Running man

Risk & Insurance, Jan, 2005 by Steve Yahn

Spitzer seemed destined to have become a social activist. He was raised in the fashionable Riverdale section of the Bronx, the youngest of three children born to Bernard and Anne Spitzer. Both parents are children of Jewish immigrants. His father parlayed training as an engineer and a reputation for doing top-quality work into a New York real estate development empire that now numbers some of the finest high-rise addresses in the city.

Spitzer attributes his education at the Horace Mann School, where he was captain of the tennis team and lost his first political election, for fundamentally shaping his view of the world.

"It is the notion," he says, "that there are children who have to be taught to be free thinkers ... to be willing to stand up to authority and say, 'That is not necessarily correct.'"

As an undergraduate at Princeton University, where he studied government and public-policy issues, Spitzer was elected student body president as a sophomore and played on the tennis team. At Harvard law school, he was an editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. He also was a brilliant, indefatigable researcher and sometimes ease maker for Alan Dershowitz, the school's famed criminal law professor and famed defense attorney.

Social activism begins at home for Spitzer and his wife Silda A. Wall, a North Carolina native and also a graduate of Harvard Law where they met. Their three daughters--Elyssa, 14; Sarabeth, 12; and Jenna, 10--attend Horace Mann School, where Silda is a trustee.

Silda stresses that she and Eliot assiduously strive to keep their professional lives separate. But a nonprofit organization the couple established in 1996 before Eliot was elected attorney general reflects their shared social and moral values. The Children for Children Foundation, of which Silda is president, runs an array of programs that encourage children of all socioeconomic backgrounds in New York to reach out and help disadvantaged children (often through schools in underprivileged parts of the city). In turn, the children receiving a helping hand move on chain reaction fashion to assist others.

STEELY BLUE EYES

At home, say close family friends, Eliot Spitzer's steely blue-eyed, lantern-jaw visage as his state's chief law enforcement officer softens easily to that of loving husband and father. "When we're done with our weekly 5:45 morning tennis match," says Constantine, "Eliot always calls the house to make sure everything is okay with the girls as they're getting ready to go to school."

In the midst of growing pressures, the real question is: Can Spitzer relax? Insiders note that Spitzer can flash a fearsome temper with staffers he believes have let down the cause, and he has "a reputation for righteously upbraiding errant corporate executives in meetings at his office. "It's getting harder for him," says Constantine. "But children have a way of humbling you. And he and his family have a farm in upstate Columbia County that gives them a place to get away to at times."