Mario Cuomo

by O'Shaughnessy, William;

  MARIO CUOMO

  BY WILLIAM O’SHAUGHNESSY

  MARIO CUOMO

  Remembrances of a Remarkable Man

  VOX POPULI

  The O’Shaughnessy Files

  MORE RIFFS, RANTS AND RAVES

  IT ALL COMES BACK TO ME NOW

  Character Portraits from the Golden Apple

  AirWAVES

  A Collection of Radio Editorials from the Golden Apple

  WITH STEVE WARLEY and JOSEPH REILLY

  SERVING THEIR COMMUNITIES

  A History of the New York State Broadcasters Association

  MARIO CUOMO

  Remembrances of a Remarkable Man

  WILLIAM O’SHAUGHNESSY

  Copyright © 2017 William O’Shaughnessy

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Whitney Media Publishing Group has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

  Some content that appears in the print edition of this book may not be available in the electronic version.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936481

  19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1

  First edition

  For a failed baseball player

  with too many vowels in his name

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Preface: This Is Personal

  1. Whence He Came

  2. Public Service

  3. Mario’s “Music”

  4. Mario’s Legacy

  5. Who Was Mario? Personal Stories

  6. The Best of Mario Cuomo

  7. Echoes of Greatness

  8. WVOX Radio Interviews

  9. Early Commentaries about Mario

  10. Letters to a Friend

  11. Andrew’s Eulogy

  Appendix: Collected Notes from “Professor” A. J. Parkinson

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photographs

  FOREWORD

  I’m grateful to Mario Cuomo for many things and for his countless expressions of friendship during the thirty-eight years I was privileged to know him. Among his many beneficences were the Introductions he wrote for my four previous anthologies for Fordham University Press. As I’ve so often acknowledged, I am not at all deserving of his blessing, imprimatur, or generous friendship, especially when it comes to anything associated with scholarship, writing, or the mother tongue, the English language.

  Two years after the governor left us we remember him as a deeply religious figure of insight, creativity, passion, and moral courage. As a lawyer, scholar, author, and governor of dazzlingly facile mind, he taught us how to think, how to write, how to feel, how to argue, and how to love.

  This book, then, is meant only to resemble something of a letter to a friend I loved and admired. Call it a love letter if you will. And on this very subject, I was flattered beyond words to have received the following wholly undeserved piece, which was originally intended as a Foreword to a future book on which I’m presently working and which is destined to be yet another anthology of interviews, editorials, musings, eulogies, and commentaries, my fifth such effort for Fordham University Press.

  But this one is about Mario Cuomo, who has now departed for what Malcolm Wilson, the great Fordham orator (who also served as governor), once called “another and, we are sure, a better world.” And I’m reminded that Mario spoke at several book parties that launched the publication of my earlier anthologies at the Maccioni family’s iconic New York restaurant Le Cirque. At each star-studded event, several hundred showed up, including some real writers: Gay Talese, Peter Maas, Ken Auletta, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Richard Johnson, Phil Reisman, Emily Smith, Walter Cronkite, Cindy Adams, and Dan Rather. They came not to hear me but to be with Mario Cuomo—except at the gathering for my most recent book, at which his wonderful and luminous daughter Maria Cuomo Cole filled in for her ailing dad. No one was disappointed as the graceful Maria read a lovely tribute to my poor literary work penned by her illustrious father.

  And well before the publication of that next anthology I expect we’ll have yet another lovely evening at Le Cirque provided by the Maccionis to mark the release of this memoir about Mario Cuomo, which my editors felt should take precedence over the planned anthology of interviews and commentaries. My only regret, of course, is that Mario himself won’t be physically present for either one.

  Please understand again that I imagine this book only as a memoir of a remarkable friendship, not as a formal biography. Nor is it intended as a political book. The following Foreword was actually written by Mario M. Cuomo himself for my “next book.” As you can see, I’ve “borrowed” it for this “love letter” as yet another expression of that extraordinary friendship I treasure. It was his last gift to me. I’m only sorry my writing, memory, and scholarship were not worthy of his friendship. Or of the great man himself.

  BROTHER BILL

  Bill O’Shaughnessy’s previous books were so good, I couldn’t put them down.

  His personal commentaries, written with casually elegant language, make you wish the whole country was hearing and reading his work. Actually, the whole world can now savor his genius thanks to the Internet and WVOX.com. He is a journalist, commentator, connoisseur, a strong political presence, and a forceful advocate of great causes.

  During his remarkable fifty-year run as the permittee of WVOX and WVIP, O’Shaughnessy has used his great Gaelic gift of words, a sharp mind, deep conviction, and the capacity for powerful advocacy to inspire the fainthearted, guide the eager, and charm almost everyone he meets. As a broadcaster and author, he has written and spoken simple truths and powerful political arguments with a good heart.

  As an interviewer, Bill O’Shaughnessy is a magic miner of fascinating nuggets coaxed from a host of extraordinarily interesting people, some of them celebrities and others previously undiscovered neighborhood gems. O’Shaughnessy is among a select few who create magic with their words. He always brings us a rich flow of genuine American opinions and sentiment.

  Few people have as rich a talent for “writing for the ear”—Charles Kuralt and Charles Osgood, certainly. Also the late, legendary Paul Harvey. And Bill O’Shaughnessy.

  He can’t describe a scene as well as Jimmy Breslin. He’s not as “easy” a writer as Pete Hamill. But when he’s on his game, Brother Bill is better than anyone on the air or in print.

  We didn’t always agree politically. But O’Shaughnessy has never lost his instinct for the underdog. He is a constant reminder of a Republican Party that was much better for this country.

  He’s also an elegant, entertaining, and spellbinding speaker. He might have taken all these gifts and made himself a great political leader or a very rich captain of history. Instead, fifty years ago, he devoted himself to what then was a small and struggling radio station, and ever since then, thanks to his brilliance and dedication, he’s created what has become his much-praised WVOX/Worldwide and the highly successful and innovative WVIP, where many different and emerging new voices are heard in the land.

  Somebody said to me about his previous four books, “That’s quite a body of good work O’Shaughnessy has put together, all while we were dazzled by his high style and glittering persona.” I guess that’s right. But it is not the body of work; it’s the soul of the work that I have always been more a
ttracted to.

  And that’s what O’Shaughnessy does. He doesn’t deliver homilies about it. Maybe he doesn’t even know it fully. But he is a lover. He loves people. He loves understanding them. He loves not just the big shots, but he loves all the little people too. And you can see it, you can read it, you can feel it, and you can hear it on the radio.

  The man is a lover. He uses one word few people in our society use regularly (unless they are in the apparel business!): sweet. The highest compliment he can give you is not to tell you this guy is bright, successful, dazzling in his language or ability, but that he’s sweet, or that she’s sweet, or that it’s sweet. Well, that, in the end, is what I like about him. He understands life, he understands love, and he knows how to portray it.

  And always—if you push the discussion with him—you find, not far from the surface, a profound yearning to use his own great gift of life to find more sweetness in the world or perhaps even to create some himself. I know him. And he will find a way, or he will spend the rest of his life trying.

  So it’s all here: O’Shaughnessy the businessman, reporter, broadcaster, commentator, friend of politicians of all stripes, religious leaders of all stripes—and even an occasional politician “in stripes”!

  So I’ve given you no new knowledge of Bill in this Foreword to his new book. But custom requires that I repeat the obvious, if only to remind ourselves why we are so pleased he was persuaded to put together another work.

  One of his great passions is the First Amendment, that nearly sacred guarantee of our unique American freedom of speech and expression, which is being challenged at the moment by government agents seeking to make themselves the dictators of public tastes and attitudes. And Bill O’Shaughnessy is one of the few respected authorities on the subject who have spoken out against these powerful and dangerous political forces, even at the risk of reprisal.

  His speech “Obsequious Acquiescence” has been widely read and admired by some of the best legal minds in America, including the estimable Floyd Abrams, the distinguished national First Amendment expert. Indeed, for his lifetime of work on free speech issues, Bill was called “The Conscience of the Broadcasting Industry” by the prestigious Media Institute think tank in Washington.

  He’s also a philanthropist and humanitarian. And the down and out in the broadcasting profession have been the beneficiaries of his dynamic and creative fundraising efforts for the Broadcasters Foundation of America, which he presently serves as chairman of its Guardian Fund to assist the less fortunate in what Brother Bill calls his “tribe.”

  In The Screwtape Letters the great C. S. Lewis wrote that what the Devil wants is for a man to finish his life having to say he spent his life not doing either what is right or what he enjoyed. For the many years I’ve known him, Bill O’Shaughnessy has spent most of his time doing things he ought to have been doing and enjoying them immensely.

  I have myself been blessed with a glittering array of loyal friends from every phase of my already long life, people willing to weigh my many inadequacies less diligently than they assess what they find commendable. None of these friends has tried harder than Bill O’Shaughnessy to give me a chance to be useful. He is a man of his words. But I’ll never have the words I need to express my gratitude adequately to him.

  Everyone in our family calls him “Brother Bill.” By any name, he is very special.

  Mario M. Cuomo

  2014

  PREFACE: THIS IS PERSONAL

  Mario Matthew Cuomo left us after a magnificent life in his eighty-second year on the very first day of the new year, 2015. The fifty-second governor of New York was much more than the sum of his public papers preserved in the great Archives of the State of New York on Madison Avenue in Albany, or the more than 700 soaring and graceful speeches he gave on matters temporal and spiritual, or his eight books that have been translated into many languages and are part of private and public libraries all over the world. Mario Cuomo was much more than the sum of what he accomplished—he was an example for us to follow, and memories of his beautiful life will inspire and instruct us for many years to come.

  He was a child of immigrants who grew up to be governor of what he called “the only state that matters.” Mario was glib of tongue, agile of mind, and generous of heart. His admirers, and there were many all over the world, tried to install him in the White House as president of the United States. Failing that, they implored him to accept appointment to the Supreme Court, the highest tribunal in the land, where he could continue his lifelong affair with “Our Lady of the Law.” Declining all importunings and flattery, this gifted son of a Queens greengrocer who came to this country from an Italian hill town to dig ditches became instead the great philosopher-statesman of the American nation. As a public man he was also a preacher who made many of us wiser about love.

  I will forever remember him because of all the gifts and good fortune bestowed on me, I was privileged to know the sweetness of his friendship for thirty-eight of my seventy-seven years. His favorite word was “sweet”—as in, “You can make a community better, stronger . . . even sweeter . . . than it is.” It is a designation and word most men are not comfortable with.

  All our colleagues in the public press and every journal, blog, and magazine in the land noted his departure. Most who practice in our tribe “warehouse” these things known as obituaries. They have them preserved in computers and filing cabinets all ready to go, often to coincide with your last breath. So I know I’m late with all this, and far more gifted writers like Mike Lupica, E. J. Dionne, Terry Golway, Bob McManus, Wayne Barrett, Steve Cuozzo, Stephen Schlesinger, Jeffrey Toobin, Ken Kurson, David Shribman, Jeff Shesol, Ken Auletta, Mike Barnicle, Bob Hardt, Paul Grondahl, David Greenberg, Erica Orden, and Hendrik Hertzberg have already written lovely reminiscences that historians and the Cuomo family will collect and treasure. One of his daughters, Maria Cuomo Cole, has already begun to assemble all the graceful tributes to her father.

  It must, however, be noted that one prominent journalist has not yet been heard from: the iconic Gay Talese, whose legendary Esquire essays “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and “The Silent Season of a Hero” about DiMaggio scream for yet a third Talese piece on another quite extraordinary Italian American from Queens whose contributions in the realm of public service were every bit as stellar as those provided by Sinatra in a recording studio and by Joe D. on a baseball diamond. Every time I see Talese around town of an evening or strolling Park Avenue in his fine clothes, I grab him by the pick stitching on his well-cut lapel: “You gotta do Mario!” Talese, a real writer of great gifts, is himself eighty-three, and however trim and fit he may be, his own clock is ticking. He writes now of bridges on Staten Island. Better he should write of one who built bridges . . . to our better nature.

  As this book went to press I had the good fortune to be seated next to the great writer at a black-tie dinner at 21. He spoke movingly of Mario and how the governor was motivated and inspired by his roots:

  Mario didn’t run for president because he came from “village’ ” people . . . like me. We’re from the south—Calabria. That’s like being from the south in this country. It’s different. It’s made up of villages. We’re village people. We’re not “national.” We’re all from southern Italy, our parents, our grandparents. We like to stay close to home and sleep in our own bed. Sinatra, Lady Gaga, DiMaggio, Tony Bennett, Talese. Mario Cuomo was the best of the village people, the most honorable. He was the Crown Jewel of Italian immigration. You always ask me why I didn’t write about him. The truth is I didn’t want to hurt him, I admire him so much. You said you make no pretense toward objectivity in your book. And you shouldn’t. His father dug sewers. It’s amazing what his father did. You guys are Irish. Your people could be cops [and] firemen and the wives could be nannies. You spoke the language. Italians had to dig ditches because we didn’t speak the language. It makes Mario all the more amazing.

  My colleagues in the public press rushed to their typ
ewriters, computers, and yellow legal pads to note Mario’s passing and assess and evaluate his stewardship of the eighty-two years he’d been given. One of the first off the mark with a tribute was Terry Golway. The brilliant Kean University professor, historian, author, and journalist who once served as a columnist and member of the editorial board of the New York Times and the New York Observer was always a special favorite of the Governor.

  Here are some excerpts and lovely highlights from his appreciation:

  Mario Cuomo became a political sensation through a medium thought to belong to another era: words. Beautiful, poetic, meaningful words, spoken in a strong, clear voice, with a cadence that turned even a clumsy phrase into a baroque masterpiece.

  Embedded in all those beautiful words there was a palpable love of American possibilities. He was an Italian-speaking kid from Queens who become not just an orator but a philosopher whose texts will be read for as long as American political thought matters.

  On January 1, 1983, after taking the oath as governor of New York on the first of the 4,380 days he would spend in residence on Eagle Street, Mario Cuomo spoke of “the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all. No family that favored its strong children or that in the name of even-handedness failed to help its vulnerable ones would be worthy of the name.”

  Here was this man from Queens, all but saying that powerful people in the body politic were peddling lies. “It has become popular in some quarters,” he said, “to argue that the principal function of government is to make instruments of war and to clear obstacles away from the strong. It is said the rest will happen automatically. The cream will rise to the top. Survival of the fittest may be a good working description of the process of evolution, but a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order, one which tries to fill the cruel gaps left by chance, and by a wisdom we don’t fully understand.”