Hugh Leo Carey

Hugh Leo Carey, April 11, 1919 – August 7, 2011 was an American attorney, the 51st Governor of New York from 1975 to 1982, and a former seven-term United States Representative (1961–1974).

Early life

Carey was born in Brooklyn, New York. Carey joined the U.S. Army as an enlisted man during World War II, served in Europe, and reached the rank of colonel. He received his bachelor's degree in 1942 and law degree in 1951 from St. John's University and was admitted to the bar that same year.

Personal life

Carey was married in 1947 to Helen Owen. They became the parents of Alexandria, Christopher, Susan, Peter, Hugh, Jr., Michael, Donald, Marianne, Nancy, Helen, Bryan, Paul, Kevin, and Thomas. His wife, Helen Owen Carey, died of breast cancer in 1974. Peter and Hugh, Jr. died in an automobile accident in 1969. Paul, who served as White House Special Assistant to President Bill Clinton as well as 77th Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, died of cancer in 2001.

In 1981 Carey married Evangeline Gouletas, a Chicago-based Greek-American real estate mogul. This marriage proved controversial and a political liability. The marriage generated controversy since Gouletas had affirmed on the marriage license that she had two ex-husbands when she actually had three. Gouletas also said that her first husband, with whom she had a daughter, was dead when he was still alive at the time. The marriage also caused trouble for Carey with the Catholic Church since he married a thrice-divorced woman in a Greek Orthodox Church. Carey and Gouletas-Carey divorced in 1989. Carey later described this marriage as "his greatest failure.

Early political career

Running as a Democrat, Carey was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1960, unseating Republican incumbent Francis E. Dorn. He served seven terms. He served on the House Ways and Means Committee and led the effort to pass the first Federal Aid to Education program. He was elected Governor of New York in 1974 and resigned his Congressional seat on December 31, 1974. Carey was reelected in 1978, serving two full terms as Governor. On January 1, 1983 he was succeeded by his lieutenant governor, Mario Cuomo. Carey returned to private law practice with the firm of Harris Beach in New York City, where he resided until his death in August, 2011. He was the first congressman from Brooklyn to oppose the Vietnam War.

Governorship

Carey was elected Governor in 1974, unseating incumbent Republican Malcolm Wilson, who had assumed the office after Nelson Rockefeller had resigned. President Richard Nixon's resignation that year because of the Watergate scandal made Republicans nationally unpopular. Carey became the state's first Democratic Governor in 16 years. In 1974, Democrats also recaptured the New York State Assembly. Carey is best remembered for his successful handling of New York City's economic crisis in the late 1970s. As Governor he was responsible for building the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center; Battery Park City; the South Street Seaport and the economic development of the NYC boroughs outside Manhattan. He also helped provide state funding for the construction of the Carrier Dome at Syracuse University. He is also remembered for preventing conservative legislators from reinstating the death penalty and preventing such legislators from taking away state abortion laws.

Upon taking office, Carey cut taxes significantly, reduced corporate taxes from 14 percent to 10 percent, capped personal income tax at nine percent, and reduced capital gains taxes. His administration also offered tax credits to encourage new investment.

Carey came into office with New York City close to bankruptcy. He brought business and labor together to help save New York City from the fiscal crisis that befell it in the 1970s. Carey managed to keep the growth of state spending below the rate of inflation through his frequent use of line-item vetoes and fights with the New York State Legislature, which was at the time divided between a Republican-controlled Senate and a Democratic-controlled Assembly.

Carey signed the Willowbrook Consent Decree, which ended the warehousing of the mentally retarded and developmentally disabled. His vision and leadership led to the community placement of the mentally retarded and developmentally disabled. He also made major strides in community programs for the mentally ill.

Carey's tenure in office was marked by a growing awareness of the environmental consequences of New York's strong industrial base, including the designation by the federal government of the Love Canal disaster area. Carey made environmental issues a priority of his administration.

Along with Senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill, Carey led efforts to end the violence in Northern Ireland and support peace in the region. The four Irish-American politicians called themselves "The Four Horsemen.

Carey considered running for President in 1976 and 1980. Carey's first wife, Helen Owen, had died in 1974, and Carey later attributed his decision not to seek the Democratic nomination for President in 1976 to her death.

Carey pardoned Cleveland "Jomo" Davis, one of the leaders of the Attica prison uprising.

In 1978, he was challenged for re-election by State Assembly Minority Leader and former Assembly Speaker Perry Duryea. After a competitive, sometimes negative campaign, Carey was the first Democrat re-elected in 40 years. Carey decided against seeking a third term as governor in 1982.

In 1989, Carey announced that he was no longer pro-choice and regretted his support for legalized abortion and public financing of abortion as governor. In 1992, he joined other pro-life leaders in signing the pro-life document "A New American Compact: Caring About Women, Caring for the Unborn. In April 2006 Carey endorsed State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer as a candidate for Governor; Spitzer went on to win the election by a large margin.

Death

Carey died surrounded by his family on August 7, 2011, at his summer home in Shelter Island, New York

Hugh Carey, Who Led Fiscal Rescue of New York City, Is Dead at 92

Hugh Carey, the two-term New York governor who helped New York City avert bankruptcy in 1975 by imposing financial controls and made tough choices to cut taxes and balance the state budget, has died, the New York Times reported. He was 92.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office said Carey died early today at his summer home on New York’s Shelter Island, the newspaper reported.

“Governor Carey led our state during a time of great financial turmoil and pulled us back from the brink of bankruptcy and economic ruin,” Cuomo said in the statement.

A Democrat who served in Congress as a representative from the New York borough of Brooklyn, Carey made financial discipline a priority from his first days after taking over as governor in 1975. Declaring that New York state had been “living far beyond our means,” he told the legislature in his first State of the State speech that “the days of wine and roses are over.”

By then, New York City was already in a fiscal crisis. Within months, banks cut off the city’s access to credit because it had run up a $5 billion deficit by borrowing to pay operating expenses and loans.

As the 51st governor of New York from 1975 through 1982, Mr. Carey led a small group of public servants who vanquished the fiscal crisis that threatened New York City and the state — the direst emergency a governor had faced since the Depression — by taking on powers over the city’s finances that no governor had wielded before and none has wielded since. A liberal Democrat, Mr. Carey reversed the upward spiral of borrowing, spending and entitlement under one of his predecessors, Nelson A. Rockefeller, a Republican who had presided in an era of limitless government promise.

But even after eight years as governor, Mr. Carey remained an enigma. The witty storyteller who could charm an audience alternated with the irascible loner who alienated many of his allies. The brooding, private man, father of more than a dozen children, who mourned the deaths of his wife and, earlier, two sons killed in a car crash, gave way to a man who engaged in an exuberant, very public romance that led to a second marriage. Hugh Carey rose to power as a Democrat outside his party’s machine. He began the 1974 campaign for governor as a recently widowed congressman from Brooklyn, a long shot who was not taken seriously, yet he cruised to one of the most resounding victories in the state’s history.

Yet he spent his final years as governor frustrated. Absent an emergency, he often seemed bored with the job.

The political strategist David Garth, who was one of Mr. Carey’s closest associates, once said of him: “Hugh Carey on the petty issues can be very petty. On the big stuff, he is terrific.”

Mr. Carey’s stature grew in his decades out of office, and he was hailed as a hero by Republicans and Democrats. As he acknowledged, his handling of government finances overshadowed all else he did.

In an interview in 1982 in his last days in office, he said, “The objectives I set forth I’ve achieved in terms of a state that’s respected fiscally, a city that’s now well on its way back to concrete foundations.”

In four terms as governor, Mr. Rockefeller had built a legacy of state universities and highways but also of much higher taxes and enormous debt. The pattern was repeated at the local level; under Mayor John V. Lindsay, a Republican turned Democrat, New York City had to borrow money for day-to-day operations. The 1974-75 recession opened yawning deficits and exposed years of unsound practices.

On Jan. 1, 1975, Mr. Carey declared in his inaugural address, “This government will begin today the painful, difficult, imperative process of learning to live within its means.”

He immediately faced a cascade of emergencies, as various state authorities, New York City, Yonkers, several school districts and ultimately the state itself flirted with collapse.

New York City lay at the core of the crisis. Mr. Lindsay’s successor as mayor, Abraham D. Beame, was taking drastic action, cutting tens of thousands of jobs, but a solution lay beyond the city’s grasp. In May 1975, Wall Street firms refused to sell the city’s bonds, threatening its ability to pay its bills.

Mr. Carey responded with a series of audacious moves to keep the city afloat. He created the Municipal Assistance Corporation to borrow money for the city. He created and headed the Emergency Financial Control Board, with the power to reject city budgets and labor contracts, giving him vast new authority at Mr. Beame’s expense.

In 1947 he married Helen Owen Twohy, the widow of a Navy flier killed in the war whom he had known as a teenager, and adopted her daughter. They had 13 more children together and divided their time between Park Slope and a rambling white house with a wraparound porch on Shelter Island that in time became the family homestead.

Survivors include 11 children, 25 grandchildren and 6 great grand-children.

After the war, Mr. Carey returned to St. John’s, where he finished his undergraduate education and graduated from law school. He then entered the family oil business. His eldest brother, Edward, struck out on his own, creating the New England Petroleum Corporation and amassing a fortune that would help underwrite his brother’s political career.

In 1960, Hugh Carey ran for Congress in a Brooklyn district that ran from Park Slope to Bay Ridge, challenging a popular Republican incumbent, Francis E. Dorn. Though Mr. Carey was not one of its own, the Democratic Party organization backed him because no one else wanted what was viewed as a hopeless assignment. Running in a strongly Catholic district in a year when John F. Kennedy was pulling Catholics to the Democratic line, Mr. Carey squeezed out a 1,097-vote victory.

In seven terms in Congress, Mr. Carey ranked high on the scorecards of liberal groups and adhered to positions like opposing the death penalty even when they were unpopular. But in keeping with the tone of his district, he portrayed himself as a moderate, playing up his support of federal aid to parochial schools.

In Congress he became one of the most influential members of the New York delegation. He sat on the House Education and Labor Committee, which handled most of the New Frontier and Great Society social welfare legislation of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and later on the powerful Ways and Means Committee. He played a leading role in trying to save the seat of the Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was the target of corruption charges, and in the enactment of federal revenue-sharing with the states.

But Mr. Carey became restless, and he and his wife grew tired of commuting to and from Washington with their many children.

In 1969, he ran for mayor of New York as an independent, angering Democratic Party leaders and prompting predictions of his political demise. But his sons Peter and Hugh Jr., both teenagers, were killed in a car accident on Shelter Island, and Mr. Carey abandoned the race. Another son, Paul, died in 2001.

Mr. Carey considered another run for mayor in 1973 but deferred to a fellow Brooklyn Democrat, Mr. Beame. That year, Helen Carey, who had been treated for cancer three years earlier, learned that the disease had returned, and on a family trip to Ireland, Mr. Carey decided to retire from politics.

In December 1973, however, he saw the political opening he had sought, when Mr. Rockefeller resigned as governor to become vice president under President Ford, leaving Lt. Gov. Malcolm Wilson to serve the year remaining on his term. Democratic Party leaders backed Howard J. Samuels, the president of the Off-Track Betting Corporation, for governor, and Mr. Carey was seen as a long shot. On March 8, 1974, Helen Carey died. Her husband, with seven school-age children still at home, was expected to bow out of the race. But on March 26, he announced his candidacy. Friends said that as much as anything, he needed the challenge to distract him from his grief.

When he said that his brother would spend $1 million on television advertising to help his candidacy, the boast was viewed with skepticism, but Edward Carey spent that and more.

With Mr. Garth as media adviser, the Carey campaign began advertising on television even before the Democratic State Convention. At the convention, with Mayor Beame’s covert help, Mr. Carey barely won enough backing to secure a spot on the primary ballot.

He put nearly all of his campaign funds into advertising, ignoring the maxim that primaries were won with organization, and he won the support of two powerful members of the city’s liberal establishment: former Mayor Robert F. Wagner and Alex Rose, the Liberal Party leader.

In September, he defeated Mr. Samuels with 61 percent of the vote. In November, in the national post-Watergate sweep by Democrats, Mr. Carey trounced Governor Wilson, 57 percent to 42 percent.

“All my life, people have been underestimating me,” Mr. Carey often said. In rising to power, he repeatedly ignored the conventional wisdom and trusted his own judgment, and he would again as governor.

Years later, he told a reporter: “A mentor long departed told me that the greatest gift in political life, in any life, is to view yourself objectively, at arm’s length, to make an assessment of yourself. So whom do I rely on? I rely on myself.