With me on the dais on March 2 were Dr. Zucker and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City. While I was not the mayor’s number one fan, a fact that was well known to the public, I made the trip to the city specifically to sit with him to show a unified front to New Yorkers. An informed, consistent message was important, so by doing this event with the mayor, I could make sure we were stating the same facts.
One of New York City’s blessings is that it has some of the best medical institutions on the planet. Joining me were the top executives from Mount Sinai Health System, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, and NYU Langone Medical Center and the heads of the Greater New York Hospital Association and the Healthcare Association of New York State. I had met with them prior to the briefing because I wanted to make sure that we were coordinated in doing research and sharing the best information on a timely basis.
My plan for this briefing and all the ones to follow was simple: We would provide unbiased factual evidence explaining the virus and its progress. A single day’s briefing means little, but constant reinforcement and updated factual data could present a story that the public could follow. Besides, matters of life and death tend to get people’s attention. The main challenge for me was to communicate this data to the public in a way that would establish my credibility for providing timely information with transparency while also instilling confidence. My daughter Mariah said to me late the previous night, her voice clearly filled with anxiety, “Don’t tell me to relax; tell me why I should be relaxed.” She was right; it was an important distinction that I would remember going forward. I understood that people were anxious. The message I delivered was that this was “deep breath time.” “Deep breath time” meant that I understood their emotions and I was not discounting them. But we could not act on emotion. We would act on facts.
This first briefing was the opening salvo in an ongoing discussion. In many ways I was reintroducing myself to the people of the state. Yes, they knew me, but today everything was different. We were going to a new and different place. Today, I was not just the governor; I was the governor in a historic crisis. If people didn’t believe in government yesterday, they desperately wanted to believe in government today. Today, government mattered.
Initially, I had no expectation when we started that these briefings would be anything out of the ordinary. I was wrong. Within a matter of days, this mundane government procedure during pre-COVID times became something of a phenomenon, what became characterized as required viewing first for New Yorkers and then for the entire nation.
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NEW YORK HAS a much larger government than most states, with more depth and more resources. Fortunately, when the virus arrived, we already had—in my opinion—the best team of professionals that has been assembled in modern political history. My team is a group of top-shelf individuals who could excel in any position in the corporate sector making millions; instead, they are public servants. And we knew one another like a basketball team that has played together for many years, how each person moved on the court and who should get the ball for the game-winning shot. My job as the leader of this team has always been to help them find the confidence to demand more from themselves and from the systems around them. Often, when people, especially bureaucrats, are faced with a problem, their first response is to list the reasons why something can’t be done. My team does not accept no for an answer; they get to yes. So when COVID hit, I was confident that my people would face this challenge with everything they had and then some.
I was also confident in my relationship with the hospitals. I was confident in my relationship with the state legislature. I was confident in my relationship with local executives. Westchester County executive George Latimer, Nassau County executive Laura Curran, and Suffolk County executive Steve Bellone were in the hot seat handling their counties, but they are pros and we worked together well. Likewise, Buffalo mayor Byron Brown, Syracuse mayor Ben Walsh, and Rochester mayor Lovely Warren were capable of handling the situation well. I was confident in myself to the extent that I had every experience one could have to be prepared. I was knowledgeable, even enough to know one could never be truly prepared. I was confident that we could do as good a job as could be done in the circumstances, but I was never comfortable with what the outcome might be.
The arrival of COVID also put New York State in direct engagement with the federal government in a new way. I had already been talking to them about COVID issues such as bringing testing capability to our state, but now the urgency went up tenfold, as did my relevance to the White House and their relevance to me.
Before this, I had probably been the most outspoken governor against Trump’s policies. We fought on immigration policy, environmental policy, you name it. We had a number of nasty exchanges. I was enraged when he imposed the cap on state and local taxes (SALT) in his 2017 tax package. That policy increased the income tax on New Yorkers $14 billion. When we codified a woman’s right to choose with the Reproductive Health Act in early 2019 in case Republicans did anything to overturn Roe
