Road to Ruin

Rough Justice

Former Governor Eliot Spitzer

Credit: Getty Images

The Rise and Fall
of Eliot Spitzer
by Peter Elkind
Portfolio, 320 pp., $26.95

It all seems so familiar: New York, once the Empire State, beset by a dysfunctional government and a dying upstate economy; a wildly popular, crusading attorney general seemingly on his way to a landslide gubernatorial victory by promising to revive the state’s flagging fortunes. Four years ago, Eliot Spitzer was the man riding in on the AG’s white horse; this year it’s Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo has no doubt carefully read Peter Elkind’s Rough Justice, if only to see how his own role in the former governor’s political demise is depicted. The “rough justice” in the title refers to the methods used by Spitzer as attorney general when he went after Wall Street executives, and also by Cuomo when, as Spitzer’s successor, he went after Governor Spitzer’s use of state troopers to subvert a rival. The method: Go after a guilty bigwig who has a lot to lose, try him in the press, squeeze him, and then force to him to quickly acknowledge his wrongdoing. The technique can be brutally effective. There’s no need for subtleties or convictions, just a big PR victory. Cuomo used the same methods to discomfit Governor Spitzer that Attorney General Spitzer had used to make himself governor.

Elkind’s book is primarily the story of Spitzer’s descent into the world of “high class” call girls. But there are two, more substantial but less developed, stories folded into the book’s melodramatic format. The first is the story of why New York’s government works best for the people employed by government. The second involves the danger of electing candidates who are merely intelligent while lacking character, experience, and integrity.