EDITORIAL: REMEMBERING HUGH CAREY, THE GOVERNOR
OF NEW YORK WHO SAVED THE CITY OF NEW YORK
Former New York Governor Hugh Carey passed away over the weekend. He was 92.
A biography of Hugh Leo Carey published last year named him “The Man Who Saved New York,” and the judgment was well-grounded in the landmark accomplishments of the state’s 51st governor.
Appraisals of Carey’s legacy, occasioned by his death yesterday at the age of 92, will surely be unanimous. All will take extensive note that he rose to the unprecedented challenge of rescuing New York, state and city, from financial collapse shortly after his swearing-in as governor in 1975.
After decades of profligate spending, hidden by dishonest if not fraudulent bookkeeping, the city had no money to pay the bills. If the city failed, the state would follow. Perhaps worse, New York was afflicted with bankrupt political leadership - with the exception, somehow, of the newly inaugurated and blindsided Carey.
As Felix Rohatyn, the master Wall Sreet financier who partnered with Carey, put it, “He was the only one who had any credibility left.”
A public that liked Carey personally discovered that they had elected more than a witty and winning Irish Catholic from Brooklyn, more than the widowed father of 14 children, one of them adopted, more than a seven-term congressman who enjoyed old-school constituent service and legislative deal-making. They had elected a man who thrived under fire.
During World War II, he fought in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, helping to capture Cologne, liberating a concentration camp at Nordhausen and winning the Bronze Star, Croix de Guerre with Silver Star and Combat Infantryman Badge. Then he proved to banks, public labor unions, Washington and more that he had the smarts, strength and honesty to engineer a historic and painful turnaround.
He forced a takeover of the city’s finances, created a new agency to borrow money for the city and got the cooperation of labor. Often, the fight was touch and go, and there were times when he needed an assist, as when the Daily News came through with the renowned headline, “Ford To City: Drop Dead,” which pushed then-President Gerald Ford to extend federal loan guarantees for New York.
Carey succeeded thanks to straight shooting and the pragmatic wisdom to do what the facts demanded even if his decisions ran counter to his liberal Democratic leanings. He leveled with New York, declaring most famously, “The days of wine and roses are over.”
There was, of course, more to Carey’s two-term governorship. His years included construction of Battery Park City and the Javits Convention Center, repeated vetoes of the death penalty, the misadventure of offering to drink a glass of PCBs after an upstate building was contaminated with the chemical and the comic opera of a short-lived second marriage.
History is forgetful of the lesser and the personal, but not of Carey’s achievement of pulling New York through an epochal crisis and establishing enduring new ground rules for the city’s management. He said in 2007 that he wanted to be remembered “as a man who loved the people of New York as much as he loved his own family.”
It will be so.
