Spitzer in Exile

Did he know what the risk was?

"Yes."

He was silent for a moment and then, without further prompting, offered an explanation: "I'm not going to say anything that … should be thought to be an excuse for anything. But there's got to be some element to its being a result of tension and release. And that builds up."

I asked if he'd seen a therapist in the past year.

He threw out a blizzard of words: "You talk to people. It's—people say, 'Look, you should just talk to somebody to help talk it out, figure it out.' You just try to sort it through."

So, yes, he had seen a therapist? "I've spoken to people and said, 'Well, what do you think?' "

Was this a politician's caution? Fear that, by admitting he'd turned to therapy, he would look weak? Spitzer's aversion seemed deeper. A politician was talking, but not the kind who cannot bear to see his image damaged. The kind who cannot bear to see himself. Several times in our conversation, Spitzer mentioned "the human mind" as though it were some mysterious affliction that can't be explained. "You think about a lot of things when you have time to reflect," he said. "You wake up every morning and say, 'I was elected to do something, and now I can't do it,' and 'What have I done to my wife and children?' You say lots of things. But they're not terribly fruitful avenues of conversation, because there's no answer. And that makes it more frustrating."

We were speaking that afternoon in the midtown Manhattan offices of Spitzer Enterprises, the family real-estate firm. On the 22nd floor of a family-owned building, the office affords an unobstructed view of the southeastern corner of Central Park. The sign outside the suite says OFFICES OF BERNARD SPITZER. There was no mention of Bernard's son Eliot, or the fact that this son was the former governor of New York. "Governor," I'd said to Spitzer as he greeted me in the reception area. He smiled and said, "I told you not to call me that."

Inside Spitzer's office there was no governor to be found. There was no glory wall, the elected official's standard assemblage of photos from moments of grandeur. Pictures on a side table highlighted the private Spitzer—smiling on ski vacations with his family, sharing a laugh with old friends. It felt like being in a movie about serendipity or time travel, as if a butterfly flapped its wings and suddenly the nation's most combative governor was transformed into a middle-aged real-estate man.

No one would have predicted this swift reordering of Spitzer's identity; politics had seemed to be his destiny. Every Spitzer profile mentions the dinner-table scene at his parents' home in the exclusive Riverdale section of the Bronx. There, Bernard, the immigrants' son who built a half-billion-dollar real-estate fortune, conducted intense seminars at the dinner table, grilling his three children, Eliot, Daniel and Emily. It was, as one Spitzer friend once told New York Magazine, "a Darwinian drama," where survival meant showing up with opinions, arguments and facts. "I understand how you can describe it as potentially scary," says Lawrence Golub, a Spitzer friend since childhood. "If somebody asked you to juggle knives, that would be scary. But if you had grown up in a family with Olympic-quality balance and hand-eye coordination … it would be like playing with rubber knives. The Spitzer family is so smart and so articulate, and they've been doing it for so long, I think it was like playing catch."