I covered Mario Cuomo when he was New York’s secretary of state, lieutenant governor and governor for nearly 20 years, for three news organizations, and what a strange, infuriating and ultimately tragic experience it turned out to be.
To nearly all who knew Mario Cuomo well, he was an underachieving enigma — brilliant yet indecisive, accomplished as a lawyer yet riddled with self-doubt as a politician, an initially popular governor who was eventually booted from office for failing to use that popularity to lead New York in a direction that would have made this a better state.
Early in Cuomo’s service as lieutenant governor, Robert Morgado, Gov. Hugh Carey’s longtime chief of staff, startled me with the observation that Carey was convinced there was “something odd with Mario” — that he was arrogant, angry and often resentful toward those he worked with in public life.
As the years passed, I heard dozens of others close to Cuomo, including some who worked with him every day, echo Morgado’s words.
Mario Cuomo was one of the nation’s greatest orators, but his sometimes-dazzling speeches — like his keynote to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in 1984 — almost always lacked answers to the problems they addressed.
Cuomo insisted he was a believing Roman Catholic, but then he went to war with his church on the theologically crucial issue of abortion.
He was someone who claimed to have foresworn political labels but was actually a quintessential political liberal and, usually, proud of it.
People who knew him well often joked that Mario Cuomo was someone who was ready with a question for every answer.
He was called New York’s “Hamlet on the Hudson’’ because of a painful penchant for delaying — usually in the grips of agonizing indecision — virtually every important decision he had to make, most famously on whether he would run for president in 1988 and in 1992, years when the Democratic nomination could have been his for the seeking.
Cuomo, a brilliant and accomplished lawyer in his pre-political life, reinforced that “Hamlet’’ image when he repeatedly told friends he was comfortable serving as a defense lawyer even in cases involving accused murderers but could never be comfortable as a prosecutor because, he said, he never would feel sure enough that someone was guilty and therefore deserving of punishment.
While Cuomo could be charming in one-on-one conversations, could show a remarkable degree of caring when dealing with individual human tragedies, and could put aside ideological differences to help political adversaries — including the New York Post in the early 1990s, when it faced severe financial difficulties — he could also be arrogant and even cruel, browbeating opponents, abandoning longtime allies, and even turning on his own son and one-time key political adviser, New York’s current governor, Andrew.
Cuomo presided over the state’s highest office during the Reagan/Bush era, and because he was such a strong proponent of traditional liberal values — higher taxes to fund state spending on social programs, opposition to the death penalty, an unrelenting defense of abortion rights — he became a darling of the political left and of many in the national media.
But his legacy as governor was anything but positive.
Gov. Mario Cuomo raised literally hundreds of state taxes to fund ever-expanding social programs and developed fiscal gimmicks, including the notorious scheme to “sell’’ the Attica Correctional Facility back to the state to pad public revenues so he could spend even more.
Cuomo rejected a chance to end the hugely expensive tolls on the New York State Thruway and he literally destroyed, under pressure from environmental activists, the Long Island Lighting Co. and its $5 billion Shoreham nuclear power plant, saddling Long Island residents to this day with some of the highest utility costs in the nation.
Mario Cuomo presided over the widening loss of upstate jobs, industry and population, of which he was well aware. Either because he didn’t know how to address the problem or because, more likely, a deep streak of fatalism left him believing there was nothing he could do about it, the problem has continued to this day.
Although he didn’t initially realize he was doing so, David Garth — Cuomo’s longtime friend and political guru, who, coincidentally, died just a few weeks ago — encapsulated Mario Cuomo’s failures as governor a few months before he was turned out of office in 1994.
Garth was overseeing Cuomo’s bid for a fourth term and he was pressed at the Democratic nominating convention by several reporters to name some of the governor’s accomplishments during his term in office.
After several seconds of cold silence, a clearly uncomfortable Garth responded, “Haven’t you seen the new rest stops on the Thruway? They’re really something.’’
Such a singularly meager legacy from 12 years in office explained why a few months later, Cuomo — the great liberal champion who might very well have become president — was defeated by a little-known freshman state senator and former mayor of Peekskill, one George Elmer Pataki.