flag at Shea Stadium for a World Series game. However, these plans were scrapped when the Marine Band made it clear that they would not play the national anthem unless the flag was at full-mast.

By the following year, the city’s division over the issue of the war would turn violent. On May 8, 1970, during an official Day of Reflection for the four students who had been killed by the National Guard at a protest at Ohio’s Kent State University, New York City construction workers assaulted anti-war protestors in Lower Manhattan. Two weeks later, 100,000 war supporters marched down Broadway from City Hall bearing banners that included “Impeach the Red Mayor.”