Arthur Edward Palmer (S&B 1930)
Yale University. Skull and Bones.
Environmental Lawyer American reading Council, NYC;
1965 to 1968 - Member, John Lindsay’s Cabinet (Mayor of New York. Pictured).[2]
“He [Lindsay] is just out of his early 40s and is so charismatic, striding through the city streets with such casual authority, that he might have been a gift of the Fates to replace another boyish, privileged political leader, a president assassinated just two years before…[4]
“He is fresh and everyone else is tired,” proclaims one of the campaign posters on display, quoting the journalist Murray Kempton…[4]
But then look at him at the end of his two mayoral terms, on a 1973 cover of The New York Times Magazine blown up on a wall at the close of this exhibition. Lindsay is graying, somber, grim. What happened between these two images? New York happened, the 1960s counterculture happened, racial radicalization happened, budget crises happened, urban renewal and urban despair happened. On the magazine cover, each crease in his face is labeled with a supposed cause: the sanitation strike, the Tombs riots, the presidential debacle, the school strike, the transit strike, the long, hot summer, and on and on…”[4]
On the night of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 Lindsay rushed to 125th Street to make an extended appearance. We read: “Critics charged that Lindsay held the police back from confronting looters, while allies asserted that the policy of selective restraint kept the riot from exploding into something far worse.” Far worse did indeed take place during that era in Detroit and Newark, which have yet to recover…[4]
Thus too, while Lindsay believed in making government more responsive by establishing neighborhood organizations, he apparently didn’t think about how accountability and control might also be needed. In 1967 he appointed a panel to consider school reform that contained no representatives from the teachers’ union or school board; the result was a “community control system” that was tried in three districts. Controversy erupted in May 1968 when the board in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district in Brooklyn affirmed, in essence, that racial or community preference should trump more central concerns…[4]
When that board summarily pushed 18 white teachers and administrators and one black teacher out of its district, the result the next fall was a series of teachers’ strikes that lasted over seven weeks. Outbursts of anti-Semitism against Jewish teachers led to a schism between many liberal allies in the black and Jewish populations. In this case the city eventually backed down, but the issue of community control haunted the schools for more than a generation.[4]
1960 to 1965 - Partner, White, Weld & Co.[2] (Independent privately held family investment holding company)
7 Jun 1940 - Married Julia Cunningham Reed, given away by brother-in-law S. Hazard Gillespie Jr (S&B 1932)
1935 to 1947, Associate, 1947 to 1960, Partner Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts.[2]
Director of Russel Trust Association. (Skull and Bones).[2]
1930 - Graduated Yale, Skull and Bones Patriarch.[1]
[3] - Skull and Bones Membership List by David Luhrssen
[5] - Julia C. Reed is Married - Brief of Arthur E. Palmer Jr. at Home in Cold Spring Harbour.
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