New York Review of Books Review

MEET Eliot, Irwin and the Impostor. Eliot - last name Spitzer - you may already know. He was the jut-jawed, flinty-eyed New Yorker who rose to nationwide fame as the state's attorney general, the scourge of crooked Wall Street analysts and self-dealing bankers. He swept into the governor's mansion in 2007 with the biggest electoral mandate in state history and then resigned a year later, disgraced and humiliated, amid revelations that he had patronized prostitutes. Irwin and the Impostor we're meeting for the first time, courtesy of two books that chronicle Spitzer's dramatic fall and seek to illuminate, with mixed success, how a seemingly promising career in politics went to such spectacular ruin. Irwin, the nickname aides bestowed on Spitzer's "raging evil twin," features prominently in Peter Elkind's "Rough Justice." He is the impetuous, hot-tempered Spitzer, periodically emerging to threaten or scream at Wall Street executives and, later, recalcitrant lawmakers. The Impostor, meanwhile, is the central character in "Journal of the Plague Year," the entertainingly self-serving memoir by Spitzer's estranged mentor and former senior adviser, Lloyd Constantine. Like Irwin, the Impostor is a kind of twisted alter ego, brought forth by the pressure of Spitzer's secret life with hookers and - in Constantine's telling - principally responsible for the wreckage of Spitzer's political career. Though published two years after Spitzer's fall, the books are inadvertently well timed. (Each of them, I should disclose, cites articles I wrote or helped write for The New York Times.) In recent months, the former governor has mounted a full-scale comeback tour: he has written numerous op-eds taking to task his old enemies on Wall Street, reportedly mulled a bid for New York State comptroller and joined CNN as co-host of a prime-time program that will make its debut in the fall. Who, then, is the real Eliot Spitzer? Elkind, an editor at large at Fortune magazine who has covered Spitzer since his days gunning for Wall Street, has written the more straightforward and sympathetic account. He briskly tours Spitzer's triumphant tenure as attorney general, much of it familiar. Shrewdly, Elkind spices up his narrative with fresh reporting on the parallel rise of the pimps and prostitutes who would eventually set up Emperor's Club V.I.P., the high-end escort service that Spitzer turned to, according to Elkind, sometime early in 2006. But not until Spitzer becomes governor does Irwin really leap off the page. From his first weeks in office, Spitzer picked fights he could not win, like trying to force the Legislature to select from outside its own ranks a replacement state comptroller. One problem, as Elkind observes, was that Spitzer surrounded himself with former lawyers and prosecutors, most of them sharing both his zeal and his unfamiliarity with the Capitol. But Spitzer himself proved a poor player of Albany chess, losing again and again to the gerrymandered and supremely patient Legislature. "As A.G., he could kill. He'd come up with the goods, bring suit, threaten to indict, and his opponents would cave," Elkind writes. "But as governor, everything was different. The lawmakers could pass a bill without him; he couldn't pass anything without them. And they didn't play by his rules." And while his eruptions at Wall Street executives could be explained away, even valorized, by his aides, in Albany, Spitzer also bullied small fry. Weirdly, he proved far better at winning the affections of some women he patronized than of lawmakers. Elkind reports that "Angelina," Spitzer's go-to escort, came to root for the governor in his battles with the Legislature, poring over his newspaper coverage and even reading a book about him. Despite some early victories, Spitzer quickly faced gridlock. Eventually, he grew so enraged with Joseph Bruno, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, and so eager to see him crushed, that he ordered an aide to release damaging records of Bruno's use of state aircraft to attend fund-raisers. The resulting scandal would spawn at least eight different formal investigations - including, in true Albany fashion, investigations of other investigations. Spitzer never really recovered. Elkind does not venture much in the way of analysis, political or psychological. But his account implicitly links Spitzer's sojourns with prostitutes to his political problems. Could it be that the more Spitzer compromised himself in private, the less he was willing to do so in public? Constantine confronts that question more squarely, though not necessarily more convincingly. He presents Spitzer as a tormented man whose judgment was warped by the shame of his secret dalliances. To the arguments and occasional tantrums already in the public record, he adds a few more. For example, on at least one occasion, Constantine reveals, Spitzer reduced Judith Kaye, then the regal chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, to tears, berating her over the phone for not thanking him and Constantine for their help on a minor initiative. In Constantine's telling, the Eliot Spitzer the public knew as governor was really the Impostor, unstable and unrecognizable even to his intimates. "At times Eliot was supremely in control, and at other times seemingly emotionally unhinged," Constantine writes. "Who is this guy?" Silda Wall Spitzer, the governor's wife, asks Constantine at one point. Like most political memoirs, Constantine's book features abundant scoresettling, notably with Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who led the first investigation into the scandal known as Troopergate, and whom Constantine - like Elkind - portrays as eager to embarrass and damage Spitzer, a rival. And while "Journal of the Plague Year" can be endearingly earnest, it is also unusually self-absorbed, even for a memoir. Pages and pages are spent detailing minor battles, like disputes over the press release announcing Constantine's job in the new administration. Among Spitzer's chief problems, Constantine suggests, was that the new governor spent too much time listening to the other aides around him and not enough time listening to Constantine. He even attributes some of his boss's volatility to Spitzer's forgoing their weekly tennis games, owing to a sore hamstring: "The lack of tennis with me, or anyone else, had also deprived Eliot of an important physical release." Constantine, who mentored Spitzer the law school student and later established a firm with his protégé, knows the former governor as well as anyone. But he struggles to understand why someone with Spitzer's drive and intelligence could not learn how to deploy persuasion to become a more successful governor. And while lawmakers came to see Spitzer's rages as simply the outbursts of a politician used to getting his way, Constantine can explain them only as the product of deep mental anguish. "I believe that an altered and impaired Eliot made the mistakes chronicled in this book," Constantine writes. "I believe that a healthy Eliot, not one being poisoned by constant awareness that his private conduct would come to light and destroy everything, would not have done these things." Maybe. A different answer, and perhaps a more honest one, comes from Spitzer himself. In an interview with Elkind, the former governor dismisses the idea that he was subconsciously trying to destroy his own career. Nor does Spitzer claim that the pressures of governing drove him to seek out paid companionship; the visits, he admits to Elkind, began as early as March 2006, when he was still attorney general and seemed poised to vanquish Albany. Like other rich men through the years who have paid for sex, Spitzer says, he simply found it convenient and thought he would never be caught. "In all fairness," he tells Elkind, "you gotta say this is an act of stupid hubris. I pretend it was nothing other than that." The real Eliot Spitzer, it seems, may be the Spitzer we knew all along. In recent months, the former governor of New York has mounted a full-scale comeback tour. Nicholas Confessore is a reporter in the Albany bureau of The Times.