ALBANY, N.Y. — Andrew Cuomo’s decision to write a book about the coronavirus pandemic — while it was still raging — always seemed like a terrible idea. Six months after publication, with the governor engulfed by several scandals, it looks even worse.
We may never know exactly how much the “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” contributed to the governor’s attempt to hide the number of nursing home deaths in New York, but the timing suggests that the book and the cover-up are interlaced.
As The New York Times reported, aides to the governor, including Chief of Staff Melissa DeRosa, stripped the total number of nursing home deaths from a Department of Health report in June, just as Cuomo was starting to write the book. He first mentioned the memoir publicly four days after the report was released.
“I am now thinking about writing a book about what we went through, lessons learned, the entire experience,” Cuomo said on WAMC, the Albany-based radio network.
Soon after, I suggested, sarcastically, that perhaps the book would at last reveal honest nursing home numbers — a tally, in other words, that finally included residents who were transferred to hospitals before they died. That’s the way other states reported the numbers. New York was a strange outlier.
The book didn’t include the accurate total, of course. Instead, “American Crisis” was peppered with half-truths and outright deceptions.
“New York was number 46 out of 50 in the nation when it came to percentage of deaths in nursing homes,” Cuomo wrote in a passage defending the controversial March 25 mandate that required nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients. “There were only four states with a lower percentage of nursing home deaths.”
The governor had to know that was inaccurate. After all, the data his aides stripped out of the Health Department report proved it was not true. Aides who so happily promoted their boss’s book — DeRosa, for example, tweeted about its position on the bestseller list — also had to know it contained deceptions.
Once “American Crisis” was published, of course, Cuomo would have been disinclined to come clean about nursing home numbers, if only because honest data would have shown that what he’d written was inaccurate, raising embarrassing questions.
But why did the governor deceive in the first place? Why was it so important for him hide just how devastating COVID-19 had been for New Yorkers in nursing homes?
That remains, and may always be, the enduring mystery of the scandal. Until he bothers to explain, we can only presume that the governor didn’t want any of the shine fading from his halo — that he didn’t want any of his decisions, including the March 25 order, to be revealed as mistakes.
That brings us back to the book. Its basic premise, after all, was that Cuomo could offer us “lessons” from his starring pandemic role. It was a celebration of the governor who became a mythic hero when the nation needed him most.
Is it possible the governor thought that honesty about nursing homes might somehow impact the book, that it could dull the publisher’s enthusiasm? Or was he determined to skew nursing home data long before the book was conceived?
Questions, questions. Again, we may never get answers.
From the start, the governor declined to say how much he was paid for the book. But the magazine Vanity Fair, citing unnamed sources, this week suggested Cuomo received “at least low to mid-seven figures,” which it described as “a blockbuster sum by industry standards.”
(On Wednesday, I asked Rich Azzopardi, senior adviser to the Democratic governor, if the administration wanted to dispute the Vanity Fair report. I didn’t receive a response.)
Whatever Cuomo was paid, it was money wasted. With the governor enveloped by scandal, the publisher has stopped promoting “American Crisis,” the New York Times reports, and the lessons we can take from the book center more on the dangers of hubris and ego than leadership.
Six months after publication, it is obvious the book was primarily about propping up the governor’s reputation. With that reputation in tatters, to reread the book now is to realize how preposterous the idea was.
Andrew Cuomo is a politician, not a hero. He isn’t honest enough to write a memoir worth your time.
We each day that passes it seems more likely that sexual harassment allegations, rather than nursing homes, are what will scuttle the governor’s political career. The behavior that may have led to those accusations has nothing to do with the book, of course.
But the nursing home scandal, which is serious enough to have attracted the attention of the F.B.I. and the U.S. attorney’s office, seems inseparable from the self-aggrandizing memoir. Without one, we may not have had the other.
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