It is both purely coincidental and perfectly fitting that when Andrew Cuomo made his calls to CNN and MSNBC in the middle of a life-and-death national crisis, he was sitting at a dinner table with his youngest daughter—in the house where his parents lived for 12 years when his father, Mario Cuomo, was New York’s governor. The power of Cuomo’s performances has come from the connection he has established with America’s frightened families, watching in stay-at-home lockdown. That resonance flows from a mix of genuine affection and calculated stagecraft: Cuomo has made his three daughters, his sick younger brother, Chris, his 88-year-old mother, Matilda, and his late Italian-immigrant-grocer paternal grandfather vivid characters in his tough-love coronavirus narrative. The stagecraft, in turn, flows from decades of Cuomo family drama. The Cuomo saga isn’t as glamorous or—thankfully—as tragic as the Kennedy family saga. But the two clans, officially bound together for 15 years by Andrew Cuomo’s marriage to Kerry Kennedy, share a thread, in which the public and the private blend together. The families are wildly different—the Kennedys freewheeling, the Cuomos tightly wound—yet both have produced leaders who know how to turn personal emotions into political tools, and how to play rough when necessary.
“Andrew has been practicing his whole life for the exercise of power,” a New York political insider says. “What you’re seeing now, for better and worse, is everything that he has learned over the years.” Many of the traits that Cuomo’s New York political antagonists disdain—his micromanagement, his tactical scheming, his need for control—are proving to be his strengths in this crisis. Cuomo’s experiences and his determination to bend the world to his will, however, may also have shaped his priorities when deciding how quickly to shut down New York.
Cuomo has a cadre of loyal aides and friends; he has an equal, if not larger, group of haters in New York’s political class. “Andrew has been trained, since he was a child, to be a leader,” says Dan Klores, a Cuomo friend for 35 years. “He’s got a reputation as a hardball player, and some of it’s true—he’s not easy to work for, right? He tries to work the press and often that’s resented. But he has a deep, deep belief in public service. Yes, he’s a politician. He was brought up to be a public servant.”
A New York business executive, who has been on the receiving end of angry phone calls from Cuomo, has a less sentimental view. “Andrew is a pragmatist. That’s the essence. You can call him a bully, and he’s got lots of crazy characteristics. But there is not an ideological bone in his body. It’s all about getting stuff done. And power.”
It was an ugly mayoral campaign: racially charged and conducted against the backdrop of a broke and crime-riddled city. A July blackout and a serial killer left New Yorkers on edge. Flyers reading “Vote for Cuomo Not the Homo” appeared in Queens. The Cuomo camp denied responsibility, but Ed Koch, target of the slurs, was angry at Mario and Andrew for decades afterward. Nineteen-year-old Andrew Cuomo worked energetically on behalf of his father’s candidacy during that 1977 race. He hadn’t been particularly interested in politics before then. Andrew was more of a gearhead, working as a tow truck driver and loving nothing better than rebuilding a car’s engine. But in the hours after Mario Cuomo’s Democratic primary loss to Koch, in the family’s home in Holliswood, Queens, Andrew turned to his mother and said, “We’ll make Dad a winner.”
He followed through, ferociously, on that vow. Andrew became the campaign manager for his father’s 1982 rematch with Koch, this time with New York’s governorship as the prize. Mario Cuomo roared back from 35 points down in the Democratic primary polls to dispatch Koch, then won a general election squeaker.