And after that they warned America was being overrun by people of color.
They tried to bar, then oust, the Irish.
They cursed and mocked the Jews.
They treated my parents with snide condescension at best.
They talked ominously about putting “America first.”
Their negativism persists and it is distasteful, but it affects our politics.
And us, to this day.
HELP THE WORLD REMEMBER
This beautiful speech on October 25, 2000, before the Westchester Holocaust Commission was widely heralded by Jewish leaders across the nation.
Some months ago one of our newspapers requested a letter to my grandchildren. They had asked me to offer my grandchildren a perspective on what they can anticipate in the life that stretches out before them in the new millennium.
I wrote some predictable things, things most people would write to their grandchildren, and I tried to share one basic idea that I, like a lot of other people, have struggled with for most of my adulthood. I told the grandchildren, or tried to at least, that if they paid attention in school, learned all about computers and the other wondrous tools of technology being created it seems almost every day, and worked very hard, they would probably do very well, materially, in life. They’d certainly make a good living, have all the day-to-day necessities and probably a lot of the luxuries, too.
And then I added that for many people all the accumulating of material goods proved not to be enough to make them truly happy, that at some point in your life, after you’ve won the struggle for survival, just filling your own little basket of appetites with goodies may leave you feeling empty. You may discover that to be fulfilled requires something else, some fundamental belief, some basic purpose in life that gives you a sense of meaningfulness and significance, that answers the question for you, “Why was I born in the first place?” And “What is my mission in life?” Without an answer to that question, all the frantic gathering of material goods can become nothing more than a frenetic fidgeting in an attempt to fill the space between birth and eternity.
I told them how hard it was, for me and for most people, to find the answer they need. Many of us look for it for a lifetime and die without it. So I offered them the thoughts I had been able to put together for whatever they were worth, and this is what I said.
The older grandchildren found most of the letter familiar, because we had discussed these things before. I told them more than once how all my life I had witnessed Jewish people living the principles of Tzedakah and Tikkun Olam and helping my own immigrant mother and father survive the Great Depression and earn a living that allowed them to give me and their other children the benefit of an education and a good life they never had themselves; and how for years I had watched the children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants, who have received abundantly from this miracle called America, giving back even more abundantly, building a stronger, sweeter American community, for the Jewish people, certainly, but not just for the Jews—for all of us together as Americans, supporting education and art and music and health care and research and human rights and civil rights.
I told my granddaughters that the Jewish people are one of the best examples we can find of the idea of community, people coming together to share benefits and burdens for the good of all. I told them that is the only way we are able to finish the work God left us to do, by sharing our strengths to combat our weaknesses.
One of my grandchildren listened carefully and, for the most part I thought, approvingly. But then in the middle of the discussion she asked a question which will occur to all of them eventually, the question which has tormented today’s Jews, and many of us who are not Jews, for a lifetime. She said, “But Grandpa, if the Jewish people have been such good people for so long, why were so many of them killed in the Holocaust?”
I was silent. I reached for an answer or an explanation for why. I had no answer. I tried to change the subject but she asked again, “Why did they kill them, Grandpa?” You scan your recollection for all the vague responses you’ve thought of or heard before: it was a religious thing, it was a political thing, it was because the Jews have always insisted upon being different and some people are frightened by different. None of these things seem persuasive enough to share, so you tell her, frustrated by your inability to do any better, “We don’t really understand, sweetheart. What we do know is that the Holocaust was one of the most horrible things that ever happened, and we must never let it happen again. Grandpa will talk to you about it again when you get older.”
And you wonder if you’ll ever get old enough to learn a better answer. Then you go over it all again in your mind. You remember how hard it was even to get New York state, the great liberal bastion of America, to face up to the reality of the Holocaust, how they refused to teach it in their schools until finally a law was signed in 1994 requiring it. Why is so much of the world so ready to pretend that this enormous horror never happened? I know there were some good people who in many ways, including risking or losing their life during the war, came to the aid of the Jewish people. I know that. But why were so many willing to turn their back on millions victimized and martyred by Nazism, so willing to obscure, to diffuse, to deny the reality of the war against the Jews, to forget the lessons of the Final Solution? And why does anti-Semitism persist—a disease which seems to be immune to destruction, waning, perhaps, from time to time, but never quite disappearing, always capable of reasserting its malignant presence, in terrorist attacks on the streets of Paris and swastikas smeared on the walls of synagogues on Long Island—Jews accused of being Jews, singled out, vilified, threatened, and not just by the Nazis?
Those who staffed and operated the machinery of genocide were not just black-booted Nazi soldiers or monsters like Eichmann, whose very name still echoes a kind of blasphemy. For every murderer with blood on his or her hands, there were thousands of others whose day-to-day cooperation made the act possible—those who had a mouth but did not speak, ears but did not hear, eyes but did not see: the typists who typed the lists and inventories, the clerks who filed them, supervisors who initialed them, a vast number of ordinary people doing ordinary jobs, acting as though genocide was an ordinary occurrence.
The truth is that the barbarians by whose hands the atrocities occurred were aided and abetted by armies of people who chose not to oppose them, as barbarians almost always are, aided by those who refused to notice or refused to care or refused to speak up, those who chose not to resist the annihilation of human decency, of mercy, of love. God bless the good people who helped: the Christians, the nonbelievers, the righteous Gentiles.
But why were there so many who failed to help? Was it weakness? Was it ignorance? Some of us have been asking these questions, and my granddaughter’s question, for half a century since the end of World War II and the first revelation of the Holocaust. For a time, as a society we tried to put the memory away. It was simply too terrible to contemplate. It was not that we forgot. For any of us alive then, the impression on our minds created by the great horrors of the time is indelible. Whether we experienced the Holocaust firsthand, God forbid, or learned about the atrocities through radio or newsreels or the stories of survivors and liberators, no one of my generation is in any danger of ever forgetting it. But it seems that some distance was required before our society as a whole could face the whole truth of what occurred. In the intervening years, two generations have been born and grown now to adulthood. They’re raising a third generation, like my grandchildren. Not having borne witness to this terrible event, those who have come after us can have only a small inkling of what the Holocaust was, and for that reason ways have to be found to preserve the truth—all of it. The truth about the pitiless slaughter of millions of human beings, the truth about the valor and dignity of those who somehow survived. Ways have to be found to teach it as it actually happened, not in some dry, aloof history-book way but in a vivid, memorable way, so the world does not forget tha
t the words “Holocaust” and “Jews” are inseparable.
To neglect the truth would be a grievous sin against the memory of those who suffered and died and those who suffered and survived, a sin against a people persecuted across thirty centuries because of the God they worship.
Judge Sam Fredman and the rest of you who do the work of your commission and support that work by being here tonight understand all this. You understand that if we fail to convey to our people, especially to our younger people, the meaning and magnitude of the Holocaust, they may never comprehend the full implications of the worst human impulses of hatred, racism, and anti-Semitism. They may fail to understand that using an ethnic slur and planning a Final Solution are links in the same terrible chain. They might not be able to recognize the seeds of new terror if they don’t understand what was done in modern Europe to the Jews. The good people that run the commission understand that until the hatred disappears, until we no longer hear the horror stories of bombings and murder, these are lessons we must never dare stop teaching. And they understand there is another lesson in the Holocaust that we must not allow to fade, this one an inspiring lesson demonstrated magnificently by the heroic souls in the Warsaw ghetto, in the Minsk ghetto, in Auschwitz, in Treblinka, in a thousand unrecorded places: the indomitable human spirit that cannot be crushed by any tyranny or oppression.
This, too, must be taught, for the agony and glorious courage will probably never grow too distant to be felt by Jewish children. We must help all our people, especially our children, Jewish and non-Jews, feel history’s pounding heart. That’s what this commission does. It reaches out in a special way to the people who would probably not be hearing about the Holocaust from their families, and perhaps not from their schools either. But the leaders of the Westchester Holocaust Commission have asked us all here tonight to assist in this vital effort to help the world remember those who stood up in history’s darkest, most abysmal corners and fought back against hopeless odds in the Warsaw ghetto, in the Minsk ghetto; the squads of Jewish partisans, the nameless freedom fighters, who kept their proud, passionate spirit alive until machines and sheer numbers ground them into the earth, fallen but still uncrushed, scattered but not obliterated—the seeds of a new and ancient nation unconquered, unconquerable.
They have us here to help them, to help the world to remember the shame of the people who might have stepped forward but did not, and the glory of the people who chose to help because justice was more dear to them than even their own safety. The story the commission is telling is unique. It is precious to everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike, and everyone who cares about the survival of freedom, about the values that make us human, about the destiny of this earth we were given to repair.
And the remembrance will be more than resurrected grief or recollected sorrow, more than ritualist speeches or even prayers. The lessons of the Holocaust can create a new respect for life and for that which resists hatred and needless bloodshed, the slaughter of innocents, and all of the evil harbingers of a failed humanity. Thanks to all of you, the commission will teach more and more of our people the meaning of Tzedakah and charity and Tikkun Olam, the need to be collaborators in the creation of a better world so that the sacrifice made by all the victims of the Holocaust will renew in us a belief in the promise that Isaiah heard for the whole: “I create in Jerusalem a rejoicing and in her a people, a joy. And I will rejoice in Jerusalem and joy in my people. And the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying.”
Shalom.
GOVERNOR MARIO M. CUOMO AT THE CATHEDRAL OF SAINT JOHN THE DIVINE
On Sunday, April 13, 2002, Mario stood in the magnificent Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan to welcome a new rector to the famous Episcopal church. He touched on many subjects.
9/11.
In one horrifying moment on that tragic day all our petty desires and concerns, and much more that we thought was important, went up in a giant cloud of black smoke that rose to the heavens above New York like a terrible lamentation.
Thousands were killed or injured: millions have been spiritually wounded.
It is a heart-searing page that will never be torn from our calendar. Two images were forever burned into our nation’s memory on 9/11.
The first, foreign assassins who hated us so much they were willing to give up their own lives to take ours. And the second, heroic Americans who loved humanity so profoundly they charged into the flames and smoke, risking their own lives to save the lives of innocent victims who were strangers to them.
Hate and love—in a war to the death that will continue for years to come.
Then, as we struggle to reorient ourselves to the ordinary chores and challenges of our life, some of us are fortunate enough to hear a voice reminding us that with all of the sadness and confusion, one thing remains certain: the greatest treasure we have is the breath we are still able to draw, the life that is still ours—however depleted, however scarred.
The chance still . . . to think, to feel, to act. The opportunity to use every precious moment well, clinging to a gift that we know may be taken from us in the very next instant and cherishing.
Moved by that inspiration we resolve to come together to do everything we can to fight hatred and make this world safer, stronger—sweeter than it is, if only a little sweeter.
I know believing that we have an obligation to love is not a comfortable position to be in. It can haunt us. It can nag at us in moments of happiness and personal success, disturbing our sleep and giving us that sense of guilt and unworthiness that used to be so strong and that the modern age is so eager to deny.
It can accuse us—from the faces of the starving, the dispossessed, and the wounded, faces that stare back at us from the front pages of our newspapers, images from across the world that blink momentarily on our television screens.
A French priest, a Jesuit, in just a few magnificent sentences, captured everything I’ve tried to say here:
We must try everything for God. Lift up your head. Look at the immense crowds of those who build and those who seek. All over the world people are toiling—in laboratories, in studios, in factories—in the vast social crucible. The ferment that is taking place by their instrumentality, in art and science and thought, is happening for your sake. Open your arms and your heart like Christ, and welcome the waters, the flood—accept the juice of humanity—for without it you will wither like a flower out of water. And tend it, since, without your sun, it will die.
To some of us that is the echo of God, at God’s most eloquent.
Not an easy matter, believing that God commits us to the endless task of seeking improvement of the world around us, knowing that fulfillment is an eternity away. But better than the anguish of futility. Better than the emptiness of despair.
And capable of bringing meaning to our most modest and clumsy efforts. A useful consolation for any of us, and especially for those of us still struggling to believe.
JACK NEWFIELD EULOGIZED BY MARIO M. CUOMO
He gave many eulogies for his friends—John Aiello, Bill Modell, Michael Modell, Tony Malara, Kitty Carlisle Hart—and this one for the legendary reporter and author Jack Newfield, at Riverside Memorial Chapel, New York City, December 22, 2004.
I’m one of Jack’s older friends who strived to stay on his good side because I expected to receive rather than give his eulogy.
Staying on Jack’s good side was prudent for politicians, too; it might not provide immunity, but it might offer a little clemency.
And I’m sorry for all of us because we lost one of our era’s most courageous and compelling journalists, a champion of justice when we needed one most.
After forty years and thousands of conversations about politics, sports, and mutual friends, I came to know Jack about as well as you can know a person.
And in recent years, when he was preparing his memoir, we even talked a little about religion.
Jack was intrigued by C. S. Lewis’s famous Scre
wtape Letters, a description of the subtleties of the Devil’s mind and how evil can overcome you in simple and familiar ways. Lewis writes, “What Hell wants is a man to finish his life having to say, ‘I now see that I spent most of my life not doing either what was right or what I enjoyed.’ ”
The Greeks believed the gods’ most valuable gift is the gift of passion, and Jack’s life bubbled over with it!
His passion infused his life as an investigative reporter, author, commentator, and political analyst. And it forged an enduring bond with his friends and colleagues.
His passion intensified his loves and hates. His love of the city, his country, baseball, music, and his idols, Jacob Riis, Jackie Robinson, and Robert Kennedy.
And his hate of racism, economic injustice, the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the death penalty, corrupt politicians, and fickle friends.
The gods did indeed bless Jack Newfield. And they blessed us, too, by allowing us to share his passion for sixty-six years. For that I think we should all say, “Deo Gratias.”
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WVOX Radio Interviews
My portfolio as a broadcaster and trustee of a daytime community radio station endowed with only 500 watts but uniquely located in Westchester County, New York, has given me access not only to hundreds of thousands of upscale local residents and those of standing, stature, and influence but also to countless politicians and business leaders who came over the years to what has been called “The Golden Apple,” drawn by the influence and money herein. It seemed like everyone peddling a new idea or ginning up a political campaign came through our home heath seeking support and affirmation. Those meager 500 watts have drawn many heavy hitters and political personages—those who aspired to high estate in the political world as well as those who were already in the national spotlight—to our Westchester studios. Our microphones have amplified the voices and pronouncements of John F. Kennedy (and his son John Jr.), Bobby Kennedy, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Tip O’Neill, Malcolm Wilson, John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Jacob K. Javits, Hugh Leo Carey, Alfonse D’Amato, Ogden Rogers Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and many others somewhat lesser known outside of our local turf. Some stellar ones—many of them down-home “townie” politicians—also come rushing back to me: Edwin Gilbert Michaelian, Frederic B. Powers, Alvin Richard Ruskin, Andy O’Rourke, Tony Colavita, Samuel George Fredman, Bill Luddy, Dick Ottinger, and Richard Daronco. But the most vivid, compelling, and memorable of all those I’ve encountered as a community broadcaster is the “failed baseball player with too many vowels in his name.”
Mario Cuomo Page 15