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American Crisis: Cuomo's Memoir Looks Back On A Pandemic That Rages On
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Nov 29, 2020
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Governor's Office
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Nov 29, 2020
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“It seems that every day I tell people not to get cocky about this pandemic, and every day they get cockier,” Governor Andrew Cuomo writes in his new book, released in the middle of the pandemic, detailing how he successfully led New York through the worst days of the pandemic. American Crisis ends in August, but the coronavirus is still here, and the state’s positivity rate has nearly tripled since its publication last month.
More than 30,000 New Yorkers have died from COVID-19, far surpassing every other state in the country. The governor and his advisors have insisted that the book is not a victory lap, merely a kind of “halftime” pep talk.
This is the Andrew Cuomo who just won an Emmy for his televised pandemic briefings: a regular guy from Queens who hates politics and loves his family and just wants to do the right thing, no matter what.
It is also the Andrew Cuomo who is a master at pulling political levers to his advantage, who raises hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the most powerful forces in the state, and whose former right-hand man is currently serving a six-year prison sentence on federal corruption charges.
That this second, messier, far more interesting Andrew Cuomo is essentially unknown to the reader—and to most New Yorkers, let alone Americans—is proof of his extraordinary abilities.
“Open your heart; show your emotion, your truth, your vulnerability, your humanity,” Cuomo writes, recounting some advice he recently gave to an unnamed, newly elected lawmaker.
The chapters of American Crisis correspond with the span of his daily briefings, from March 1st through late June, with subheadings of the number of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, and a sometimes numbingly anodyne quote from that day’s briefing (“What are we doing? Everything we can.”)
That the book was published so soon after these events transpired—essentially while they are still happening—means that even the kind of limited, if illuminating consideration seen in some political memoirs is almost impossible. How can anyone clearly and candidly reflect on something they are still living with? (A less generous critic might suggest that Governor Cuomo doesn’t want to tell us anything we haven’t heard before.)
American Crisis often feels like one long coronavirus briefing, held in Cuomo’s man cave, after some cold ones are passed around and someone asks, “What was it like to be governor this year?” This is a man who uses the power of his office to pull over wayward truckers in a blizzard.
There are comparisons to Pearl Harbor, Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm,” and enough Winston Churchill references to disturb a History Channel producer. Also: painful puns (“Trump change”); a deeply uninteresting fishing story involving fellow Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut; and lots of snappy, Sorkin-lite filler—“Matt, how many [testing] instruments can you get to New York and how fast?”
If the book has a tangible thesis, it’s that Cuomo can transcend these boomer bromides and summon actual managerial competence when his constituents need it most.
“COVID would kill people. I knew that, and it was hard to come to terms with. But no life should be lost because of our lack of organization, resources, or talent,” Cuomo writes.
So the governor gets to work, expanding the state’s testing capacity from a few hundred samples up to a system that now can run hundreds of thousands of tests in a single day, ordering the public and private hospital systems to quickly transfer patients and create overflow beds, and clawing ventilators and PPE out of an international shortage to protect front-line workers, all while the federal government actively undermined these efforts.
Of course, this level of proficiency—doing one’s job as an elected official during extraordinary times—tends to stand out when the leader of the free world is literally suggesting that his subjects inject bleach to kill a virus. Cuomo acknowledges that the bar is extremely low.
“If he had led the country through COVID, he could have been one of the greatest national leaders in a generation,” Cuomo posits. “Trump just had to recognize the reality and lead.”
Instead, the governor describes how he used these briefings to extract what New York needed from the president, who he says he knew “from earlier days in New York and was aware of his lifestyle,” an interesting thing to say about someone who appeared at your bachelor party.
“The only thing he responded to was public pressure,” Cuomo explains, “So that’s what I would use.”
Cuomo recognizes that he isn’t just performing for the president, and displays an almost Trumpian fascination with his rising approval ratings and the plentiful memes generated from the briefings.
“At dinner each night, I’d ask them what they did that day, but what I meant was, what did they think of the day’s briefing?” Cuomo writes, describing evenings with his three daughters.
One particularly amusing and revealing passage describes how Larry Schwartz, a longtime Cuomo aide known for his extreme dedication to the governor, was installed in the governor’s mansion to help with the test-and-trace efforts. Cuomo’s dog, Captain, did not get along with Schwartz.
“Larry appeared afraid of Captain, and Captain adopted a somewhat hostile posture toward Larry,” Cuomo writes in typically understated fashion. “Captain weighs about a hundred pounds and is quite resourceful. I could hear the commotion from my bedroom.”
It’s funny, but also a little mean.
Trump is presented as the primary cause of the death and destruction in New York, because he failed to take COVID-19 seriously when it was spreading in China and Europe. “To be clear, New York’s problem was caused by federal negligence. New York was ambushed by COVID,” the governor writes, using a phrase he has repeated over many months.
“As of this writing, we do not know what the CDC and NIH knew about COVID and when they knew it,” Cuomo points out. “We do not know the source of information to the White House in January 2020 that led Peter Navarro, a senior aide to the president, to write a memo suggesting apocalyptic consequences from COVID-19. We must demand answers to these basic questions to understand why such an early warning by a senior administration official was ignored at the highest level of the federal government.”
Crusading for government transparency is a strange new turn for Cuomo, given that he prefers to conduct business outside of email channels and previously undermined and disbanded his own anti-corruption commission. The state ethics board's approval process for American Crisis has been shrouded in secrecy. (Cuomo earned a $783,000 advance for his 2014 book, “All Things Possible,” which sold fewer than 4,000 copies. The governor has declined to say how much his advance was for this book.)
The governor’s pat explanation, that the federal government is ultimately why his state suffered so greatly during the pandemic, doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for a detailed discussion of the shutdown orders that he issued in late March—what kind of data was being looked at, and whether the governor should have imposed them sooner. The governor spends six pages vigorously defending the fallout from his state’s policy that effectively directed nursing homes to take coronavirus patients. The idea that his decision caused more deaths in nursing homes is a “Republican claim,” a “lie,” and there wasn’t much the governor could do anyway, he insists.
“The virus was here earlier than we knew and therefore was spreading among the nursing home workers before we were aware.”
While a state health department report on nursing homes all but exonerated the governor, New York has yet to come up with an accurate count of nursing home patients who died from the virus.
These were Cuomo’s decisions to make, as he repeatedly refers to Mayor Bill de Blasio not as an equal partner, but a feckless annoyance, “quick to make public pronouncements despite his having no authority under the law to do so.” There is no acknowledgement that New Yorkers would benefit from improving this strained relationship. It’s just presented as the way it has always been and always will be.
Cuomo writes that he hates “bureaucrats” who wring their hands and stand in the way of progress, but he spent precious days dithering on the optics of announcing a “shelter-in-place” order like San Francisco had in early March, because according to the governor, some New Yorkers might find its connection to nuclear bomb drills unsettling.
“I had to first earn the trust of the public and gain unprecedented credibility to overcome the intense politics and mixed messages of the time,” Cuomo writes.
Some of that credibility could be attributed to Cuomo himself, but most of it would come from the shocking number of New Yorkers who would die, day after day, as the virus continued to spread.
Cuomo, who categorizes himself as a "real progressive," saves some of his harshest criticism for the unnamed Democratic lawmakers he calls “faux-progressives.”
“Faux-progressive officials advocate but never accomplish. Faux progressives frustrate the public by raising false expectations and by failing to improve matters,” he declares. “I have little patience for people who disrespect the profession. It’s much the same way that a professional ballplayer disrespects another player who gets caught gambling on his own game. Or a police officer disrespects a cop who violates someone’s civil rights.”
He continues, “People who call themselves progressives must be examples of why Americans should trust us. Their service must be honorable and productive. They must be willing and able to make the hard choices to effect change and deliver results...This is my philosophy and that is the plain truth.”
Cuomo never states what "real progressives" will do, just that they will do it. Opportunities abound for a leader of Cuomo's caliber to talk about what kinds of policies he thinks will make people's lives better, but the governor doesn't seem interested.
In a “Blueprint For Going Forward” at the end of the book, he lists ways that “state governments must reinvent the public health capacity,” but doesn’t suggest that having a single-payer healthcare system—not exactly a radical belief for a "real progressive"—would eliminate these kinds of maddening bureaucracies altogether.
In the handful of pages that deal with the George Floyd protests and police accountability, Cuomo acknowledges that the outrage stemmed from "seeing the same injustice and no meaningful governmental response." He then scolds looters, makes no mention of the actions of the NYPD, which spurred an as-yet-unfinished investigation from his Attorney General, and signs a handful of incremental reforms. The two-page chapter on the police reform bill signing ends with Cuomo describing how he and Rev. Al Sharpton once had lunch at the same restaurant that inspired Billy Joel's "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant," and only realizes it thirty years later, once he's invited to Billy Joel's birthday party. The reader understands that the two men have been power brokers a long time.
“My natural instinct is to be aggressive, and it doesn’t always serve me well. I am a controlling personality," Cuomo admits. "But you show me a person who is not highly controlling, and I’ll show you a person who is probably not highly successful.”
Tagged
COVID-19
pandemic
andrew cuomo
Christopher Robbins
Christopher Robbins is a New York City reporter covering transportation, affordable housing, local politics, and criminal justice. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Chris is a graduate of Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and enjoys biking to Fort Tilden in the summertime.
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