As we’re taking our seats, Newfield said, “This is the restaurant that inspired Billy Joel’s ‘A bottle of red, a bottle of white.’ ”
Sharpton and I were both in our twenties, and to us Newfield seemed like an old man. He was probably forty. Sharpton thought he was a wise guy, and I thought I was a wise guy. We looked at each other like “Sure it is. What a line of crap.” This couldn’t possibly be the restaurant.
Thirty years later, Billy Joel invited me to his birthday party. It was in the back room of a little Italian restaurant called Il Cortile. When I walked in, I said, “This place looks familiar. I don’t know why.” The owner comes up to me and says, “You were here before, with Al Sharpton and Jack Newfield.”
I had a great laugh with Sharpton about it when I told him. And Newfield was right when he introduced us; we’d been around a long time.
Thinking back on the forty years since Sharpton and I met at the restaurant that day, I felt it was fitting that we were together on this historic occasion when New York took a giant step toward addressing racial injustice.
JUNE 15 | 620 NEW CASES | 1,608 HOSPITALIZED | 25 DEATHS
“When we were talking about a curve—I never saw a curve. I saw a mountain. That’s what I saw. I saw a mountain that we had to scale and we didn’t know where the top was.”
IT SEEMS THAT EVERY DAY I tell people not to get cocky about this pandemic, and every day they get cockier. Sometimes I had the same level of success communicating in the briefings that I have communicating at home with my daughters: Everyone thinks they know better. The growing accomplishments in our war against COVID were causing people to get more confident. After months of home quarantine, people were desperate to get out of the house. The warm weather and small apartments increased their desire for freedom. There were scenes from across New York of large congregations in front of bars, in parks, and on street corners. The prime responsibility of local governments during the pandemic was to enforce compliance of the reopening rules. The state workforce did not have enough police or health officials to cover the entire state if the local governments did not do their job.
Upstate had just moved into phase 3, while downstate areas outside New York City were in phase 2. Restaurants and bars were supposed to allow takeout alcohol and outdoor dining, but it was clear from pictures and videos that the rules were being violated across the state. I had dozens of conversations with local officials pushing them to enforce the rules, but they just yessed me to death on the phone and then did nothing. Why did they cave to the fear of local politics when they knew the consequences? I said to them: If the virus spread goes up, we will have to roll back the reopening in your region, and then people will blame the local politicians as well as me and that is a worse situation than making them comply with the law.
But they either didn’t want to get it or couldn’t get it. They were being “politicians.” I remember an incident when I was a teenager and my father was serving as the secretary of state in Governor Hugh Carey’s administration. We were in a delicatessen picking up some food and chatting with some people in the store when someone referred to my father as a “politician.” My father really got his back up, as if the man had called him a son of a bitch. When we got back in the car, I made the mistake of pushing the point.
“Dad, you are a politician.”
He got crazed again.
“How can you be a part of a system that you despise?”
It’s not logical and it is counterintuitive, but I understand it now. I am part of the system because I want to change the system; you need to be part of the system to be most effective in changing it. But don’t ever suggest that I am part of the failure in the system. In my father’s worldview, “politicians” are responsible for the failure in the system. “Politicians” are politically motivated individuals without professionalism or integrity. They say what people want to hear without doing what needs to be done. I consider myself a counter-politician. That may sound like a nuanced difference, but to me it’s all the difference in the world.
JUNE 18 | 618 NEW CASES | 1,358 HOSPITALIZED | 29 DEATHS
“Wake up, America!”
IN THIS CRISIS I THOUGHT we had seen it all and faced every possible issue imaginable, but in New York City the problems were compounding rapidly. In addition to continuing protests and tensions with the NYPD, the city was experiencing a rising crime rate. The decline of the city was palpable.
We had a similar situation post-9/11. Many people felt being in the city itself was dangerous. The fear was that the city would always be a terrorist target. It took months for people to return to downtown Manhattan, the site of the former twin towers. But this was even worse. People who had alternatives left the city. We had closed down businesses, and large congregations would not be allowed for some time. The assets of living in the city include the great restaurants, museums, Broadway shows, events, and conventions. Without them, many people decided they would move out to Long Island or up to the Hudson valley or east to Connecticut and wait to see what happened. Depending on how the situation develops, they might never return.
We had seen people with means flee disaster areas before. In Hurricane Katrina, the people who could have fled New Orleans were gone by the time the
