I intend to serve as governor of New York as long as the people will have me. My daughters are grown, their education is paid for, and I can pay for their three weddings. After I’m done as governor, I want to help my children in any way I can, and also buy a boat and go fishing. But for now, I have 19.5 million people counting on me. That is my priority. At the beginning of this crisis, I thought of FDR’s words: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” There might be no good outcome, but I knew I could not live with myself if I stayed in the foxhole. The right thing to do in the coming battle was to step up and give it my all. There could be no ambivalence. Total commitment is always the first step.
Most Americans go to sleep at night thinking that the government is keeping this nation safe—that, God forbid, if a terrible disaster emerged, some authority with men and women in uniforms and equipment would show up to save the day. Sometimes that is not enough. I have been through hurricanes, floods, fires, and earthquakes. I know how fragile our social foundation really is. I have seen people panic and trample one another. I have seen civilization degrade when the instinct of self-survival takes over.
An airborne virus was one of the nightmare scenarios envisioned as a terrorist plot. It is easy to create chaos and overwhelm society with fear when people are afraid to breathe the air. There would be no good news with this virus and no good outcome. Schools and businesses would be closed. The economy would suffer. People would die. Nothing we could do would be enough. There was no possibility for victory, and even FDR and Churchill had at least the possibility of a successful outcome.
I knew this country was in trouble when COVID hit. It was divided and vulnerable, making it weak. A serious threat was inevitable, and when it came, we did not have the capacity to handle it. The only way to defeat the virus is for a united societal response where we all agree to protect one another. But the coronavirus is attacking us at an unprecedented time of partisanship and internal discord. Political, racial, economic, and geographic divisions are at all-time highs. The nation is more divided than at any time since the Civil War. The unity this nation has shown in the past when it was under attack, such as in World War II, is nowhere to be seen. When we are united, we are undefeatable. When we are divided, we are vulnerable.
Our ability to respond together as a society is dependent on the strength and the capacity of our government. Government is nothing more than the vehicle for collective action. Washington, Lincoln, FDR, JFK—these were great men made for the moment, or the moments made these men great. At this moment in time, this nation is led by neither a great government nor a great leader.
Still, there is reason for hope. In this crisis we see evidence that the virus can be defeated. New York State, a microcosm of the nation, has shown a path forward. We have seen government mobilize to handle the crisis. We have seen Americans come together in a sense of unity to do the impossible. We have seen how the virus is confronted and defeated. New York didn’t do everything right, but there are lessons we can learn that will lead to victory.
MARCH 1 | 1 NEW CASE | 0 HOSPITALIZED | 0 DEATHS
“It was a matter of when, not if.”
IT WASN’T LONG AFTER THAT evening call from Melissa that my office issued a statement reassuring New Yorkers that it was always a matter of when COVID would arrive in our state, not if, and now that it was here, we were managing the situation.
While New Yorkers are a diverse international community, they can still be a parochial bunch. There is an attitude that it’s not real until it happens in New York, and until we had our first COVID case, our population was still fairly dismissive of the threat. Even with the announcement of the first case, New Yorkers had largely not yet reached a point of high anxiety. But I had.
We had no idea how bad the situation would become. For weeks, the federal authorities had told us to look to Asia and the West Coast of the United States, where the infections first surfaced, but what we would soon find out was that the coronavirus had come from the other direction and that travelers from Europe to and through New York had brought the invisible hitchhiker with them weeks if not months earlier, and it was already circulating among thousands who had not yet manifested the illness. In a retrospective interview given on June 26, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), acknowledged that the first wave of cases that hit New York was from Europe. “Everybody was looking at China and it came from Europe,” Fauci said.
MARCH 2 | 0 NEW CASES | 0 HOSPITALIZED | 0 DEATHS
“It is deep breath time.”
I FLEW DOWN TO NEW YORK City to hold what would be the first daily press conference, or “briefings” as they would become known, about the arrival of the coronavirus. I had done them often as governor, usually at the state capitol in Albany, the main location for my operation. The capitol is a beautiful building first erected in the late nineteenth century and finished when Teddy Roosevelt was governor in 1899. At the time it
