Mario Cuomo

by O'Shaughnessy, William;

  Mario was also a great admirer of Tony Bennett’s painting. The last of our crooners is also a brilliant and accomplished artist. He signs his works by his real name, Benedetto. Tony’s painting of the Lincoln Memorial graces the cover of the reissued edition of Mario’s Lincoln on Democracy, published by Fordham University Press.

  Mario returned the favor on January 29, 2007, when he took pen in hand to write a gorgeous foreword to Tony Bennett in the Studio: A Life of Art and Music, a stunning coffee table book featuring the paintings and artwork of Anthony Dominick Benedetto a.k.a. Tony Bennett:

  Ever since Tony Bennett began drawing chalk pictures on the sidewalks of Astoria, Queens, 75 years ago, he has painted—and sung—he says, “Because I have to. I’ve got to sing. I’ve got to paint.” I’ve known Tony Bennett much longer than he has known me. I enjoyed listening to him sing “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams” on a jukebox in 1949. In 1954, I danced with Matilda to the strains of “Stranger in Paradise” on our honeymoon at the Condado Beach Hotel in San Juan. He cannot tolerate discrimination, hypocrisy, or unfairness of any kind. Tony feels the world’s pain and does all he can to soothe it, with music, with painting, with advocacy, and always . . . with great love. Once, Tony said to me that sometimes when the sound of a standing ovation is ringing in his ears, or he receives another honor for one of his paintings, or he’s sitting with Susan quietly enjoying a blissful moment, “I think to myself, ‘This is heaven.’ ” I asked him, “But then, what comes after heaven?” He said, “I can’t even imagine; I’m just going to keep going like this for as long as I can.”

  I can’t imagine either what comes after heaven. But I know this: What gives Tony’s music the sweetness, the emotion, and the power that make it so moving—and what gives his painting the insight and sensibility that are so apparent—is not his throat, or his eye, or all his hard work. It’s his heart. And his soul. Tony is a lover of all that is good and beautiful, and that makes him a great singer, painter, and philosopher. More than that, it makes him a truly beautiful human being. John Keats got it right: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.” Never. “The Best Is Yet to Come.” That’s Tony Bennett.

  It seems people just loved to sing for Mario Cuomo. Case in point: his attendance at my mother’s funeral . . . .

  I remember it so well. And because it wasn’t something I was exactly looking forward to, I also remember arriving somewhat late for my mother’s service in Mount Kisco.

  As I pulled up to Saint Francis of Assisi Church I noticed an unmarked (and quite ancient) state police cruiser, and climbing out of the shotgun seat next to the trooper-driver was the governor of New York. “What the hell are you doing here? Your schedule says you’re supposed to be in Buffalo today,” I said.

  “I’ll explain later, Brother Bill. You’d better get in there and do what you have to do. We’ll talk after the Mass.”

  Mario, as I recall, sat well in the back of the church, while his trooper stood respectfully by the door. The governor stayed for the entire Mass and had to suffer my poor remarks and my brother Jack’s much more graceful eulogy. And later that evening, I picked up the phone for a call from the Executive Mansion. “It was good; you did fine, Brother Bill. But you went too fast. Incidentally, who were those two old gals in the pew just in front of me?”

  “Oh, those two dames were some of the characters my mother collected over the years. Actually, they were a couple of her drinking buddies. Why?”

  “Well, they were very quiet during the first part of the Mass. Until the sign of peace. And when they saw who was behind them, they started singing much louder. So loud, in fact, I actually took a quick glance toward the back of the church to see if my trooper was still there! I mean, at this point they were really belting it out to the high heavens!”

  Although you could not accuse Mario Cuomo of being a “long-hair” or classical-music devotee, he adored the soaring “Ode to Joy,” the last glorious movement in Beethoven’s ninth and last symphony.

  For me at least, Mario’s taste in music revealed a lot about his philosophical outlook on life: a longing to make things better than they are.

  Mario always said he prayed for “sureness,” which he described thusly: “You’re on the road to Damascus, and you’re suddenly hit by a tremendous bolt of lightning. The Lord then appears in all His . . . or Her . . . refinements and says, ‘Get back on that horse, Saul. And, incidentally, your name is now Paul. Oh, and one other thing: You’re a saint!’—That’s sureness: a lightning bolt in the tush!”

  He had the reverence, bordering on awe, of a first-generation American for the majestic English language. All the days of his life Mario was constantly searching for meaning, for clarity, or, as he often said, for “sureness.” You could hear it in the themes he chose. All the while, in the back of his brilliant, fertile mind was the gentle caution he received early on in Catholic school that we never quite “get it” in this life. The old priests used to insist we are capable of only “glimpses” of enlightenment, happiness, or absolute Truth. Undeterred, Mario never stopped searching.

  The governor loved to tell another “biblical” story, which he would recite in the vernacular and tailor for his audience—in my case, the recipient being a stumbling, faltering, weak Roman Catholic who struggles for coherency and meaning in his life and in his broadcasting endeavors. He put it this way for me:

  The Lord was bopping along a dusty street one day with some pals when a wise guy broadcaster . . . a scoffer . . . a journalist . . . came up to Jesus and said: “Hey, Rabbi, fancy running into you. I heard you were pretty good in the temple last night. In fact, they say you literally knocked it right out of the ballpark.” And Jesus, accepting the compliment gracefully, said, “Well, yah, I had a pretty good night . . . .”

  “ ‘What the hell did you tell them, Rabbi, that so unsettled the elders? Could you sum it up for me in about ten minutes? I’m very busy and I have to be on the air soon.”

  The Lord said: “Look, I know how busy you are. I’ll do it for you in less than a minute: Love your neighbor as you love yourself, for the love of Me; for I am Truth.”

  Then Mario the philosopher added his own advice: “That’s all you need. That’s The Whole Law. You don’t need a guy to come down from the mountain with tablets. That’s everything . . . .” Or as he said on another occasion, “How simple it seems now. We thought the Sermon on the Mount was a nice allegory and nothing more. What we didn’t understand until we got to be a little older was that it was the whole answer, the whole truth. That’s the way—the only way—to succeed and to be happy, to learn those rules so basic that a carpenter’s son could teach them to an ignorant flock without notes or formulae.”

  He preached variations on the theme throughout his life. In every interview with us on the radio and with each speech, lecture, or address from the lectern—no matter the subject—he somehow returned, again and again, to Love Your Neighbor and The Whole Law, tenets that he saw as not only instructions but also as just plain common sense, not to mention the essence and raison d’être of all our religions. Time and again he would go back to Galatians 5:14: “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ” He then brought his audience around to the ancient Hebrew notions of Tzedakah and Tikkun Olam.

  Tzedakah is a central theme of Judaism; at its root it means justice or righteousness. To get there we all have a communal social obligation to take care of one another. We are all brothers and sisters.

  Tikkun Olam literally means “repairing or healing the world.” We all have a responsibility to transform or, in the words of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “to complete the world.” “That’s your job; that’s our job,” Mario instructed us, “to be God’s partners in Creation, to collaborate in its completion.”

  On a beautiful summer day in 1993, Governor Cuomo arrived at South Haven Park in Suffolk County to sign an histori
c piece of legislation protecting 50,000 acres of pine barrens stretching through Brookhaven, Riverhead, and Southampton, while designating yet another 50,000 acres for future development, thus pleasing both Long Island’s environmentalists and powerful business interests, who had each spent millions of dollars in what the journalists of the day called the “War of the Woods.” It was exactly the sort of sensible compromise that would appeal to Mario, who saw it as a victory for future generations. As he stood in the heat of that July day, the governor delivered himself of these soaring impromptu remarks, another expression of the spiritual themes that coursed through most of his public pronouncements.

  And so this is an environmental state. And the Pine Barrens now is its latest, most glorious expression.

  This is what the State is the best at. Nobody thinks of us that way because if you’re anywhere in the United States and somebody says to you, “New York,” the instant Pavlovian response is for your mind to summon up a subway mugging in Manhattan. That’s what happens when you say, “New York.” Nobody thinks of us as environmentalists. But that’s what we are.

  And all the Tom Jorlings and Orin Lehmans who built the greatest park system in the United States, all of those deserve special credit for—to use the word again—the legacy that this place will leave to all of the generations of children who will not know the people who lived today.

  That’s what I like best about the issue. I don’t know about you, but I’ve lived now for more than half a century. And I have done a lot of things in a lot of places, and I’ve had a lot of fun. I’ve played professional baseball, and I’ve been a professor, and I’ve been a lawyer, and I’ve been a businessman; and I have a great family with the most beautiful woman in the world who decided to be my wife, and five children and grandchildren. I’ve been governor. I’ve met kings and princes and presidents.

  And I’m still a little confused about life and what it really means, and I know that way down deep we’re always looking for something bigger than we are. Something more beautiful. Something we can throw our arms around and wrap our souls around and say, “This is right! This is good! This is something I can believe in with passion. This is something I can give myself to.” Sometimes it’s a person, and then they take them away. They shoot them down, and they murder them, and they break your heart. And you give up on people and you look around for causes. And you run out of them. And you get into public life and you’re not even allowed to say “morality” or “God” or “religion.” They rule all of that out.

  And you find this truly barren land and you’re looking for something larger than yourself, and then it occurs to you! Niagara Falls! The Adirondacks! The Pine Barrens! The water under Long Island Sound! The rivers! The chestnut tree in the park in South Jamaica, Queens! The environment. Ecology. Preserving it! Saving it! Fighting for it!

  I won’t save a single fish in a single lake for me to catch with all that we do for the clean water. But somebody . . . somebody will have a fish. Some child ten generations from now who doesn’t remember our names or even the place as it used to be will benefit from this.

  I found it! Eureka! Something larger than me. Something beautiful. Something better than I am. Something to believe in. Something to give myself to selflessly. Not because I’ll be able to build a house and make a dollar. Not because it will make me richer. Not because they’ll pin a medal on me, but because it’s good. It’s right.

  And no quarrel. And no dispute and no equivocation with sureness.

  I go to bed tonight having signed a bill and made it a law, knowing that I did the right thing.

  Thank you for that.

  I wonder . . . indeed, I wonder if Mr. Lincoln himself could have done better on his feet in the sunlight on that magical July day in the pine barrens of Long Island. . . .

  In 2015 Pope Francis also spoke in very clear, unmistakable terms about protecting and preserving Creation: “A Christian who does not protect Creation, who does not let it grow, is a Christian who does not care about the work of God, that work that was born from the love of God for us. There is a responsibility to nurture the Earth, to nurture Creation, to keep it and make it grow according to its laws. We are the lords of Creation, not its masters.” On another occasion, Pope Francis told his listeners, “God will judge you on whether you cared for Earth. It is a grave ethical and moral responsibility. Creation is not a possession which we can rule over, nor is it the property of only a few. Creation is a marvelous gift God has given us so that we will care for it.”

  Somewhere—and I think I know where—a sweet, good man, another one with too many vowels in his name, is smiling. Mario would have loved and had a deep admiration for the Argentinean Jesuit, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, had he been able to stick around long enough to embrace him.

  In almost any situation Mario leaned toward the underdog, the put-upon, the guy under fire. I saw this instinct operating when, in my own tribe, Dan Rather was behind the eight-ball at CBS in 2007 in that Texas Air National Guard–George W. Bush contretemps. Mario worked quietly behind the scenes to assist the embattled anchorman when the elders at CBS News turned on Dan. And now, when Brian Williams has been hung out to dry by the holier-than-thou NBC-Comcast hierarchy, I have no doubt that Mario Cuomo would have been among those defending and trying to rehabilitate Williams. I’m sure of it. For among his other becoming traits, Mario forgave people their oddities and eccentricities. His acceptance of me among his friends, tenuous at times as it was, is certainly proof of that.

  Mario was a great student of the English statesman—and Roman Catholic saint—Thomas More, whose likeness was always on display in the governor’s offices. Mario studied More’s works of philosophy, including the fictional Utopia, long before Pope John Paul II named the beheaded English chancellor and Renaissance humanist scholar “patron saint of political leaders.”

  He could appreciate a graceful turn of phrase or the use of powerful imagery as crafted by others. He was very admiring, for example, of a passage in President George W. Bush’s 2001 inaugural address quoting John Page writing to his friend Thomas Jefferson shortly after the Declaration of Independence was published. Governor Page of Virginia said, “We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?”

  Mario was also an admirer of the somewhat controversial New York poet and essayist Walt Whitman (Mario was always careful to call him “one of our most popular” poets, as opposed to “one of our greatest”), and Cuomo borrowed from the last—and best—line of Whitman’s “A Backward Glance o’er Traveled Roads”: “The strongest and sweetest songs remain yet to be sung,” which the governor used to stunning effect in one of his State of the State addresses. He also praised—and often quoted—Whitman’s poem “Excelsior,” which found immodest reflection in New York’s state motto.

  As his son Andrew often reminds us, Mario was very much enamored of the idea that “New York was a beacon for the nation.” He loved the word excelsior and used it often in correspondence with friends as encouragement to “rise higher, surpass and go ever upward.” To those who would inquire of its meaning, the former law professor would gently but proudly remind you that the Excelsior battle cry, which in 1778 inspired the official seal of his beloved state of New York, was actually “derived from the Latin Excelsior, the same root from which we get the English words excel and excellent.” And then he would add: “Both Longfellow and Walt Whitman wrote poems based on excelsior, which revealed both men as dreaming and hoping for a happy world that is constantly moving higher, ever upward.” Mario heard their music.

  And we can’t forget to mention that Mario also listened to the counsel and prompting of his “favorite philosopher,” the aforementioned A. J. Parkinson.

  Late one night the ever-present Parkinson, who often visited his wisdom on Mario by the cold light of early dawn, whispered these haunting lines about God:

  I struggled to know, but found

 
the ultimate truths were unknowable.

  I struggled to believe what I could not know,

  but found I had not the strength.

  Now I hide in ceaseless activity,

  clinging to hope, pretending it is belief,

  and calling it FAITH.

  I’ve stayed too long on the spiritual as I try so inartfully, awkwardly, and imprecisely to draw the measure of a truly extraordinary man. But I’ve argued for years, even when he was governor and often to the displeasure and consternation of his political advisors, that he had gone beyond deciding how many Bob’s Big Boys to place on the New York State Thruway. I am among those who found Mario to be a much better and more skillful and able governor than he is sometimes given credit for. He always said he suffered from the “Dumb Blonde Argument,” which means that he was so gifted and articulate that he couldn’t possibly have been a good manager. But his handling of the minutiae of governance, the “prose” as he called it, no matter how impressive, was always secondary to the gentle and lasting metaphysical instruction he gave on cosmic issues to a nation looking for some lasting meaning and purpose.

  Mario Cuomo valued clarity and did not flee from complexity. Even those who admired the former governor have to acknowledge that, as a result, Mario was disliked, nay despised, by a small, virulent group of rabid haters who never forgave him for his principled stand on capital punishment or his nuanced, misunderstood position on abortion. They could be heard almost daily, in all their full-throated animus and vulgarity, on Bob Grant’s daily radio programs and even, to this day, venting on the Internet. A “right to life” zealot named Julie recently took to the Internet to criticize his stand on abortion and requested her followers to “pray for Mario Cuomo.” Someone I know sent the good woman a note: “Dear Julie: I pray to Mario Cuomo!” And forever and ever let the record show that one Mario M. Cuomo personally hated and loathed abortion because of its “violence and vulgarity,” as he told me early one morning.