June 19, 1988

What He Learned From Losing

By SAM ROBERTS; SAM ROBERTS WRITES ON URBAN AFFAIRS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES AND HAS REPORTED ON MARIO CUOMO FOR 15 YEARS.

MARIO CUOMO A Biography. By Robert S. McElvaine. Illustrated. 449 pp. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $19.95.

WHICH one of the seven dwarfs did Mario Cuomo play in a kindergarten production? Was he a virgin when he got married? More fundamentally, is Mr. Cuomo just another petty face, or is he a genuine political phenomenon - one of those rare individuals who emerge every generation or so with the right mix of vision and pragmatism to inspire the nation?

''The crucial question,'' Robert S. McElvaine writes, ''is whether the symbols coincide with reality.''

Mr. McElvaine's book, ''Mario Cuomo,'' promises to be revelatory, insightful and intimate. It tries hard; to some extent, it succeeds. It is as if he set out to write a Presidential campaign biography, only to find in midcourse that, to his apparent disappointment, there was no campaign. Mr. McElvaine began unabashedly disposed in the Governor's favor and, perhaps as a result, got to interview Mr. Cuomo and assorted intimates who form maybe 180 degrees of his inner circle (thus inspiring, one hopes, a sequel by some writer of the lost arc). Also, Mr. McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., and the author of ''The Great Depression'' and other books, isn't Donald Regan. ''Mario Cuomo'' is largely miss and tell. The book raises considerably more questions than it answers about an intriguing politician who began his career in public service relatively late in life and who, after more than five years as Governor of New York, can claim enormous popularity, though many might be hard pressed to single out a particularly impressive accomplishment. Some questions don't seem even to have been asked. Two of the Governor's closest political advisers, his son Andrew and Meyer S. Frucher, the president of the state's Battery Park City Authority, apparently weren't interviewed. Moreover, few of the answers that are offered are definitive. That is not entirely Mr. McElvaine's fault. In part, it reflects the frustration experienced by virtually everyone who has tried to plumb the depths of Mr. Cuomo's personality and rhetoric.

The author depicts Mr. Cuomo as unusually high-minded. He is described as ''a sort of Catholic Puritan.'' Unlike sports, Mr. McElvaine writes, presumably paraphrasing Mr. Cuomo, politics ''offered a full scope for both the Catholic and the competitor that together constitute Mario Cuomo. Here, more than in the other endeavors he had tried, one could both win and serve -one could, in fact, win in order to serve. Winning in politics could be seen as not just for the self, but for others.'' While acknowledging that Mr. Cuomo ''does have a tendency toward self-righteousness,'' the author concludes nonetheless that ''there is nothing calculated about his honesty.''

Moreover, Mr. McElvaine says that although a creditable campaign for Mayor of New York City in 1977 salvaged Mr. Cuomo's fledgling political career, losing that race instilled in him a new sense of humility and thereafter ''much of his apparent arrogance evaporated.'' Mr. McElvaine also finds, with no evidence of having interviewed any possible victims, that Mr. Cuomo doesn't hold a grudge and that ''his reputation for lasting vindictiveness is, in fact, largely unfounded.'' Finally, while agreeing that the Governor has talked about family more than he has spent time with his own wife and children, Mr. McElvaine observes that ''not practicing what one preaches amounts to hypocrisy when it is consistent and intentional. In Cuomo's case, it is neither.'' Indeed, the author hails Mr. Cuomo, an inspiring orator, as ''the best speaker American politics has produced in at least the last half century,'' and this seems to be an ingredient in Mr. McElvaine's version of manifest destiny - ''It may be something approaching a historical necessity that Cuomo become president of the United States.''

The impressionistic portrait Mr. McElvaine paints is by no means monochromatic, however. He includes one telling account in which the Governor's brother, Frank, attempts to place in context his previously reported remark that Mario Cuomo cheats. ''If you were playing pool,'' Frank Cuomo is quoted as recalling, ''Mario wouldn't drop one of his balls into a pocket. But he might suddenly and loudly cough while you were taking a shot.'' Mr. McElvaine interprets this to mean that ''in a game he will get away with anything he can, without flagrantly violating the rules. This 'cheating' should in no sense be taken as an indication that he would as an officeholder have any propensity toward 'cheating' the public. That would be impossible for someone with Cuomo's character. He just likes to win.''

Frank Cuomo offers another insight about his brother: ''He's right much more than he's wrong. But, then again, I've never heard him admit it when he was wrong.''

Even Mr. McElvaine admits Mr. Cuomo has been wrong, sometimes. He questions his rationalization of his defeat in the 1977 mayoral race; recalls the negative, even nasty, tone of his campaign that year (the Governor's appeal to the Presidential candidates to refrain from negative campaigning came too late for Mr. McElvaine to include it here as a mark of his maturity), and recounts how a year later he was ready to renege on a promise not to run for state Attorney General.

It's true, Mr. McElvaine writes, that the Governor didn't aggressively campaign for fellow Democratic candidates in 1986 - among the few definitive conclusions the author is able to reach as he navigates between occasional contradiction and equivocation.

The following year, figuring the State Legislature would override his veto anyway, the Governor signed into law a tax cut that he had argued was too big. If Mr. Cuomo signed it only to avoid an override and the appearance that he opposed tax cuts, Mr. McElvaine writes, ''it seems that he slipped into a politics of expedience rather than principle.''

MR. McELVAINE himself slips too frequently into the hackneyed phrase and the sports metaphor: ''The New York primary was just a regular-season game, though, even if a very important one. The Democratic League Championship Series to determine the party's representative in the November World Series was to be played in Madison Square Garden in July.''

He also tends to quote sources seemingly to demonstrate his access more than to provide intimate detail. For instance, Gary Fryer, the Governor's press secretary, offers this revelation about his boss: ''He's a real, live, honest-to-God human being.'' We're also informed that ''like Abraham Lincoln, with whom he identifies, Cuomo experiences periods of melancholy.''

But if Mr. McElvaine's biography often seems otherwise unfulfilling, the final paragraph of his final page is worth reading - and repeating - for its perspective and insight:

''No one on this side of the Jordan is perfect - or even very close to it. I greatly admired Mario Cuomo when I started this project. At its conclusion I still admire him. But my admiration is not blind. I have found and in the preceding pages detailed many examples of his imperfections. I was not expecting to find someone ready for canonization, and I did not. What I did find was a human being who has a very large ego that he must struggle to keep in check, who enjoys winning a bit too much, who is not as selfless as he knows he should be, who can be vindictive, plays hardball politics more than there is any reason to, sometimes constructs an image of himself that is not entirely in keeping with reality, works obsessively, and spends less time with his family than he knows he ought to. I also found a man who is more aware of his faults than most of us are of ours, who has great compassion rooted in deep religious belief, possesses extraordinary talent and intellect, and whose abilities seem almost perfectly to match what America needs at this point in its history.''

Any traditional politician would, on balance, be pleased with that assessment. It is revealing of Mr. Cuomo that, having dismissed the book in passing, apparently he is not. In one respect, however, the Governor and Mr. McElvaine's biography have something in common. Like Mr. Cuomo, the book has greater promise than it delivers - although Mr. Cuomo, unlike the book, still has more time.

LITTLE MARIO OWNS UP

If Mario Cuomo's boyhood seems too good to have been true, it was. He was not quite the perfect child that sticks in the memory of relatives and friends. He was, to be sure, an extraordinarily ''good kid,'' but he did have a few minor brushes with imperfection.

To cite a trivial example of the sort of trouble all children get into at one time or another: once when Mario's mother bought him a new suit for Christmas, he went out and climbed a fence in it, ripping the coat. Afraid to take it to his mother, he went instead to a woman across the street, who sewed it so that he would not have to tell his mother what happened. Two days later Immaculata Cuomo decided to send the suit to the cleaners. Seeing the repair job, she exclaimed, ''My God, he gave me a bad coat!'' She was about to return it to the merchant when little Mario stopped her by owning up to what had happened - not because he could not tell a lie, but because he had been caught in a small one.

Nor, it seems, did young Mario work quite as much in the store as he often remembers. Arthur Foster [ a close friend in grade school ] remembers helping him ''stock the shelves with cartons of sugar, corn flakes, stuff like that,'' but the youngest Cuomo child did not work in the store nearly as much as his brother. Mario began making deliveries only at the age of twelve, when [ his brother ] Frank went into the navy late in World War II. Mario only made deliveries on Saturdays. Frank had started working in the store at a much younger age and worked every day after school, in addition to Saturdays. From ''Mario Cuomo.''