His Dark Journey

He was contrite, but he still managed to sound self-righteous. "Over the course of my public life, I have insisted, I believe correctly, that people, regardless of their position or power, take responsibility for their conduct. I can and will ask no less of myself," said Eliot Spitzer, resigning as governor of New York last week after getting caught patronizing prostitutes. His wife, Silda, stood by his side, looking ravaged but dignified.

Spitzer had shown more self-awareness a month earlier when an old, though not especially close, friend asked him if he liked being governor. "I hate it," he answered. "Really?" the friend asked. "Yeah, I'd rather be a high-school teacher." Maybe he was being arch or wry, but his tone was more matter of fact than facetious, says the friend, who did not wish to be identified discussing a private conversation. Spitzer's close friends say that he can be self-effacing and blunt about himself and everyone else—indeed, too blunt to be a successful politician.

But to most of the outside world, he was arrogant. The Wall Street Journal had dubbed him "Lord High Executioner" after he had seemed to take a kind of vindictive glee in prosecuting the rich. On the New York Stock Exchange floor last week, there were scattered cheers when people heard the news of Spitzer's fall. At at least one investment bank, reportedly, champagne corks popped. Some Spitzer watchers speculated that he had thought he was above the law, an untouchable. More likely, say the amateur psychologists, he wanted, at some level, to get caught. After 9/11, the banking laws were changed to increase scrutiny on anyone who might be secretly moving money around. Spitzer must have known that: as the hard-charging attorney general of New York, he had been one of the politicians who pushed to have the laws toughened. There is some evidence that he thought he could outsmart the computers, but he failed. In any case, what could he have been thinking when he met with prostitutes at places like the old Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.? High-priced call-girl services are supposed to protect privacy, but with Spitzer's well-known, jut-jawed face, he was taking a mad risk.

Spitzer is hardly the first moralizer to consort with call girls or get caught at adultery. Throughout the years, cheating televangelists have tearfully confessed their sins. In the 1960s, the FBI secretly taped Martin Luther King Jr. in flagrante with women-not-his-wife. In the late 19th century, British Prime Minister William Gladstone, a great and noble reformer, walked the night streets of London, saving prostitutes for Christianity. (He reported succeeding in about one of 90 cases; it was never clear whether Gladstone was doing more than preach to the women, but he admitted in his diary to moral qualms and "self-flagellation" after his nocturnal activities.) Spitzer's self-destructive indiscretion caught his closest friends by surprise. Bill Clinton's inner circle knew that the former president was a womanizer, and tried to protect him from himself. Spitzer's friends had no inkling, says one who declined to be identified talking about him. His marriage, says this friend, was—is—strong. Not much is simple about the human psyche. "The human heart," writes the novelist Tobias Wolff, "is a dark forest." For some reason, Spitzer lost his way; he will now begin a painful process of trying to understand why. The logical place to start looking is the home in which he was raised.

Brought up in a cold-water flat in a New York slum, Eliot's father, Bernard, the son of Jewish immigrants, made a half-billion dollars in the cutthroat world of New York real estate. He and his wife, Anne, a former college literature teacher, are regarded as refined and cultivated, not domineering. But expectations in the Spitzer household in Fieldston, a wealthy enclave of the Bronx, were extremely high. A series of Eliot's childhood and college friends have reported the intimidation they felt just sitting at the Spitzer dinner table. Each of the three Spitzer children was required to hold forth and debate on worthy topics (social chitchat was frowned upon). Jason Brown, who went to Horace Mann School, Princeton and Harvard Law with Eliot, compares the dinners to "a college class where the professor grills you." Afterward came games of Monopoly that qualified as play only in the loosest sense. "I play to kill," Bernard liked to joke.

Bernard never angrily put down or humiliated his children, says a close family friend who was often in the house and didn't want to be identified talking about private matters. But the humor around the dining table could have an edge. Eliot was accustomed to the joshing and digs, and made light of it. After he moderated a panel at an evening event endowed by the Spitzer family at the 92nd Street Y, NEWSWEEK Editor Jon Meacham was greeted by Bernard, who said something mildly complimentary about Meacham's speech. Eliot, then New York attorney general, was standing nearby and told Meacham, "You know, my father doesn't hand out compliments very easily." Meacham joked, "You know, General, you've just become more explicable." Replied the younger Spitzer, "You have no idea."