There was a momentary pause in the war between Eliot Spitzer and Joe Bruno recently when the governor called to express his sympathies about the Senate majority leader’s wife, Barbara, who is suffering with Alzheimer’s disease. “She’s in very rapid decline,” says one source close to Bruno. “Within the past six months, the progression has been dramatic.” Bruno’s staffers were a bit surprised by the call. “That’s been the only reach-out in the past three or four months,” the Bruno source says. “They had a very brief conversation, exclusively about the illness and about his wife.” Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for Spitzer, confirmed the call took place. She declined to comment on “private phone calls” but disputed the Bruno camp’s assertion that the call was the first in months. “Definitely wasn’t the first,” she said. Not so, the Bruno source says: “The Spitzer people try and spin it like they talk all the time.”

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Geoffrey Gray
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