What I said to Cindy Adams and what I said on the street is just a summary of all that. In the end, that’s the whole game: living your life in a way that makes this place a little bit better, and understanding that your limits in trying to change things are very, very drastic. You’re very small. But to the extent that you can make a difference in this big world, for the better, you do it. For the better. That’s life.
WO: Mario Cuomo, we’re going to be on the air for most of this sad day. We’ve got a lot of rabbis, judges, mayors, journalists—including the great [Jimmy] Breslin—coming up next. I doubt—nay I’m sure—we won’t have anything as inspiring or as eloquent as your words. Thank you, Governor. We’re very grateful to you on this, another sad September morning.
TWENTY YEARS LATER
We again took to the airwaves on July 26, 2004, the twentieth anniversary of the famous “Shining City on a Hill” keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
WILLIAM O’SHAUGHNESSY: Governor, remember when you stood in the spotlight and gave that keynote in 1984?
MARIO CUOMO: I do remember, Bill. This is the twentieth anniversary.
WO: Were you nervous standing there? Do you remember that now-historic speech?
MC: I remember it extremely well. And I wasn’t nervous because I resigned myself to utter failure! The speech wasn’t something I wanted to do. As a matter of fact, I told Walter Mondale to get Ted Kennedy. And I had spoken to Kennedy about it, and he was willing to do it, but Mondale didn’t want Kennedy. And when he asked me, I was shocked, and so was Tim Russert, who worked for me at the time, and my son Andrew. All three of us thought it was a bad idea. I resisted, but Fritz Mondale insisted.
And when we came to the podium, nobody appeared to be paying any attention, including John Forsythe, the actor; President Carter; and Ed Koch, the mayor of New York City. And I remember John Forsythe saying, “Well, just look at the light; keep your eye on the red light, Mario; that’s the television camera.” So when I started the speech, I was prepared for the worst. I said a silent prayer, “Oh Lord, please don’t let me screw up too badly here.”
WO: “There is another shining city on the hill, Mr. President.” Did that line just fly into your head?
MC: Actually, when we reluctantly agreed to do the speech, I didn’t know where to start. So I took my inaugural speech from the previous year in Albany. And then there was a story in the paper about President Ronald Reagan referring to the country as a “shining city on a hill.” And I got to thinking about that and the story of the shining city. And it just came naturally, the next line: yeah, it is a shining city on the hill, perhaps, but there are people in the gutter, where the glitter doesn’t show. And there are people halfway up the hill who are sliding back down. So the allusions came very easily after the president himself painted the picture.
ELECTION DAY 2004 RADIO INTERVIEW
MARIO CUOMO: I think a lot about how lucky I am. And the older and closer I get to the ultimate accounting, the more I think about how good this country has been to us, to our family. I think about how I can make my contribution. I am all over the country; I do give speeches—and they are not all for money, incidentally, O’Shaughnessy. But I do give as many as I can. I do speak my piece and try to make my case in the hope that it will help a little to advance the dialogue in this country, and be a contribution. I want desperately to be as useful as I can be.
I don’t think I had the stuff to be a president. I really don’t. I know what I am good at, and I know what I can do. The notion that you are smart enough, wise enough, and strong enough to run the whole place, to do the most powerful job in the world . . . George [W.] Bush had the confidence for that position. John Kerry certainly did. But not all of us feel that way about our own abilities.
WILLIAM O’SHAUGHNESSY: You’re picking Kerry. I am picking Bush. Do you want to make a bet right now?
MC: What do you want to bet, O’Shaughnessy?
WO: Well, I don’t know . . .
MC: If I win, I want to interview you! And I want you to answer all my questions the way you expect me to answer all your questions. How is that?
WO: All right, sir.
MC: Prepare yourself for some real shots, O’Shaughnessy!
A RADIO CONVERSATION ABOUT CHRISTMAS . . . AND LIFE
In this December 2007 interview we spoke about growing up . . . and life.
MARIO CUOMO: In our circumstances, Bill, let us think about big issues: What is life? When did it begin? What about God?
For most of us, for much of my life, and certainly for all of my parents’ lives, they didn’t have the time for that. They needed to put bread on the table and raise their kids. And so most people are driven by necessity and don’t have the opportunity for conversations like this one.
I’ve been gifted with the time, and the situation, to think a lot about those issues. In politics, they come up all the time. A governor interacts with the private sector to help people lead fulfilling lives. But to do that, you must define a “full life” and determine how to distribute the resources of the society.
And, yes, deep down inside me, even as a child, I had questions about life. And I think they derived from my early introduction to books.
My mother and father were never formally educated and read only a little bit. They ran a grocery store, and I was sheltered indoors during my early years because my older brother was hit by a car and badly injured.
So I listened to the radio and read books. My older brother brought them home from the junkyard in the war years because they were separated from the other paper due to their disproportionate weight.
And sometimes it was an old Bible. Sometimes it was an interesting book on lesbianism or homosexuality, an otherwise forbidden topic.
I read a lot, Bill. And I also became a shabbos goy. Our grocery store was on one corner, a synagogue on the other. And on the weekend, a shabbos goy performs tasks forbidden to Jews on the Sabbath, such as taking out the garbage or other chores.
And you listen to their chants and witness their liturgies. And then on Sunday morning, you’re an altar boy in the Catholic Church, and you compare the two.
They both speak a foreign language: Hebrew and Latin. And you ask yourself, “Why?” And you conclude there’s a “mystique.” We can’t know everything about God with our puny intelligence. God is indescribable, and that’s what Christian encyclopedias say if you look for a definition.
With a start like that in life, those thoughts are constantly with you, and you can spend a lifetime mulling them over. And I have. And sometimes, you share your struggle with others, and they find it interesting.
WILLIAM O’SHAUGHNESSY: You still have an amazing facility with words. Any regret you didn’t do more with that?
MC: [sigh] I regret, the way many people do, I wasn’t better at what I did. Not in the first half of my life, where everything was trying to put bread on the table for five children, living in a furnished room, and then a walk-up apartment. But then, after that, you can write books, as you have, Bill, brilliant books, and give speeches, as you have, Bill. And you are probably unsatisfied as well.
You write the book because you think you have something to say. You give the speech because you think you have something to say.
People don’t listen. Yeah, they will applaud. But the purpose is to move people to a different level so they make different decisions.
WO: I’m glad you’re a friend of WVOX and WVIP, sir.
MC: How could I not be? They’re wonderful, wonderful always to listen to. And so are you.
THE MORNING AFTER: “MY SON, THE GOVERNOR”
This WVOX interview was broadcast November 3, 2010, the morning after Andrew was elected governor. It was one of the good days.
In this conversation we hear one of Mario’s best-known utterances/observations, which many political candidates of both parties, most recently Hillary Clinton in 2008’s presidential campaign, have appropriated: “You campaign in poetry,
but you govern in prose.” Many years earlier President Richard M. Nixon said, somewhat less elegantly, “Politics is poetry, not prose.” And a British journalist, Beverley Nichols, who although he wrote fifty books is mostly remembered for his essays on gardening, once famously said of marriage, “It’s a book in which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.” But Mario Cuomo’s succinct and graceful observation is the one that carries down through the years.
Is it possible my friend Donald Trump heard the interview? When you read the transcript, you’ll see what I mean.
WILLIAM O’SHAUGHNESSY: This is, in every telling and by every account, an historic day for the state of New York, for last night Andrew Mark Cuomo became governor-elect of the Empire State. We’ve talked many times to his father, the fifty-second governor of New York. And it’s fitting, proper, and appropriate to talk to him once more on this “morning after.” How did you feel last night when the returns came in?
MARIO CUOMO: Well, it was almost anti-climactic, Bill, because we had been listening to polls and they consistently said Andrew was going to succeed by a comfortable margin.
There’s great relief for his mother and family, including myself. It’s not pride. People keep insisting you must be proud. I think gratitude is a better word. We’re grateful for the good luck that gave us the opportunity to serve, the good luck that gave Andrew all the wonderful gifts he was born with—a good mind, a strong body—and we were lucky he’s made the most of that good luck, and we admire him. That’s the way we feel this morning, and I believe that’s the way we will feel for every day of his long governance.
WO: Governor, why do you take yourself out of this? Don’t you believe genes rule? Didn’t you have something to do with the man he’s become, with his priorities?
MC: No. It’s hard for me to say, Bill. Frankly, I don’t like the gene game. I have two sons who are startlingly good-looking men—and they remind me of that constantly—and my biggest disadvantage according to my sons was that I appeared on television and allowed my photograph to be taken too often!
WO: I know where you’re going with this, but he was raised at your knee, with your example. Andrew spoke movingly about you last night, about the integrity and decency you bring to the political arena.
MC: Now, that was nice. But there are two aspects to the experience he had. Yes, he was there from the very beginning—from my sudden decision after twenty years as a lawyer to go into politics and government, he was there. He was a part of it from the very beginning. And sure he learned a lot, some of it good and positive. But then he also learned about mistakes that can be made. And I, like every other human being, am subject to mistakes and sometimes significant ones. So there were two things he got: an education in how to do the right thing—some very good moves we made, especially economically—and a warning he ought not make the kinds of mistakes I made. So he learned from the negatives, and he learned from the positives.
WO: The morning papers, Governor, say you were the hero of the liberal wing: an icon of liberal persuasion. And that your son and heir Andrew is more of a centrist, a moderate, a technocrat. Does that sell him short?
MC: I think it is a very serious mistake, Bill, to give theoretical political ideology a high place in our legal and political discussions. I don’t believe you should put together a bundle of principles the way they do for the platforms of the parties. Incidentally, in every election cycle there’s always a platform in which they say we believe in this or that. I don’t believe putting them all together—and calling them liberal or independent or Republican or conservative—I don’t think that is useful. I think we should be clearer about our governance, clearer about what we want as president of the United States, as Members of Congress, as governors, as members of the state legislature.
You have to answer the following questions: Is what you are attempting to do something government should be doing because you can’t get it done privately? Now with education, for example: A long time ago, the Founding Fathers had the opportunity when they put the Bill of Rights together to say everybody in the nation should get a reasonable amount of education and the government has that obligation to provide it. And they had the opportunity to say, as Founding Fathers, that everybody in the United States should have the right to health care. OK. And they had that opportunity at the founding to put it into the government. But they let it pass, notwithstanding we as a state, for example, put in our Bill of Rights that we will fight poverty using government. OK, but the federal government didn’t mention health care or education. And so we had to do them privately. And we did health care privately from 1789 until 1965. And a lot of people died because they didn’t get health care—especially old people who couldn’t work died before their time because they didn’t have the money to take care of themselves. And, finally, after all those years passed, they said this is something we must address through our government. And we did, with Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security.
And that’s what we should do again. You want to spend money on something, well prove to me you can’t get it done through the market system or through independent means, and you can’t get it through the benefactors, pro bono, the charitable foundations. Do you want a tax cut? Well, do you need a tax cut? You want a tax increase? Well, do you need a tax increase? And that is where our process should be. That is what Abraham Lincoln instructed us to do. Lincoln said: Look, don’t make this complicated. He said we’re a government, a coming together of people—O’Shaughnessy, Cuomo, and all the rest of us—in this particular state and this particular country, to do for ourselves what we could not do as well or at all, privately. If you can do it privately, Cuomo . . . and O’Shaughnessy . . . then do it. But if we need it and can’t get it done privately, then consider, as a last alternative, government.
WO: Governor, I think what I am trying to find out . . . is Andrew going to be more like his—if you will forgive me—his magnificent, soulful, visionary father, or is he going to resemble pragmatic, “gettin’ it done,” . . . “doin’ what it takes” Bill Clinton, for whom he once worked?
MC: He’s going to be smarter than his old man was because he won’t make the mistakes his old man made, because they made him bleed when he first witnessed them, and he’s going to avoid those. So he’ll be smarter than I was. He’ll learn from what I did that didn’t work well, and he will also learn from what I did that did work well.
For example, Centers for Advanced Technology. If there is anything this state needs and this country needs, it is to get back to the business of making things and selling them to people in the rest of the world and to our own consumers. And those things should involve high technology, because there is no limit to high technology. Think of a rocket that will make it through the atmosphere, and you keep going until you think of ways to build communities in space—oh my God, there is no limit to it. And so we did Centers for Advanced Technology on imaging and on other things. That’s all in a book I wrote: The New York Idea. He should pick that program up and follow it, and he will. And he will use it. He’ll profit from both the things I did right and the things I did wrong.
WO: You said earlier no feelings of pride have invaded you this morning after the historic election. But surely it’s not lost on you, great student of history and things political, that none of your predecessors—Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, Nelson Rockefeller—none of them ever had a son who became governor.
MC: Let me tell you what the most beautiful thing about that is. It’s not Mario Cuomo, and it’s not Andrew Cuomo at all. It’s Immaculata Cuomo and Andrea Cuomo who, in 1927, came to this country, uneducated in their Italian country where they were born, without a whole lot of money, without any particular skills. He, a laborer. She, doing what a woman could do—raise children, do the cooking, do the sewing, et cetera. And they lost a child by the name of Mario, incidentally, who died at the age of two, because they didn’t have health care. They didn’t hav
e a clinic. They didn’t have friends around them. And they were helped by a Jewish owner of an Italian American and Jewish grocery store in a place called South Jamaica, Queens. And they put my mother and father and an infant behind the store, and they worked there for seven years. And Mr. Kessler, the owner, turned it over to them, and so these poor Italian immigrants who did everything right, everything they were capable of doing at the simplest, most fundamental level, got a public education for their kids. And one of them became a governor! Oh my goodness! But now it’s the next generation, and a second one of them will become a governor, as he did last night! What it means is that this is a spectacular place, this is a spectacular country. This is a magnificent, unique home of opportunity for everybody: no matter how humble, no matter how miserable, no matter how little they come with, if they work hard, say their prayers, and get a little lucky, they can go all the way! That’s what this says. It’s not me. It’s not Andrew. It’s not the Cuomos. It’s America I celebrated last night.
WO: Governor, it’s become part of the popular lore that when your mother, Immaculata, heard about Lee Iacocca, she reproved you and said: “What’s the matter? You think you are very successful, you don’t know how to make a car?” What do you think she would have said to Andrew this morning? Or your father, Andrea, after whom Andrew is named? What would they think?
MC: Well, they would probably start talking about auguri, their way of saying “pride.” They would be proud, and they would talk to everyone around them and say, “See my son, see what he’s done!” They would be very, very happy about it. Unfortunately, only one of them was around when I got to be governor, and even then she was a little disappointed. Early on, when I went to my parents and said, “I am no longer going to be a lawyer; I want to be a politician,” they were very upset because they didn’t know anything about politics—except politicians were not to be trusted; it was a terrible business, et cetera. “All your life you’ve been good and decent. You are a nice lawyer, why should you do this thing?”
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