If New York is a Family, Mario Cuomo was its Soul

Predictably, Ed Koch beat Mario Cuomo in the New York Times obit contest. Until the Times changed it a day later, the front-page introduction to the Cuomo obit described him as a “prickly personality.” Koch’s 2013 obit branded him  “brash, shrewd and colorful” in its headline. Ask anyone who knew both about which one was more “prickly”.

As usual, the Times was channeling Koch, a pallbearer at the funeral of the Times executive editor who managed the coverage of the two (Mario doesn’t appear on the list of attendees). Endorsed by the Times for a fourth term in 1989 after the worst scandals in modern history, Koch taped a 2007 interview for his favorite paper that was sealed until his death—a highly unusual license to rant. In it, he addressed the Cuomo he ran against four times. “You prick,” Koch spit at the camera. Then he pounded Cuomo again for posters he said appeared in Queens in the 1977 mayoral race—“vote for Cuomo not the homo”—though there’s not a shred of evidence that Mario had anything to do with it. The Times repeated this urban legend in its obituary, a smear without a source beyond Koch himself, who first claimed he'd seen the posters 12 years after the election.

There have been other, telling, farewells to Mario. Most of them have been about his poetic mouth, which often seemed directly connected to the hearts of those within its reach. Self conscious Cuomo thought people were focused on another body part, his “baggy ears,” which he actually used to listen, one of his and his son’s many joined pleasures. Sometimes, when we were just chatting, I’d go on and on with one of them and then abruptly pose a question just to see if they were paying attention. My words would come back at me as if they were recorded. As eloquent as Mario was, he also knew how to be sagely quiet, taking it all in without giving any of himself away. Son Andrew echoes his intaking silences.

But Mario’s lifeblood organ was his soul—a reservoir of conscience battling a conniving world. He never left Albany while governor, I always thought, because he feared he might not be able to force himself to come back, despite an oath he said he often repeated in his mind. He was no saint in a brothel, but he might have been one of the few at the Capitol who knew what sin was. And he had to make the government work, like a chef with nothing but tawdry leftovers to cook.

Chained to a wide Republican majority in the state senate, Mario flattened income taxes, built a record number of upstate prison cells, froze welfare payments, and finessed budgets with band aids and surgical social cuts. He said he taught his son the politics of the practical, but it was a lesson so distant from his soul that he rued it later. I wrote in Mario’s first term that when he died, the state would name a prison after him, but he came to wish he hadn’t doubled the prison population and was pleased when his son started emptying them.

He became the prison builder to compensate for his staunch opposition to the death penalty, which became the hammer Koch used to beat him in a primary, runoff and general election in 1977, when the Son of Sam, a serial killer who captivated the city with mad murders, was arrested in August. Remarkably, at a time when death was a bipartisan bromide, Mario stood against the wind for 12 years, until the governor who beat him, George Pataki, could gleefully welcome its return. If we are looking for a list of Mario’s accomplishments, start with an end to official revenge killings, a veto of the soul.

Continue on to his Notre Dame speech, when every word was a prayer for tolerance, a careful reconciliation of a church he loved with a constitution he loved at its point of collision, the abortion issue. “We know,” he said to Catholics, “that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might try someday to force theirs’ on us.” The convention speech he gave in San Francisco in 1984 was not so much “the tale of two cities” as it was the tale of two Cuomos—the one his soul yearned for, which he could express on a national stage, and the one who governed New York, where every dollar was a decision.

He could be as courageous when he left Albany as he was cautious in his second floor office, where he lived two-thirds of each day in a swamp of paper, a phone attached to one of those huge ears. His hero was Saint Thomas More, the “heavenly patron of statesmen and politicians” who, as chancellor to Henry VIII, was beheaded for refusing to put the king at the helm of the church. But the only way Mario could get himself executed in Albany was to refuse to pass a budget, an annual trash heap of deals.

It was courage alone that made him governor. He was lieutenant governor as 1982 approached and Gov. Hugh Carey’s expected departure opened the door for him. But Rupert Murdoch used the New York Post to literally draft Koch for governor, just a few months after he’d been re-elected mayor. Koch was 50 points ahead in early polls. The bonanza of real estate and Wall Street money was tumbling into Koch coffers. David Garth, the campaign guru who’d promised to manage Mario’s media, switched camps, casting Cuomo as such a loser he might not even get the votes at the state convention necessary to put him on the ballot. Twenty-four-year old Andrew managed a delegate triumph and months later Mario rode the minority vote to a stunning win. 

I was in Syracuse at that state convention and in San Francisco for the Democratic National Convention. I wrote scorching copy about Mario and Andrew over decades and was still the only reporter I could see at Mario’s 82nd birthday at the Executive Mansion in June. While governor, Mario had gone many months at times refusing to talk to me, a sulk that would eventually become a smile again. I got the smile one last time at the party, a beam really, the embrace of old combatants who understood the tug of war now in a way neither did when they were on the battlefield. He was so lean he was fragile. I was so sick I was in a wheelchair. There was already the whiff of pending demise in the air but he was content, allowing Matilda, Chris and Andrew to deliver the family speeches.

It was another of his blessed silent moments, listening for the welcoming of his Lord.           

Wayne Barrett covered the Cuomos for nearly four decades, primarily for the Village Voice.