Opinion

Hugh L. Carey, 1919-2011

Hugh Leo Carey, who died yesterday at 92, was a governor for his time.

Confronted with fiscal calamity when he took office in 1975, he rose magnificently to the challenge — almost single-handedly shaping the agreements that saved New York, city and state, from bankruptcy.

No one really thought Carey could do it; a seven-term congressman out of the Brooklyn Democratic machine, he’d shown no signs of administrative leadership.

But Carey proved more than equal to the task. He refused to be constrained by ideological purity or Democratic orthodoxy.

“In the very simplest of terms, this government, and we as a people have been living far beyond our means,” he famously said in his first State of the State message, just nine days into his term. “Now the days of wine and roses are over.”

Carey targeted “the undue escalation of state and local taxation” and demanded “a proper self-discipline” as well as “deep and hurtful cuts . . . in the cost of government.”

These notions are part of the everyday discourse in 2011. In the ’70s in New York, they were heretical.

But raise them he did. And with New York City teetering on the brink, Mayor Abe Beame flinched — and Carey took command.

He brought the banks, the unions and the Legislature together, forming the Municipal Assistance Corp. and the Emergency Financial Control Board to take charge of municipal finances. (The New York Times memorably headlined an editorial, “Mayor Carey.”)

As his former budget director, Peter Goldmark, once said, many New Yorkers didn’t fully comprehend “how strong, how far-seeing, how resolute he was. How steep the odds were against him. And how lonely the journey was.”

The rest of his time in office was less successful, thanks in large measure to his increasingly erratic personal behavior — like offering to drink a glass of PCBs, dyeing his hair bright orange (and other colors) and marrying a woman who couldn’t keep track of how many ex-husbands she had had.

“He almost seemed to need a crisis to motivate him,” observed Warren Anderson, the GOP Senate leader, towards the end of Carey’s second term.

But as recently as 2003, the now-elder statesman was still warning that “this is not the time to return to the tax-and-spend policies of the 1980s: “New Yorkers struggle to live within their personal budgets, especially in tough times. Why shouldn’t they expect the same or better from their elected officials in Albany?”

It’s no small irony that many of the problems plaguing New York during the early Carey years are of a sort now dragging the nation itself toward the abyss.

Albany had been spending beyond its means for years; Washington, for decades.

Albany had worn out the patience of the credit raters; so too, Washington.

But there is one difference — and it’s huge: Albany, when it mattered, had a chief executive who could, and did, lead.

Yes, the degree of difficulty today is higher by orders of magnitude, but leadership is leadership — Washington, and America, are bereft.

Hugh Leo Carey might not have been a man for all seasons — but he was the right man at the right time when the Empire State needed him.

And that’s something for which New Yorkers can be eternally grateful.