Goldmark: Carey did what couldn't be done

Peter Goldmark was budget director of New York State from 1975 to 1977. His weekly column for Newsday appears Sundays.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt died, Edward R. Murrow called him one of the most "unaccountable" men in American history.

Murrow didn't mean Roosevelt failed to fulfill his obligations to those he governed. He meant that Roosevelt didn't fall neatly into the normal political categories of American history, and that in rising to the great challenges he faced he broke nearly every rule, crossed nearly every line, and scrambled nearly every alliance in American politics. He created a whole new chapter in American history and a whole new lexicon for the governmental enterprise.

And so it is in New York with Hugh Carey, who died on Sunday at his home on Shelter Island.

Carey was a giant among modern governors. He faced a financial crisis of a character and dimension no one had foreseen. Rather than rely on old cronies from his political past, he pulled together a team of new faces and huge talent from the public and private sectors.

In fashioning a solution to the financial crisis, he built new coalitions; assumed direction of the financial affairs of the country's largest city; and persuaded banks, labor unions, the legislature, the state comptroller and the president of the United States to do things they swore they would never do. Along the way, he shattered almost every shibboleth of New York politics.

I served as Gov. Carey's budget director, so I had a seat at the table. And that table was often a 24-hours-a-day table, with a shifting cast of public and private figures sitting at it. There are lessons from those days that can serve our troubled nation today. One is that we Americans can do things that everyone says are impossible.

In 1975, there were budgets that the experts said couldn't be cut. We cut them. There were revenues that people said couldn't be raised. We raised them. The banks made financial efforts they said they couldn't make, the unions accepted wage givebacks and freezes they swore they would never contemplate, and Republicans around the state supported a Democratic governor as he fashioned tough, no-nonsense measures in the middle of a severe recession to put a threatened city and state back on the road to solvency and then prosperity.

Carey's place in history was secured when he rescued New York City and the state. He did that because he had to, but it wasn't the kind of thing he most wanted or liked to do. He was an activist and an idealist, and he wanted most to do things that helped people.

All that cutting and saying "no" took a toll somewhere deep inside him. But working on the plight of the mentally handicapped or juvenile offenders -- he came alive for those individuals and their issues, and made huge contributions in those areas that in history's headline-driven eyes were overshadowed by the fiscal crisis.

Carey was not always an easy man to understand or to work for. He could be scathing, dismissive, sarcastic or just plain unresponsive. I remember vividly the morning early in 1975 when I told him that New York City's budget deficit was probably far greater than anyone had previously thought, and that the only way out might be for the state to step in, fund out the city's debt, and take over control of its finances for a while.

Those black, beetling brows came down over his eyes as he frowned and said, "Peter, have you forgotten the first rule of New York politics? The governor doesn't interfere with the mayor's running of his own city." Then he threw me out of his office.

But giants are seldom an unalloyed joy to work with. And of course we wound up breaking that rule and a dozen others. Carey understood that history had dealt him an unpredicted and extremely difficult hand, and so, supported by a talented, sprawling, loving family, he set out to play that hand as well as he possibly could -- with unbreakable resolve, with extraordinary intellect, with political finesse.