American Crisis

by Andrew Cuomo

  Masks became a political statement. President Trump would not encourage mask wearing, nor would he wear a mask himself. To him, if you wore a mask, you were a Democrat. Remember, the White House narrative was that this was only a blue-state problem. There was also a machismo element to the president’s message. If you wore a mask, you were weak. Real men didn’t wear masks. I’m sure he didn’t want to wear one because doing so would clearly demonstrate that COVID was a real problem, and that was the last thing Trump wanted to do.

  The mask was also a visible manifestation of government action, and Trump would never vindicate government action. Also, it wasn’t his idea. If it had been Trump’s idea, he might very well have accepted it. He could have red masks embossed with “Make America Great Again.”

  New York was the first state to seriously advocate for masks, which made it a Democratic idea and so political paralysis set in immediately. It was frustrating to know that such a simple thing could make such a big difference but had been mired in this hyper-political environment. Everyone now had access to masks. Why wouldn’t you wear one? It required so little, and you had so much to gain.

  We did everything we could to publicize the benefit of masks. I wanted to make mask wearing “cool.” My daughter Mariah led a PSA mask contest, and the winner’s ad would run on television.

  Mariah has my drive and functionality. She is purposeful and directed, creative and talented. She is a social media guru with a great public relations sense. She watches social media during the day and sends me texts alerting me to information I need to know and suggesting responses and strategies. I get a kick out of how protective Mariah is of me and how offended she becomes at hostile tweets or negative posts. I know how she feels because I felt the same way with my father. But the tweets only hurt me because they hurt Mariah.

  We had celebrities like Chris Rock and Rosie Perez do PSAs for mask wearing. Morgan Freeman, the voice of God, did a PSA. I was especially interested in getting younger people to wear them. Social media and advertising could help there. A mask should be emblematic of intelligent social action. We tried to appeal to people’s better angels: I wear a mask out of respect and caring for you, and you wear a mask out of respect and caring for me.

  Overall the initiative worked very well. We estimated 97 percent of the population was complying with the mask order. We didn’t mandate masks be worn all the time, only in public if you couldn’t socially distance and if you were going to come within six feet of a person. I thought that was entirely reasonable. Even as the numbers grew worse and other states started to spike, it was incredible how few states mandated masks. Republican governors were in a difficult position because they didn’t want to offend Trump. Trump was doing rallies with thousands of people, and few wore a mask. Herman Cain, a onetime presidential candidate and Trump supporter, would tragically die five weeks after attending one of those rallies maskless. I can only imagine the number of unnamed supporters who attended those rallies who met the same fate. In the midst of this, the White House was showing evidence of a split personality. Vice President Pence said people should wear a mask, and Trump’s CDC and FDA commissioners said people should wear a mask. But the president would have none of it.

  What was the conversation when Trump was with his health advisers? Did any one of them say, “Mr. President, you should be wearing a mask”? Or did the president say to them, “Don’t tell people to wear a mask”? I find it inconceivable that such a situation could even exist.

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  I NEVER BLAMED the president for not having enough ventilators in the national stockpile. However, he took my comments factually stating that there was a national shortage as a personal attack. And I understood full well the difficulty in procuring ventilators in the midst of a global shortage. What I did not expect was that FEMA, the main federal operating agency that can help states, would offer assistance, only to make the situation worse by involving us in a scam.

  When we contacted FEMA on the issue of ventilator procurement, they directed us to a company that would sell us ventilators for immediate delivery. FEMA did not offer to pay for the ventilators, but they would facilitate the procurement. We thanked them for their help and contracted with the company they recommended.

  The price that the company was charging for ventilators was outrageous. Each ventilator would cost on average more than $59,000. The pre-pandemic price of a ventilator was $15,000. But we believed lives were on the line and understood we had few alternatives.

  We agreed to the terms and signed an $86 million contract requiring a $69 million pre-payment with Yaron Oren-Pines’s company for delivery of 1,450 ventilators. Detecting possible fraud, banks in the United States and China froze the funds. At the same time, Oren-Pines began to warn of delivery complications and failed to arrange required inspections. We moved to cancel the contract and recovered $59 million. Not a single ventilator was delivered. To date we are in the midst of legal action to recoup the remaining $10 million, and law enforcement is reviewing the matter for possible prosecution.

  I have a top-flight team to protect every tax dollar. We wear a lapel pin I designed that has three hallmark principles: Performance, Integrity, Pride. The integrity protection team includes my counsel, Kumiki Gibson, special counsel Judy Mogul, and inspector general Letizia Tagliafierro. Kumiki is a top-shelf Harvard lawyer whom I met when she was counsel to Vice President Al Gore. Judy is a former federal prosecutor who practiced privately and is as sharp as they come. Letizia is a former assistant district attorney who worked with me in the attorney general’s office; as the state inspector general, she is the watchdog for the entire operation.

  When people ask me why New York was so much more advanced than any other state in its fight against the virus, my answer is simple. Besides the advantage of 19.5 million New Yorkers who were New York tough, no other state government had the talent that we had. My team is in many ways more talented than I am. I enjoy surrounding myself with people who are smarter and better than I am. Some people get defensive when the people around them are stronger and smarter. I don’t. I know my limitations and they are many. I know what I do well and I know my weaknesses. I want people on my team who complement one another and me. Melissa, Rob, and Stephanie really manage the whole operation. It gives me the freedom to focus on what I need to do without sacrificing a beat.

  The juxtaposition between my team and the White House operation could not be more stark. To further compound the federal incompetence, FEMA and the White House refused to honor an agreement made by the president himself. The customary arrangement is that a state reimburses FEMA for 25 percent of the total cost incurred by FEMA in assisting a state during an emergency. This 25 percent state allocation can be waived by the federal government, and it often is.

  When we were at the White House on April 21, I was on my way out of the West Wing when I ran into Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin. Secretary Mnuchin is a New Yorker, and I had known him tangentially. As we were standing in the hallway near the Roosevelt Room, Mnuchin informed me that they were considering waiving the requirement that New York State pay the 25 percent share of the FEMA cost. This was a positive gesture by the federal government and was surely warranted, because New York had paid a much higher cost for the COVID virus than any other state.

  “I just need the president to sign off,” he said.

  Jared Kushner was nearby, and Mnuchin suggested that we go back into the Oval Office to get the president’s sign-off, which we did. They called the president back into the Oval Office to meet with us; Mnuchin explained the situation, and the president authorized the waiver. Secretary Mnuchin estimated this would save New York State approximately $300 million. The president told me that I should announce it publicly. We left the White House, went to the airport, and flew back to New York. I was grateful for the assistance. It didn’t make any sense that the state that endured the m
ost pain and death had to pay because it endured the most pain and death. The reprieve made my trip worthwhile, and we agreed that we would publicly announce it immediately. That evening I did my briefing and among other news thanked the president for the waiver and the $300 million in savings for New York.

  Several weeks later, I was in Albany when Robert Mujica, the budget director, came in with the FEMA agreement, which was requiring that we pay the 25 percent match. I told him it was a mistake and that he should contact FEMA. Several days later he came back and said that FEMA refused to waive the 25 percent. I called the FEMA administrator, Peter Gaynor, and he said he had no knowledge of the 25 percent waiver. I asked Gaynor if the president was authorized to make such decisions—because he had. I told Gaynor that when I was a cabinet secretary, the president did have authority to make such decisions and that the president’s decisions usually mattered. I suggested Gaynor call the president and call me back. I told him if he wanted more information, he could google it by punching in “Trump Cuomo FEMA.” I never heard back from Gaynor.

  I then called the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and told him of the disconnect, and he said he would look into it. To this day, FEMA has refused to grant a waiver that the president agreed to. How do I explain it? I can’t. It is either a level of operational incompetence beyond my imagination or just more smoke and mirrors. The White House wanted positive publicity for helping New York, and they received it when I made the announcement in my briefing, but there was no incentive to follow through. Jim Malatras was right: It was all a scene from a reality TV show. In any case, to me it was the perfect metaphor of the federal government’s role in this crisis.

  APRIL 22 | 5,526 NEW CASES | 15,599 HOSPITALIZED | 474 DEATHS

  “Make no mistake, this is a profound moment in history.”

  GREAT PROFESSIONALS HAVE DEDICATED THEIR lives to the field of public health. And there are great institutions dedicated to educating the field. However, it shocked me to see how little public health operational capacity we actually have. I hope the COVID crisis will turn what has been a largely academic field into an operationally oriented profession to the scale necessary. Public health threats are no longer theoretical; they now exist in the real and practical world.

  The systems we had to design on a moment’s notice must now be institutionalized. Beth Garvey, my special counsel, and I spent hours writing the state manual on quarantine back in March. Now what I call the T&T twins—testing and tracing—must be studied and implemented. Our initial scramble was to assemble the testing programs, but the tracing operation is what makes the testing work to reduce the viral transmission rate. The concept is to debrief individuals who test positive to find out whom they have been in contact with in order to find out whom they might have infected. They call tracers “disease detectives.” The function predates COVID; they were used in previous outbreaks such as Ebola. The CDC has an entire division of dedicated disease detectives who travel the world. The scale of the operation we would now need for COVID made it a much different undertaking.

  There were only so many balls I could juggle, and my team was on the verge of collapse from exhaustion; they often worked fourteen-hour days under normal circumstances, and the past months had been anything but normal. Larry Schwartz was a former top aide to me. I called Larry and asked him to come back and help. I hated doing it because I knew that if I asked, he couldn’t say no; he was that good a friend. I’d known him for thirty years. I told him that he could stay with me in the mansion and that we would “hang out” and have fun. Larry laughed: He knew hanging out was not in the cards for either of us.

  Larry came to Albany and met my dog, Captain. Before COVID, it was just me and Captain. There were people at the mansion whom Captain interacted with. Captain loves Carol Radke, who has worked at the mansion since before my father was governor. The entire crew at the mansion had to adjust to a full house during COVID and took extra special care of my girls. Carol takes good care of me but better care of Captain. Captain and I were the pack members. I was the boss, and he was not the boss. That was the social order. It was simple. Captain is a Northern Inuit, and the order of the pack is important to him.

  Then the three girls arrived and were in the house all the time: meals, mornings, nights. Captain’s world changed. This disrupted his perception of the pack and his place in the pack.

  Now Larry was added to the pack. And Larry was another male. Larry appeared afraid of Captain, and Captain adopted a somewhat hostile posture toward Larry. Larry worked late and would not return to the mansion, from the capitol, until midnight or 1:00 A.M. By that time, I was usually upstairs. The conundrum was that Captain was still downstairs, and Larry and Captain had a number of encounters. I would set up blockades to allow Larry free passage without encountering Captain, but never with much success. Captain weighs about a hundred pounds and is quite resourceful. I could hear the commotion from my bedroom.

  Altercations with Larry aside, Captain’s personality changed dramatically with the girls at home. Before the girls came, Captain was a “dog’s dog.” He was energetic and loved to be outside. He would chase squirrels and rabbits, although never catching them. He would bark when strangers came to the house. He had a cool detachment about him. There’s an Italian Renaissance concept called sprezzatura: a grace and aloofness that is most appealing. He exuded strength and confidence in his very presence.

  But then the girls smothered Captain with kisses, hugs, sweetness, and constant cooing. Captain has become a tender, loving couch potato. Michaela is the main cause of Captain’s personality transformation. She has a hypnotic charisma. Now Captain doesn’t want to go outside, and he won’t give a squirrel a second look. All he does is walk over to the girls and put his head on their laps so they can whisper sweet nothings in his ear.

  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the kinder, sweeter, gentler Captain. But I tell the girls they broke him. They say, no, they fixed him.

  Meanwhile, Larry coming back to Albany was a significant asset. He took over the contact tracing portfolio, working with Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, and his Bloomberg Philanthropies along with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, to establish a unified system in New York. We developed a contact tracing system for every county to use, and a training program for the thousands of new contact tracers. We established a benchmark minimum number of contact tracers every region of the state would need. We established a formula requiring 30 per 100,000 residents, but the formula allowed adjustment to the required number of tracers if the infection rate changed.

  With Mayor Bloomberg’s help, over the next weeks New York developed the most sophisticated tracing program in the country, and we were soon in a position to offer the training online to any state that needed it. The tracing program is run by the state but operated by local governments. Statewide we have about fifteen thousand tracers working as of August 2020. It has allowed us to reduce the infection rate, identify originators of the virus, and attack hot spots before they become dangerous.

  Every morning, either at the mansion or in my office in the state capitol, I would go over charts with new positive cases, analyzed by region, per county, and sometimes per zip code. Having this data was invaluable. It informed our reopening strategy. One day in mid-June, our zip code data would show an uptick in central New York, specifically Oswego and Cayuga Counties. The Oswego County Health Department had traced three new positive COVID-19 cases to an apple-packaging plant in the county. Over the next days, the New York State Department of Health and the local health department sent staff to test all employees and close the plant to conduct a deep clean. The team set up a free testing site at an apartment complex where a number of the employees and their families lived. The effort was successful; an initial three cases led to eighty-two total positive cases tied to the cluster, and the local and state health departments’ quick action ensured the cluster didn’t
grow or spread into the broader community.

  APRIL 24 | 8,130 NEW CASES | 14,258 HOSPITALIZED | 422 DEATHS

  “An outbreak anywhere is an outbreak everywhere.”

  (A. J. PARKINSON)

  PEOPLE WERE WATCHING THE BRIEFINGS not only across the country but across the world. I was deluged with phone calls, emails, texts, and letters from every state in the nation and countries I have never even visited. It was remarkable and touching. Across the country, people were expressing their support for New York in any way they could. People sent baked goods, poems, prayers.

  I received literally thousands of masks from across the country. Some masks were handmade. Some were incredible works of art. Many were sent with beautiful letters and cards. It was a daily boost to me, like a B12 shot for the soul. I asked my staff to put all the masks up on a large board in the front of the press conference room so we could unveil it during one of our briefings. We did that. It was huge and magnificent. We called it “Self-Portrait of America.” It showed we are not alone. We are a mosaic of people from different places, with different strengths, but there is so much beauty in our unity.

  I never stopped being touched by how supportive people were. I mentioned to someone that I was a fan of the Fonz from Happy Days, and next thing I know, Henry Winkler called. Hillary Clinton called to check in and see if there was anything she could do to help. Robert Redford wrote to say they were watching me out in Utah. Winston Churchill’s granddaughter, the artist Edwina Sandys, inscribed a copy of her book about her grandfather, Winston Churchill: A Passion for Painting: “In great admiration for the inspirational leadership and efficiency you are radiating in this ‘Your finest hour!’ ”