On Sunday
Parade.com published an exclusive interview that Eliot Spitzer did with David Gergen. Remember that Spitzer/Parker (or is it Parker/Spitzer) premiers on CNN Monday night at 8.
DAVID GERGEN: You once said your obituary had been written in March 2008. How would you like your public life to be remembered?
ELIOT SPITZER: For trying with enormous passion to influence the course of the state and the nation toward a society that is progressive, based on opportunity, equality, fairness, and decency.
DG: You omitted what’s obviously going to be in the first paragraph.
ES: I had a failing that I acknowledged, confronted, and am trying to move beyond. Whether I will or will not is obviously yet to be determined. But there is a before and perhaps an after.
DG: Is your new TV show a path to redemption?
ES: No. I see it as an opportunity to create persuasive arguments about the direction we should move in as a society. If there is a redemptive consequence, wonderful.
DG: You have said it would be unbearable to put your family through another run for office. Yet friends of yours are quietly promoting the idea.
ES: I don’t think there’s any real close friend of mine who’s been saying that.
DG: So you’ve closed that door?
ES: You never in life close the door. But I would say this: It is not where I am heading.
DG: Do you see yourself as a journalist now?
ES: Over the last 20 years, the integrity of journalism as reporting has been lost. What we now have is journalistic advocacy, which has diminished the quality of news. I will be a commentator who will try very hard to present fact as fact; opinion will be clearly denoted as opinion.
DG: Critics have argued that your selection is bad for TV news, that it rewards vice over virtue.
ES: There are precious few who are pure. I say that not to in any way justify myself or diminish my sense of remorse but, rather, to say, “Okay, I have acknowledged my lapses. If you think I can still offer something, I’ll be happy to try.”
DG: You’ve said that your transgressions did not come from a death wish, from hubris.
ES: For years I had a T-shirt tucked away in the closet that I used to quote to executives on Wall Street: “Hubris is terminal.” I should have worn it. Hubris was a part of it. It was also the human frailty of anxiety that leads one to succumb to certain temptations, even though one knows, without any doubt, it is wrong and it is in public.
DG:You built your reputation on your insistence upon integrity—on Wall Street and elsewhere. How conflicted were you about your own—
ES: —double life? It created enormous tension.
DG: You feared for your family?
ES: Sure. Though the mind manages to diminish certain risks.
DG: Rumor has it that very wealthy enemies of yours hired detectives to pursue you.
ES: I have many wealthy enemies, and I have many enemies who are not so wealthy. They have claimed a role in bringing this to light. Whether they did, I don’t know—and don’t really care. I’ve acknowledged what I did.
DG: Were you set up?
ES: I wasn’t set up. One is set up when one is charged improperly with having done something he didn’t do.
DG: Are you at peace now?
ES: One never leaves behind the pain that one has caused to loved ones. Somewhere further down is the cost to career.
DG: Let me go back to your family. How do they feel that in effect your life has been semi-fictionalized by a popular television show, "The Good Wife"? Many people will think that it’s built on your experiences.
ES: We just ignore it. I mean, not to be someone catty, [but] there’s not much I can do. We just basically sign off on that stuff.
DG: What’s been the secret to repairing your marriage?
ES: I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate in having a wife who is loving, caring, forgiving—far beyond what I’m entitled to. She has been criticized for that, which has been hurtful to her. But she has shown remarkable fortitude and charity.
DG: There are those who argue that time in the wilderness can be productive for someone in the public arena.
ES: You learn more by losing than by winning. If you win, everything is glorious; one’s own brilliance has been proven again. Losing and being forced through a period of self-examination is useful and important. It’s easy to ignore the private side of life when one is in the public arena, because the constant drumbeat of the media overwhelms the things that ultimately matter much more. It’s a cliché, but the moments that really matter are the ones with the kids.
DG: Have the last few years made you humbler, more forgiving?
ES: The short answer is yes. The more subtle answer is that the image of me as attorney general—that I would come into Wall Street and say, “Here are the rigid rules! Boom! You are damned!”—was a caricature.
DG: What do you say to Americans who have been watching failures in the corporate world and in politics?
ES: Our plutocracy has failed. Every society has a plutocracy, a structure of decision-makers across institutions—private sector, public sector, not-for-profit, religious—and we have lived through a 20- or 30-year period where the social contract has fallen apart. In the ’40s and ’50s, there was a sense of responsibility that no longer exists.
DG: How do we find our way back?
ES: We need a Barack Obama. I don’t say this as an endorsement of him, but we need someone who speaks with the stature he had when he was campaigning in ’08 to say, “Here is what we owe each other.” That’s what Ronald Reagan did. There are certain remarkable leaders who project that capacity of social purpose that we have lost.
DG: You’ve criticized President Obama for not doing enough to change how Wall Street operates.
ES: He needs to bring in more creative vision. I would have loved to see him bring in [former Federal Reserve chairman] Paul Volcker as Treasury secretary. Volcker is a person of integrity and trust; he also has the stature to say, “Here’s what we have become. The financialization of our economy was ultimately destructive. The creativity that we see on Wall Street was a remarkable exercise in intellect but not in asset allocation.”
DG: There must be things you wanted to do as governor…
ES: It would be hubris on my part to say, “If I had been there…” What I wish I had done—as attorney general—was speak with a louder voice about the structural flaws I saw. The conflicts of interest inherent in the structure and centralization of decision-making on Wall Street led to fundamental fissures and violations of fiduciary duty that permitted enormous wealth to be created by those who were at this vortex of control of capital. But they did not ultimately benefit those whose capital they were playing with—the pension funds, the individual investors, the mutual funds. Or our economy.
DG: Martin Luther King Jr. biographer Taylor Branch once told me that King took great chances in his public life because he wanted to atone for the inner issues he was struggling with.
ES: That’s interesting—he felt compelled to push hard in order to seek the redemption he believed was necessary. That’s the great tension: We are better at understanding morality than we are at living it. And that may be one of the great—
DG: —curses—
ES: —of humankind. I’m not aware of any other species that even has a moral sensibility. So we are blessed in having one but cursed in our inability to abide by it.
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