In 1961, on this day Time magazine published an article on New York City mayor John Lindsay which speculated on Lindsay's future prospects on the national political scene once his mayoral tenure was over.

From Gracie Mansion To Pennsylvania AvenueThe article's title posed the intriguing question "From Gracie Mansion To Pennsylvania Avenue", a clear hint as to how far the experts thought Lindsay could go; rumors that Lindsay might one day run for President had been circulating ever since his improbably victory in the mayoral elections the previous November, and those rumors would pick up steam after he won re-election as mayor in a landslide in 1964. By the time the 1968 presidential campaign started most political analysts were convinced the race for the Republican nomination would boil down to a two-man battle between Mayor Lindsay and former vice-president Richard Nixon. When Nixon finally did gain the GOP nomination, he surprised a great many people(himself included) by choosing Lindsay as his running mate -- an ironic decision considering how the two men had butted heads eight years earlier over the Eisenhower administration's initial response to the Jamaica Bay hurricane.

Lindsay did eventually become president, albeit in a more roundabout way than anyone would have expected; when the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign the presidency in 1974 Lindsay, then nearly a year and a half into his second term as Nixon's vice-president, was sworn in as the 38th President of the United States. Lindsay would go on to win a bruising fight with former House of Representatives minority leader Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination and crush Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter in the general elections. His successes with welfare reform and anti-crime legislation and his hands-on role in the historic 1978 Camp David peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt would pave the way for Lindsay's own vice-president, former California senator Ronald Reagan, to defeat Carter's second White House bid in 1980. This post is a variant ending to the President Lindsay article.