WO: The Boston Globe called you the great philosopher-statesman of the American nation. Did you ever get the feeling you’d like to get in there and save your Church?
MC: No, no. I’m too weak to do a lot of the things I’d love to be able to do. It would be wonderful if we could all get one more shot at it, at one point be given the opportunity to go back and do it over. Imagine how much better you could do it. And that’s the way we should feel about the Church now. We should feel the Church is invited to have a new day. A new era of the Church. If you could find the right person to lead it, then wonderful things can happen to our religion and to the world affected by that religion.
WO: Governor, speaking of a final shot, you gave an exceptional interview with New York magazine about sometimes a friend, sometimes not so much a friend, Ed Koch. Would you like one final comment on the man?
MC: Final word on Ed Koch? I’ll give you one final word. I wrote something; can I read it to you, Bill?
WO: We’d love to hear it, sir.
MC: “Everyone who has ever sat in the magnificence of Temple Emmanuel cannot be unmoved by the dazzling and soaring beauty that surrounds them. Some of our great city’s greatest citizens have chosen it as the platform for their last goodbyes, as did Ed Koch on Monday, February 4, 2013. I knew Ed Koch for most of the quarter of a century that we both became involved in politics. During those years we had our ups and downs, but no politician I know ever equaled Koch’s mastery of the media. All of it—television, radio, newspapers, public appearances. It made him, perhaps, the best-known political leader in New York City’s history. That was made clearer by the unprecedented media coverage his passing received. He deserved to be well known. Ed devoted his life to two great loves: the world of politics and his family. He spent his entire adult life in public service as a soldier, mayor, congressman, writer of books and columns. In the end he was more than a uniquely honored mayor. He was an institution that became an ineradicable part of our city’s history, like the Statue of Liberty and the great bridges. New Yorkers will never stop answering his question, which was ‘How Am I Doing?’ And they’ll answer it with their reply. ‘You did good, Ed. You did good!’ ”
WO: Governor, I couldn’t talk you into running for pope, but you’ve given us some great gifts, as you always do. I’m glad you’re a friend of this radio station, sir. Thank you.
MC: Thank you for having me once again, Brother Bill.
9
Early Commentaries about Mario
We’ve broadcast many editorials and commentaries about Mario on WVOX. This was the very first one, on June 22, 1982. I called it “Reality with a Red Rose.”
In 1982 the race for governor of New York was wide open. Hugh Carey was not seeking reelection, and Mario M. Cuomo, the articulate, graceful lieutenant governor, decided to make the run, as did Edward I. Koch, who had beaten Cuomo five years earlier to become mayor of New York City. This set up a bruising primary battle within the Democratic Party.
But first came the state convention in June of 1982, at which the party regulars and the Democratic establishment regulars backed Koch. But Cuomo won enough votes to force that historic primary.
Our thoughts the first week of summer are upstate in Syracuse, where Mario Cuomo fights for his political life and for the soul of the Democratic Party. In this task, he will come up against Edward Irving Koch, who is the mayor of New York. The bosses and elders of the Democratic Party are almost certain to designate Koch to run for governor. He is colorful, a media event, a winner as they see it, and he is quick, diverting, and funny. Koch is also cutting and cruel. He plays to the worst instincts of people with his pandering and vengeance in the matter of killing sanctioned by the state known as the death penalty.
In other times, delegates to this state convention would bring forth Franklin Roosevelt or Herbert Lehman or Averell Harriman or Alfred Emanuel Smith. But it is 1982, and the Democratic Party is just as confused and lost as the rest of us. And so it will choose Koch as the “official” designee, because David Garth, the media manipulator and political wizard, assures them Koch is a stronger media event. His Honor Mayor Koch will raise millions from his realtor friends in New York. Not as much as he saved them. But they will not forget what he has done for them or what he can still do to them even if he should lose the race for governor.
We’re for the other man, Mario Matthew Cuomo, the lieutenant governor. He speaks in paragraphs while Koch speaks in headlines. He makes sense while Koch makes jokes. He makes us think, while Koch makes news. He talks of love and reconciliation, while Koch talks of vengeance and punishment.
Koch is the best horse David Garth has ever had. But William Haddad, the Cuomo campaign director, faces the same problem we have now in trying to tell you about Cuomo the mediator, the conciliator, who is like nothing we’ve ever seen in the body politic.
It is almost impossible to package this fine, bright man, the philosopher whose name is laden with too many vowels. But as we’ve been telling you, Cuomo has been in Westchester a lot in recent months, and we detect the old stirrings again among the party faithful here. Grandmotherly Miriam Jackson is moving around our home heath again, under her sunbonnet, and using Yiddish phrases to tell people about this son of Italian immigrant parents who would be governor. And Samuel George Fredman, the famous matrimonial lawyer, who is himself a decent man in a murky calling, accused Cuomo of being a “mensch.” “A ‘mensch’?” said Cuomo, “how nice; that’s the way you lose!”
Mario Cuomo stood there at the Mulino restaurant in White Plains the other night in a baggy, rumpled suit with a rose on his lapel and a lawyer’s vest. His watch looks like a Timex deluxe. As he began to speak to the Westchester Democrats, the orchestra leader reached over and tried to smooth the jacket pocket on Cuomo’s blue suit. The only style the man has is in his mind and on his face. Even Fredman, who is a master politician, is stumped. “Cuomo is a real, decent man. I want people to know him for what he is,” Fredman said.
Later, Cuomo appeared at a party for Dick Ottinger. And Gary Hart, the senator from Colorado who wants to be president of the United States, stood waiting while Cuomo spoke. Although Hart has been around a lot, you could see him warm to Cuomo.
It happens everywhere whenever someone stops to actually listen to the man. It happened again at a dinner for four hundred people who had come to honor the Reverend Calvin Sampson, pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in New Rochelle. Jesse Jackson, the preacher, was the guest speaker, and Ossie Davis, a marvelous human being and neighbor of this radio broadcasting station, was to introduce Jesse Jackson. Jackson and Davis are as strong in front of a crowd as any two men in America. And then a tired Cuomo approached the microphone to talk to these four hundred people who had come to be inspired, but not to hear a political speech. And up on the dais, Jesse Jackson whispered to Ossie Davis, “This Cuomo is no lightweight.”
We predict Koch and his Realtor friends will find this out soon enough. The smart-money guys, the movers and shakers at the bar of 21, tell you Koch will win. Their main slam against Cuomo is that “he won’t deal; you can’t do business with Mario.” But can you say anything better about a politician in this day and age?
“This is a hard business,” Cuomo the politician told us. “It’s easier when you have something to believe in,” Cuomo the philosopher reminded us. In this day of media events, practically every politician is something less in person than he appears to be on television. Reality, as they say, is a downer. But then along comes Cuomo with a red rose on his lapel, who is stronger, one on one, than his image on television.
All his fellow Democrats have to do is listen. Or they could just go ahead and let Garth pick the next governor. But word is getting around about this Cuomo. The old stirrings are there, in the Democratic Party, and in the land.
Here is another commentary, “Cuomo and the Moonbeams,” from September 20, 1982, that was widely circulated all across the state and quoted in several newspapers and political journal
s all across the nation.
On Sunday afternoon, Henry Kissinger, the rich Republican author and commentator and friend and counselor of Nelson Rockefeller, stood in the elegant living room of Peter Flanagan’s country house in Purchase, telling marvelous, witty stories. Mario Cuomo of Queens was in Bill Haddad’s disorganized office in New York, writing a last-minute appeal to registered voters of another political party, those Democrats who could make him their nominee for governor of New York.
Other candidates in this strange political season hire paid flacks, like David Garth and Howard Rubenstein, to string words together for them. The eager candidates then push these words through manufactured smiles. But Cuomo would handle and record his own appeal for the radio. The words on the tape would be coming out of his own mind.
But not even Cuomo the candidate knows how to capture Cuomo the man in thirty seconds. And so yesterday, the words came across the paper off his pen—tight, precise, factual, and dull. One hundred neat little words aimed at convincing you that Ed Koch is a good, colorful mayor who would be a terrible governor.
On his feet talking to poor people, blacks, Hispanics, or a man out of work, Cuomo is as good as we have in this country today. He reaches those people as precisely as Henry Kissinger zeroes in on the rarefied wavelength of Peter Flanagan’s rich, conservative, country-squire neighbors here in Westchester. “There is a place for believers,” Cuomo says. It is as thrilling as anything the Madison Avenue crowd could push together for this final week. “The Democratic Party is a party of hope. Koch preaches fear and speaks of death, while I speak of life!”
I asked Pete Hamill, the street-smart writer of the poor and of the city, if Cuomo was really as good as we have heard. “He’s better,” said Hamill, “but I’m afraid they can’t package this particular politician in thirty seconds. The trouble with the son of a bitch is he really believes.”
I don’t know what Mario Cuomo has decided to say in his final appeal to the Democrats of New York state. He may go with the dull litany he read aloud yesterday while Bill Haddad stood over him with a stopwatch, counting off the precious seconds, up to thirty. I hope he will just look up from the paper and lean into the microphone and say he has done what he could to help this party find its soul and now it’s up to you. “There is a place for believers,” he should tell them. “There is hope!”
A lot of people are rooting for Cuomo. Sam Fredman, the former chief of the Democratic Party in Westchester, who is now chairman of the Westchester Jewish Congress, heard the Italian from Queens defending Israel the other night. Fredman said, “I only wish I, as a Jew, could do as well.”
However, the Daily News, which would have you believe it is the paper of the people of New York, is against him. The New York Times, the best paper in the world, is for Koch too. And so is William Paley’s flagship television station, WCBS-TV. Each of these instruments of communication is run by people who do a lot of business in New York City, and an angry Mayor Koch could be somewhat dangerous to their corporate health. It has to do with property taxes and abatements and printing plants and labor unions; also with Phyllis and Robert Wagner and Frank Sinatra and Harry Helmsley and Lou Rudin and Steve Ross and Jimmy Robinson of Amex.
Hugh Leo Carey in his thousand-dollar suits is for Koch, sort of. I say this because Carey is of my tribe. I know him and I like him, and he didn’t look too good as he stood up with Koch on the TV last week.
It is probably futile to broadcast this kind of piece the Monday before the great primary. Anyway, I don’t believe in miracles anymore. And yet . . . and yet, this Italian from Queens nags at me. He is what politicians were before they wore thousand-dollar suits. He is what the party of our fathers used to be. But, forget it. The big Realtors in New York and Hugh Carey and the Times and WCBS-TV are never wrong. Koch will probably clobber Cuomo and his moonbeam crowd of liberals.
It is 1982, and the Democrats wear thousand-dollar suits just like those Republicans having drinks and fawning over Henry Kissinger up at Peter Flanagan’s house in Purchase. But the question lingers; is there a place for believers?
Cuomo beat Koch in that hard-fought primary, which set up a bruising race against millionaire Lewis Lehrman in the general election. Cuomo won that one too . . . and was on his way to becoming a national figure.
I wrote this next piece, “An Implausible New Year’s Day,” while going back down the Thruway to Westchester after a few drinks at Windham Mountain with former Governor Hugh Carey and his pal Kevin McGrath on the day Mario became governor, January 1, 1983.
It was beautiful and bright, that first day of 1983, out of season for winter. Even upstate New York threw off its dullness and gray pallor. When you saw Bella Abzug smiling and coloring her cheeks with extra rouge at the New Baltimore service area on the Thruway, you knew something special would happen this day farther on up the Hudson Valley.
This, then, is how I spent that New Year’s Day, and what I saw and heard. It started with Bella Abzug in a Thruway service area south of Albany. And it ended with Hugh Leo Carey, the former governor, drinking a Molson’s in a Windham ski lodge and saying he is glad he is not governor anymore.
Everything else that happened that day belonged to Mario Matthew Cuomo. The day was his, having been earned across eight years and thousands of nights and hundreds of lonely rides up and down the Thruway, with his butt against a small, flat, hard board to relieve the relentless pain in his back.
I have always been pretty straight with you and those seated around your breakfast table. But for almost a year now, as the listeners of these broadcasts know, it has been increasingly difficult for me to be entirely objective about a certain politician from Queens whose name ends in a vowel and who is a member of a political tribe quite different from my own. He is not a Republican.
So, up front: I like Mario Cuomo. I like his style. I like the stuff he is pushing off from his bright, fine mind and from his heart. I am nuts about his wife, who is a sheer, pure, natural force. And I like his family, too. I like almost everything about this attractive and appealing man, who is a politician the way the men of my father’s time imagined them to be. I like his music. Thus, any comments I might make on the radio about what happened in the capital city of our state when this man became governor ought to be greatly suspect. In point of fact, we were there on Saturday only because he prevailed in what he himself has called “an implausible pursuit.” Which means Cuomo was rejected by his own and rose from the rebuke of the elders of the Democratic Party, which he distinguished for so long. He won against their official designee, Edward I. Koch, the enormously popular mayor of New York, and then he went out and beat a man who spent $15 million to defeat him. You cannot spend more money to buy an election in the state of New York, and Lewis Lehrman may even sue his ad agency for not purchasing more time on the airwaves in the final week. As Cuomo said, his victory was implausible. But it happened.
And now in Albany, this day, there were American Indians and Mayor Koch and Engie Carey, who is married to Hugh, and flags and an orchestra and a chorus with young, black faces, and pomp and ceremony, and Al DelBello, the lieutenant governor. There were, however, no Realtors from New York. The big bankers and moneymen of the state and the powerbrokers and fat cat lawyers were elsewhere—so were all the people at the bar at 21 who had written off this man who became governor of the only state in the nation that really matters.
Hugh Carey was there Saturday in the Empire State Plaza, which he had graciously—and characteristically—renamed for Nelson Rockefeller. And Carey, in only a few hours, would be in the lodge at the base of Windham Mountain telling them why he is glad he is not governor anymore. No one believed him.
But earlier that afternoon, as he waited for the new governor, you had to remember that if Carey did nothing else, he kept this state from becoming New Jersey or Texas or Virginia, which are places in this country where they kill human beings with lethal injections as part of their tidy, most efficient, and functional capital punishment p
rograms.
As this day belonged to the man from Queens, an aide to the new governor, Tonio Burgos, gently and kindly helped Carey and his wife depart from the state capitol building before the crush. To the sound of cannon fire outside and flanked by state troopers, Cuomo came at last to become governor of New York. He first appeared in the far corner, in the far reaches of the great hall, and he moved through the crowd and down the aisle with the easy grace of the natural athlete that he is. And as the applause rose, he stopped and found a child with disabilities and a woman in a wheelchair, ignoring all the elders and powerbrokers grasping for his hand.
As he began his talk to the people of the state, many of us who have seen him on a flatbed truck in the Garment District or on lonely street corners were concerned that he might be distracted by the sophisticated electronic TelePrompTer or just overwhelmed by the moment and by the sweep and architecture of the building that bears Rockefeller’s name. And it did take him a while to get rhythm into his words and sentences in front of these three thousand people. Those who love the man knew he has sounded better out on the streets, and some in the audience began to despair when he seemed to be relying on [those] damn TelePrompTers to either side of him. He went on like this, without music and without poetry to his opening remarks.
And then . . . then Mario Cuomo became Mario Cuomo. It happened about five minutes into the speech: “I want to talk about the soul of the administration.” And then everything this man is exploded all over the room. “I would rather have laws written by Rabbi Hillel or by the good Pope John Paul II than by Darwin. I would rather live in a state that has chipped into the marble face of its capitol these memorable words of the great Rabbi: ‘If I am not for myself, who is for me? And if I am for myself alone, what am I?’ ” He then continued with “I am the child of immigrants” and went on to speak of his parents, going back sixty years, to tell how his mother, Immaculata, arrived at Ellis Island to join her husband, Andrea, who had come before her.
Mario Cuomo Page 22