WHAT'S LEFT UNSAID

A firsthand account of crisis in the governor’s mansion.

DeRosa, who served as communications director and chief of staff for Andrew Cuomo, recounts her tenure, revealing in eye-opening detail the insidious forces that impelled him to resign. The daughter of a prominent Albany lobbyist, DeRosa was drawn to politics early, interning for Hillary Clinton when she was 19. Recruited to become Cuomo’s communications director in 2017, she quickly learned that her boss was “a micromanager who obsessively and single-mindedly focuses on the problem in front of him until it’s resolved.” The problem that engulfed the governorship in 2020 was the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. With growing case numbers and a scarcity of reliable information from federal agencies, Cuomo, serving as “de facto commander in chief,” demonstrated his capacity to be “consummately cool” in a crisis, mounting a “massive operational undertaking” to find protective gear for hospital workers, set up testing sites, find labs to process tests, and procure hospital beds and ventilators. In addition, he made crucial decisions about lockdowns, quarantines, and masking, often in conflict with New York Mayor Bill di Blasio and a hostile President Trump. As she dealt with marital problems and infertility, DeRosa admits that the early weeks of the pandemic pushed her to her limit. The author admires Cuomo’s decisive leadership, but she admits that “his hard-charging style and aggressiveness had earned him a host of political enemies.” That enmity coalesced in the spring of 2021, when a whirl of “vague claims of sexual harassment” became a storm, whipped up by a voracious media. “Everyday interactions” were “weaponized,” contorted into vicious claims of abuse, and eventually led to his resignation. DeRosa counters those allegations, asserting that they “didn’t comport with the Andrew Cuomo I knew,” whom she portrays as compassionate, respectful, and dedicated.

An angry, raw, and briskly told memoir.