“You have Mayor Daley’s looks, Ted Kennedy’s luck, Jane Byrne’s brains, and Hugh Carey’s deficit.”
Finnerty warned me, however. He said, “Governor, they won’t make it easy. The Irish aren’t happy unless they’re confronted by dilemmas or creating them. They are people who enjoy swimming at the tops of waves they’ve created by their own turbulence.”
To illustrate the point, he told me a story. It’s about an old Irish fisherman who fished the lakes of Mayo and, no matter how badly anyone else did, always came in over the allowed quota of fish.
Nobody knew how he did it, least of all the Ministry of Fisheries in Dublin.
One afternoon, on the day before the opening of the fishing season, the old man and a brand new English-educated inspector from the Ministry of Fisheries found themselves sitting next to each other in the local pub.
The old man looked over at the young inspector and said, “And would you like to start the season with me tomorrow?”
The inspector said, “Do you know who I am?”
The old man said, “Yes, I do.”
The inspector said, “Well then, I’d love to.”
The old man picked up the inspector the next morning, put him in his rowboat, rowed out to the middle of the lake, put down his oars, looked over at the young fellow, reached under his seat, took out a stick of dynamite, lit it, and threw it overboard. Boom! Dead fish came floating to the top of the lake. “Good grief, man, you can’t do that!” the inspector said; “you’ve violated three statutes and six regulations with me looking right at you!”
While the consternated inspector fumed and reeled off violations, the old Irishman leaned down, took another stick of dynamite, lit it, held it a second or two, leaned over, handed it to the inspector, and said, “And tell me now, do you want to fish, or do you want to talk?”
I have chosen to talk. I hold no grudge against the Irish because, in 1929, a stockbroker named Jeremiah Aloysius O’Grady ended my father’s career on Wall Street.
O’Grady, you see, was a Fordham graduate who apparently knew more about Jesuit philosophy than he did about arithmetic or the stock market. And so he jumped out a window one day . . . and landed on my father’s pushcart!
Before he passed away, however, O’Grady swore he had nothing against Italians . . . and was just aiming for the street!
In the well-heeled audience of more than 1,000 Irishmen were the legendary federal judge William Hughes Mulligan and former New York Governor Malcolm Wilson, both renowned Fordham orators who insisted they had never heard the O’Grady story before. They roared.
He was in rare form perfect early one morning after a breakfast at 21.
WILLIAM O’SHAUGHNESSY: Governor, at the 21 Club breakfast this morning, with all the moguls here assembled, they called you the “great philosopher-statesman of the American nation.” One of the fat cats said that, but they also let slip that it is your birthday. How old are you?
MARIO CUOMO: I’m much older than I was when I was born, you see, because that’s when I was beginning. Now, I’m beginning to hit my stride. So, I’m old enough to know better, and probably, because I’ve learned to know better, this is the last interview I’ll ever do with you, O’Shaughnessy! [laughter].
I once told Mario I fell in love at a horse sale in Elmira. Mario immediately replied, “Well, I hope with a horse, Bill!”
Mario loved to joust with my former father-in-law, the late B. F. Curry Jr., a prominent Westchester car dealer, one of the best-known in the nation. “Papa” Curry, as Mario and everyone in our family called him, was, shall we say, quite conservative politically. Make that very conservative. But he very much liked the governor on a personal level. Mr. Curry would often refer to Mario as a “modern-day Robin Hood”—a nice guy who takes from the rich to give to the poor. Mario, when they first met, immediately dubbed him “Paul Bunyan.” “Papa” Curry was a strapping six-foot-five-inch-tall man with a big, booming, resonant voice. (He was also a 2-handicap golfer at the fabled Winged Foot Golf Club, something the governor also kidded him about on several occasions.) They loved to have a little “sport” with each other.
One day my phone rang.
“Brother Bill, you’ve got to hear this. I called ‘Papa’ Curry and said, ‘This is the governor. I’m in Albany working on bills the legislature sent over for the governor’s signature. I thought you’d like to know that I’m vetoing that one the car dealers were lobbying against because it’s flawed.”
“Papa” took a moment to respond. Then he said into the phone: “Well thanks, Mario, but you’re still a foul ball, politically.”
The exasperated governor said, “I’m trying, Brother Bill, I’m trying.”
We had a hell of a laugh about that one. And here is a little clip from one of our radio interviews:
WILLIAM O’SHAUGHNESSY: You’ve given me one unsettling bit of news though: that Andrew was a rugby player as a youngster. Is that a sport young Italian guys from Queens take up? Rugby?
MARIO CUOMO: I don’t even know how you say “rugby” in Italian, O’Shaughnessy!
Mario sometimes started a speech in this way:
I received a marvelous and memorable introduction the other night as I was preparing to give a speech.
Actually it was by the mayor of a city in upstate New York who was—to put it mildly—unhappy with my state budget.
He referred to me as a “Gov-er-nor.” Then he slowly read for the audience a dictionary definition: “Gov-er-nor: a device attached to a machine to assure it does not achieve maximum efficiency!”
Well, at least the crowd loved it!
Sometimes, actually quite often, the governor liked to joke at my expense:
I don’t know how many people know Bill O’Shaughnessy, but he provides outstanding evidence and represents a perfect example of the extraordinary opportunity allowed in this country. All you need is a good face, a head of hair, you don’t even have to wear socks, and you can make money in Westchester County. Here’s a man who, with good looks, goodness, and a 1920s suit, has won himself prominence in places like 21. Only in America. That was just one of the many success stories I was thinking of as I saw the Statue of Liberty—talk about your teeming refuse!
Not everyone was over the moon about the man. Our Westchester radio stations once lost a lucrative fast-food advertising account when we received word from its Madison Avenue ad agency that “We’re sorry we have to cancel your advertising, but one of our major franchisees is not exactly ‘crazy’ about the governor, and they’ve informed us, in no uncertain terms, that this individual doesn’t want to do anything to ‘help’ Mario Cuomo.”
And on another occasion, during the chaos of the Elliot Spitzer–David Paterson era in Albany, we lost another pretty substantial chunk of advertising support—after an eighteen-year relationship—from a New York state entity for much the same reason.
I view these episodes as a small price to pay for Mario Cuomo’s friendship. In fact, I them as a badge of honor.
6
The Best of Mario Cuomo
In Governor Andrew Cuomo’s recent memoir All Things Possible, which came out in 2015 amid political turmoil and distractions (everyone expected a “campaign” book, but there are actually some very candid, revealing, deeply personal—and honest—passages!), Mario’s son and heir has a fascinating chapter about the tension, uncertainty, and preparation leading up to the famous keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. The current governor recalls that his father’s legendary San Francisco speech, subject to many rewrites and much massaging by Andrew, Tim Russert, and Mario himself, was “The Best of Mario Cuomo,” an opinion shared by many. Mario never thought so. I heard him say countless times, “It wasn’t one of my best.” But the great James Reston was among those who were greatly taken by what is undeniably Mario’s most famous speech. Scotty Reston called it a “brilliant speech . . . with every word, gesture, expression and pause in harmony.”
William S
afire, in his excellent collection Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, chose the Iona College speech of June 3, 1984, when the governor spoke over the heads of the graduates to their parents. “We have for a full lifetime taught our children to be go-getters. Can we now say to them that if they want to be happy they must be go-givers?” Safire, a Pulitzer Prize winner for the New York Times, thus elevated this address above the governor’s better-known “Shining City” speech at the Democratic convention and his brave and controversial Notre Dame talk about abortion and the responsibilities of Catholic public officials.
My candidate for The Best of Mario Cuomo occurred on an early spring day in 2005 when Mario addressed the prestigious Omega Society at the New York Sheraton (site of many of his campaign kick-offs and victory parties).
On that April day, the governor faced a ballroom full of brilliant and thoughtful “thinkers, searchers, and seekers.” They weren’t disappointed as he took the lectern. Listen again to his observations about the Roman Church that he loved. It’s almost as if ten years ago Mario was predicting the coming of Pope Francis. Here is the entire speech, “Meditation on Ultimate Values.”
When I was asked by a representative of Omega to give the closing remarks following the galaxy of distinguished individuals you have already heard, I said I probably could not add much to the intelligent, subtle and splendid articulations they were sure to deliver.
The representative said, “You probably can’t, but as a former three-term governor and still-active political voice, you may be able to tell us something about how politics and government might affect our search for meaning, truth and a sustainable future.”
I agreed to try.
Actually, I attempted to do something similar some years ago when we were in the midst of another troubling period that created greater-than-usual uncertainty, agitation and anxiety. Another period when people’s search for meaningfulness intensified.
On that occasion the title of the conference was “Who (or What) is God?” with “God” being the undefined and undefinable label given to ultimate meaning and direction.
I addressed the question then, as I do now, certainly not as a scholar, or a theologian, or an apologist, but as an ordinary New Yorker—from Queens, from asphalt streets and stickball, from a poor and middle-class neighborhood—who made a living, helped raise a family, and found his way, somewhat improbably, into the difficult world of politics.
I do it as a person who struggles to keep a belief in God that he inherited; a Catholic raised in a religion closer to the peasant roots of the simple Sunday Mass practitioners than to the high intellectual traditions of the Talmudic scholars, elegant Episcopalian homilists, or abstruse Jesuit teachers.
The simple folk of South Jamaica, Queens, who came from the tenements and attached houses on Liverpool Street, perceived the world then as a sort of cosmic basic training course, filled by God with obstacles and traps to weed out the recruits unfit for eventual service in the heavenly host.
The obstacles were everywhere. The prevailing moral standard was almost impossibly high: If you liked it, it was probably a sin; if you liked it a lot it was probably a mortal sin.
Their fate on Earth was to be “the poor, banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears,” until by some combination of grace and good works—and luck—they escaped final damnation.
For many, if not most of them, their sense of who or what God is was reflected in the collective experience of people who through most of their history had little capacity to learn from the exquisite musings of philosophers and theologians, and little chance to concern themselves with helping the poor or healing the world’s wounds.
They were the poor, the wounded.
It was a cold voice these people heard from God on Beaver Road, next to a cemetery across the street from St. Monica’s Catholic Church, where a famous ex-jockey, one of the homeless winos, froze to death sleeping in a large wooden crate.
No doubt there were others in America—millions indeed—who felt content with the world as they found it.
But for most of the people in my old neighborhood, it was hard to see God’s goodness in the pathetic faces of the customers in our small grocery store who pleaded with my father for bread, and maybe some cold cuts—until the next relief check came in.
It got harder still, during and after the Second World War, when the best we could say about victory was that the new terror was put down . . . for a while.
And a gold star in a window announced that someone’s son had been killed, his mother’s prayers at St. Monica’s never answered.
It was hard for them to believe God spoke at Hiroshima either.
Who could blame these people for feeling that if God was not dead, he must surely be looking in another direction?
Others reveled in what they believed was the cultural liberation and enlightenment of the sixties, but for most of the people of Saint Monica’s the sixties were remembered for Vietnam and the sadness memorialized by Simon and Garfunkel: “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio—our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.”
No more John F. Kennedy, no more Martin Luther King. No more Bobby Kennedy. Nothing to believe in. Nothing to grab hold of. Nothing to uplift us.
People weren’t asking, “Who is God?” They were asking, “Is there a God?”
The same question many were asking after 9/11 and after a preemptive war in Iraq in the name of liberation that killed more than 40,000 human beings, most of them innocent civilians; and after Rwanda and the grotesquely lethal tsunami.
The same question many ask today when a child dies in a crib—inexplicably.
Many of us find a way to go forward resigned to a world that has no answers to the biggest questions.
For some of us, however, the burden becomes intolerable; the absurdity of a world without explanation is almost too much to live with.
Our intellects push to find a rationale, an excuse . . . anything to take the place of despair . . . some fundamental belief or belief system, some dominant purpose in life—an absorbing activity, a benign crusade, a consuming passion for romantic sex, or music or art, something larger than ourselves to believe in.
If the answer cannot be compelled by our intellect, we plead for an answer that, at least, we could choose to believe without contradicting that intellect.
We yearn for more than just a God of prohibition. More than just a God of guilt and punishment.
More than John Calvin’s chilling conclusion that God loves Jacob but hates Esau.
For us, it must be a God like the one that was promised in the New Testament: a God of mercy, a God of peace, a God of hope.
In the end, to make any sense, it must be a God of love!
Mostly, we want a God because we sense that the accumulating of material goods and the constant seeking to satisfy our petty appetites—for a flash of ecstasy or popularity or even temporary fame—is nothing more than a desperate, frantic attempt just to fill the shrinking interval between birth and eternity with something!
In my old neighborhood, despite the doubts, the simple and sincere preachments of the pre–Vatican II Catholic Church, and the prodding of uneducated parents whose moral pleadings and punishments were as blunt and tough as the calluses on their hands, were still given a degree of apparent respect. Probably this was only because there seemed to be nothing more intellectually satisfying to put in their place.
In the fifties, some of us were suddenly gifted: We were presented with the enlightened vision and profound wisdom of an extraordinary man.
A scientist, a paleontologist. A person who understood evolution. A soldier who knew the inexplicable evil of the battlefield. A scholar who studied the ages. A philosopher, a theologian, a believer. And a great priest.
Teilhard de Chardin heard our lament, and he answered us. He reoriented our theology and rewrote its language and linked it, inseparably, wit
h science. His wonderful book The Divine Milieu, dedicated to “those who love the world,” made negativism a sin.
Teilhard glorified the world and everything in it. He taught us to love and respect ourselves as the pinnacle of God’s creation to this point in evolution. He taught us how the whole universe—even the pain and imperfection we see—is sacred. He taught us in powerful, cogent and persuasive prose, and in soaring poetry. He integrated his profound understanding of evolution with his religious understanding of the “Divine Milieu.” He envisioned a viable and vibrant human future: “We are all foot soldiers in the struggle to unify the human spirit despite all the disruptions of conflict, war and natural calamities.”
“Faith,” he said, “is not a call to escape the world, but to embrace it.” Creation is not an elaborate testing ground with nothing but moral obstacles to surmount but an invitation to join in the work of restoration; a voice urging us to be involved in actively working to improve the world we were born to—by our individual and collective efforts making it kinder, safer and more loving. Repairing the wounded world, helping it move further and further upward to the “Pleroma,” St. Paul’s word for the consummation of human life. The Omega point, where the level of consciousness and civility would eventually converge, having infiltrated the whole universe, elevated to the highest level of morality. A new universe, a peerless one; one we could help create by our own civilizing behavior.
Teilhard’s vision challenges the imagination, but it has achieved sufficient scientific plausibility to be given cautious but respectful attention by celebrated intellectuals like Robert Wright, a scientist and a declared agnostic. (See his book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.)
Actually, I would have been less influenced by Teilhard’s exquisite and moving enlightenment if I thought it was reserved for people like Robert Wright who are equipped to understand the scientific complexities and nuances that he weaves through his theology.
Mario Cuomo Page 11
