OBITUARY: Hugh Carey, Governor of New York

Wednesday 10 August 2011

Hugh Carey; Governor of New York who drove through a programme of austerity and co-operation to rescue the city from bankruptcy in the 1970s

It was a crisis that today would seem all too familiar. In January 1975 New York City was going bust, unable to service its debts, which had been run up by two profligate mayors, John Lindsay and Abe Beame, and made worse by the outgoing state governor, Nelson D. Rockefeller.

The city could not afford to pay its own workers, including police officers, firefighters, Subway workers and teachers.

There was talk of default and bankruptcy.

While Democrats and Republicans in the nation's largest city and its second most populous state seemed to have no idea where to turn, the incoming governor, Hugh Carey, a former seven-term congressman from Brooklyn and an old-style Democrat, knew precisely what had to be done.

There was no question of a default. If New York was to be rescued from its own folly, it needed a bailout. First, though, he had to get the rhetoric right. There was no point in increasing the debt burden if expenditure continued to run rampant.

"The days of wine and roses are over," he told the audience at his inauguration in the state capital, Albany. "This government will begin today the painful, difficult, imperative process of learning to live within its means."

Few of those listening had much faith in the new governor's resolve. They had heard it all before, many times. And in one sense they were right. For while Carey did indeed set about pruning the state budget, particularly as it related to the city, his primary approach was to Wall Street institutions and the rich, unashamedly holding out the gubernatorial begging bowl. Carey wanted money. He wanted loans. He wanted those who had the big bucks to buy city and state bonds and thus replenish the coffers so recklessly depleted by the previous generation of politicians.

To achieve this, he deployed youth and experience - youth in the form of a new cadre of city operators familiar with Wall Street and big-scale investment; experience in the shape of himself, wheeling and dealing, charming and cajoling. He had no big stick to wave, but he quickly created a new climate of opinion. If New York City went down, he warned investors, Wall Street and the banks were going down with it, and then where would they all be? Never mind that the new bonds would one day have to be redeemed. The policy worked - so well that even the notoriously conservative city labour unions bought into the scheme. Over the next few years money poured back into state and city coffers. Despite opposition from the President, Gerald Ford, there was even a $2.3 billion federal loan. State and city employees continued to receive their pay cheques. Carey's Young Turks, a new breed of thirtysomething city slickers, proved to have been deft in drawing up the terms of the new loans. The agency they set up to oversee the market proved its worth time and again. Simultaneously, if more slowly, budget restraint began to eat away at the existing debt. The days of wine and roses might have been over, but the Big Apple was getting back its rosy glow.

The lesson of that crisis was not entirely lost on later generations of political leaders. Carey's achievement was recalled by George Pataki, Governor of New York from 1995 to 2006, as a lesson for dealing with the present fiscal crisis - "that with sober, enlightened leadership, government can help solve even the most difficult problems."

New York's current governor, Andrew Cuomo, delivered his verdict on Carey's legacy when he took office in January this year - he sent union leaders copies of The Man Who Saved New York, a recently reissued biography of Carey by Seymour P. Lachman and Robert Polner. Cuomo spelt out the message: self-sacrifice, austerity and co-operation, as demonstrated by his illustrious predecessor, was the only way forward for New York.

Hugh Leo Carey was descended on both sides from Irish immigrants. He was born in Brooklyn in 1919, the third of six boys, to Dennis Carey, an oil salesman, and his wife Margaret. He grew up in comfortable circumstances and attended St Augustine's parochial and high school before going to study law at St John's University, in Queen's.

His studies were interrupted by the war. He enlisted in the New York National Guard and was posted to Europe where he fought with the 104th (Timberwolf) Infantry Division in France and Germany, helping to liberate a concentration camp and winning the Bronze Star and Croix de Guerre. On his return to the US, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, he joined his father's kerosene distribution business but kept up his law studies and was admitted to the New York Bar in 1951.

In 1960 he stood for the House of Representatives in a central Brooklyn district bounded by Park Slope and Bay Ridge. He won the seat from a fourterm incumbent on a wave of pro-Catholic sentiment generated by the election in the same year of President John F. Kennedy, and for the next 14 years, which coincided with the Vietnam War, worked in Washington in support of the Great Society.

As a congressman Carey looked to be more interested in the issues than in his own advancement and over the years he built up a reputation as a fairminded and progressive member. He was against the war, pro-choice (ie, pro-abortion - a position he reversed in later life) and opposed to capital punishment.

In 1974, concerned about the worsening financial position of his home state, he announced his intention to campaign for the governorship, running against the Democrats' preferred candidate, the businessman Howard Samuels. Despite being warned that if he ran against Samuels his head would "roll in the gutter", Carey persisted and eventually secured adoption.

The election was hard-fought, and having secured victory Carey lost no time in addressing the financial disarray.

In his first term he also persuaded legislators to support the appointment, rather than election, of judges to the state supreme court, which did much to remove the judiciary from the taint of politics. He also vetoed several attempts to restore the death penalty. During his period in office the Democratic Party twice held its national convention in New York. It was Carey who launched the slogan "I love New York".

His second term as governor, from 1979 to 1982, was markedly less successful.

He appeared to have less energy and less focus. "What am I supposed to do - save New York twice?" he is said to have asked exasperatedly. It was increasingly said that he had lost the ability to deal with colleagues and that he was cold and detached from reality. It was also charged that he was vain, dying his hair jet-black in the manner of President Ronald Reagan.

But he did remain committed, as an avid Irish-American, to the Northern Ireland peace process. As one of the "Four Horsemen" (the others were Senator Patrick Moynihan, the House Speaker Tip O'Neill and Senator Edward Kennedy), he did much to distance Washington from armed republicanism while supporting Sinn Féin's demands for an agreed solution to the Troubles.

Carey's personal life was touched by tragedy. His first wife, Helen Twohy, the widow of a wartime naval pilot, by whom he had no fewer than 13 children, died of cancer while he was running for the governorship in 1974. Three of his sons predeceased him. His second wife, a Greek heiress, told him she was a widow when in fact she had been married twice before to men who remained very much alive. Divorce - viewed by Carey as an annulment - followed.

Carey is survived by five daughters and six sons.

Hugh Carey, Governor of New York, 1974-82, was born on April 11, 1919. He died on August 7, 2011, aged 92

'The days of wine and roses are over,' he said at his inauguration

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