It was late on a Sat urday night, and a long-retired Hugh Leo Carey — his face wrapped in that forbidding scowl New York came to know so well — seemed very bored indeed.
But he brightened when asked about the medallion attached to his jacket lapel: a miniature US Army combat infantryman’s badge — a stylized silver musket on a deep-blue background, an emblem rarely seen in Manhattan anymore.
“Yes,” he laughed. “People ask me if I belong to the National Rifle Association.”
Not likely — but, then again, who knows? New York’s 51st governor was never constrained by convention.
Nor did he lack self-assurance. Carey embraced brilliance when he recruited talent, even if that meant he himself might sometimes be overshadowed by aides — rare among politicians, and unheard of among his successors.
Whether that confidence was rooted in Carey’s wartime combat service is a matter for speculation, but it seems likely: He was one of the first officers to cross the Ludendorff Bridge — the famous “Bridge at Remagen” — in the spring of 1945, after having fought his way across a sizable chunk of Europe.
After that, what did he have to prove?
After that, what terrors could New York politics possibly hold?
Hugh Carey’s crisis came in the summer of ’75, soon after he took office, and while the notion that he alone “saved New York” from fiscal calamity might be a bit fanciful, there is no doubt that the relatively soft landing that finally was achieved was a product of his vision, political skill and virtually unparalleled grit.
He simply turned Nelson Rockefeller’s mini-Great Society on its head — necessarily so, given the circumstances — and that will mark his place in history.
There were other triumphs: New York’s mentally disabled never had a greater friend, and the ferocity with which he went after nursing-home fraud and abuse was remarkable.
Still, absent a crisis, Carey was easily distracted. There were never any real scandals during his two terms — but ridiculousness was rife: No one who saw it will ever forget the orange hair.
But even that was a measure of the authenticity of the man — flawed, but not so much that his essential greatness couldn’t emerge when it mattered. Above all, he was a human being.
Hugh Leo Carey was a politician in the finest sense of the word, and a man for the ages.