Sicilian Culture: The News & Views: Despite Stony Brook Honor, D'Amato is No Model

Sicilian Culture

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The News & Views
Despite Stony Brook Honor, D'Amato is No Model
By Marie Cocco, Newsday
Thursday, April 26, 2001 - - (Page A 41) Mamma D'Amato's son has gotten something he never earned in office. Respect. There is to be an Alfonse M. D'Amato chair in Italian- American studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, an endowed professorship to which some $1.5 million has been pledged. Having failed to win the tribute of his name etched into a hunk of concrete at the federal courthouse in Islip, the former senator gets to be known forevermore as a historic, even revered, figure in Italian-American history. Long Island's very own LaGuardia.
It certainly is hilarious to name a university chair after a politician who made a career of scoffing at smarty-pants intellectuals. And like everything Alfonse, there is about this the whiff of a cash exchange.
Stony Brook president Shirley Strum Kenny, in announcing the professorship, pointed to D'Amato's help in securing federal money for the university as a reason for bestowing the honor. There was, of course, the $2.5 million D'Amato won for the cancer institute in 1998 and the federal money to help the university when it got involved in managing Brookhaven National Lab.
Doubtless there was much more. For if there was one thing D'Amato became known for over nearly two decades, it was eking out money for local coffers and, his former congressional colleagues would point out, taking credit. Some $1 million in private pledges is helping finance the professorship, along with $500,000 from the state.
The list of donors, which is being kept private, includes the names of prominent Italian-Americans and not-so-prominent ones. They are, justifiably, people who are proud that a major state campus has seen fit to invest in the study of Italian-American history and culture. We are, after all, the only major European immigrant group that has not made much effort to learn about or celebrate our own story and reveal its truth.
The void has allowed others to do it for us. The cast of characters they've created is peopled with mobsters and neighborhood goombahs. The best we ever get is rosy nostalgia for baseball heroes.
Which is why the Alfonse M. D'Amato chair in Italian-American studies gives me agita. It is something very good. And too hard to digest. D'Amato's first, winning Senate candidacy in 1980 was a milestone. Here was an aggressive, working-class Italian who hid neither his roots nor his rough edges-and made it anyway, his own way. His triumph was a victory for the "little people" he always said he stood for. In him, they saw themselves.
"The average person, I think, identifies with D'Amato," said Mario Mignone, director of the school's Center for Italian Studies and architect of the drive to establish the chair.
The average person also must note another of D'Amato's unique skills: He always managed to stay a half-step ahead of federal prosecutors. With D'Amato, it was always something: Throwing HUD contracts to his developer friends and contributors; wangling subsidized housing for his relatives and cronies in Island Park; turning his Senate office into a redoubt for his influence-peddling brother; transforming Roosevelt Raceway into a feeding trough for his political benefactors. That's the short list.
Maybe there are some Italian-Americans who believe D'Amato was unfairly pursued because of his ethnicity. I am not one of them.
The theory is disproved by the many Italian-American public officials who manage, somehow, to make it to the top without a taint. Like Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Frank Carlucci, who was President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser and defense secretary. And Leon Panetta, the longtime California congressman who became White House chief of staff under President
Bill Clinton. And-dare I say it-Mario Cuomo, three-term governor of New York.
D'Amato spokeswoman Lisa Dewald said it is "sad and typical" that I would raise all this at such a moment of great honor. And I agree.
This is a happy occasion for Italian-Americans. The Stony Brook center is a unique chance to achieve a deeper understanding of the Italian experience in America-one that gets beyond stereotypes that depict us as sleazy operators.
That's why naming it for D'Amato is so sad.

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