frailty of anxiety that leads oneto succumb to certain tempta-tions, even though one knows, without any doubt, it is wrongand it is in public.
DG:
You built your reputationon your insistence uponintegrity—on Wall Street andelsewhere. How conflicted were you about your own—
ES:
—double life? It createdenormous tension.
DG:
You feared for your family?
ES:
Sure. Though the mind man-ages to diminish certain risks.
DG:
Rumor has it that very wealthy enemies of yours hireddetectives to pursue you.
ES:
I have many wealthy enemies,and I have many enemies whoare not so wealthy. They haveclaimed a role in bringing this tolight. Whether they did, I don’tknow—and don’t really care. I’veacknowledged what I did.
DG:
Were you set up?
ES:
I wasn’t set up. One is setup when one is charged im-properly with having donesomething he didn’t do.
DG:
Are you at peace now?
ES:
One never leaves behind thepain that one has caused toloved ones. Somewhere furtherdown is the cost to career.
DG:
What’s been the secret torepairing your marriage?
ES:
I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate in having a wife whois loving, caring, forgiving—farbeyond what I’m entitled to.She has been criticized for that, which has been hurtful to her.But she has shown remarkablefortitude and charity.
DG:
There are those who arguethat time in the wilderness can beproductive for someone in thepublic arena.
ES:
You learn more by losing
continued
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When daylight saving time(DST) stops or starts, shouldyou adjust the clock on yourlight timer?
—Adrienne Kerr,Plano, Tex.
Nope. Changing to standard time(ST) makes no difference.Say you’ve set your timer toturn the lights on at 6 p.m. andoff at 7 a.m. Then DST stops,and ST resumes. That day, it getsdark at 5 p.m. To your unchangedtimer, it’s still 6 p.m., so the lightsgo on, which is what you want. The same thing happens thenext morning. It gets light at 6a.m., but to your timer it’s still 7a.m., and the lights go off, also what you want.If you occasionally reset youron-and-off times throughout the year as daylight hours get shorteror longer, you can switch yourtimer clocks to the current timethen, if you like. But you neverneed to do this on the officialtime-change dates.
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continued
than by winning. If you win, everythingis glorious; one’s own brilliance hasbeen proven again. Losing and beingforced through a period of self-exami-nation is useful and important. It’s easy to ignore the private side of life whenone is in the public arena, because theconstant drumbeat of the media over- whelms the things that ultimately mat-ter much more. It’s a cliché, but themoments that really matter are theones with the kids.
DG:
Have the last few years made you humbler, more forgiving?
ES
:
The short answer is yes. The moresubtle answer is that the image of meas attorney general—that I wouldcome into Wall Street and say, “Hereare the rigid rules! Boom! You aredamned!”—was a caricature.
DG:
What do you say to Americans who have been watching failures inthe corporate world and in politics?
ES:
Our plutocracy has failed. Every society has a plutocracy, a structureof decision-makers across institu-tions—private sector, public sector,not-for-profit, religious—and wehave lived through a 20- or 30-yearperiod where the social contract hasfallen 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. Idon’t say this as an endorsement of him, but we need someone whospeaks with the stature he had whenhe 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 socialpurpose that we have lost.
DG:
You’ve criticized President Obama for not doing enough tochange how Wall Street operates.
ES:
He needs to bring in more cre-ative vision. I would have loved to seehim bring in [former Federal Reservechairman] Paul Volcker as Treasury secretary. Volcker is a person of integrity and trust; he also has thestature to say, “Here’s what we havebecome. The financialization of oureconomy was ultimately destructive. The creativity that we see on WallStreet was a remarkable exercise inintellect but not in asset allocation.”
DG:
There must be things you want-ed to do as governor…
ES:
It would be hubris on my partto say, “If I had been there…” WhatI wish I
had
done—as attorney general—was speak with a louder voice about the structural flaws Isaw. The conflicts of interest inher-ent in the structure and centraliza-tion of decision-making on WallStreet led to fundamental fissuresand violations of fiduciary duty thatpermitted enormous wealth to becreated 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 indi- vidual investors, the mutual funds.Or our economy.
DG:
Martin Luther King Jr. biogra-pher Taylor Branch once told methat King took great chances in hispublic life because he wanted toatone for the inner issues he wasstruggling with.
ES:
That’s interesting—he felt com-pelled to push hard in order to seek the redemption he believed was nec-essary. That’s the great tension: Weare better at understanding morality than we are at living it. And thatmay be one of the great—
DG:
—curses—
ES:
—of humankind. I’m not awareof any other species that even has amoral sensibility. So we are blessedin having one but cursed in our in-ability to abide by it.
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October 3, 2010
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