Mario Cuomo

by O'Shaughnessy, William;

  And because it brings meaning to our most modest and clumsy efforts.

  2

  Public Service

  Most of the tributes, appellations, and encomiums bestowed on and written of Mario Cuomo since his passing (and how I hate that phrase) reminded a sad nation of his stunning rhetorical gifts and his mastery of matters political. How he rose from the back of Andrea Cuomo’s grocery store in Queens, New York, to become chief executive of a state that Franklin Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, Charles Evans Hughes, John Jay, Theodore Roosevelt, Hugh Leo Carey, Thomas E. Dewey, Herbert Lehman, Averell Harriman, Alfred E. Smith, and our dazzling Westchester neighbor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller had also governed.

  The essence of his public service, I think, can be found in these words from his first inaugural address, in 1983. He never forgot his origins, but he also never lost sight of his predecessors, nor of the state’s expectations of him:

  We are the sons and daughters of giants, and because we were born to their greatness, we are required to achieve.

  So good people of the Empire State I ask all of you, whatever your political beliefs, whatever you think of me, to help me keep the moving and awesome oath I just swore before you and before God.

  Pray that we all see New York for the Family that it is.

  That I might be the State’s good servant. And God’s too.

  And, finally, Pop, wherever you are—and I think I know—for all the ceremonia, and the big house, and the pomp and circumstance, please don’t let me forget?

  I can’t depart these reminiscences without recalling a phone call I received early one morning in cottage 92 at the Lyford Cay Club in the Bahamas. My wife exclaimed, “It’s 8 dollars a minute!” “He’s paying for it,” I reminded her.

  This long-distance phone call concerned the Supreme Court. Not accepting my excuse that this topic was “well above my pay grade,” Mario said, “C’mon, O’Shaughnessy, you have an opinion about damn near everything.”

  I also sensed, and it was later confirmed, that Matilda and Andrew were pressing him to say yes to President Bill Clinton, who was trying to determine via George Stephanopoulos if Mario would accept an appointment to the nation’s highest court.

  Now, I could easily see this Italian from Queens with the powerful intellect mixing it up with those previous lords of the law like John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Evans Hughes, Louis D. Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Thurgood Marshall, and William O. Douglas. As an elegant writer, Mario would have penned graceful opinions—whether in the majority or among the dissenters—that would have surely placed him among those great stylists Justices Holmes, Brandeis, and Robert H. Jackson. And it would have been reward enough just to see him engage with the late Mr. Justice Antonin Scalia, whom he called “Nino” and greatly admired but didn’t always agree with.

  But I pressed on with my objection, arguing that some wise-guy reporter would one day do a story on the construction and composition of the High Court that would include the line “Justice Cuomo . . . appointed by William Jefferson Clinton,” of whom I was not, as Mario Cuomo knew, exactly a fan. I also pointed out that if he wrote a majority opinion, the Times would give it maybe three short paragraphs (“If you’re lucky”)—and only about one graph if he penned the minority finding.

  More important, Mr. Justice Cuomo would be precluded from freely speaking his mind on all those great issues of the day, those not before the Court and even some on the docket.

  The governor, who seemed to almost exactly intuit where I might be on the Question, then said, “But it’s a great job, Brother Bill—you don’t have to even wear underwear! You’re impossible, O’Shaughnessy.” Click.

  The next day Andrew relayed his rejection to the president via Stephanopoulos.

  With Justice Scalia’s passing in February 2016, the thought occurs that Heaven and the “celestial bar” just got a lot more interesting with Mario Cuomo and Antonin Scalia competing, in all their radiant brilliance, for the approval of Our Lady of the Law. At the very least there is sure to be an elevation of heavenly jurisprudence when these two gifted Italians from Queens engage in their new realm.

  On the other hand, I did once dispatch a late-night plea to beg Mario to merely “consider” jumping into the presidential sweepstakes. Still, my heart wasn’t really in it, as reflected in this WVOX commentary from 1991 entitled “Don’t Run, Mario!”

  I have a troubled, confused mind about some of the great issues of the day. This will come as no surprise to those who tolerate my ravings here on the radio each morning. It is about the economy, about presidential politics—and about Mario Cuomo. The confusion in my meager brain goes beyond new car sales, housing starts, the GNP, and unemployment figures. It is somewhere out there beyond the reach of the stock market, which is the playground of an elite few.

  What ails America, my own personal country, is not the value of the dollar abroad or the possible failure of our banking system. The whole damn mess—the problem—is not something you can reach out and touch. It concerns the spirit and soul of a struggling republic. The newspapers and television commentators focus on charts, graphs, and downward spirals or the pronouncements of narrow, limited politicians who don’t understand either. The media of the day should forget about Star Wars and smart bombs rained down on desert rats like Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi. These are easy stories to file.

  A sense of disconnectedness is the real issue. It is a big, sprawling, awkward word, devoid of romance or glamour. But it is slowly tearing apart the America we love and pray for on this Thanksgiving Day.

  How do you get at the spirit of the country? You get there, I think, only with love . . . and by that other peculiar word Cuomo uses that so unsettles the eager, plastic politicians abroad in the land with their red ties and transparent ambition: the word . . . is sweetness.

  It is not Cuomo’s way with words or his oratory that recommends him, or even the genius of his bright, fine mind. Ultimately, the governor brings to all of this only a decency, an innate goodness, and an ability to feel people’s pain. George H.W. Bush, in his cigarette boats and golf carts, will never understand, as nice a man as he is.

  “You can make us sweeter than we are,” the governor told two thousand broadcasters recently. Some of my colleagues, who will never hear his music, were uneasy hearing this particular word from a big, strong, failed baseball player with too many vowels in his name. Real men don’t talk like this—and certainly not governors. Or presidents.

  So I don’t want Mario Cuomo to run for president. There, I’ve said it! My mind—read, dwindling purse—does. But my heart is not in this game. Of only this I’m sure: Mario Cuomo is operating on a level far beyond [that of] every other contemporary politician. He doesn’t know it yet, but he has even gone beyond being governor of New York. The stuff he is selling and what he is about are not shaking hands at factory gates in Cleveland or playing word games with cartoon-like Sam Donaldson or prickly, brittle, bespectacled George Will.

  Cuomo is the only public person who can go inside people, to places where politicians rarely get and few belong. He may yet be the greatest Supreme Court justice . . . or the Thomas More of our century. But he doesn’t need Air Force One as his vehicle to get there, or the Oval Office as his podium. Cuomo needs only himself, and so does the nation. I care not about the forum, the setting, or the venue. I would even take him from behind that big, ornate desk at the Capitol and strip Cuomo of his robes and mantle and high estate and send him out into the streets with the people in their restlessness, confusion, hurting, pain, and hopelessness.

  The place for Cuomo is not in the editorial boardroom of the New York Times or jousting with a lightweight like Dan Quayle. As I see it, his ideas will prevail, even if he were to spend the rest of his days standing down at the bar at 21 singing “Danny Boy,” like his predecessor Hugh Carey.

  This is lousy political and tactical advice with which, in one grand gesture, I hereby once again alienate all the political o
peratives who are chanting, “Run, Mario, run!” But he doesn’t belong with Fortune 500 fat cat executives, dazzling them with economic theory. The governor doesn’t need to do one more position paper or show up for one more photo opportunity. He needs only to remember another November night a few years ago, when the heavy, electronic gates at the Governor’s Mansion at 138 Eagle Street slid open to let out an old, unmarked Chevrolet. No troopers, no reporters were in the automobile as it headed for a Protestant men’s shelter in a rundown, drodsome section of Albany known only to the poor and the homeless. It was a sad, alien place, which might have been reconstructed in the mind of William Kennedy, the great Albany writer.

  The governor of New York was behind the wheel with his young son Christopher the only passenger. A father and his son were on a mission this Thanksgiving night to deliver sixty pumpkin pies, which had been run up in the kitchen of Matilda Cuomo.

  And on a lonely Albany street, Mario and Christopher Cuomo unloaded all sixty pies, carefully, one after the other. Just as they completed their sweet task, the executive director of the shelter came running out to insist that he be allowed to tell the governor of New York all about the wonderful workings of the shelter. He was especially proud of their efficient procedure for delousing the men before they entered the premises. After the impromptu “tour,” an unsettled governor and his young son sped back to the mansion.

  This little vignette, which comes drifting back to me on this Thanksgiving Day, tells everything about Cuomo. Anyone else I know would have felt very good about delivering pumpkin pies to the homeless. Some would have had photographers present; others would have merely leaked it to the press. But back on Eagle Street, the light in the tiny office on the second floor burned late into that cold night. And after his own family had retired, their stomachs filled with the good food of Matilda Cuomo’s holiday table, Mario Cuomo sat alone, wondering and churning and struggling about those lost, lonely souls he had encountered earlier on the dark side of our capital city.

  There goes our invitation to the White House.

  It was about this time that I received several phone calls from a California congresswoman named Nancy Pelosi, who didn’t know how to convince Mario to run for the highest office in the land: “Mr. O’Shaughnessy, I realize I’m talking to a Republican, but I understand you know Governor Cuomo. What the hell can I say to him from way out here in San Francisco to get him into this thing? He’s wonderful, and he’s what we need . . . .”

  His personal magnetism and gifted tongue made Mario one of liberalism’s most compelling champions. He was our lodestar for large-hearted but practical government that acknowledged budgetary limits and fiscal constraints while still providing shelter for the poor and homeless, work for the idle but willing, care for the elderly infirm, and hope for the hopeless and destitute. “Progressive pragmatism,” he famously called it.

  Nancy Pelosi wasn’t the only distaff admirer of Mario Cuomo abroad in the land. There was another powerful woman in Washington, D.C. Mary McGrory, the flinty, brilliant Washington scribe, was a tough, perceptive dame who was quite immune to the blandishments of Washington solons and panjandrums. But she too was crazy about Mario Cuomo: “The Republicans have nobody like Cuomo, an intellectual with street smarts, a first-generation American who is crazy about words and ideas.” McGrory was especially taken by Mario’s hopeful and oft-repeated observation that “Democrats would rather have laws written by Saint Francis of Assisi than Charles Darwin.”

  McGrory’s great admiration and enthusiasm for the governor was not unrequited. (She was also keen on John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson.) In an aside to Maureen Dowd, that other shy, modest, retiring woman of letters, Mario once confessed, “I’m not myself when I’m with Mary. She’s crazy. She can get anything she wants from me. She is magnificent. Not only is she smart, gracious, nice, she’s also human. She’s got just enough of the devil in her so you know she’s real and beautiful. And if she didn’t have a little bit of the Irish in her—and a little bit of Boston too—she’d be just too perfect.”

  Mario had many deep philosophical talks with McGrory. When the governor told her about his lifelong quest for “sureness” and his oft-repeated story of Paul’s dramatic encounter with the Lord on the road to Damascus, he admitted to her, “The Lord has not yet obliged me with a shaft of lightning in the tush as was visited on Saul of Tarsus”—as Mario told it again and again for any and all who inquired about his search for “sureness.”

  And yet, there was one thing about which Mario was sure: that he made the right decision in declining to run for president, remaining in his elected post as governor of New York.

  Mario’s service in Albany ended, of course, with the stunning election upset of 1994 when he lost his bid for a fourth term to George Elmer Pataki, an affable and attractive state senator from Peekskill who parlayed Mario’s opposition to the death penalty and New York’s perennially high taxes into a narrow victory that was interpreted as part of a sweeping national “Republican Revolution.” Pataki was also the beneficiary of a brilliant campaign run in the Empire State by a dedicated group of supporters who included Senator Alfonse D’Amato; upstate power lawyer John O’Mara; the pugnacious Zenia Mucha, a bright, tough-as-nails P.R. gal who is now a top exec with the Disney Corporation; feisty state GOP chairman William Powers, a former Marine; and Pataki mentor and law partner William Plunkett. (Plunkett later became a great friend of Mario Cuomo’s. Al D’Amato is now a confidant of Mario’s son Andrew. Wonders never cease.)

  During his third term, Mario was left to his own devices while Andrew was toiling away in Washington as secretary of Housing and Urban Development in Bill Clinton’s administration. Andrew, to this day, regrets not doing more to assist in that campaign.

  The truth is, we were all surprised. But I do recall an ominous “warning” about Mario’s last campaign from a brilliant young man who once worked for the governor. Luciano Siracusano, now a successful Wall Street type, shared his unease in a confidential note:

  October 28, 1994

  I’m glad he’s talking about “love” again. It was good to see that he still believes in what he’s doing and in himself. To win, especially in a three-way race, he must energize his base and motivate them to turn out. They need to know that he still believes. The ads are pathetic. Everybody loves to dance around the heat and fire. The Governor must be allowed to breathe fire. His folks should film segments from these next two weeks of rallies and unleash some of the Governor’s emotive and cathartic powers on these numbed and frozen hearts. Do it with film, not video, and let the pieces speak for themselves. No slogans. No music. No voice-overs. Just reveal the truth and release some of the ether in his soul. If his political geniuses lack faith in what’s possible when the Governor’s blood turns to brandy, then they deserve to lose.

  3

  Mario’s “Music”

  His favorite song was “Stranger in Paradise” as sung by his friend Tony Bennett, and he loved Johnny Burke’s lyrics for “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” (“There were questions in the eyes of other dancers. There were questions, but my heart knew all the answers . . . and perhaps a few things more . . . .”).

  He was also moved by Ray Noble’s “Love Is the Sweetest Thing,” later a great instrumental by Artie Shaw.

  Love is the sweetest thing.

  What else on earth could ever bring

  Such happiness to everything

  As Love’s old story . . . ?

  Mario liked two other songs from the Great American Songbook, lovely ballads favored by musicians, torch singers, and that dwindling breed of cabaret performers. One such was Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke’s haunting “It’s Always You”:

  Whenever it’s early twilight

  I watch till a star breaks through

  Funny, it’s not a star I see

  It’s always you.

  Wherever you are you’re near me.

  The gorgeous and plaintive lyrics of these and other romantic
songs favored by the governor, come to think of it, are, at first glance, merely romantic. But they would work as well in a religious context.

  Maybe Mario was just drawn to the simplicity and sweetness of it all. As I recall, another achingly sensitive song that commended itself to his favorable judgment (and mine) was Rube Bloom and Sammy Gallop’s beautiful “Maybe You’ll Be There”:

  Each time I see a crowd of people

  Just like a fool I stop and stare

  It’s really not the proper thing to do

  But maybe you’ll be there.

  I go out walking after midnight

  Along the lonely thoroughfare

  It’s not the time or place to look for you

  But maybe you’ll be there.

  Tony Bennett was a pal, and the great singer idolized the governor. At Mario’s seventieth-birthday party, held under a huge white tent in the back yard of Maria and Kenneth Cole’s sprawling estate in Westchester, Chris Cuomo emceed the proceedings in his trademark dazzling and witty style as speaker after speaker took to the microphone to praise Mario. Chris said, “Dad, we’ve had enough Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer . . . it’s time for a Republican. We found only one, your shy friend Bill O’Shaughnessy.”

  As the applause and laughter subsided, I looked at Mario surrounded by his granddaughters: “Governor, I’m going to sing for you, because frankly, I’d rather sing in front of the great Tony Bennett [he was next up at the mike] than even attempt to talk in front of you!” Then I said some awkward things to convey my great affection and admiration for Mario.

  As I handed the microphone to Tony Bennett, he said, “Thanks for the plug, Bill.” And turning to the governor, Bennett said, “I have just one song for you. It’s called ‘It Had to Be You.’ ” And then the great crooner sang a capella as several hundred of Mario’s friends and family wiped away tears.