Mario Cuomo

by O'Shaughnessy, William;

  WO: When you sit in your ivory tower at the Willkie, Farr & Gallagher law firm in Manhattan, or go around the country making those magnificent speeches, does your mind drift back to that one room behind the grocery store?

  MC: When I am all finished with my speeches, O’Shaughnessy—whether they are bombs or passable—when I’m all finished with the day’s work, advocating whatever I’m advocating, what I think of—the truth, Bill—is a plate of good pasta, and a good glass of red wine, a nice piece of bread. That’s enough for me.

  WO: Mario Matthew Cuomo, give us some predictions for the new millennium.

  MC: Predicting what one thinks will happen in the new millennium gets easier when you remember it’s going to take a thousand years for anybody to prove you were wrong, O’Shaughnessy! And I’m comforted by that reality. The change that has been so dramatic over the course of my own lifetime is going to continue, and it’s going to change the way we play, the way we look, the way we think, the way we relate to one another, and it will present us with immense challenges: to our intelligence, to our political wisdom. And it will present challenges to our soul. Physicians are going to be able to operate on people on the other side of the world, through robotic hands, by using computers, without ever moving from the great hospitals here in New York. The computers are still in their infancy; they will grow more intelligent and more effective. Artificial intelligence will allow a computer to beat us at chess, or even rotisserie baseball—all the time, without ever lagging, without having a headache, or a bad hair day, or a fit of depression. The newspapers will probably become obsolete—not totally obsolete, but less needed because of the Internet and computers. You won’t be able to work unless you’re computer literate. The computer will shrink the universe. Space travel will become so frequent it will drop out of the headlines. They’ll be going back and forth to the moon. There may be colonies there. The cascading of new possibilities constantly says to the intelligent person: you can’t rule anything out. The interconnectedness and interdependence of all people will become clearer, and that will have its consequences. It will spur more and more linkages and mergers of political groups.

  The European community will be well established within the first quarter of the new millennium, and so will the euro. The French and Italians will have to stop arguing with one another about their wine and their romance and all the other things that have divided them. And in that first part of the new millennium it will be the dollar and the euro, a bipolar economy. And you’ll have to figure out how to stabilize these things, and that will remind you of your interconnectedness and your interdependence. NAFTA will become AFTA, the American Free Trade Agreement. Inevitably, it will take all of Latin America, all the way down to Brazil and Argentina and everybody else. They’ll all be in one grand trade zone.

  The ability to destroy one another with even newer and more powerful devices, unfortunately, will continue. We’re not going to get smart enough over the next millennium to stop progressing in the ability to demolish one another. Our insecurity, our imperfection, will be sufficient so that we’ll keep guarding against the enemy. We need to have it because we’re good, they’re bad. And we need to protect ourselves. And because they think they’re good too, everybody will have this lethal force. More and more we’ll be aware that we can destroy one another very easily. Thirty years ago we said, “That’s what will bring peace to the world,” and it hasn’t, and it won’t over the next century. But what it will do is remind you that you had better talk, you had better communicate with one another, or you may just destroy yourselves. And so the United Nations will continue. The World Trade Organization will be more meaningful than ever.

  Thanks to television, the computer, and other technological marvels, we’re already the most knowledgeable people in history. Kids will sit in front of that Internet, as they do now, and get information from all over the world that you didn’t dream of when you were twenty-two. It’s frightening in a way. We’re going to be much more knowledgeable; will we be wiser? Does it follow that because kids or adults know a lot they understand a lot? Or will you confuse facts with philosophy?

  How will we deal with our ability to clone life? We’re so afraid of the issue now we’re saying, “Don’t mess with it. Don’t even look at it.” You can’t tell the scientists and the world, “Don’t study it. Don’t explore it. Don’t see what it means.”

  I did an article a hundred years ago at St. John’s Law School for Catholic Lawyer magazine, as a St. Thomas More scholar. And we had a priest who was a sociologist, a canon lawyer, and a regular lawyer. And we did an article on artificial insemination, and I thought the dean would go crazy. So I said to the dean, “It’s coming and it’s real and we have to think of the morality and the legality of it.” He said, “That will never happen!”

  I’m very good historically, better than I am projecting, because I’ve been around so long.

  Will our computers become our soulmates, withering our relationships with humans? Person to person, people to people, community to community? Will we fall in love with our computers? Will we become too introverted? Or will chat rooms that make us disembodied conversational companions to people all over the world draw us closer together? Because now you can talk to anybody. But you can’t feel them, you can’t touch them, you can’t smell their breath, you can’t kiss them, you can’t hug them. But you can talk to them. Will that make you closer?

  We’ll certainly be stronger and smarter. But will we be better? Or sweeter? Ever since Adam wondered why the fruit was forbidden, and Einstein struggled with the meaning of energy, thinkers have been forced to admit there are more questions than answers. But because it’s true that where there is no vision the people perish, we have to continue asking ourselves these questions. We should be practical and constructive about preparing for this future or we risk a world run by computers, which would be a grotesque intensification of the Frankenstein fable.

  The politicians, very silently, are saying to us, “Don’t mess with this economy. Don’t try to make it any better for people. Because if you do, you’re only going to spoil it.” Using economic language: the economy has to do with the production, the distribution, then the consumption of goods. What does it have to do with the condition of people? Zero! That’s sociology. So you have to ask a separate question here: What is the condition of people? You have more millionaires, more billionaires, more people making over $100,000 [than] in our history. About 5 percent of the American people now are in that shining city on the hill above $100,000 a year. That’s very good.

  I remember being in the Executive Mansion with Momma, before she died. On a coffee table, she saw a Fortune magazine with Lee Iacocca’s picture on it. She said, “Who is that?” I said, “Ma, that’s Lee Iacocca.” She said, “What does he do?” I said, “He makes $15 million a year, and he says it’s not enough.” She said, “What does he do?” I said, “He makes cars for Chrysler.” I was governor, my second term. I thought I was doing all right. She looked at me and said, “What’s the matter, you don’t know how to make a car, Mario?” For her, the idea that you could make $15 million and think that’s not enough, that was incredible. She couldn’t read, she couldn’t write, she came from a very poor neighborhood, her son got lucky and got to be a governor. But as far as she was concerned you go all the way you can in this country as long as you don’t cheat, you don’t steal, you don’t hurt anybody—that’s the American Dream. And so we have more people in the shining city than ever—that’s great.

  But there’s a second city where the glitter doesn’t show. Forty million poor people. We have 16 million children at risk of malnutrition, under-education, teenage suicide, teenage pregnancy. For the new millennium you have to conclude: Look, things are great. But they could be better. Unless you’re willing to conclude that there is no more room in the circle of opportunity.

  One last thing, more important than anything. And that is something that I don’t think that we can be taught by our com
puters. And that is that no matter how much cloning we do and how fast we do it, we’re never all going to look alike in America. Thank God there’ll always be tremendous diversity of race, of color, of sex, of sexual orientation, national origin, economic class—there’ll always be great differences. That’s what we are. We’re made up of differences. And we continue to be nurtured by it. We’re not endemic. The people who lived here first, we destroyed virtually. Those were the Native Americans. Them we killed and brutalized. All the rest of us came from somewhere else. One of the great strengths of the City of New York, the in-migration of people from Asia, the Caribbean—people with strength, with will, with values, with family—that’s going to continue. And no matter how hard we try to widen the distribution of opportunity and success, there’ll always be winners and losers, the well-to-do and the strugglers, the people who can afford to give and the people who desperately need.

  And how will we deal with that as a society? That’s the question for the new millennium. Above all things, we should be sure that Americans and New Yorkers remain fully human. We should make ourselves masters of the technical universe without ever forgetting a truth thousands of years older than our computers and infinitely more powerful: that we will find our greatest good as individuals in the good of the whole community.

  SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  It was a soft, gauzy September morning with high, thin clouds floating over Westchester and drifting toward Long Island Sound. And as one of the great, simple pleasures of my life has always been washing my own cars, I was out in the driveway early on this beautiful Indian summer day.

  The former Nancy Curry appeared at the side door and said, “Billy, I think you should come and take a look at this.” Some idiot, so we thought, had flown a small plane into the World Trade Center. As serious as it was, I went back out to finish washing my car, wondering, What was that jackass doing up there? and What next?

  A few minutes later I found out, when Nancy reappeared to announce that yet another plane had struck. I immediately called my office at WVOX and WVIP. They were already on the story with bulletins and live, firsthand reports from lower Manhattan.

  I jumped into my dripping-wet car and raced down Pinebrook Boulevard to the Whitney Radio Network studios and began to assemble a series of interviews with some leading New Yorkers and ordinary citizens.

  I’ve sat before our microphones during earthquakes, race riots, a tanker blowing up in the Hudson River, and blizzards. And on every one of those occasions we found that a community radio station, if you do it right, can play a very useful and essential role by serving as a platform or forum for our listeners, many of whom were confused, frightened, and eager for information and also for the reassuring voices of their neighbors.

  We fielded thousands of calls from all over the metropolitan area. While other radio stations “adjusted” their programming somewhat, I’m immensely proud that we at WVOX and WVIP threw ourselves totally and completely into those terrible events as they unfolded.

  Our listeners heard raw, unfiltered dialogue (we’re the only station in the area without the infamous seven-second delay, preferring to fly without a net), and they were exposed to the confusion and apprehension abroad in the land on this terrible day that changed our lives forever. You could also hear the sweet strength, courage, and hope of the indomitable people of New York as they roused themselves from their initial shock and disbelief. But before we opened up our microphones, we put in a call to Willkie, Farr & Gallagher.

  The terrible events of September 11 have been called a “television story.” But tens of thousands turned to local radio as the day wore on. And one of our first interviews was, of course, with Mario Cuomo, that morning at 10:30:

  WILLIAM O’SHAUGHNESSY: Now on the line from Manhattan, a former inhabitant of the World Trade Center. He was governor of New York when the previous attack occurred [in 1993]. His office, the office of the governor, used to be there. Governor Mario Cuomo, good morning, sir.

  MARIO CUOMO: Good morning, Bill. Well, of all the inappropriate greetings, I guess yours and mine set a record: “Good morning.” If anything, it has been a terrible morning.

  WO: Governor, you are a sensitive and deeply religious man. What are you thinking about all this?

  MC: Well, I’m thinking what you’re thinking, Brother Bill, and what everybody is thinking at the moment, and that is the details of the tragedy: how many people have been lost, whose people, how many of my people, how many of my family. I think that is what everybody is fixed on now. And that’s not surprising, and that is as it should be. And I suspect the next few days we will spend measuring the extent of this brutal, brutal act of damage. But after that, I think we will come to analyze the situation and discover that it is even worse than it appears today and will appear tomorrow. It’s worse because you will not have an identifiable enemy to defend yourself against. It won’t be as though some nation had declared war on you. We can fight a nation: we can defeat any nation, and we can protect ourselves in the process. This will be about unnamed people. And worse than that, we may not understand their grievance, what it is that fuels the hate, that inspires the acts of terrorism, and we will be in the frustrating position of not being able to defend ourselves, because the truth is there is no way, militarily or through the use of your police, to protect yourself against madmen who are willing to sacrifice their own lives to take yours. That’s what this proves. We’ve been warned over and over that they were going to make this kind of attack. They even got quite explicit in their warnings about airplanes and other ways to do it. But you just can’t protect yourself against it. So the real anguish will come, Bill, after all the personal tragedies, that will keep us crying for many lifetimes. The real anguish will be, how do we defend ourselves in the future? And I am afraid, Bill, that our society, at least yours and mine, at least for our lifetimes, is changed for the worse—permanently. We’ll be more militaristic. Of course, we’ll have to be to protect ourselves. We’ll be more bitter than we should be and have been. We’ll be more afraid. We’ll be more concerned about protecting ourselves. And we will be angrier.

  WO: Governor, even these days, at airports in Rome and Paris, you see troopers with sawed-off shotguns and Uzis. Do you think we will ever get to resemble almost a police state?

  MC: That’s what I mean about being more militaristic. You’d have to. The people will demand it. The people will demand, first of all, that you do everything possible to protect yourself, to find these people, to punish them, to execute them. That is the natural and almost certain reaction. You do have to do everything you can to protect yourself.

  WO: You told me once, Mario Cuomo, vengeance doesn’t work.

  MC: It won’t be for vengeance. Many people will want to take vengeance, but there won’t be anybody to take vengeance against. That’s the problem. You won’t know the enemy. You won’t know who it is. You can’t say, “Well, it’s every Islamic person, or every Arab, or everybody from the East.” That’s not rational. So you wouldn’t know whom to take vengeance on. And so what you do know is you have to protect yourself. And in the process of protecting yourself, you will go to extremes. These are your children. This is your life you’re protecting. So you can expect, Bill, and we can expect, like it or not, more militarism in our society.

  WO: Governor, is it too far a stretch to suggest that people might now be saying, “We paid a hell of a price for supporting Israel”?

  MC: Oh, God forbid. God forbid. I think it would be simplistic and unfair to Israel and unfair to the Jewish people to say this is all because of Israel. I think, Bill, that would also be a little bit arrogant of us. You know what that would leave out? That we have never done anything as a nation to offend anybody. I don’t think that’s true. I think there are a lot of people in this world who think we have offended them and who feel offended. People who think that you ignored their poverty, you ignored their despair, you ignored their begging for help, while we lived in the lap of luxury. You ign
ored your obligations. We have had evidence of that. This is not to say they’re right, but that is not the question, right or wrong. We know this was wrong. This couldn’t be more wrong. So, you know, there’s no need to quibble about who’s right, who’s wrong. They’re wrong. But, you also have to understand what it is that is motivating them. And to say, “Well, it’s Israel,” that’s too easy, because all you’d have to do then is betray Israel and you’d be safe. But that would be wrong. That would be unfair. And it would be arrogant. We have to study the relationship between us and the whole world to see whom we might possibly have offended. To see whom we might be provoking. Now, that is something we’ll not do easily. But I think it is necessary.

  WO: Did you ever think you would see, when you looked out the window from your office, that anything like this could ever happen in your city?