Another complication was that hospitals across the state would need to share excess ventilators on an as-needed basis. Most of the hospitals in the state agreed. One hospital system in western New York refused, saying they might need them. It was an unkind gesture and threatened the spirit of cooperation. Some upstate politicians were also quick to seize the moment as an opportunity to divide New Yorker’s upstate from downstate. Several upstate politicians started a campaign saying, “Upstate lives matter.” It was totally contrary to the sense of sharing and community we’d been trying to build from the beginning; it was straight out of the Trump playbook.
But the positive reactions in people overwhelmed the negative. When the news of the perceived “selfishness” was publicized, I received a call from a nursing home in the upstate town of Niskayuna outside Albany offering thirty-five ventilators to help. How great! A nursing home, one of the most vulnerable places, made a gesture to say, “I hear your negativity, and I respond with love.” I returned the ventilators myself to the nursing home on Easter to say thank you, and the staff and patients all came to the windows. The episode was a little litmus test of what would win, the devil or the angel. You have the devil on your shoulder, you have an angel on the other shoulder, and the devil is generally easier to motivate. I had been trying to talk to the angels, and the angels were winning; then some politicians saw an opportunity to get the devil all fired up. The devil lost at the end of the day.
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MORE THAN EVER, I was getting the growing sense of being on our own in New York. Trump never pretended to be a leader who could bring the country together in a moment of national crisis. In fact, I believe he relished his role as “divider in chief.” It fit his personality. He was angry and resentful, and he communicated it. Nor did Trump ever suggest he believed in government capacity or that he himself could provide government stewardship. In many ways his response to COVID was predictable. At the same time, we still needed federal help whether he liked it or not.
With Trump, it’s always about his ego. When one accepts that is when one knows how to deal with him. While he has no patience for the operations of government, he does like the bright lights and big stage and enjoys the optics of associating himself with the military.
I had met with the Army Corps of Engineers in Albany on the eighteenth, and we sketched out a simple plan. The state would identify sites and coordinate with existing health-care facilities to provide staff, and the Army Corps of Engineers would manage construction of temporary field hospitals. We took an aerial tour identifying large sites near existing hospitals. We identified four locations where the Army Corps of Engineers could construct thousands of temporary beds: SUNY Stony Brook in Suffolk County, SUNY Old Westbury in Nassau County, and the Westchester County Center—a regional balance that together with the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan would cover the entire downstate area, with each facility being able to treat at least a thousand patients. In the end, the military also agreed to provide a thousand medical personnel to help staff the Javits Center, which would be the largest facility.
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NEXT I SPOKE to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator, Peter Gaynor. I had worked with FEMA extensively when I was in the federal government in the 1990s. When FEMA is well operated, it is a beautiful thing, but when FEMA fails, it is a catastrophe. They show up either immediately before or immediately after a disaster. They have to be prepared for the unexpected, and they have to be able to deal with whatever peculiar circumstances develop.
In many ways FEMA is the antidote to a dangerously slow federal bureaucracy. They can mobilize quickly, command other agencies, be the central point of contact for local governments, and expedite procurement mechanisms. FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers are the one-two punch for the federal government in an emergency.
The COVID crisis exposed the good, the bad, and the ugly in so many ways. Pressure tends to do that. And when the pressure was on during COVID, FEMA crumbled. The ventilator issue was a pure procurement and supply chain issue. It was a unique and unexpected challenge, but in an emergency you must expect the unexpected. FEMA was dreadful. Not only that, but on PPE procurement, personnel deployment, and ground transportation FEMA was incompetent.
As for the White House, the most productive person I could find there was Jared Kushner. He had a difficult time with the press. As the president’s son-in-law, he was a natural target; the arrangement was peculiar and open to criticism of nepotism. In his position, he inherited all of the president’s enemies, and the media had reported that he was resented by many of the president’s staff.
Jared was from the private sector, so his natural orientation was the “end justifies the means.” He was focused on production, and by definition he would run afoul of the bureaucracy. When I went to work for my father as special assistant during his first year as governor, I faced many of the same dynamics. Jared needed to get things done in the federal bureaucracy, but he didn’t know how. He knew if they failed to produce, it would be blamed on the president. On the other hand, if he bumped heads with the bureaucracy to accelerate production, the bureaucracy would bite back. It was a no-win situation for him and he knew it, but he pushed anyway.
I saw him as the key to New York getting
