Mario Cuomo

by O'Shaughnessy, William;

  The governor also had a very “lively” and respectful correspondence with Wellington Mara, patriarch of the New York Giants football team, over the best ways to curb the evil of abortion. Mr. Mara was a strong pro-life advocate. And, in truth, so too was Mario Cuomo. He knew that whatever name you try to put on it, it’s still genocide, infanticide, killing, murder . . . death.

  Make no mistake: Mario was constantly struggling, questioning, searching for guidance and enlightenment in both his personal and public lives. The stunningly candid words of Mr. Lincoln most certainly apply to the author of Lincoln on Democracy and Why Lincoln Matters: “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.” Cuomo also loved this quotation from the writings of Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found within myself an invincible summer.” And he was a great admirer of The Emperor’s Handbook by the educator David Hicks and his brother Scott, featuring the timeless counsel, writings, and instruction of Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher and emperor.

  Mario was greatly taken with a slim but powerful and touching book, The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, a parable about a shepherd in the foothills of the French Alps who quietly and consistently planted one hundred acorns a day in a desolate valley ravaged by two world wars. Gradually, the sorrowful region is reborn with new life. The seventy-four-page book is a reflection on how much good one person can accomplish in a lifetime and on how to live life with deep meaning. Mario made sure his friends received copies of the lovely little story.

  THE FIRST AMENDMENT

  Harry Jessell and Donald V. West, great editors of communications journals, and Rob Taishoff, scion of the legendary family of journalists who founded Broadcasting & Cable magazine as our sentinel on the Potomac to sound the alarm about government incursions on free speech, are always asking me where Mr. Cuomo came out on censorship. Here’s where:

  In his book Reason to Believe, filled with powerful themes, Mario speaks brilliantly of the important First Amendment but also places the responsibility for the coarsening of our culture squarely on us. These comments really resonate with me, a self-proclaimed First Amendment voluptuary—even to this day. He was speaking of values:

  There is among the American people a growing unease with the harshness, the coarseness, the violence, depravity, and obsessive sexual emphasis of American life.

  At the very least, we should make sure that our laws do not tear at the fabric of the values we cherish.

  We must resist absolutely the temptation for any brand of more direct government intervention. It would mean giving grandstanding politicians or faceless bureaucrats the power to decide what should be written or produced or seen or heard. In addition to raising grave First Amendment concerns, it would be hopelessly impractical. Who would be wise enough to decide which violence was okay and which was morally destructive? What standards would they use to censor what we see and hear? Would news coverage of war atrocities and vicious real-life crimes be appropriate, but not fictionalized accounts of murder and mayhem? Or would it be the other way around? Would violence inflicted by heroes be treated the same as the violence of villains? Should the main test be the context of the violence or how graphic or realistic it is? What about slapstick cartoon violence, the kind Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd inflict upon each other? Too violent? How about opera or professional wrestling? Or Arnold Schwarzenegger or William Shakespeare?

  Yes we should, and I do—right here. But no matter how eloquent our arguments, self-policing by business will have only limited effect. Like all business[es], media companies function in a profit-driven free enterprise system. Their main obligation, their fiduciary duty, is to produce profits for their shareholders. Few of them recognize any moral obligation beyond that—even if some politicians insist they should.

  The ultimate truth, I think, should make us a lot more uncomfortable. If we agree that government censorship is impermissible and self-policing relatively ineffective, we must also agree that any effort to clean up the airwaves and other media will have to start much closer to home, with us. The executives of movies and TV and music aren’t jamming sex and violence and profanity down our throats. The American people are choosing it from an ever-expanding menu. The viewers, not the producers, boost the ratings of the titillating kiss-and-tell TV talk shows in which people announce to an audience of two million strangers sins that people of my generation would have been ashamed to whisper in the privacy of a confessional. The music-buying public, including millions of suburban kids from what we would be quick to call “good” homes, eagerly buy gangsta rap CDs with vulgar and vitriolic lyrics. We the people—we ordinary Americans—buy the tickets for the blockbuster films in which murder, mayhem, car crashes, and explosions occur at the same rapid pace that once characterized the witty banter between Nick and Nora or Tracy and Hepburn. We’re the ones with the lust for sex and blood, scandal and perversion. We are the ones caught in this uncomfortable contradiction: the desire for what disgusts us, the disgust for what we desire.

  A television network or a Hollywood studio will offer us virtually whatever material [that a] vast number of people will watch. They’re businesses designed to make a profit; we can no more expect them to substitute thoughtful documentaries for bloody cops-and-robbers shows than imagine that McDonald’s will overlook our appetite for French fries and high-mindedly insist that we accept side orders of spinach instead.

  If it’s clear that we cannot legislate our way out of the moral miasma of the media, it should be equally clear that the trail upward to a stronger, sweeter culture will not be carved with the tools of government action.

  We need to think of ourselves as a family. We need to give our children an example so big and sweet and joyful that they can be brave in the face of degradation and emptiness. We need to envelop them in the warmth of our national ideals, as my parents enveloped me in their love, taught me fairness and a sense of responsibility, and offered their own eloquent examples of hard work, humility, self-sacrifice, and persistence.

  SWEETNESS

  As Andrew Cuomo is always quick to remind us, “My father was right, on so many things.” For example, Andrew recognized and appropriated the power and beauty of Mario’s one special word and favorite appellation: sweetness. Andrew’s recent Christmas card from the governor’s mansion had this lovely phrase: “Together we will make New York a stronger, safer and sweeter place.” Mario would have been pleased.

  RE: IMMIGRANTS—AT AMFAR’S “HONORING WITH PRIDE” DINNER, ELLIS ISLAND, NEW YORK

  On June 21, 2000, Mario Cuomo spoke movingly about America as a “mosaic” instead of a “melting pot.”

  The venue was Ellis Island, for many thousands their first view of our country.

  Just say “Ellis Island,” and for millions of Americans, the nostalgia is immediate and profound. America at its best: open arms, generously sharing a unique abundance; welcoming seekers of freedom, fairness, and opportunity.

  And adding new souls to the magnificent mix of tints, accents, colors, and creeds that make up what we used to call our “melting pot.”

  The “melting pot” image suggested that the vast diversity of the immigrant waves would somehow melt down into a unique, new, beautifully bland homogeneity.

  The new arrivals would abandon their cultures, their creeds, and their orientation, and morph into some kind of safe nondistinct, prototypical American.

  That was an unrealistic expectation, and an undesirable one.

  It’s clear after two hundred years that the strength of this nation is not blandness, but rather it is our diversity—the sparkle of it, the clang and clatter of it, the excitement and the richness of it.

  From the beginning, a better image than the melting pot would have been the mosaic.

  America, made up of fragments, of different size and shape and color. Each beautiful by itself. But when joined with all the others, and harmo
nized within the design set forth in the Constitution, they create a greater strength and more scintillating beauty than any homogenized new stereotype ever could.

  That has always been our highest aspiration as a people.

  But so far, it’s still only a dream unfulfilled: we are still struggling to arrange the pieces.

  I’m reminded of a good man, A. J. Parkinson, who could have written a real keynote for this evening if he were still alive. He was a bright and sensitive soul, learned and wise, and he had suffered great and inexplicable calamities in his own life. In his last pain-wracked days he was weary and worn by the struggle, but these are his last words, which I think tell us all we have to remember:

  I still see only one way out:

  To keep going forward,

  Believing ever more firmly.

  May the Lord only

  Keep alive within me a

  Passionate delight in the

  World. And may He

  Help me to be, to the very end—

  To the very end—fully human.

  “ENDURING WISDOM IN AN IVORY TOWER”: MARIO CUOMO AND MR. LINCOLN

  A wet, stifling summer heat hung over the great city as Mario Cuomo sat in his corner office at the Willkie, Farr & Gallagher law firm high up on the 42nd floor of the Equitable Building on 52nd Street in Manhattan.

  It was the summer of 2003. The grand statesman, orator, and conscience of American Democrats was seventy-one. On the office wall hung mementos of his twelve years in Albany when he was governor of the Empire State. Even now, thirteen years later, it is impossible to be around Mario Cuomo without also wishing he had listened to the urging and importunings of the elders of his party to run for president. His young partners at the big international law firm founded by Wendell Willkie also believed the man in the corner office would have been a magnificent justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

  But on that summer day the liberal Democrat sat during his lunch hour talking about the patron saint of Republicans—Abraham Lincoln, who is one of Cuomo’s heroes. Cuomo told a visitor:

  Abraham Lincoln is at once our most popular president and the most used—and abused—by scholars, historians, and contemporary speakers. Everyone knows of his humble roots, his strength during the terrible War Between the States when he had to deal with a whole range of life-and-death issues like war and slavery and equality. Nine hundred thousand Americans died during those four years. And then there was his martyrdom. But most of all we are attracted to Lincoln because of his wisdom. It is an enduring wisdom that speaks for all the ages, a wisdom that transcends the evolving realities of the day.

  He had this magnificent eloquence. Nobody wrote like he did. He was constantly dealing on a very high moral plane during all the days of his life. That eloquence—that wisdom—resounds to this day and speaks to us and instructs us still. No president in our history has ever received the admiration, reverence, or the near-sanctification that Abraham Lincoln has received. More books have been written about him, more articles, more newspaper columns, more movies made, than about any other figure in our history. Why is Lincoln so popular? Is it his upbringing, the way he rose up from a log cabin to the White House—which appeals to me and to most Americans—that somewhere in our bloodline there is the pioneer spirit that we still respond to? Is it the achievement of [his] having kept the nation together after the Civil War? Is it the beginning of the end of slavery that he’s responsible for? Is it all of those things, plus an incredible wisdom that emanated from him and the magnificent words he used both orally and in his writings?

  To explain, his position on the most profound issues, the equality of all men and women, made the aspiration of the Declaration of Independence the reality of the Constitution. Because the Constitution, as we all know it, wasn’t nearly as lofty in its achievements as the Declaration was in its aspiration. In my new book, our second on Lincoln, we talk about today’s problems: Iraq, terrorism, the military tribunal, the problem of poverty in the world and even in the United States of America. After we list the problems we add what we believe Lincoln would say about the problems if he were confronted with them now. Obviously, some of them are of a specific nature that he could have hardly imagined, like cloning or even abortion. Or even Internet communication. So there are a lot of specifics in our daily list of challenges that the great Lincoln wouldn’t have been able to imagine. But it’s hard for me to imagine any problem at all that the great sweep of his logic and common sense wouldn’t have reached in some form. Specifically, he has many views on war and when one should go to war. And even specifically on preemptive war—like what has now been described by some as the first truly “preemptive” war declaration by the United States of America against Iraq. And the question of globalization and how he felt about international relationships. How he felt about the distribution of assets in this country.

  The gap between the wealthiest people in America and everybody else is growing rapidly and in a very divisive and fragmenting way. CEOs are now paid three hundred times what workers are paid. Not long ago it was only ten times what the workers were paid. Here is an astonishing number: four hundred Americans at the very top average $175 million a year! That’s $69 billion total! The average wage is $42,000 in this country.

  How would Lincoln feel about gay marriages? Some representatives of the gay community have recently claimed him as one of their own because he traveled the circuit as a lawyer, and in those days the few hotels and rooming houses they had as you traveled from town to town were often packed, and men often had to double up. What’s your guess as to what Lincoln would have said about gay marriages?

  We’re not going to pretend that he thought specifically about all the problems we’re thinking about now. Every politician on every side appears to take for granted that a connection to Lincoln is good for them—whether it was Eisenhower, the Republican; or Reagan, the Republican; or Roosevelt, the Democrat; or Clinton, the Democrat; or Wilson, the Democrat. Everyone has a picture of Lincoln on his wall. Lincoln was called a Republican. But the Republicans of Lincoln’s day were more like the Democrats of today. And the Democrats of Lincoln’s day were more like the Republicans of today.

  As for 9/11 and why Muslim terrorists would attack us . . . Lincoln said a lot about wars and how he never saw a war he would want to get into unless he was absolutely forced to—and how he was against “preemptive” war, how he was against invading another nation on the theory we were afraid they were about to invade us—which is precisely what we did in Iraq. He answered that question very specifically and said he would be against it—and he knew how you should deal with people after you defeat them in a war, how you should try to embrace them and make them friendly, as the best protection against their wanting to go to war against you again.

  Abraham Lincoln said an awful lot that would be useful today, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. He has been called all sorts of things over the ages. He’s been called a conservative by people like Jack Kemp and Lou Lehrman. Lincoln scholars have written of him as the great liberal. David Donald, who wrote the book that won all the prizes just a few years ago, said Lincoln was proud to call himself a liberal president. And J. R. Randall, the great Lincoln scholar, wrote a whole book, Lincoln, the Liberal Statesman. Those labels don’t really fit, neither conservative or liberal. I would say there is no label flexible enough and wide-reaching enough to embrace the magnificent riddle that was Lincoln. He was much more complicated than any label will allow you to be.

  The Lincoln who called himself first a Whig and then a Republican imposed upon the people of the United States of America the first income tax. Not only did he impose the first income tax, he did it unconstitutionally. How do you like them apples?

  Why does his wisdom survive? Why does the wisdom of the Founding Fathers survive? Why does the wisdom of the Old Testament survive? Why does Confucian wisdom survive? Why does Buddhist wisdom survive? Some things are true, timelessly. And Abraham Lincoln had
the ability to think profoundly about the most basic, sweeping, and important moral principles.

  There are two great bodies of belief written in our early days. One, the Declaration of Independence. And the second, the Constitution. The Constitution—as Lincoln well knew, because he was a wonderful lawyer—is a set of laws and rules and has the force of law [saying] you must live by it. The Declaration of Independence has no force as law. It was nothing more than a declaration of aspiration by the Founding Fathers. But in it, they said things Lincoln believed were on a higher level of morality than the Constitution. The Constitution did not create an equal society. It created a slave-ridden society and absolutely assured that slavery would stay in place at least for a while. The Declaration of Independence prayed for and committed the country to equality without slavery. Lincoln’s beliefs were at the level of the Declaration of Independence, not at the reduced level of the Constitution. That was his aspiration. That was what he talked about, and that’s what he prayed for. That’s what he fought for, and that’s what this country believes in even more than it believes in the Constitution. It believes in what we should have been much sooner and what we can be.

  The Declaration talks about self-evident truths. Self-evident means you don’t need a tablet and a man in a gown with a beard coming down a mountain to deliver it to you like Moses. Self-evident means you don’t need a church, you don’t need a book, you don’t need a history or a school, you don’t even need an ancestor to tell you. You figure it out for yourself that all men are equal. That it is better for us to love one another than not to. We all have the right to proceed as long as we don’t hurt anybody else in achieving our own destiny. We have our own version of happiness and belief and trust and love. That’s the Declaration of Independence. That’s what [Lincoln] believed in. That’s the highest level of belief in this country, and that’s why we respond to Lincoln, because that’s the level at which he spoke to us, timelessly, transcending all the changing realities evolving on a day-to-day basis—day to day, year to year, century to century. Timeless wisdom. We understand it. We respect it. That’s why we love Lincoln.