Spitzer in Exile

But it had a purpose. Young Eliot, who carried a Samsonite briefcase to junior high, was being groomed, not to juggle knives, nor even to build buildings, but to serve. Real estate was then, and remains, a family enterprise in New York, and it would have made sense that the Spitzer children might follow in Bernard's footsteps. But the elder Spitzer, in Eliot's telling, wanted something different for his children. "My dad's sense was that making more [money] is not really the measure of who you are," Spitzer says. "I don't think he ever felt guilty about it … But it's not as fundamentally as interesting or as useful an endeavor as somehow doing something that's meant to help people."

It did not always seem inevitable that helping people would mean running for office. Spitzer was not, and is not, a natural politician. He does not have Barack Obama's ability to look at a stranger and see him for who he is, nor Bill Clinton's ability to look at someone and see who he wants to be. On meeting the young lawyer Eliot Spitzer for the first time, new acquaintances could be charmed, yes, but also confused, insulted, outsmarted or challenged to a game of tennis. He had a passion for public policy, but plenty of other bright young men and women from Princeton and Harvard had that. What made Spitzer destined to run for office was his belief that he alone could stand at the center of great debates, fight and eventually win.

It drew him to the spotlight. When it came time to find a home for his family, he did not follow his parents' example and settle in Riverdale. Instead, the Spitzers made their family home in one of Bernard's rental buildings on Fifth Avenue. Here the Spitzers had one of the most exclusive addresses in town, thanks to the views of Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum, and also one of the most exposed, thanks to the crowds of tourists who swarm to those destinations each day. "Silda was always afraid of being too suburbanized," Spitzer says.

Her husband did his part to keep things interesting as well. In his nine years in public office, Spitzer became expert at using public attention as a means to achieve his ends. As attorney general, he brought major cases against AIG, Merrill Lynch and New York Stock Exchange chief Richard Grasso. He made himself the most well known state attorney general, probably in American history, by not hesitating to put his own personality at the very center of the story he told the public. He was a white knight always creating new monsters to slay, and he always found them: Grasso, AIG's Hank Greenberg and New York state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno. For the world, Spitzer never flinched, but there was a cost. "You can't show publicly that you're hurt or angry," Spitzer says. "People don't want to see it. So you have to maintain that façade of … invulnerability." He says he never tried to make any of his battles personal. "In AIG, for instance, yes, I felt like it was David vs. Goliath, but I was David! I wasn't Goliath … I was fighting up the mountain and fighting institutions that ultimately had much more staying power than I did."

To Spitzer's foes, and even his friends, this will sound plainly ridiculous: Eliot Spitzer, the eternal underdog. But in light of what was to transpire, it seems telling that Spitzer so often felt imperiled. I asked him if, at the beginning of his political career, he and Silda had discussed the risks a life in politics would bring. "Yes," he said, "and I thought we could handle it, and we did for a while. And then I didn't. Silda had some latent sense that this was going to impose pressures that we had to be careful about. I didn't pay enough attention, obviously."

In the end, it didn't matter whether he was David or Goliath; Spitzer slew himself. How did he grapple with the fallout? In the earliest hours, there were countless things to do, urgent concerns. It is ghastly to imagine how horrible the first days of the scandal must have been for Spitzer's three daughters—their father the giant slayer, now their father the john. Spitzer proudly notes that "they didn't miss school." That meant they were the first members of the family to face the cameras on Fifth Avenue. "I just hoped beyond hope that they would be able to walk out the front door without the media being too obtrusive … I wanted to create a sense that, yeah, their dad had done something unforgivable, but we were still a family and we were going to make it through this."

Then, of course, there was Silda. One grotesque irony of political sex scandals is that in the beginning, when the pain and shock are greatest, husband and wife need each other more than ever, for each of them is under attack from the outside world. "When you're in the foxhole with somebody," Spitzer says, "and there are incoming mortars, that breeds a certain closeness because nobody else can appreciate what you're going through."

The hard work, though, came after the cameras went away. Everyone wants to know, I said to Spitzer, why did Silda stay with you? "I'd be surprised if everybody said that," he said. "Marriages are dynamic. There are ups, there are downs, and I am incredibly fortunate to have a wife who has suffered unbelievably from this and yet who is still forgiving … And for that I am eternally grateful."

In the first months after the scandal, Spitzer approached healing his family as his primary occupation. "He clearly cares very much about the effect on his family from all this," says Jason Brown, a lifelong friend. "Before all this we didn't have that much occasion to talk about how his family was doing ... Now a lot of his focus is on, what do I do to help my family here?" He owed it to his family to keep his head down. The pictures that emerged of the private Spitzer were few and far between: walking the dogs, driving his car, seeing his eldest daughter off to the prom. Just another nerdy dad with a BlackBerry strapped to his belt.

For the first time in a decade, he tried to be a private person. There was an upside: more free time meant more running in the park. He resumed his weekly tennis game. He cooked breakfast for his daughters. "When you're in office, it's harder to find time for friends," he says. "So then, suddenly, here you are, thrown back into normal life … There's almost a sense of guilt. Why wasn't I calling them for the last 10 years when I was viewed as being, you know, important, powerful, whatever?"