The silence that falls after a losing political campaign is almost total, like the quiet inside an abandoned mine. The senator said, “There’s no other business to compare it with. Based on how people vote, you go from almost leading the free world to not having a job in twenty-four hours.” A few media types might call for help with their postmortem stories, but after a day or two you no longer hear from the thousands of people who a week earlier jammed the phone lines with advice, requests, and offers of support.
After John Kerry and John Edwards lost, they didn’t even call each other very much. In fact, they lost touch in a matter of weeks as Kerry prepared to return to the United States Senate and Edwards turned his attention to his wife’s health and his own uncertain future.
Mrs. Edwards’s prognosis seemed dire. Her cancer was aggressive, and by the time it was discovered it had already moved beyond the duct where it started and into surrounding tissue. When this occurs the cancer can spread almost anywhere in the body, and the best treatment is an all-out assault with chemotherapy and radiation. It was a grueling regimen that took about six months to complete. During this time the senator divided his attention between her, their children, and his own struggle to get past his defeat and set a course for his political future. During a week when Elizabeth was between treatments and strong enough to be alone, the senator and I went together to Figure Eight Island, where we could rest and brainstorm.
The Edwards beach house sits on the Intracoastal Waterway, with a commanding view of the water. During our first few days, the senator spent much of his time walking on the beach and reading through a stack of books by or about Bobby Kennedy. Calls from political supporters brought the suggestion that he run for chair of the Democratic National Committee, and if he’d been interested in this kind of nuts-and-bolts party work, he could have had the job. However, he rejected the idea because he didn’t see how he could run for president from the DNC position, and he was probably right. When Howard Dean announced he wanted the job, he more or less accepted the end of his own desire to occupy the Oval Office.
Aside from occasional chats with his cronies, the senator’s main contact with the outside world during this beach retreat came from Elizabeth, whom he called about half a dozen times a day. I was impressed by their friendship and how he valued her input. Sometimes she’d ask to speak to me so that I could give her a report on his spirits. More than once she said, “I’m glad he’s with you, Andrew. It fmakes me feel safer.”
At night we would go to Wilmington, where restaurants that bustled with business in the summer were mostly empty and quiet. Although he sometimes seemed plagued by doubts about his campaigns for the White House, he also made arguments about why he had done it and even why he should try again. Invariably, the rationale would come down to his concern “for people who can’t help themselves” who needed him to be their champion, their white knight.
In all these conversations, the senator noted that Elizabeth was certain that he should mount another campaign, whether she was sick or not. During this time he admired her determination, but I noticed that he also complained more about her mood swings and demanding nature. Toward the end of the campaign, she had started picking fights with him as he was leaving for a flight or about to go onstage for some event, not caring how it might make him late or affect his performance. Often these arguments were about staffers she didn’t trust (she didn’t trust most of the senator’s aides) or about something he said or did that she didn’t like. “Sometimes I think she’s crazy,” he said.
We drank a little more than usual during this week, and as the wine took hold, the senator invariably talked about the tragedy of his son Wade’s death, going over the details as if repeating them might release some of the pain. On the day it happened, Wade’s companion, who survived virtually unscathed, had called friends in the neighborhood, who knew about it before the Edwardses. The senator told me about how the police came to their home and Elizabeth knew what was happening even before they spoke. She screamed, “Tell me he’s okay! Tell me he’s okay!” When they hesitated, she collapsed on the floor. One of the officers turned to Edwards and said, “I’m sorry, sir. Your son was killed instantly in a wreck.”
As he told this story, the combination of emotion and wine filled the senator’s eyes with tears. He said, “This is just between you and me, okay?” and then continued. The most poignant moment would come when he recalled that when he went to the medical examiner’s office to identify Wade, he actually climbed onto the table where he had been laid out so that he could embrace him one last time. This was the same story he told John Kerry, but unlike Kerry, I didn’t judge Edwards for repeating it. I know that people have to tell their tales of grief over and over again, so I didn’t mind. I hoped the process would help him recover his energy and optimism, and by the time our retreat was over, it seemed he had.
Despite the obstacles he might face, John Edwards believed he would occupy the Oval Office in January 2009. To get there, he would need some way to remain in public life and maintain an organization that could provide the base for a run at the nomination. I would continue to work for him as a sort of personal assistant, which meant I accepted some very unusual assignments. One required me to make good on a promise that Elizabeth made to a young woman who asked her for help getting trained to drive trucks. Elizabeth had said she would help. I wound up driving the woman, who had been Wade’s friend at school, more than an hour each way, at least a dozen times, so she could get to class. These round-trips always started before dawn.
kwn.
I was not happy serving as a chauffeur so that Mrs. Edwards could fulfill a personal pledge of charity, but I did it because I believed in John Edwards and wanted to be part of his long-term effort to win the White House. No out-of-office Democrat had won the nomination in modern times. But there were some advantages to being freed from the Senate. He wouldn’t be forced into voting on legislation related to issues like abortion and gay marriage that Republicans crafted in order to paint Democrats as lacking commonsense or morality. Freed from this trap, he could present himself as a person of faith, who held moral Christian views, and this was critical to him being elected president. We began the effort by creating two organizations: a PAC called the One America Committee and an institute at the University of North Carolina called the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.
The PAC, which was named by Mrs. Edwards, would fund a small staff in Washington and pay for the senator’s travels and other expenses. The antipoverty center would support research and education and host conferences that would bring together experts on jobs, education, housing, health care, and other issues that would become the core of the senator’s 2008 campaign. He would draw only a modest stipend from this organization, but he did ask me to try to get the university to grant him certain benefits-tickets and parking for basketball games, for example-in exchange for lending his name and presence to the school. He didn’t receive these wish-list items, but he did get a beautiful office to share with his wife. However, she never actually worked there, and on the rare occasions when he was at the center, he did mostly political work, including fund-raising.
In choosing a populist, antipoverty focus, Senator and Mrs. Edwards threw out the advice of prominent consultants like Bob Shrum and David Axelrod, whom they blamed for the timid Kerry-Edwards campaign that failed in 2004. They were determined to run the next campaign themselves and as they saw fit, and they thought it didn’t matter if poverty was not a popular cause with a majority of Americans. They believed that people just wanted to see that a candidate stood for something important, as had Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms, and was strong in his resolve. (You might not agree with them, but you knew what they stood for.) They also thought that the issue would appeal to the small number of intensely political folks, especially labor leaders, who participate in the Iowa caucuses and can give a contender the momentum to win the nomination.
Edwards dreamed of getting more political legitimacy from an independent grassroots movement that would demand that he run for president. Since no one in the country was actually building such a movement, he explored the idea of creating one, on the Internet, but in a way that he could deny having anything to do with it. I attended a meeting with the senator, Mrs. Edwards, and a consultant named Zack Exley, who they hoped might pull off this trick. (Exley had been a major force in the online efforts of the liberal activist organization called MoveOn.org.) It was a giddy session, with lots of excitement about how they could start an online petition to make it seem as if thousands, if not millions, of people were begging Edwards to run. However, in the end, the Edwardses decided Exley wanted to have too much influence on the campaign. The senator would have to find support the old-fashioned way, by meeting people face-to-face and winning th kandem over.
Once the plan was set, the Edwardses embarked on a schedule of visits to homeless shelters, union halls, universities, and other places where he gave speeches and joined forums that allowed him to remain in the public eye. He used his appearances to test ideas for his platform. One of his favorites was a College for Everyone program that would fund the first year of study for poor students willing to work ten hours a week. When he wanted to test the idea in a pilot demonstration, I raised a million dollars to fund a College for Everyone trial in Greene County, a poor community in eastern North Carolina.
Money is the fuel that runs every think tank, every political action committee, and, for that matter, every aide to an out-of-office politician. I worked hard to fuel-up all three of the Edwards organizations, raising more than $4 million, which freed him from having to spend much time on the phone asking for cash. Sometimes the hardest part of this job involved getting the senator and Mrs. Edwards to participate. For example, when I recruited a Chapel Hill businessman named Michael Cucchiara, one favor he asked for in return for his donation was that I get tickets for his wife to see The Oprah Winfrey Show. He also asked for dinner with the Edwardses.
As everyone knows, Oprah tickets were a tough get, but I managed to score some through her friend Gayle King. Cheri went to the show with Mrs. Cucchiara. She received a video camera from Oprah, who gave them to audience members willing to film themselves doing something positive in their communities. Cheri raised $30,000 for soldiers at Fort Bragg.
Getting the Edwardses to drive across town for dinner with the Cucchiaras was much harder than finagling the tickets to Oprah. I finally had to pitch a fit to get them to do it. Despite this kind of resistance, I helped to get the three Edwards organizations rolling and then maintained them with a flow of cash. Fred Baron purchased a jet, which he remodeled according to the senator’s specifications and then gave to him to use.
While most of his expenses and staff were covered by the money I raised, and favors from supporters like Fred, Senator Edwards wanted to continue to generate personal income as a matter of both financial security and pride. His political contacts and experience made him an attractive commodity for influence-and information-based operations like law firms, lobbying outfits, management consultants, and investment houses. Always alert to opportunity, he went to the industry with the most money-finance-and got a part-time gig with a hedge fund called Fortress Financial for a salary of roughly $500,000 per year.
As he did with the poverty center, the senator put very little time into his Fortress job, but it allowed him to become an investor in exclusive funds generally closed to newcomers. He put $16 million into Fortress, which before the economic collapse of 2008 used a variety of creative and controversial schemes to deliver high rates of return. If you think that hiring on with a hedge fund that avoided taxes by incorporating offshore accounts conflicted with Edwards’s political concerns about “two Americas,” rich and poor, you aren’t alone. The irony wasn’t lost on his critics, and they would eventually catch up to him; b kh uut before they did, he would profit handsomely. He added to this income by making speeches about poverty, some of which netted him up to $55,000 apiece. One of these appearances was in the United Arab Emirates, where he was accompanied by a new body man, Josh Brumberger, who later told me that the service at the seven-star luxury hotel in Dubai was “the kind of attention Edwards always wanted.”
With his need for a political base and personal income met, the senator next turned attention to his home and his appearance. Using my name to register under, he checked into a hospital for extensive dental work and plastic surgery to remove a mole from his upper lip. The new teeth were susceptible to stains, so after he got them he switched from Diet Coke to Diet Sprite and diet orange soda. Still holding to the routine, I bought these drinks by the caseload and had them waiting whenever I met him with the car, but at this time I also began a quiet exercise in rebellion by making sure the left armrest for his seat was always lowered when he got in. It may seem like a small thing, but he preferred to have it raised so he could move around in the seat. I put it down and smiled to myself whenever an annoyed look flashed across his face before he pushed it up. I also took silent pleasure in waiting for the moment he would demonstrate that he had become truly spoiled rotten by voicing a complaint about this tiny inconvenience.
The senator got lots of opportunities to complain to me during this time because I was his only North Carolina-based aide, and he needed to be home as much as possible as Mrs. Edwards planned the construction of her dream house in Chapel Hill. The process began when they put their house in Washington up for sale and bought more than a hundred acres to accommodate a sprawling house, as well as a barnlike athletic building housing a basket ball court, racquetball court, exercise room, and indoor swimming pool along with living quarters. Emma Claire and Jack got adjoining tree houses, complete with working windows, measuring more than one thousand square feet each. Mrs. Edwards, who added rooms for Christmas ornaments and gift wrapping to the plans, had found inspiration for this project at John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s estate in Pennsylvania, which is a beautiful collection of rambling old structures set amid rolling farmland.
As the Edwardses’ lifestyle became ever more extravagant, I began to feel incredulous. His big issue was poverty, but he was flying around in a private jet, building a gigantic estate, drawing big checks from a hedge fund, and booking speeches for tens of thousands of dollars apiece. In frustration, I once said to Mrs. Edwards, the architect, and the builder, “The press is going to eat him alive on this.” They laughed and dismissed my concerns. The guy who once drove a beat-up Buick for appearances’ sake told me it was impossible for him to cut back on the house because his wife was sick with cancer and it was her dream.
As the employee who never said no to the senator and Mrs. Edwards, I simply accepted extra assignments related to the new house. One of the first required me to drive a rented truck to Washington, D.C., where I struggled to back it down the narrow alleyway behind their house. The entire Washington campaign staff had come on Mrs. Edwards’s order to load stuff she couldn’t trust to a moving company. I drove back the same day, and after finishing in the early hours of the morning, instead of thanks, I received a grilling about buying beer and pizza for kandthe volunteers who met me to unload.
In time I would realize that my relationship with the Edwardses had grown so close, so familiar, that they felt comfortable asking me to do anything they might imagine, and without expressing much gratitude. During the construction of the mansion, I became Mrs. Edwards’s assistant and informal project manager in charge of chasing down the architect, harassing contractors, and keeping track of appliances, flooring, and other essentials. I helped pick out and purchase most of the furnishings and devoted days to pushing stuff around until it was all positioned perfectly.
Fortunately, when you are working for a presidential candidate, you don’t have to call a 1-800 number to get service. Instead, you call the CEO of the phone company or electric utility and get immediate attention. This power was especially helpful as I worked through to-do lists written by Mrs. Edwards for me and other PAC employees. These were many pages long and required us to set up everything from the room designed for the sole purpose of wrapping Christmas presents to outfitting a project area with arts-and-crafts supplies.
A few problems were beyond even the Edwardses’ power and influence. When the fellow who lived across the street from the Edwardses put up a RUDY GIULIANI FOR PRESIDENT sign, I even posed as a real-estate speculator to see if his land was available. (Elizabeth was also bothered by the “slummy” buildings and auto repair shop the owner, Monty Johnson, kept on the land.) Monty’s asking price-more than $1 million-was so high, she decided she would just put up with the irritation of seeing Rudy’s name every time she left the house. She often joked about burning down an abandoned house that was on the property.
I, meanwhile, resented having to deal with her neighbor and all the other extra work related to the house, especially the more menial labor. However, I didn’t say anything because these assignments all seemed to flow out of a relationship that was far more complex and personal than the usual employee-employer arrangement. I believed I would work for the Edwardses for many years to come, and to make my commute easier, I began pushing for us to move closer to their house. Cheri resisted when I suggested building our own new place but eventually agreed. I felt confident taking on the expense because I was making a very good salary, which I expected would grow whether the senator was elected president or not. We bought some land and we hired the same architect and builder that the Edwardses had and began a misadventure similar to the plot of the 1986 movie The Money Pit.
Of course, as this all happened I couldn’t see that I had allowed myself to be trapped in the Edwardses’ orbit. Cheri worried about how entangled my life (and hers) had become with theirs, and though she tried to be supportive, it was a source of conflict in our marriage. However, when she tried to talk to me all I heard was that she objected to the amount of time I put into my job, time that could have been spent with my family. I didn’t understand her other major point, which was that I had come to identify too closely with the Edwardses at the expense of my own priorities and hopes. After so many years, I no longer saw them clearly. In fact, I was willing to imagine they had positive qualities they d kaliidn’t actually possess and overlook their flaws and mistakes, because I needed them to succeed.
Of course, once you allow someone to get away with being pushy, they become only more demanding, and this is what happened with Mrs. Edwards. The clearest illustration of this truth came on Thanksgiving weekend 2005, when I bought the turkey her family would eat for the holiday, left it in the refrigerator, and tried to enjoy the long weekend with my family. On Saturday I was with about twenty members of my family and had turned off my cell phone so I could enjoy the holiday. When I turned it back on, I discovered eight or nine voice mails about a flood at the Edwards home. In one of them, Mrs. Edwards accused me of leaving the water on and causing the flood. In fact, the hose that supplied water to a washing machine had broken and Wade’s room was flooded. Senator Edwards said he and his wife would meet me at the house, where neighbors, a cleanup company, and the fire department were on hand. When I arrived, I found the senator and his wife in the backyard, spreading things out to dry. Noting that his wife was distraught, he asked me to take charge so they could leave.
The plumbing disaster at that house occupied much of my time for several months. First I had to clear out the soaked furnishings and property-everything from rugs to a baseball card collection-and dry whatever might be dried. I then had to have hundreds of items put in storage along with household goods that would be packed away pending the family’s move to the mansion under construction. Between the mess and the valuables such as Lladró figurines that were supposedly damaged in the move, I devoted hundreds of hours to physical labor, managing contractors, and haggling with insurance firms. Mrs. Edwards was initially very pleased with all this work, but this episode would come back to haunt me years later.
Gratitude was often in short supply with the Edwardses, as was empathy. When I was working with the senator, I accepted that he would always be the center of attention, but even when we were alone and I was supposedly “off duty,” he would never express much interest in me, which was a change from our early days. Now he was focused on politics to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes I would tease him by saying, “Okay, now let’s talk about you!” but even this joke failed to make him less self-centered.
I trained myself to ignore his self-centeredness and overlook incidents where he seemed hypocritical-remember when Kerry stopped being an asshole?-and refused to notice when things he said or did made no sense or conflicted with the image he wanted to project. When he flirted repeatedly with a young waitress in Wrightsville Beach, I forced the memory of it out of my head. When I heard about him having extramarital affairs, I refused to believe the stories. And when he arranged for the campaign to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a video project to a woman with almost no experience, I didn’t let myself ask the questions that needed to be asked. Instead, I listened as Josh Brumberger told me to put this mysterious person, named Rielle Hunter, a woman the senator had met in a bar, on the payroll. It was a strange request because the senator knew I wasn’t in charge of the payroll, but I promised to relay it because he was the boss.
The senator first met Rielle in early 2006 when he was in New York during a cross-country speaking tour with actor Danny Glover on behalf of hotel workers who wanted his help at union rallies. As she eventually told me herself, she saw Edwards in the lounge of the Regency, a five-star hotel on Park Avenue. A tall, slender blonde with blue eyes and a warm smile, Rielle was the kind of woman who moved comfortably in a place like the Regency lounge, where at any given time half the tables are occupied by big-money power brokers and celebrities. Her sense of ease in such settings had been acquired over time, as she had tried to climb the social ladder in the world’s most important city. As I heard it, she moved like someone who was practiced at identifying rich men, married or not, and connecting with them-at least temporarily.
Born Lisa Druck and raised in Ocala, Florida, she had dropped out of college and moved to New York City in her early twenties. Drawn to the cocaine-fueled fast life enjoyed by young artists, writers, and fashion models, she quickly earned a reputation as a sexually liberated party girl. She briefly dated the writer Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City) and inspired the repulsive character Alison Poole, who appears in two of his books. In 1991, she married attorney Alexander Hunter and changed her name to Rielle Hunter. (This new name allowed her to escape the shame associated with her infamous father, who had participated in a horse-killing insurance scam.) Rielle did a little acting, produced a short film, and in 2002 appeared on a TV game show. She had studied Eastern and New Age religion for years, seeking some special understanding of her place in this world and whatever lies beyond. By the time she saw John Edwards, she had lived much of her life on the edge of glamour, wealth, and enlightenment but was, at forty-one, divorced, unemployed, and living rent-free with a friend in New Jersey named Margaret “Mimi” Hockman.
According to Rielle, when she first saw John Edwards, she noticed “an aura” of energy floating over him. When she made eye contact with the senator, she knew their destinies were intertwined, and that she had been sent to Earth to serve him. His “old soul” had known her “old soul” in a previous life, she said. She asked him if he was the candidate she had seen on television. After he identified himself, she said, “You’re so hot, but on television that doesn’t come through. You seem distant. I can help you with that.”
Rielle said that Edwards gave off an “energy” that told her he could be a powerful force for peace and progress, like Martin Luther King Jr. She decided immediately that she would devote herself to helping him reach this potential. This assistance would begin later, after she arranged to bump into him on the sidewalk, where she would flirt some more.
As Rielle later told Cheri and me, she recognized that the senator was married and her attraction was mixed with a feeling that he was somehow “dangerous.” But when he gave her one of the key cards for his room, she waited a few minutes and then followed him upstairs. Inside the room, they sat for a while on separate beds (she was trying to play hard to get). Rielle said he got her to come over to the bed where he was relaxing by saying, “Hey, c’mere and watch some TV with me.̶ k wi1;
I first encountered Rielle Hunter in the flesh at Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, when I met a plane bringing the senator in for a meeting I had arranged with a donor who would become one of his most important supporters. Rielle was with him as they walked into the baggage claim area, and when I went to grab the senator’s luggage, he said, “No, Andrew, help Rielle with hers.”
He introduced her to me as a filmmaker who was going to make brief documentaries-called “webisodes”-that would air on the Internet and bypass the media to connect the senator directly to voters. The idea fit perfectly into Edwards’s desire to make his campaign the first to take full advantage of the World Wide Web. Although he hardly ever used a computer himself-I never saw him send an e-mail or surf the Web-he understood that this approach would appeal to younger voters and wealthy backers in Silicon Valley, North Carolina ’s Research Triangle, and other centers of innovation. He also understood the Web’s potential for raising campaign donations, dollar by dollar, from vast numbers of people.
On that day at the airport, Rielle and I weren’t in each other’s company for more than a few minutes, as she took her bag and went off on her own. But something in the way the senator looked at her, or maybe it was the way she looked at him, made me decide I wouldn’t say a word about her to the senator during the hour-long drive to a district of estates and Thoroughbred horse farms called Upperville in Virginia. I needed him to focus on the person we were going to visit and the opportunity she represented.
At ninety-five years of age, Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, whose deceased husband, Paul, was the son of the great banker Andrew Mellon, was one of the richest women in the world, but her public profile was so low that few Americans outside of high society knew of her. In fact, when she contacted our 2004 campaign to offer her help, no one recognized her name or followed up on her offer. Nevertheless, Bunny spent large sums buying pro-Edwards newspaper ads on her own.
In 2006, Bunny contacted me with the assistance of her close friend Bryan Huffman, a decorator whose sister had been in my law school class at Wake Forest. When Mrs. Mellon reached me on my cell phone, I was driving home for the night, so I pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s and listened carefully. She told me that she was terrified by the imperial rule of George Bush and Dick Cheney at home and abroad-war, torture, bullying allies-and was sure that John Edwards could be the great president who would save the country from ruin.
As I recalled for the senator, Mrs. Mellon had sent her private jet-a Dessault Falcon capable of transatlantic flights-to bring Bryan and me from Raleigh to the mile-long private airstrip at her estate. (The interior of the jet was decorated with paintings from the National Gallery of Art, to which she was a major donor.) When we arrived, one of her staff drove me past statues of Paul Mellon’s four greatest hor kr gses, including Sea Hero, a Kentucky Derby winner.
Mrs. Mellon was the last of a dying breed, the closest thing to royalty in America. As a child she played in the White House, and as a woman she dined with kings and queens. But I was impressed to discover that she lived in a relatively small, graceful home in a secluded spot, where she welcomed us with Bloody Marys, lunch, and fascinating stories of her relationships with John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy (later Jacqueline Onassis). In the Camelot years, Bunny had redesigned the Rose Garden, aided the decoration of the White House, and mentored Jackie in art and fashion. She was Caroline Kennedy’s godmother.
Remarkably, the senator had actually resisted going to meet Mrs. Mellon, and he had come only because I had insisted. Now, as we drove through Upperville and his jaw dropped at the sight of the houses, he said, “Shit, Andrew, these people have real money,” and was glad he’d said yes. (The senator often gawked at the homes, offices, airplanes, and similar signs of wealth displayed by others. He would also ask me if the people he met were “rich like me” or “really, really rich.”)
After we were admitted to the Mellon property by an armed guard, we drove past a North Carolina flag and EDWARDS FOR PRESIDENT signs that Bunny had set out to welcome us. I reminded the senator that she had already offered at least a million dollars on her commitment to see him elected president “and save the world.”
In the few hours we spent with Bunny, who was warm and unpretentious, she concluded that John Edwards was the best of John and Robert Kennedy combined. She said he had JFK’s intelligence and wit and RFK’s intensity and drive. She also bonded with the senator based on the loss of his son Wade and her daughter Eliza’s terrible auto accident, which had left her profoundly brain-damaged and bedridden. Bunny took the senator into Eliza’s room, where they sat together for a while.
Before we left, she assured the senator that his PACs would soon receive the first of two $1 million donations.
“Have Andrew stay in touch,” she told him. “We’re going to do whatever it takes to make you president.”
With a laugh, Bunny recalled her late husband, a staunch Republican, and added, “Paul is going to roll over in his grave.” (Later, I would learn that Paul had kept a mistress through much of their marriage, something that hurt Bunny but which she accepted as such a common practice for powerful men that it was hardly worth noting.)
As we drove out of Upperville, the senator was high with excitement. Aside from trial lawyers like Fred Baron, he had no backers ready to make the kind of unconditional commitment Bunny had made. Others asked for more in return than they gave.
I was happy because Bunny and I had established a very good rapport. For the next few years she w kew ould call me regularly and I would send her video and news clips almost every day. She would work with me and Bryan to help her “beloved senator save America.” Eventually, “whatever it takes” would amount to more than $6 million.
When someone like Bunny Mellon invites you to her guarded estate, declares you superior to John F. Kennedy, and makes a multimillion-dollar commitment to see you elected president, it has an effect. Ever since he ran for the Senate in 1998, John Edwards had experienced similar encounters on a regular basis, and by 2006 he had evolved into a man who was absolutely certain he should be the leader of the free world. This change had also been aided by countless people who added their ambition to his because they hoped to get carried into the White House with him. I count myself in this group, along with various other professionals and Mrs. Edwards.
Committed to her political ideology, Elizabeth Edwards was even more excited about addressing the country’s serious problems-in health care, foreign policy, and economics-than the senator himself. And when she talked about living in the White House with him, it was with the assumption that she would remain his closest confidante and adviser. Mrs. Edwards showed plenty of ego as she made these plans, but she had the brains and courage to back up her dreams. These qualities saw her through her cancer treatment, which came with all the terrible side effects-hair loss, anemia, insomnia, terrible pain, and nausea-and I admired her bravery. Despite her outbursts and the times when her demands seemed excessive, I loved her and prayed for her to recover. I also admired her strength, which got her to her computer keyboard day after day to work on a book about her life, including her battle with cancer. It was to be called Saving Graces, and I was honored to be among the half dozen people she thanked in its pages for making the book possible.
The opportunity to tell her story, and a big-money contract from a major publisher, came because Mrs. Edwards (like her husband) was a visible and popular public person. In presenting herself to the voters through the media, she had played up the elements that appealed to the majority of Americans-her roles as mother, wife, and advocate for things that mattered to families-and played down her career as an attorney and the role she had in helping to direct her husband’s campaigns. She also showed herself to be flawed in ways that might endear her to people. She struggled with her weight, ran herself ragged dealing with the demands of her life, and was guided by commonsense values.
Compared with political wives like Teresa Heinz Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and even Laura Bush, Elizabeth Edwards presented a more approachable and warmly human persona to the world. In private she was sometimes these things, but she was also fiercely ambitious and determined to advance herself. Because she got help from people like me and the nanny, Heather North, who lived with her husband, Jed, in an apartment over the garage, she had the kind of support for her writing that others just don’t get. She poured herself into the work, especially during early 2006, and even made frequent overnight trips related to this project and others.
When Elizabeth was away, Emma Claire and Jack were tended to by the senator and Heather North. Heather saw as much of the family as I did, and we became friends as we talked-shared war stories, really-about the care and feeding of folks who considered themselves “the First Family in waiting.” She set firmer limits than I did on the time she gave to the Edwardses, and this caused some friction between her and Elizabeth. But Heather’s job was safe, because when she was on duty she was completely reliable, Jack and Emma Claire loved her, and she loved them back with a consistency that made them feel safe and secure. She was a perfect fill-in mom.
Heather was so much like a third parent that when Jack was upset and couldn’t find his mother or father, he naturally ran to her. In the fall of 2006, this happened in the middle of the night when Elizabeth was away and Jack went to his parents’ room hoping to get a reassuring snuggle from his father. He found the bed empty and then ran to awaken Heather. She took him by the hand to look for his dad and found he was gone. Somehow she managed to get Jack to go back to sleep, and in the morning the senator was back in the house to make breakfast and see the kids off to school.
My phone rang at nine A.M. On the other end of the line, Heather sounded worried, angry, and confused as she reported that the senator had gone missing in the night along with one of the family cars. (This was the first of several incidents like this.)
I didn’t lie when I told her I didn’t know where he might have been, but I did try to offer the most innocent explanation. He must have been unable to sleep and driven someplace where he could take a run.
How, then, Heather asked, would I explain the hotel key card from the Courtyard by Marriott hotel that she had found on a kitchen counter?
I couldn’t explain the card, except to say that perhaps he had gotten tired and just checked in someplace. I knew this was a lame explanation, but I did manage to calm her down, and since Mrs. Edwards was on her way home, she agreed to throw away the card and stay quiet, at least in the short term. As I told her I would look into things, I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach, as if a long-dreaded crisis were at hand. I also found myself recalling little incidents that should have given me pause in the past but that I had chosen to ignore.
On the campaign trail, I had seen that the senator occasionally pocketed notes from eager women he met at an event rather than hand them to me for disposal. I had also received calls from other staffers who said that the senator had begun to request that they stay on different floors, away from him, whenever they were booked into a hotel for the night. On the hundred-county tour, there were many nights when he would go out for “jogs” at two o’clock in the morning. I hadn’t been concerned about those episodes because I believed he was faithful to his wife.
My worries and Heather’s report came spilling out that morning as I told Cheri about Heather’s phone call. A committed skept kommic when it came to John Edwards, she was not surprised that he might be sneaking around, but she was upset about the threat an affair posed to his family. For all her flaws, Elizabeth was an essentially good person. Jack and Emma Claire were great kids who adored their dad. These concerns dominated Cheri’s reaction. But in a moment, when she was able to set them aside and offer a witty observation or two, she said she was shocked that the key card was from an inexpensive hotel and equally surprised by the identity of the woman I suspected was his mistress. For a man who could have his pick from among thousands of women who had literally thrown themselves at him, Rielle Hunter was, in my eyes and Cheri’s, a strange if not dangerous choice.
I could have confronted Senator Edwards immediately, but I didn’t. For one thing, the prospect of challenging one of the nation’s great trial lawyers without more evidence than I possessed seemed futile. For another, I thought-or rather hoped-that whatever he was doing amounted to a brief fling that would end soon and never be discovered. Despite his complaints about her, he loved Elizabeth and his children, and I knew he wouldn’t want to hurt them. I thought he would understand that an affair, if made public, would ruin him politically and personally. Cheri and Heather and I decided to keep our mouths shut in the hope that with a little time, he would realize that he had too much at stake to continue.
In the meantime, the senator was more affectionate toward his wife and our friendship was never closer. In part, this was due to the fact that I was raising extraordinary amounts of money for his various causes, and this made him respect me more. My confidence was climbing, but I never ceased to support the senator in any way he asked. When his son Jack needed surgery-not a major operation, but still serious-he wanted me to go with him to the hospital. After the operation, when he knew everything was okay, he left Mrs. Edwards with Jack and came to tell me the news. I suggested he call his parents, which he did, and when that call ended, I asked him if he wanted to call anyone else. I expected him to dial up family and friends. He noted that he had some time and a quiet place to work, and it seemed like a good idea to call some of his more important donors. “Andrew, it will mean something for me to call them from here,” he said. “It’ll make them feel important.”
I thought Edwards’s idea was strange, especially since like most candidates, the senator didn’t enjoy fund-raising. (Actually, he hated many of the chores one must perform to gain office and did them reluctantly.) To make it easier on him, we sometimes parked a couple of staffers at his house with cell phones and let them dial down a list of bigwigs until they got someone who was willing to wait, on hold, for the candidate to come on the line. He would walk around into his library and in front of the massive fireplace, chatting away about some big interview or event, and then he’d offer an anecdote that was “just between you and me.”
When he got a donation, he’d hang up and say, “Shit, they love me-they would do anything for me. Make sure we follow up on that one! Who’s next?” If someone else kept him on the line too long, he would roll his eyes, look at me with a sarcastic face and a half grin, point at the phone, shrug, and mouth to me, “Ass kisser.” If he hung up without getting a commitment, he would sa kt, y, “What the hell-why are they wasting my time? I’m going to be president. I don’t have time for this shit. Everyone wants to give me advice. I don’t want advice. I want their money.”
As the summer of 2006 began, both of the Edwardses had taken on an overwhelming amount of work. He was campaigning full-time. She was working with the editors for her book and planning a nationwide media and signing tour that would start at the end of September. Together, they were taking responsibility for all the major decisions related to the presidential campaign. As part of this effort, the senator joined the Wake-Up Wal-Mart tour, which was sponsored by a union that was pressuring the company to improve its pay and benefits. The tour was conducted from a brightly painted bus and brought politicians and celebrities to towns and cities across the country. They spoke about Wal-Mart’s employment practices and called on the company to buy more American-made products. For John Edwards, the tour offered a chance to connect with local politicians and voters who might come to his side in the primaries, but it also provided settings where his speeches and other performances could be captured by his new videographer, Rielle Hunter.
Having used part of her first check to buy a camera, Rielle joined the senator as he flew to and from events on a jet provided by his friend Fred Baron. The five-minute film she made about the Wal-Mart tour, called The Golden Rule, opens with Boyd Tinsley singing, “When you look into the mirror, do you like what’s lookin’ at you?” It shows the senator making speeches about the misdeeds of the world’s largest retailer-“It’s about responsibility and basic human morality”-and signing autographs, and it ends with outtakes, including Edwards sharing an inside joke with Rielle and saying, “Very graceful, camera girl.”
In another webisode, Rielle caught Josh Brumberger as he sat inside Fred Baron’s jet and filled out forms for a trip to China. (He actually never went.) The camera focused on him and he said, “I never know what to put for ‘Occupation.’ Perhaps I should put ‘His bitch.’ ” This little scene was still available on the Internet at the end of 2009.
By the middle of the summer, Camera Girl was booked to accompany the senator on many of his trips, and I soon had an idea of what was going on between them. The senator would often tell me his cell phone battery was dead, ask to use my phone, and dial her number. (In fact, Mrs. Edwards had a habit of checking his calling history, and he didn’t want her to see Rielle’s number.) They would talk about the campaign and politics, but their long conversations included too many “I miss you”s to be considered strictly business.
Rielle also developed the habit of telephoning me directly to ask about the senator’s schedule, to offer critiques of his performances on television, and to ask for favors. In one case, she requested backstage passes to a Dave Matthews concert in New York City. I got them for her and later heard that she had practically tackled Matthews when she saw him. A member of the band’ khe s staff called me and asked, “What’s up with this Rielle chick?” and told me she had “weirded out” everyone backstage.
A dramatic person who seemed to act before thinking, Rielle worried me for many reasons. She was flashy and loud, and she acted as though every man she met wanted her. I was worried that she might do something to make her relationship with the senator public. And I was also concerned about how she might affect important relationships, like the one between the senator and members of the band. It’s hard to overstate the value of having rock-star friends. I once organized a special trip to a Dave Matthews concert, with backstage access included, to reward a busload of big Edwards donors. (To show off, the senator also had the group meet him at the airport to see his new jet.) The experience of hanging out with a presidential candidate and musicians who made thousands of fans scream for two hours was enough to persuade one fellow to give $2 million to “combat poverty.” I didn’t want to lose access to that kind of star power because of Rielle Hunter.
With the risk she posed in mind, I told the senator about Rielle’s behavior at the New York event and watched him carefully when he reacted. He seemed most concerned that she had offended Dave Matthews and promised to speak to her about it. The fact that she may have been flirting so aggressively with another man did bother him, but I would later learn that he and Rielle had agreed to an “open” relationship. They were free to do whatever they wanted with whomever they wanted, just as long as they were honest with each other. I soon found out that they told each other everything about their sexual histories and behaviors. To my embarassment, they also told me far too much about their sexual activities.
Whenever Rielle called me, she tried to talk explicitly about her relationship with the senator. For obvious reasons, she couldn’t talk about these things with anyone else, so I figured I was serving as a sort of safety valve, letting her blow off steam. When the details about specific sexual acts, love bites, or the condition of her vagina got too graphic, I cut her off, but my attempts to set limits on Rielle were only partly effective. She was a bright person who loved to talk, and she tried hard to get close to people by sharing her spiritual insights-including her predictions of the future-and her opinions. Senator Edwards listened when she discussed his campaign performances. (She was right about how he sometimes “switched off” and came across at half power.) He also fed off her devotion, since she promised to do anything he asked because he was destined to be world leader. I wasn’t surprised when I heard that she would accompany him to Uganda on a trip that would add a little foreign policy exposure to his résumé.
As the trip approached, it fell to me to arrange for the senator to get the required vaccines at the last possible moment. Rielle was in town, so when I told him he was up against a deadline, he invited her to go with him to a walk-in clinic. I didn’t like this, because folks in the rather gossipy community of Chapel Hill would see them together. To make matters worse, the senator’s parents were due for a lunch visit, so he just told them to meet us at the clinic.
The scene, as Bobbi and Wallace Edwards came upon it, found their son hidden a kr sway in the doctor’s private office with a younger woman who was not his wife. They sat side by side chatting playfully, like a couple preparing to go away on their honeymoon. Unlike the nurse who attended the senator and Rielle, who looked at them incredulously as she did her work, Bobbi and Wallace didn’t seem to notice anything was strange. I went to a nearby deli to get sandwiches, and we all ate together. When we finished, Wallace and Bobbi wished their son well in Africa and went home.
The Africa tour was sponsored by the International Rescue Committee, which was trying to address a humanitarian crisis caused by a civil war that had displaced more than one million people. Rielle filmed Edwards, clad in khaki pants and a Tar Heel blue T-shirt, inspecting refugee camps and listening as groups of children greeted him with songs. On video he looked like the great white leader who had come to save the country. Later he and Rielle would tell me that during this trip, when they spent every night together, he said “I love you” to her for the first time.
When the senator and Rielle returned to the United States, he stumbled into the house exhausted, brought his luggage into the huge dressing room where he kept his wardrobe, undressed, and then flopped into bed. At some point a secret cell phone he had left in his suitcase began to ring. Mrs. Edwards heard it, found it, and, noting a number from a New York City area code, answered.
Without hearing a “Hello,” Rielle Hunter launched into a romantic monologue about how much she missed the man who was supposed to answer the phone. In her defense, this particular phone had been purchased by Rielle for the sole use of John Edwards, and she was the only person who had the number. Still, unless she intended to force some kind of showdown, Rielle’s blurted professions of love and adoration were a big mistake.
After ending the call, Mrs. Edwards, carrying the phone in her hand, went to the senator and demanded to know what was going on. He confessed to having had a one-night stand but didn’t say with whom. For some reason, she accepted this explanation but demanded he return the call and, as she watched, end the relationship. He did as he was told, but as soon as he was able, he telephoned Rielle again to tell her what had happened and reassured her that they were still in a relationship.
The senator explained all of this to me soon after it happened. We were alone backstage at an event, and as often happened, the conversation got around to the fact that he was unhappy in his marriage. He said that Mrs. Edwards was being overly demanding, obsessive, even “crazy.” But he also said that he would never seek a divorce. For one thing, he still loved Elizabeth in certain ways. And he believed that his wife was more popular with many voters than he was and that if he left her, he might as well forget ever becoming president. (I cringed when he said this.) When I thought about how it would look if he divorced a wife of almost thirty years, who had lost a child in a car wreck and was living with cancer, I had to agree with him about the political impact. And since becoming president was his single driving ambition, it was never going to happen.
When Mrs. Edwards left Chapel Hill to start her book tour, the senator brought Rielle to his home, where she met Jack and Emma Claire and even interviewed them briefly while holding a video camera to capture their replies. (She also interviewed Edwards’s parents, who were there that afternoon.) When I went to the house to see him, I discovered her sitting in the living room curled up in a chair like a cat, with her shoes and socks off. She wore blue jeans and had a colorful scarf around her neck and sunglasses perched atop her head.
The mood in the house was relaxed and upbeat. Instead of the news blaring out of various TVs, which Elizabeth kept tuned to C-SPAN. I heard music playing. I noticed because the senator had told me he had stopped listening to music when Wade died, and I had seen him turn off music whenever it was playing. We went on a run together, following our usual route past a cow pasture full of mooing heifers and waving to neighbors who hailed us from their front porches. While we were gone, Rielle napped in Cate’s room.
That evening, we ate take-out ribs from a place called Nantucket Grill and sat on the senator’s back porch, a huge space covered by a sturdy roof. The group included me, the nanny, Heather, and her husband, Jed, the senator, his kids, and Rielle, who talked excitedly about everything from national politics to astrology. She said she had been a spiritual teacher and that she believed the future was foretold by the stars. Rielle took great pleasure in noting that John Edwards’s future was limitless, and every once in a while she punctuated her observations about him with a laugh and the line “It’s good to be king.”
As the wine flowed and Heather put the kids to bed, the senator and Rielle became more comfortable touching each other and dropped the pretense that they weren’t involved. At one point, they started musing about how the house seemed like a happy place with Elizabeth and her “negative energy” removed. Rielle talked about living in the mansion once Mrs. Edwards was out of the way. A new family would be formed, the senator said, after he and Rielle married on some rooftop in Manhattan with a celebration that would include music from Dave Matthews. As Rielle listened to the senator spin this fantasy, she smiled like a little kid who had gotten her way.
As the night wore on, clouds rolled in, followed by thunder and lightning and the heaviest rain I had ever seen. Protected and dry under the roof, we watched the water come down in sheets, and in a quiet moment the senator said, “This is the way it should be-no stress, no fighting.”
“It’s good to be king,” said Rielle.
I left the house during the downpour, shaken by everything…
The next time I spoke to Rielle, she happily told me that she had spent that night in the Edwardses’ bed and slept in while the senator made breakfast for the kids and then drove them to school. She said that when he r kthaeturned, he got into bed and they “made love.”