Gone where? Gone from my sight, that’s all.
She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of her destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says, “There! She’s gone!” there are other eyes that are watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”
And that, dear friends, is dying.
But the playwright John Patrick Shanley observed recently, “As long as you’re alive and on your feet, you have a shot at the title.”
Mario would have loved the line.
7
Echoes of Greatness
WORDS OF WISDOM
Over the years, Mario came up with a number of graceful, memorable phrases that he called upon many times in order to press home an important point. His wisdom and goodness linger in these wise and pithy pronouncements and observations dispensed over the years:
Franklin Roosevelt rose from his wheelchair to lift this world from its knees.
This nation was born in gunshot and flames.
We should show a little creativity in selecting a president. Let’s choose, not a hawk or a dove—but an owl who is strong enough to fight but wise enough to know when it’s necessary.
New York has never been and never will be one of those quaint, restored, historic villages frozen in time. Change—constant, dynamic, unpredictable, exciting change—is part of the rhythm of New York!
You are among those who weigh my many faults and inadequacies less diligently than you assess what you may find commendable in my persona and stewardship.
Don’t let us forget who we are and where we’ve come from. We are the sons and daughters of giants.
Instead of capital punishment . . . the taking of another life . . . I’d say, “That’s it, Charlie, you’re going to be by yourself for a hundred years!”
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
We believe in a government strong enough to use words like love and compassion and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities.
We believe in a single fundamental idea that describes better than most textbooks and any speech that I could write what a proper government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings—reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race, or sex, or geography, or political affiliation.
We believe in encouraging the talented, but we believe that while survival of the fittest may be a good working description of the process of evolution, a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order.
The Republicans believe the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of our old, some of our young, and some of our weak are left behind by the side of the trail. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact.
Lincoln isn’t a man with ingrown toenails, he’s an idea.
A shining city is perhaps all [President Ronald Reagan] sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there’s another part to the shining city. In this part there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can’t find it.
For me to make lasagna would be a desecration of a great Italian dish. . . . I don’t mess with sacred things.
Every time I’ve done something that doesn’t feel right, it’s ended up not being right.
When you’ve parked the second car in the garage, and installed the hot tub, and skied in Colorado, and wind-surfed in the Caribbean, when you’ve had your first love affair and your second and your third, the question will remain, where does the dream end for me?
I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.
We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship, to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we’ll do it not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that bring people to their senses.
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 the way—the only way—to succeed and to be happy is to learn those rules so basic that a shepherd’s son could teach them to an ignorant flock without notes or formulae.
In this life, you should read everything you can read. Taste everything you can taste. Meet everyone you can meet. Travel everywhere you can travel. Learn everything you can learn. Experience everything you can experience.
The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman.
The beauty of America is that I don’t have to deny my past to affirm my present. No one does. We can love this nation like a parent and still embrace our ancestral home like cherished grandparents.
I love bunt plays. I love the idea of a bunt. I love the idea of the sacrifice. Even the word is good. Giving yourself up for the good of the whole.
I don’t want to be a big man. I know who I am.
Life is motion, not joy. If the way you measure success in life is by how much joy it brings you, you’re measuring inaccurately. Life is also sadness, defeat, striving.
I am the one who believes that the world goes from the slime to the sublime. And you can take Darwin and all your philosophers and all your ontologists, and that’s the direction.
What would you say on your tombstone? I know what I would say: “Mario Cuomo, 1932–” and, “He tried.”
Religion is extremely important in this democracy—so important that it occupies a prime position in the Bill of Rights.
Lincoln had bad press, too. He wasn’t appreciated until after he was gone. My favorite thought about Abraham Lincoln is [that] he believed in two things: loving one another and working together to make this world better.
I love immigrants. Legal, illegal—they’re not to be despised.
Decide exactly what you want to achieve. Do you want to help people, or do you want to be powerful?
I have no quarrel with people seeing me as a sinner.
I talk and talk and talk, and I haven’t taught people in fifty years what my father taught me by example in one week.
America was born in outrageous ambition, so bold as to be improbable. The deprived, the oppressed, the powerless from all over the globe came here with little more than the desire to realize themselves.
I am a trial lawyer. Matilda says that at dinner on a good day I sound like an affidavit.
The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.
Most of us have achieved levels of affluence and comfort unthought of two generations ago. We’ve never had it so good, most of us. Nor have we ever complained so bitterly about our problems. The closed circle of materialism is clear to us now—aspirations become wants, wants become needs, and self-gratification becomes a bottomless pit.
Tell me, ladies and gentlemen, are we the ones to tell our children what their instructors have tried to teach them for years? That the philosophers were right. That Saint Francis, Buddha, Muhammad, Maimonides—all spoke the truth when they said the only way to serve yourself is to serve others; and that Aristotle was right, before them, when he said the only way to assure yourself happiness is to learn to give happiness.
An unborn child is, at the very least, potentially human and not to be treated causally.
I’m a good man in the ontolog
ical sense.
CUOMO ON THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE
Mario Cuomo was always quite a glorious champion of free speech and the First Amendment. Over the years we had countless conversations on the subject. He used to accuse me of being a First Amendment “voluptuary,” an appellation I proudly embraced. When the Congress, driven by Democrats, came close to reviving the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” with legislation that had previously been vetoed by President Ronald Reagan (at the urging of my dear friend of many years, the legendary Midwest broadcaster-statesman Ward Quaal), MMC spoke boldly and bravely against the doctrine’s reimposition or any other incursion against free expression that the Congress or government bureaucrats might dream up.
Broadcasting has such immense impact on our lives: it is important to our politics, our governance, our economy, and our culture. We must protect it.
Underlying and supporting our system, and the entire Constitution that built it, is a specific working principle: the people who will always remain the ultimate authority must have freedom of expression. Now, from the beginning, it’s been clear this extraordinary gift—the right to speak, to advocate, to describe, to dissent, to sing—is not just a wonderful privilege that makes this democracy the miracle that it is.
The Founding Fathers gave us this freedom of expression—not tentatively, not embroidered with nuances, not shrouded and bound up in conditions, but plainly and purely.
The government that seizes First Amendment power from the people develops an appetite for power that can be sated only by consuming more of the peoples’ liberty.
This nation was born in gunshot and flames, driven by a passion for freedom. For two hundred years we have fought for freedom and given up lives for it. But we are a rational people as well as a bold people, and we know that freedom brings with it responsibilities. The marvelous self-correcting instincts of our exquisite separation of powers insists on balancing these two: freedom and responsibilities. And where freedom is abused, laws and rulings will spring up to correct the abuse, by diminishing the freedom. And let broadcasters or journalists be guilty of excessive bad taste, dangerous incitement, reckless reporting, pervasively biased opinion and analysis, yes, palpable unfairness, and they will be inviting laws and rulings the Founding Fathers would have abhorred.
I would urge broadcasters and journalists to remember that you have the ability to uplift. But that implies the capacity to demean. You can unfold for us the majesty of Creation and humanity’s masterpieces. But you can also teach a child a taste for violence or encourage a fascination with perversity and inflicted pain. You have the power to instruct, but it implies the power to distort. You can make things darker, meaner, uglier than they are. Or broadcasters who reach millions and millions with your sights and sounds and words can make us fuller, surer, sweeter than we are. As long as you continue to treat your power and privilege with the respect it deserves, you’ll preserve for yourselves the freedom to help us develop the richest and wisest culture ever.
LADY LIBERTY
Mario loved the Statue of Liberty. He used its wonderful symbolism and shining example in many speeches. One of his loveliest tributes to Our Lady in the Harbor was written thirty years ago in the form of a letter to his then-sixteen-year-old youngest son, Christopher. New York magazine printed the entire piece when the statue was given one of its periodic refurbishments.
Our youngest son, Christopher, recently asked me why everyone was making such a fuss over the Statue of Liberty. I tried to explain it to him the way my parents explained it to me.
My mother and father came from another country. My mother came here by ship from Italy, and her first glimpse of this great country was when she sighted the Lady of Opportunity, steadfastly lifting her torch.
My mother understood immediately the meaning of that beautiful symbol. To her, the Statue meant freedom and opportunity, a chance to earn one’s own bread with dignity. The Statue told my mother that if she and my father were willing to work hard and care about this nation, they would be able to share in its incredible bounties. And this new country would not ask them, or force them, to give up the culture of their parents. Lady Liberty said, “Welcome. You are welcome, and the culture you bring with you is welcome, to blend with all the others into this beautiful mosaic that is America.”
America was made into steel and stone by the flesh and bone and muscle of people like my parents, from every corner of the world. Guided by the beacon of hope that the Statue of Liberty represented, they settled across New York state and throughout the five boroughs of New York City. To the Lower East Side, to South Jamaica, to Hell’s Kitchen, to Williamsburg, to Brownsville and the South Bronx, these “strangers” came to this strange land and quickly made it their home, investing the equity of their labor in their new communities.
Our neighborhood in South Jamaica was then poor and lower middle class, made up of Irish, Italians, blacks, Poles, Jews—a classic polyglot community: immigrants and the sons and daughters of immigrants from Europe, the East, the South; people who had come to New York for opportunity but were only beginning to find it.
We had an Italian American grocery store on the corner of 150th Street and 97th Avenue, and on the other corner, down the block, there was an Orthodox synagogue. And between us were Lanzone the baker, Rubin the roofer, and Kaye the tailor. We lived in rooms behind the store in a building owned by the Kesslers. The Kesslers taught my mother how to count, and she taught Mrs. Kessler how to make tomato sauce—à la marinara, without meat.
Together, we taught one another, learned from one another, shared tears when a neighbor down the block passed away, felt joy at each bar mitzvah, Holy Communion, or wedding our friends celebrated. We were family, sharing burdens and benefits, birth and death, good times and bad.
We had—from different lands, with different customs—come through the Golden Door, beckoned by the same beacon of hope, the same promise of opportunity.
We were family, and although we were aware of our differences, we didn’t think so much about them. Instead, there was a commonality among us, a commonality of need and concern and striving that helped form us into the American mosaic.
The Statue of Liberty will always remind me, and millions of others, of that striving, of that commonality of need, of the responsibility we have for one another’s welfare. It reminds us that together we have bridged rivers, put up buildings that pierce the sky, elevated the arts to new levels, defeated depressions, and reached down to lift up millions of immigrants who came to this country with little more than the clothes on their back and the children in their arms.
In celebrations across New York state and throughout America, we commemorate the restoration of the Statue and the reaffirmation of that spirit—the dream that brought our ancestors past the Statue’s lamp to Ellis Island and then into this magnificent land.
What’s all the fuss about, Chris? It’s about a struggle by millions who came before us to create a new society of opportunity and tolerance. It reminds us how, beginning with nothing but their hands and their hearts and their minds, they built this beautiful country and gave it to us and left us the obligation to make it a better one.
“YOU ARE THE SUN”
Before he became governor of New York, Mario Cuomo served as lieutenant governor under Governor Hugh L. Carey, and prior to that he was New York’s secretary of state (1975–78). Few people will recall, but he also ran for mayor of New York City back in the seventies. At each stage of his political career, Mario Cuomo dazzled audiences all over the state. Here are some remarks delivered at the New York State Labor–Religion Coalition Conference in Albany on February 22, 1982.
For too many of us, there are no more noble causes, nothing beautiful to believe in. “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”
But now we see the beginning of a new period, an awakening, a reminder of old lessons temporarily forgotten. We remember with pride that we are a nation that believed in justice and love—unashamedly and relentlessly; that
we fought wars in the name of virtues. We fought them abroad and even among ourselves.
We are beginning to see again more clearly what has always been true: that these are the things our religious leaders have been trying to tell us from the beginning. What else did Buddha, Maimonides, Christ, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King say but “justice and love”?
Some of us now appreciate more fully what John Courtney Murray meant when he told us involvement in the issues of the day was a better road to sanctification than the basket-weaving done by contemplatives to fill the grim interval between birth and eternity.
The unions carried the tablets into the mean streets and valleys and, holding them on high, struggled for recognition. They embodied—probably for the most part without suspecting it—what Teilhard de Chardin later called the “Christian perception of human endeavor.” For them, whether they would accept its theological implications or not, they demonstrated what Chardin urged when he said, “God is waiting for us in our work of the moment. He is at the tip of my pen, my spade, my brush, my needle, of my heart and of my thought. Work is the truth.”
No one ever said it better than that great French priest who reminded us that what we do today we do in and for God, by whatever name we call Him.
Teilhard said it this way: “Lift up your head. Look at the enormous crowds of those who build and seek. All over the world men are toiling—in laboratories, in studios, in deserts, in factories—in the vast social crucible. Welcome humanity! Accept the burgeoning plant of humanity and tend it, since without your sun it will disperse itself wildly and die away.”
How perfect a marriage you have made: the world of religion and the world of labor.
You are the sun.
SPEECH AT ST. JAMES CATHEDRAL
Mario Cuomo Page 13