[From article]
Cuomo and The Post were not friends. We mercilessly trashed his policies, and he retaliated in kind. Yet, while the loons battled for control after former owner Peter Kalikow faltered, Cuomo proved himself an honorable man of rare magnanimity.
When Hoffenberg was delivering daily, zany newsroom tirades, Cuomo popped in and promised, “We are looking at alternative forms of investment . . . just in case Mr. Hoffenberg should change his mind” — prompting Hoffenberg to sputter in rage.
[. . .]
The Post’s March 16, 1993, edition carried the famous front page showing founder Alexander Hamilton shedding a tear.
In a visit that day to demoralized Post staff in a diner next door, Cuomo celebrated the paper, “It’s like the World Trade Center towers, if it goes down, that’s bad for all New York.”
Summoning his great oratorical power, he roared, “I like to think The Post is indestructible, and if it survives Abe Hirschfeld, it will be” — and the room went wild.
[. . .]
Cuomo wrote to Rep. John Dingell, who oversaw the FCC: “I frequently disagree with The Post’s editorial stance . . . I anticipate that under . . . Rupert Murdoch, I will continue to find myself at odds . . . nevertheless I respect the value of a vigorous, independent journalism voice, and would join its other readers in bemoaning its passing.”
The FCC granted the waiver.
Maybe it would have happened anyway. But for legend’s sake, and for the heart he gave to us in our darkest hour, Mario Cuomo earned an unlikely hero’s place in The Post’s proud 213-year history.
http://nypost.com/2015/01/03/remembering-the-posts-unlikely-savior-mario-cuomo/
Remembering The Post’s unlikely savior, Mario Cuomo
By Steve Cuozzo
New York Post
January 3, 2015 | 12:56am
* * *
[From article]
“I watched a small man with thick calluses on both his hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example . . . That they were able to build a family and live in dignity and see one of their children go from behind their little grocery store in South Jamaica on the other side of the tracks where he was born, to occupy the highest seat, in the greatest state in the greatest nation . . . ,” Cuomo said in his famous Democratic convention speech.
Cuomo attended P.S. 50 and St. John’s Preparatory School. A gifted student, graduated at the top of his class at St. John’s University Law School in 1956 after earning a bachelor’s degree.
[. . .]
Mario and Matilda, also a St. John’s student at St. John’s who became a school teacher, wed in June, 1954. They have five children: Governor Andrew, Chris, Maria, Margaret and Madeline.
[. . .]
Cuomo first claim to fame came in the late 1960s as a community lawyer representing the “Corona Fighting 69”, a group of property owners fighting a plan to demolish their homes to make way for a new high school. After a six-year battle with the Lindsay administration, Cuomo and the homeowners prevailed in saving most of the homes from the wrecking ball.
Cuomo’s work in Corona caught the eye of then-Mayor John Lindsay, who tapped him to mediate a racially-tense dispute over the city’s plan to build low-income public housing towers in middle class Forest Hills. He fashioned a slimmed down, compromise plan that won the support of the community leaders as well as City Hall, a delicate feat that drew widespread praise and catapulted him into politics.
http://nypost.com/2015/01/01/former-new-york-governor-mario-cuomo-dead-at-82/
Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo dead at 82
By Larry Celona, Carl Campanile and Leonard Greene
New York Post
January 1, 2015 | 8:02pm
* * *
[From article]
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.
[. . .]
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.
[. . . ]
People who knew him well often joked that Mario Cuomo was someone who was ready with a question for every answer.
[. . .]
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.
[. . .]
Cuomo rejected a chance to end the hugely expensive tolls on the New York State Thruway
http://nypost.com/2015/01/02/cuomo-inspired-but-did-little-for-new-york/
Cuomo inspired but did little for New York
By Fredric U. Dicker
New York Post
January 2, 2015 | 12:11am
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