Ambitious Eliot Spitzer

Policy Review, Aug/Sep 2006 by Munson, Sam

Ambitious Eliot Spitzer BROOKE MASTERS. Spoiling For A Fight: The Rise of Eliot Spitzer. HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY. 368 PAGES. $16.00

IT SEEMS INCREASINGLY likely that Eliot Spitzer - sometime scourge of the fund managers, the people's champion, part Rudolph Giuliani and part Fighting Bob LaFollette - will become the next governor of the Empire State. And while the office may no longer be the stepping stone to the presidential candidacy that it once was, Spitzer's accession to it, should he succeed, holds out at least the distinct possibility of his taking a run at the White House in the not-too-distant future. Whether one considers this a sobering or an elating prospect, the spectacle of Spitzer in pursuit of the highest office in the land would doubtlessly be long remembered, if he were to display even only a fraction of the keen intelligence, tenacity, fierceness, media savvy, and fathomless self-confidence he has shown as attorney general of New York.

But before the American populace can contemplate the prospect of Eliot 2011, Spitzer must successfully fulfill a different dire commission: the management, fiscal and political, of New York's state government - sclerotic, graft-rich, and in as permanent a crisis, it seems, as the government of the city itself - an office, it must be noted, that counts among its past holders both the great Theodore Roosevelt and the stunningly ineffectual George Pataki. Only the prospect of this job, one imagines, could make a man think wistfully of weeks engrossed in mind-numbingly complicated data-mining on a hunt to pinpoint managerial malfeasance in the seemingly dull but apparently quite seamy world of mom-and-pop mutual fund investment.

SPITZER'S METEORIC rise into America's political consciousness has as much to do with the times as with the man. The lean years after the dot-com collapse left the investing public with a hankering for visible, swift revenge on its defrauders, real and alleged. Practices that had gone uncriticized throughout the 1990s (to the point, nearly, where they had become standard operating procedure for growing corporations) suddenly emerged as proofs of the utter moral bankruptcy of America's corporate culture. Something, to coin a phrase, had to be done, and Spitzer - in his own mind, certainly, and in the media's collective imagination - was just the man to do it. But while his success as a reformer seems undeniable, his record in ensuring that the wrongdoers actually received their just punishment is far spottier.

The source of this curious disconnect forms the implicit subject of Brooke Masters' open-eyed treatment of Spitzer. This theme, indeed, first appears in the book's title. Masters' book is a studious and objective account of the life and times of Eliot Spitzer, and one fact of Spitzer's character emerges over the course of it as undeniably clear: This is a man whose considerable worldly success is founded, in the end, on his bottomless font of aggression. (That, and his father's money.) What this may mean for his political future is unclear at present. But it is eminently worth considering.

Eliot Spitzer was born in Riverdale, a tony near-suburb of New York City, in 1959, the middle of three children. His father, Bernard, an engineer-turned-developer, was in the midst of amassing his fortune; his mother was teaching college English. He attended the famed Horace Mann School and Princeton, and earned his JD from Harvard (where he served as an intern in Alan Dershowitz's defense of Claus von Bulow). Spitzer did a stint as a clerk for Judge Robert Abrams, and another at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, but really began to hit his stride when he joined the Manhattan DA'S office in 1985, under the renowned Robert Morgenthau. Here he worked closely with Michael Cherkasky (whom Spitzer's prosecutorial efforts would, more than 20 years later, propel into the limelight as a newly-appointed CEO in charge of cleaning up insurance giant Marsh & McClennan) in its organized crime department. In 1988, Spitzer negotiated a high-profile plea deal with mobsters caught in a sting operation aimed at exposing corruption in the garment trucking industry, and immediately stepped into a whirl of media controversy that has not quieted appreciably up to the present day.

Spitzer left the DA'S office in 1991 to return to private practice at Paul, Weiss, but in late 1993 the state attorney general's office began to look tempting: It was filled by appointee G. Oliver Koppell, who would have no real incumbent status come the election in 1994. Spitzer entered the race late, took out a huge bank loan to offset his lack of fundraising time, and began spending like a sailor. (This loan would come back to haunt him: His father paid it off through a series of self-dealing real estate transactions, an act that pushed the envelope of New York's campaign finance laws and provided fodder for Spitzer's political foes). The hard-and-fast approach did not avail, however. Spitzer placed dead last in the Democratic primary. But by 1998, when the office came up for contest once again, he was ready. He had spent the intervening four years quietly campaigning and building a political support network. Spitzer took the primary (with a little more financial help from his father) and, in one of the most hotly contested elections in state history, defeated Republican Dennis Vacco by just over 25,000 votes. Spitzer was sworn in on January 1, 1999.