Word: cuomo
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Whatever the answers, Cuomo's restless mind keeps turning. His thinking is, in fact, more systematic than adventurous. He pores over options deliberately, delaying decisions until the very last moment while he gathers even more information. A Cuomo presidency would be less daring than determined. Says one aide: "He has to know the answer...
...Cuomo's mind is swift and shrewd, almost awesome in its ability to grasp and retain material. He takes a lot from his voracious reading. "This morning," he wrote recently in his diary, "I read an hour or so of The Razor's Edge (Somerset Maugham's novel about a restless man searching for inner understanding). It always had good meanings for me." Another morning he rereads portions of Thomas Jefferson's autobiography. "One thing struck me," wrote Cuomo, "the logical forcefulness of his debate...
Sometimes his own unrelieved sense of logic gives him trouble. Cuomo is exhilarated by the power of government but dismayed by its necessary politics. "I have to plead, cajole, rationalize, justify," he wrote out of exasperation last month in the diary. "I don't want that." He is only partly amused that on occasion he receives high praise for routine decisions and sometimes little acknowledgment for politically courageous ones...
Once in a while the urge to escape is tempting. "How I would like to disengage, if only for a while," he wrote one day last year, "away from decisions, scrutiny, interaction. To be alone." Once a friend teased Cuomo that the perfect job for him was Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. There, in splendid remoteness, he could contemplate and decide. Cuomo had already thought...
...mere solitude would never hold the eclectic man from Queens. His need to accomplish and excel runs too deep. For 15 years he has scorned vacations. Instead, hard work is more renewing. Cuomo dominates those around him. An excessive talker, he routinely holds listeners captive as he slips into changing courtroom roles, playing innocent here, bullying there, as a technique for gathering information and testing the motives of others. It is a bruising process that tends to make flunkies out of the less sturdy around him. One top aide has packed on 50 lbs. from nervous overeating. But the extra...