FAVE WAS ON THE HOOK
Paterson: I had to tell Hill of Spitz
“Love Gov” Eliot Spitzer went from dropping trou to totally dropping the ball when his hooker scandal exploded, delegating everything to then-Lt. Gov. David Paterson — even the awkward task of breaking the news to Hillary Clinton, the accidental successor reveals in a dishy new memoir.
Paterson’s book, “Black, Blind, & in Charge,” exposes the inside chaos of Spitzer’s 2008 resignation as governor.
As his governorship collapsed around his ankles like a pair of limp black socks, Spitzer shut down, instead leaving staffers to pick up the pieces, recounts Paterson, who would succeed his disgraced boss and become the state’s first black governor.
Spitzer was not even the one to tell Paterson that he was stepping down over the trysts with call girls including Ashley Dupré. Instead, Paterson learned he was about to become New York’s 55th governor in a call from Spitzer’s top aide, Richard Baum, who told him in a barely audible voice.
“I would learn six months later when I had a conversation with him that the reason [Baum] was whispering was that he was in the bathroom of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s Fifth Avenue house,” Paterson recalls in his book.
Baum confided that he had pressed Spitzer to call Paterson but the disgraced governor had demurred. “Don’t worry about him. We’ll type something up for him to read,” Spitzer had told Baum, according to Paterson.
“Baum knew I couldn’t read anything that was typed, particularly on that short notice. I needed time for memorization,” writes Paterson, who is legally blind.
Paterson’s first call concerning the Spitzer bombshell was to his father and mentor, the former Harlem politician Basil Paterson. The dad, a former New York secretary of state, deputy mayor and state senator, advised him to call other top New York political leaders to avoid being accused of keeping them out of the loop.
“How do you explain a sex scandal to Hillary Clinton?” David Paterson mused.
He left an urgent message with Clinton, who was a New York’s junior senator and running for president at the time in 2008.
Clinton called back immediately, and he told her Spitzer was about to resign. She asked why.
When he told her that Spitzer had been with a prostitute, there was a long, awkward pause.
“You know, a prostitute, did you hear that?” Paterson repeated. Another long pause. Clinton, who endured humiliating sex scandals involving her husband, former President Bill Clinton, finally broke the silence and said, “Oh, what a world!”
Clinton said she and Bill would be totally supportive of Paterson and emphasized, “There is nothing I could go through that they hadn’t already been through, and I felt relieved,” Paterson writes.
The memoir also recounts the time a much younger Paterson, then newly elected to the state Senate, met Muhammad Ali.
It was in Manhattan, as a June 1986 march against South African apartheid was about to start.
Ali was fuming — Paterson had failed to recognize the boxing legend when they shook hands.
Learning Paterson was blind, Ali went back and embraced him and asked that they march together at the front of the parade.
Older and more veteran politicians were left muttering about the young Paterson.
“Well,” Ali told the rising political star, “I was the youngest heavyweight champion of the world. You should be here.”