Good Riddance Dick Cheney, Andrew Cuomo and Larry Summers

By Arthur Schwartz

November marked the death, or fall, of some major personalities. Society is better off with the loss of all three.

Dick Cheney – Death of a War Criminal

Let him rest in…peace? The irony is a little too much for me to grasp as I contemplate the death of Dick Cheney at age 84. My wife says not to speak ill of the dead. But I can’t let this go. Just because he spoke out against Trump after January 6, 2021, does not mean that we should forget the sum total of his horrible life.

Cheney was the mastermind and primary organizer of the “war on terror,” which, in a 20-year span of insanity, cost the United States $8 trillion and killed (murdered) nearly a million people according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Cheney was a White House chief of staff, a congressman, a Cabinet member, and George W. Bush’s vice president, as well as the CEO of Halliburton. The Iraq War was his most consequential action. It caused death, suffering, and loss and created instability in the region that resonates to this day. It was a colossal miscalculation, one of the worst in U.S. history. But more than that, it was based on one big lie by Cheney.

Bush and Cheney repeatedly made false statements about Saddam Hussein and the danger he presented. They routinely ignored intelligence that raised questions about Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” and his ties to al Qaeda—both turned out to be nonexistent. In the summer of 2002, as the first anniversary of 9/11 approached, the Bush-Cheney White House launched a campaign to persuade the American public that a war against Hussein was necessary. This was not a consensus view on Capitol Hill or among Americans. On August 26, 2002, Cheney delivered a speech at a national convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville which was loaded with hair-raising rhetoric. “The Iraqi regime,” he declared, “has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents…” He cut to the chase, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” But Cheney was lying. His lie led to a horrific war which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, saw 4,492 U.S. service members die, 468,000 U.S. soldiers return with traumatic brain injury or PTSD, led to the rise of Isis, and cost the U.S. $3.9 trillion.

Cheney also played a key role in developing the U.S. torture program and global secret detention program. In a 2008 interview, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Cheney about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was held in a secret CIA prison where he was waterboarded over 100 times. Cheney admitted authorizing torture as a means of getting information.

If there is a Hades, he surely belongs there.

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Andrew Cuomo – The End of the Bully

I was happy to see Andrew Cuomo go down, and not just because I found Zohran Mamdani inspiring. Cuomo’s end means the end of the political career (I hope) of an entitled bully who views others exclusively as instruments of power or impediments to it. This type is often, old, white and male–and refuses to acknowledge that his time is up.

Ross Barkan, writing in New York Magazine, put it this way, “A certain kind of politics died with Andrew Cuomo’s political career on Tuesday. He was, at his peak, the consummate Machiavellian macher. For him, it was always better to be feared than loved. During his 11 years as governor, he wielded the machinery of the government to unsettle and punish his rivals like few in the history of New York, and he was known, above all, as an executive who was never to be crossed. He was a bruiser, a bully, and as a mayoral candidate he hoped to export that cutthroat style to the streets of New York City. Courting voters was an afterthought. He would intimidate enough of the old power players in the shadows, collect his chits, and rumble to victory.”

In the weeks before Cuomo’s mayoral dream went up in smoke, a handful of independent groups backed by New York City’s oligarchy spent more than $55 million supporting the ex-governor or attacking Mamdani. Cuomo garnered just under 855,000 votes, with the would-be power brokers spending $65 per vote for a losing candidate. One group backing Cuomo unleashed a high-voltage ad featuring a photo of Mamdani placed over an image of the burning World Trade Center. It was an ugly campaign. Cuomo seemed to get angrier when his message was not resonating, so he tried to generate hate and fear of Mamdani.

His tenure as governor ended in disgrace in 2021 after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment. He resigned but continued to maintain that the accusations were meritless. Cuomo’s supersize sense of self manifested itself not just in his resentment that sexual assault allegations ended his governorship, but in an assertion that Attorney General Leticia James had manufactured the whole thing. He ultimately regretted his decision to step down. Why he wanted to be mayor was never entirely clear — he hadn’t lived in the five boroughs in decades and often spoke of them with great disdain — but it was obvious that winning City Hall was about redemption. His political obituary would have to be rewritten. Instead of the governor who fell from grace, he’d be the mayor who found his way back to the political mountaintop.

When Cuomo started his campaign he was supported by 35% of the voters and Mamdani was at 3%. He only got 33% in the Democratic primary. In the end he got 40% and Mamdani got 50.4%. Cuomo then decided to run as an independent. His strategy was to knock everyone else out of the race and face Mamdani one-on-one. He described it as a “heavyweight championship bout.” When asked if he should have done anything differently in the primary, he said should have done more on social media. Going out to meet voters hadn’t crossed his mind. He didn’t understand that Mamdani did well because he spoke to issues voters cared about and he spoke to them directly, even once walking the length of Manhattan in one day.

If Cuomo had a message that didn’t involve only crime-doomerism and Islamophobia, it was that his opponent was young and less experienced. True. But that meant voters could project their hopes onto Mamdani and his simple and direct message about a more affordable city. Once upon a time Cuomo created an ethics commission to clean up corruption in Albany, which he disbanded after it began looking into him and his allies. His chief of staff, Joseph Percoco, was convicted of bribe-taking. His gubernatorial administration was sullied by concerns over conflicts of interest. He actively eschewed transparency, with his staff using private email to conduct state business. He tried to build himself as an anti-Trump hero during the worst days of the pandemic, but it was discovered that he got his friends and supporters “firsties” on COVID vaccines, ordered that the ill be kept in nursing homes, and used $5 million in taxpayer money to help write his self-congratulatory non-bestseller.

And I can tell you as one who engaged in some high level politics in New York, and who Cuomo tried to get fired from a big job, that he was as mean and vindictive as any politician in America, equal only to Trump.

So, goodbye to Cuomo and Cuomoism–sharp-elbowed, retributive and transactional. Cuomo backers must now pay attention to what the people of the city actually want and give respect to Mamdani, the candidate who won. Mamdani has a friendly smile but he also can land a punch. He won the heavyweight title.

“I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life,” the new mayor-elect said on election night. “But let tonight be the final time I utter his name.”

You and me both, I thought.

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Larry Summers

He was once Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, a president with the “utmost of respect” for women. He went on to become president of Harvard, where he taught economics. He served on the boards of OpenAI, Bloomberg and Santander, was an opinion writer at The Times, and co-director of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

In the latest trove of Jeffrey Epstein emails Summers was seeking advice about how to cheat on his wife — after Epstein was indicted for sex-trafficking minors. The emails were about the young daughter of a major banker in China. Outed and “embarrassed,” he resigned from all of his positions, even at Harvard (where Epstein gave tens of millions of dollars through Summers.)

Another powerful man goes away (I hope).