If you’re not from the South, where these places seem to be on every other corner, the first thing to know about the Golden Corral buffet is the price. Our family of five could eat there for about thirty dollars. The second thing is clown night. Once a week, the management at our local corral brought in a clown to work the dining room. With the kids gaping at his makeup and big rubber shoes and occupied with balloon animals, the clown gave weary mothers and fathers a chance to breathe.
On a clown night in early 2007, Cheri and I balanced the nutritional hazards of turning our kids loose on a pile of fried and sugary food against our need for a little stress relief and decided the rewards outweighed the risk. After we worked our way through the line and found a table, my cell phone began to ring. A check of the screen told me the call was from Mrs. Edwards. All I had to do was show it to Cheri, and she just sighed with acceptance and glanced toward the door, which let me know I could take it outside.
I answered the phone as I walked through the dining room, past the clown and tables filled with families like mine. The first words I heard were, “Hey, Andrew, how are you? How are the kids?”
The pleasant opening made me wary. She hadn’t been nice to me since the PlayStation 3 conflict. She told me the refrigerator at the new house had been acting up, and I thought that perhaps she wanted me to call the repairman again. But as I stepped outside onto the sidewalk and leaned against the wall, her tone changed abruptly. She said that she and the senator had been discussing Rielle Hunter and that while she believed she knew the entire story, she wanted to clear up a few details with me.
Once I agreed to talk, Mrs. Edwards turned from friendly to prosecutorial. The interrogation began with questions about Rielle’s visits to her home. She knew that Rielle had been there to interview the senator’s parents and the children, but she had spent hours reviewing the tape handed over when Rielle was fired and couldn’t find the stuff shot at her house. This only made her more suspicious, and she wanted to know how many other times I had helped this “other woman” invade her sanctuary, to sit on her furniture and enjoy her food and drink.
As my mind raced, I couldn’t think of any other time I may have transported Rielle to the estate, but the shock of being questioned made me feel uncertain and confused. Whenever the senator was home, I might bring half a dozen parties a day to see him. Rielle could have been in one of those groups. But I didn’t think this had happened more than once, and I told her so.
“Andrew,” she replied, “I know you are lying.”
Here she was acting like a detective, using the old technique of suggesting she possessed some kind of incriminating evidence when in fact she did not. It worked a little, making me scour my memory for something I may have forgotten. But then I got a little angry. After all I had done for the Edwards family, I didn’t deserve to be pushed into a triangular drama with the senator and his wife. (He should be answering those questions, not me.) When I stood my ground, she applied one last bit of pressure: “And I have Heather standing here beside me. I know you are lying to me, and if you don’t tell the truth to me, I’ll have John fire you.” When I repeated my answer, insisting I was telling her the truth, she abruptly hung up the phone.
The call gave me something to discuss with Cheri when I got back to the table. She was accustomed to hearing about my difficulties with the Edwardses and had grown bored with their c {d womplaints about household problems like broken refrigerators. However, Rielle Hunter had introduced a new level of drama and danger into the Edwards saga, which made any scene involving her far more compelling. At the table, we agreed that Mrs. Edwards’s investigation was not over and that Rielle was not going to go away. Of course, we didn’t know that Mrs. Edwards believed I had become Rielle’s lover after her husband saw the error of his ways.
After dinner, we went home and I decided to get on the treadmill to work off some of the mashed potatoes I’d eaten. I was still angry when our home phone rang. I checked the caller ID and answered because it was Mrs. Edwards again. Cheri, who had glanced at a phone in another room and knew who was on the line, came to listen to my side of the conversation. It was a good move, because this was one of the few times that my end of an exchange with Elizabeth Edwards was worth hearing.
She began by saying that she thought I hadn’t been given a full opportunity to “tell the truth” and now she was willing to listen. After I asked whether she wanted the truth or “what you want to hear,” she opted for the straight story and I launched into a minor diatribe.
“Mrs. Edwards, I love you like a big sister, and I love your husband like a big brother,” I continued, “and after ten years of me working for you, for you to treat me like this is wrong, utterly wrong.”
She was not impressed. As far as she was concerned, the real issue was her “thirty-year marriage” and not “about you working for us” as a staff person. “Andrew, you are not family. You work for us. Nothing more. You get paid for all you do.”
For a decade, I had heard the senator and Mrs. Edwards use that word-“staff”-to dismiss certain people as if they were interchangeable parts. Hearing it used to describe me was too much. “I don’t do the things I do because I get paid,” I answered. “I’ve changed your kids’ diapers. I helped your parents move twice. That’s not what a staff person does. You take advantage of people. You chew them up and spit them out. I’ve done everything in my power to help you and your family because I believe in you and your goals.”
My resistance and anger only made her come on stronger. She said that her husband wore “blinders” when he looked at me, not noticing that I had worked my way into a tight relationship with the family so I could exploit them. “Andrew, you hold us close so you can advance yourself.”
“What do I get for changing your kids’ diapers?” I asked. “What do I get out of helping your parents move?”
After telling me that household chores were part of my job, Mrs. Edwards said I had “thirty seconds to tell the truth” or I would be fired. This time I was the one who ended the call. As I clicked off the phone, I turned to see Cheri staring in amazement. “Fuck her,” I said. “It looks like I {lono longer work for the Edwardses.”
“Yeah, right,” said Cheri. She didn’t believe they would let me go.
Later I thought about the commitment we had made to build a new house (I had really forced that decision on her) and about our kids and their needs, like health insurance. Then the senator called to ask about my argument with his wife. “Did you just yell at Elizabeth?” he asked. I told him I had and explained why. He laughed in amazement and then asked, “You said that to Elizabeth?” He then told me how the storm had developed.
According to the senator, once Rielle was dismissed, Elizabeth demanded that campaign manager Jonathan Prince gather all the videos Rielle had shot. She then locked herself in her crafts room to review them hour by hour, and then day by day, coming out only to use the bathroom and/or fetch a Diet Coke. She interrogated Heather, who told her about Rielle interviewing Jack and Emma Claire at the mansion. She knew that if all of the work had been turned over, she should be able to see this footage. None of it was in the collection she received. In fact, she saw nothing at all from the house, not even the interviews Rielle did with Wallace and Bobbi Edwards. Knowing that Rielle had held out this material made her furious, and she pored over the videos again and again, devoting days to the work, believing she saw things that suggested that a great deal of potentially incriminating evidence had been withheld.
During this time, Mrs. Edwards also focused on me in her effort to track down information about Rielle, including her phone number. She left me a voice mail saying, “Andrew, I am tired of playing games with you. I want every single number, every single person. And if you DARE, you can call John.”
As the senator discussed all of this with me, I could imagine his wife scanning for clues and then shaking with rage as she confronted him. Now I understood her fury. He said, “Let me take care of Elizabeth,” and he repeated that he needed me and would be terribly hurt if I walked away at the start of his big push for the White House.
What he didn’t say was that I was the only person in the world who knew everything about Rielle Hunter and his marriage, and he needed me to keep the charade going. The knowledge made me the one friend he would open his heart to and the one person besides Rielle who could hurt him the most. Years of service had also earned me a place as his most trusted adviser, and at the time no one was able to raise more money for him from big donors.
Taken together, everything I could do for John Edwards and everything I knew about him made him more loyal to me-a rare switch in roles-than he had ever been. I could hear a hint of desperation in his voice, and I knew that if I stayed working for his political action committee, I would be able to stop doing domestic chores at his house and enjoy more autonomy at work than I had ever known. I agreed to stay on. And from that day forward, my status changed. In the campaign office, people began making fewer demands on me, but they also began to shun me. I found out this happened because Mrs. Edwards had called many of the people I worked with and {ork informed them that I wasn’t to be trusted or included. I was soon banned from the house I had helped them build, and she stopped letting her children play with mine.
Elizabeth Edwards was able to control what happened at our office because for all intents and purposes she was the manager of the campaign. She set the strategy, determined the senator’s political positions, approved the schedule, and made all the key hires. (In most cases, she picked people with little or no experience.) There was a philosophy behind this approach. She and the senator believed that they were smarter than the big-time consultants and that they were going to pioneer a new kind of campaign that would use the Internet in a huge way. Instead of old speechwriters and pollsters, they focused on hiring the hottest Web gurus they could find. (The key one was Matthew Gross, who had been a big influence on Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.) Elizabeth was right about the World Wide Web, but as far as I could tell she was wrong about the way she used these fellows. She told them what to do and then second-guessed them. They were afraid to discuss issues with her because of her temper.
Ironically, the Web guys were very competent in their specialty and would have delivered the innovations Elizabeth wanted had they been managed properly. Similarly, the majority of the players who filled out the 2008 Edwards roster were smart and effective despite their inexperience. But in her rush to bypass so-called party hacks, Mrs. Edwards had failed to bring in people with real passion for John Edwards and for the issues at the core of his campaign. In 2004, we may have been a bit behind the curve when it came to technology, but we were deeply committed to the cause, and Nick Baldick was an assertive and effective manager. This time around, we had no strong manager and seemed to be reactive instead of proactive.
John Edwards, however, was far improved as a candidate, willing to outwork everyone in the field and burning with real intensity. Everyone else felt the desire to win and harbored hope for a victory but made the effort as if it were a job instead of a crusade. I still recognized that John Edwards was a charismatic campaigner and that he was right about the issues. But my enthusiasm was flagging, and I was being shunted aside. I used the freedom I enjoyed to set my own agenda and schedule, and to focus on raising money from donors. I was able to enjoy my family more, and pay attention to our dream house project.
The acreage Cheri and I had purchased on a forested hilltop in Chapel Hill represented a dream come true for me. Before any construction started, we got a camper and set it up on the site so we could enjoy weekends in the woods with the kids. On Super Bowl Sunday 2007, we held a big party where we set up a television outside, made a big bonfire, and laughed and hollered into the night. That party was more fun than I could recall having in a long time, and the vision of our home-all stone, glass, and natural wood-rising among the pines gave me a powerful sense of optimism about the future.
Visits to the land became even more important for me and the rest of the family after we moved out of Lake Wheeler and into a rental in Southern Village. The new place was painted such an odd shade of violet that the kids took to calling it “the purple mansion,” and everything about the move was painful. For one thing, it required us to adjust {d u to living in a space less than half the size of our old place. For another, when the time came to make the transfer, I was busy with the campaign and unable to drive because of the DWI conviction. Cheri’s mom and dad came from Illinois to lend a hand, and they did it all without me. At one point, her mom was so angry about this that she literally turned her back on me. I couldn’t blame her, really; I was fed up with me, too.
The cramped space, the circumstances of the move, and the ugly paint weren’t the only reasons for our urge to flee for the trailer on the hilltop whenever we could. The previous occupants of the mansion had been pet lovers, and soon after we settled in and turned on the heat, we discovered that the whole place smelled of cat pee. Constant cleaning and deodorizing helped, but the scent never really went away. You would have wanted to escape, too. Our cat Pepper certainly did. A rambunctious boy we had adopted in 1999, he went outside as much as possible, and on a fateful night soon after we moved in, he was killed by a car. I found his body along a busy highway and rushed to dispose of it before the kids saw him.
Cheri and the kids spent far more time in the purple mansion than I did, because every day I walked over to the Southern Village town square office to work. This convenience was in contrast with the demands the move made on Cheri. The kids remained in their school in Raleigh, and she drove them back and forth for three months. She also brought them there for sports after school and visits with friends. She must have felt as though she spent her life on the road.
My workdays were devoted to chasing donations, fielding calls from the senator, and solving certain problems. Once, when he was on the road, he called sounding very upset and explained that he had lost the Outward Bound pin that Wade had received before he died. (Edwards had worn it to public events since 1998.) Many staff members dropped what they were doing to search in every vehicle or room he had occupied in the last twenty-four hours. When they failed to find it, we bought a new one from the organization, but it was a new design and did not resemble Wade’s pin.
Aside from managing the senator’s personal crises, I dealt with inquiries from colleagues who knew I had Edwards’s ear and understood him better than anyone else. For example, when John Davis reported sighting Rielle on the trail, I reassured him that although she was no longer on the payroll, she and the senator were probably just friends and there was nothing to worry about.
Rielle’s travel arrangements required fancy footwork, and here my experience as a campaign aide came in handy. When I knew where the senator was staying, I made reservations in my own name, faxed copies of my credit card and state identification card, and told the hotel staff that my “wife” would be checking in on my account. This ploy allowed Rielle to get into the hotel and wait for the senator, who then called and signaled her to come to his suite. Rielle would leave before the aides came to get the senator at the start of the workday.
The routine worke {rod perfectly except for on one occasion in Florida, when the campaign bus left a swanky resort where the senator had spent the night so early that Rielle was still in the suite when he departed. She planned to go back to the room I had arranged for “Mrs. Young” but decided to get into the shower first. That’s when she heard pounding on the door. She got out, wrapped herself in a towel, and looked through the peephole to see someone from the campaign. (The staffer had a key card, but fortunately Rielle had fastened the security chain on the door.) Afraid to respond, she hid in the bathroom and called the senator on the Batphone. When the senator heard what was going on, he called me.
Accustomed as I was to having the phone ring at all hours with emergency requests from John Edwards, it still rattled me when the phone rang before the alarm clock, and it took me a few seconds to wake up. The senator, who was calling from the campaign bus, where he was surrounded by staff and press, spoke in an upbeat voice-as if nothing were wrong-but his breathing sounded panicked, and I could tell he was faking it.
“Our friend is having a problem,” he said. “Can you give her a call right now?”
I soon understood what was wrong. Someone from the staff had gone to the room with a key card to make sure the senator had not left behind any confidential papers. This was standard operating procedure, and whoever it was had been surprised to find the door bolted from the inside. I told him I would fix it, and as he hung up I immediately heard from Rielle. There were now two security guards and three campaign aides, including my old assistant, banging on the door. Rielle was scared, but also excited and giggly. (I think she wanted to get caught.) She agreed to tell them she needed to get dressed and would open the door in a few minutes.
While Rielle dressed, I called the hotel, which was the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood, Florida. Using my best presidential campaign aide voice, I asked for and got connected to the manager. “I had an old friend drive through the night to deliver confidential papers to the senator this morning,” I explained. “I told her that she could take advantage of the room-since it was paid for-and enjoy the resort after he left. If you want to check out who I am, call the campaign. They’ll confirm who I am.”
Five minutes later, the manager called me back and agreed to call his security men on the radio and have them leave the hallway. But this still left the Edwards staffers who were upstairs and wanted an explanation. I called Rielle again, then had her open the door a crack and, since Mrs. Edwards had turned my former assistant against me, I told her to hand the phone to one of the other staffers. When he got on I said, “Who the hell is this?” with as much authority and impatience as I could muster.
With my opponent back on his heels, I said, “This is Andrew Young.” I then said that all he needed to know was that the woman in the room was someone I had sent with confidential documents because every call I had made the previous night had gone unanswered by staff people, who were out partying. (This was an assumption that turned out to be true.) “I had to get one of my friends to do {fr your damn job, so leave her alone.”
The bluff worked and they left Rielle alone. I then instructed her to pack up and call me as she left the room. She did as I told her, and I kept her on the phone to calm her as she walked down the hallway, rode the elevator, crossed through the lobby, and went outside to a cab stand. She noticed the Edwards staffers who had come to the door of the room outside the hotel, but they saw her on the phone and didn’t intercept her. She breathed a huge sigh of relief and then started laughing as the cab departed the hotel, with her aboard, safe and still secret. I called the senator and told him the crisis was over.
Senator Edwards thanked me up and down on the day I got Rielle out of the Florida hotel, but the next time I saw him, he’d developed a case of amnesia about this event. Having had my daytime driving privileges restored, I had picked him up at the airport, following our usual routine. I had continued to tease him by putting down the armrest. He looked at me and said, “Why do you keep doin’ that?”
I stayed silent as he handed me the Batphone, enjoyed a sip of wine, and sighed with relief. I then casually mentioned the tight scrape we had just survived. He turned to me and with a perfectly straight face said, “I don’t know what you are talking about. Rielle wasn’t in Florida.”
I looked at him, amazed, and said something about how he must be joking. Of course Rielle was in Florida with him. She had been discovered by the staff, and I had come up with a brilliant scheme to explain why there was a woman in the shower of his suite. The senator looked at me blankly, repeated that “Rielle was never in Florida,” and asked me how I could say such a thing.
We were hurtling down the interstate, and since I had to keep my attention on the road, I didn’t stare into his eyes directly. But I could tell from his tone of voice that he truly believed what he was saying. I decided that he was either the best liar in the world or he was having some sort of psychological episode. My phone records showed more than thirty calls with him, Rielle, and the Westin on the day of this incident. Clearly, I could prove to him that something big had happened that day. But I decided to drop the subject.
The way I saw it, Rielle presented a problem with three possible outcomes. If Edwards ended the relationship, she would probably go to the press, reveal the affair, and, I assumed, supply enough solid evidence to make the story stick. Since he had presented himself to the country as the handsome and brilliant man of the people who was standing by his wife through her illness, news of an affair would end Senator Edwards’s political career. If he followed the second option, he could keep seeing Rielle and, if Elizabeth found out, risk a divorce that would expose him in the same way. The difference here was that Mrs. Edwards’s desire to live in the White House was as great as, if not greater than, his. She had already accepted his personal betrayals as part of the price for the real estate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The third option would be to continue to see Rielle and hope to keep Mrs. Edwards in the dark until after the election. Callous as it was, the senator chose this last option and pursued the presidency with all the energ {aly he could muster while talking to me about how much easier life would be without Elizabeth. I thought all of this was repulsive, but since she had forced me out of her life, I felt there was nothing I could do about it.
Ironically, once the senator was relaxed about discussing Rielle with me, he frequently aired the same kinds of complaints about her that he had expressed about Mrs. Edwards in the past. He said Rielle was overly demanding and emotional, and he frequently called her “crazy.” But just as he counted on his sometimes “crazy” wife for counsel and support, he depended on “crazy” Rielle’s input and advice. Along with her commitment to do everything and anything he requested as part of her spiritual mission to see him become a world leader, she offered political guidance, comments on strategy, and criticisms on every aspect of his performance from wardrobe to cadence. Although it came mixed with horoscope readings and other New Age mumbo jumbo, the senator genuinely valued Rielle’s input. He called her before every debate or major public appearance and generally called her afterward for a critique. I know, because I was the go-between who used three-way calling to connect them so no record of Rielle’s number would appear on his phone.
Strange as it may sound for a man raised a Southern Baptist, I think the senator was open to the idea that Rielle might have a special power to see into the future-a startling number of powerful people believe in such things-and that her age and social background meant she could speak for a part of the electorate he wanted to reach. Finally, in listening to her and including her in the campaign, he rewarded her for accepting the mistress role and staying in the background. She clearly loved playing secret adviser to a future president, and he fed her feeling of importance by having me send her the daily schedule, clippings from the national press, and important memos so they could discuss them. Regardless of her flakiness, she did provide an interesting and creative perspective on his campaign.
Besides information, Rielle needed money. She had worked in the past as a spiritual adviser, but now believed her life’s purpose was serving John Edwards. The senator wanted to keep her happy but had difficulty getting money to her. He once gave her his bank card, but when Mrs. Edwards saw that a large sum had been withdrawn in New York when her husband was in California, she sent out an alarm. He was able to make some kind of excuse to cover up this incident, but from that point on he asked me to handle Rielle’s finances. I used my credit card to book hotel rooms and airline flights for Rielle. I even gave him cash to give her-a few hundred dollars at a time-when I took him to the airport for outbound flights. He promised I would be repaid when a wealthy benefactor was recruited to cover these costs or when Mrs. Edwards died.
“I’ll take care of you, Andrew,” he said. “You know I’m good for it.”
Elizabeth Edwards’s cancer had hung over her family and the senator’s various organizations ever since it was discovered in 2004. At that time, it was described as a metastatic for {metm of breast cancer that is almost always fatal, and the senator talked about the future in the bleakest terms. But three years after it was discovered and her treatment was begun, Mrs. Edwards seemed as robust as ever. She was so active that I sometimes forgot she had been diagnosed.
In many ways, the senator acted as if she were gone already. In March he arranged to celebrate Rielle’s birthday at the Hotel Fort Des Moines while he campaigned in Iowa. When the date arrived, I got an urgent call from John Davis, who was with him. The plans had been changed, he said, and the boss was coming home. He gave me the time to pick him up at the private hangar at Raleigh-Durham International and warned me that the senator was “very upset.” He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew it was bad.
At the airport, Edwards skipped the usual handshakes he offered the ground crew and hustled to my Suburban. He didn’t say a word until we had left the airport proper and had merged onto the interstate. “ Elizabeth ’s cancer is back,” he said, “and it’s bad.”
The senator looked out the window and cried as he told me that Elizabeth ’s cancer had spread to her bones. He told me she had heard one of her ribs break as she was moving a box “and cussing you out, Andrew, for putting it in the wrong place.” Publicly, she would say the fracture happened when Senator Edwards had hugged her too hard. I wondered what she thought she gained from this version of events.
Imaging done at the hospital had turned up a fracture on one side of Mrs. Edwards’s rib cage and a mass on the other. A biopsy had shown a malignancy in one rib, and further tests indicated the cancer had spread to other areas of the body. As he talked about his wife’s condition, the senator used words like “fatal” and “terminal” and seemed to be genuinely grief-stricken. But then, as we reached a point halfway to his house, the conversation turned to the campaign and he made it clear that they both wanted it to continue. Within days they agreed that this diagnosis would generate positive publicity after frustrating months when the press ignored him. They actually believed the cancer would give the senator’s poll numbers a boost.
From a coldly political perspective, they were correct. If people believed the campaign was intended to serve others, the brave pursuit of a victory despite the cancer would seem heroic. Anyone else whose spouse had received a death sentence diagnosis might decide to chuck all current plans and devote the time to a sail around the world or anything else his or her heart desired. But the White House was what the Edwardses desired most, and they weren’t going to give up the dream just because of a fatal illness. Instead, they planned to bring them on the campaign trail so the family could be together as much as possible. (They would be “homeschooled” along the way, with lessons taught from books and trips to museums and historic sites wherever they traveled.)
As we exited the interstate and turned west toward Chapel Hill, the senator recalled that Rielle was waiting for him in Iowa. He used my cell phone to call her and explained why he would not be there to celebrate her birthday. When he finished going through his wife’s d {wifiagnosis and describing how it would be revealed to the press, he paused to let her respond. She cussed him out so loudly that I could hear almost every word. He let her complain and then kept saying he was sorry until we approached the long driveway that led to his house. The senator repeatedly tried to end the call and finally asked me to pull over since we were near his home, but Rielle wouldn’t stop talking. After the senator finished placating Rielle and ended the call, we then went up the drive, and I let him out. Before he went inside, he told me to send Rielle some flowers but to leave the name John off the card.
The Edwardses told the world about the recurrence of her cancer at a packed press conference conducted in Chapel Hill at the Carolina Inn, a graceful old place made of soft red brick where they had held their wedding reception in 1977. Mrs. Edwards explained how she had broken her rib-the senator joked, “Actually, I was beating her”-and then recounted how her doctor had said there was no reason for her to give up the campaign. She also said that her treatment would consist of a less debilitating type of chemotherapy that could put the cancer into remission and be used again and again “for the rest of my life.”
After watching this performance, most people believed that Elizabeth Edwards was riddled with cancer and not long for this world. (Cheri and I thought she might live weeks or a few months at best.) At headquarters, where many people owed their jobs to her, talk of her courage and strength dominated conversations, and I heard more than one person say, “We should try to win it for Elizabeth.”
Outside of the campaign, the response to their decision to keep on with the quest was mostly positive. A few criticized the Edwardses for their ambition, but in the main they were honored for their courage and forthrightness. Frank Rich of The New York Times would even publish a column titled “Elizabeth Edwards for President.” Others cheered the open way they were dealing with the illness and said they were grateful that the news reports put breast cancer awareness on the public agenda, which might motivate more women to perform self-exams and go to the doctors themselves.
On the Saturday after they announced Mrs. Edwards’s cancer had returned, health care was the focus of a seven-candidate forum sponsored by the Service Employees International Union in Las Vegas. Senator Edwards mentioned his wife’s illness in the course of presenting the most complete prescription for fixing the health care system anyone offered. Compared with Barack Obama, who hemmed and hawed and never offered specifics when asked to cite his priorities, Edwards made a brilliant case that included honest talk about how his plan would require raising taxes. As he made this point, he added, “I think it’s really important, particularly given what’s happened in the last six or seven years in this country, that the president of the United States be honest with the American people.”
In fact, he was being honest about the things he considered to be the public’s business, like taxes and health care, even as he maintained an elaborate fiction when it ca {ionme to his personal life and the image he projected. Many politicians have taken this approach and said that the ends justified the means. In other words, the illusions they projected were merely the kind of advertising that is required in the age of mass media. Few mortals, and even fewer with the kind of narcissistic drive required to run for president, could really be as upright and decent as the public expects. Similarly, the unrealistic expectations of the press and the public discourage many qualified people from running for office.
A small but telling example of the art of political deception could be seen in the suit Senator Edwards wore for the Las Vegas union event. As he prepared to depart for the debate, he had realized that the label inside the coat read “Made in Italy,” because, in fact, he loved expensive Italian suits and wore them routinely. Trouble is, a union crowd is likely to harbor a wiseacre who will ask a politician if he’s wearing an American, union-stitched suit. When he thought of this possibility, the senator asked me about the label on my jacket-“Made in USA ”-and had me take his to a tailor, where the tag from my coat was switched for the one in his. After the debate he said with some anger that he was disatisfied with the tailor’s work. He played a video of the debate and pointed out a wrinkle where the label was installed.
If other candidates haven’t switched labels in a suit, they have done comparable things to avoid embarrassment or promote themselves. Everyone who works at a high level in a campaign knows it goes on and goes along for the good of the candidate or, if you really believe in him or her, for the good of the country. On the day after the health care forum, John Edwards told the audience of 60 Minutes that he was continuing with his run for the White House because he had “a responsibility to this country.” In other words, he was so sure that America needed his leadership that he simply had to stay in the race. Mrs. Edwards agreed and explained that in the time she had lived with cancer, she had learned to accept and even live with the prospect of her death. When Katie Couric pressed her for a more complete explanation, Mrs. Edwards said:
You know, you really have two choices here. I mean, either you push forward with the things that you were doing yesterday or you start dying. That seems to be your only two choices. If I had given up everything that my life was about-first of all, I’d let cancer win before it needed to. You know, maybe eventually it will win. But I’d let it win before I needed to.
It was a good answer, and for the next few weeks the Edwardses offered a version of it in a series of interviews and at campaign stops. The attention they received was so broad, and lasted so long, that media commentators recognized it as a national phenomenon. Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post noted that John Edwards couldn’t get on 60 Minutes with his proposal for health care, but the cancer story “mesmerized people who don’t give a fig about politics.” Polls taken after the publicity about Mrs. Edwards’s cancer showed that her husband was finally gaining ground on Hillary Clinton and Barack {on Obama. On the road, Mrs. Edwards drew big crowds and loud cheers. In Des Moines, she went to a TV station to do a live interview via satellite with Larry King as a solo act. In that performance, she was a far cry from the nervous lady who sat next to Teresa Heinz Kerry to speak to Lesley Stahl in 2004. She was confident and relaxed, and after it was over I heard people say she should be running for the United States Senate.
Rielle watched with envy as Mrs. Edwards became a star. With her growing popularity, she was able to stand in for her husband and double the amount of ground the campaign could cover in a day. But as she expanded the reach of the organization, she also put more stress on the staff, most of whom were young and inexperienced. Although I continued to work as a fund-raiser, Mrs. Edwards had told the people in charge of the day-to-day campaign to take away all my responsibilities and to keep me away from her husband and her house.
I knew she was angry because she believed I had helped the senator communicate with Rielle. (I still didn’t know the senator had told her I was carrying on an affair with Rielle and thereby endangering her husband’s career.) Her fear that something was going on was well-founded, of course, because I had kept the senator’s secrets in the past and I was continuing to help him stay in touch with his onetime camera girl. For months I had been in charge of the Batphone. He kept it with him on the road and then gave it to me when he returned. It then became my job to sneak it back onto the campaign plane and into the pocket of the seat in front of his before he departed again. Security at the airport made this a difficult job, and one time I actually raced off the plane and out of sight as Elizabeth was bringing him by car to the waiting aircraft.
Because she identified me with her husband’s infidelity, but also knew I remained one of his trusted assistants, Mrs. Edwards obsessed over what I knew and what I may have done. She called me over and over again, demanding information I wouldn’t give her. If I didn’t answer, she left angry messages. At various times she accused me of lying, cheating, and even stealing from her household. In furious fights, she insisted her husband fire me, which he couldn’t do because he needed me to take care of Rielle. Of course I hadn’t taken anything from her family, and by pushing me out of campaign operations and putting untested people in charge, she set the stage for mistakes and mishaps.
For example, until Mrs. Edwards barred me from the campaign, I had managed many of the day-to-day expenses the senator incurred, including his haircuts, which were more of an issue than you might imagine. Naturally thick and lustrous, his hair was a fixation with him. He insisted on using just one kind of shampoo-HairTec Thick & Strong Shampoo for Fine, Fragile Hair-which Mrs. Edwards bought by the case. His hair also had a tendency to grow in a way that made him look like Opie Taylor on the old Andy Griffith Show. A gifted barber could make him look mature and presidential, and when the senator found one with this skill, he was willing to pay whatever it cost to obtain his services. In 2006 his favorite was Joe Torrenueva, a Beverly Hills stylist who charged between three hundred dollars and five hundred dollars per appointment.
For years, I had used my credit cards or the Edwardses’ personal credit c {sonards to pay for the senator’s personal items so that they wouldn’t be charged to the campaign and then turn up in the public reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. Political opponents and news reporters scoured these documents as they were submitted each quarter, hoping to see something juicy in the spending. The senator’s pricey haircuts would certainly catch the eye of any journalist interested to see if the man who was the champion of the poor was a spendthrift. I made sure that no one ever knew about them. When the new, inexperienced staff got the job of arranging for the senator’s personal on-the-road needs, they pushed two bills for four-hundred-dollar haircuts through the normal campaign channels, and the payments were included in the big public quarterly report submitted to the FEC.
The revelation of the four-hundred-dollar haircuts, which was discovered by the Obama campaign, would have been bruising for any candidate under any circumstances, but it was worse for Senator Edwards because of his antipoverty focus and because of a video on YouTube that showed him having makeup applied and fussing over his hair to the tune of “I Feel Pretty” as sung by Julie Andrews. For a few weeks the “Pretty” video, which went viral at the start of spring, was one of the most viewed political items on the Internet, and it revived a mean-spirited line of attack that officials in the Bush White House had devised to use against John Edwards in the 2004 campaign.
Back then, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times made public the Bush team’s decision to refer to Edwards as the “Breck Girl” and emasculate him by playing on his boyish good looks. Dowd has a habit of using gender issues to attack people, often suggesting something’s wrong with any man showing so-called feminine traits. In this case, she gave currency to the Bush rhetoric, which just happened to be accurate.
Unstated, but always part of the context when it came to their public image, was the idea that John Edwards was actually prettier than his wife. This was an issue inside their marriage, and it contributed to her insecurity and his roving. It was also an unstated factor in the campaign and in the minds of many women voters who found him attractive and were reassured that his attachment to Mrs. Edwards remained strong as she aged more rapidly than he did and cancer stole some of her beauty. He gained political capital by loving the real Elizabeth, no matter what age and childbirth and illness did to her body. He lost a little of it when he spent too much time and money attending to his hair. And as they both knew, he risked losing all of it if his relationship with Rielle Hunter became known. Since Mrs. Edwards assumed that I was responsible for keeping Rielle around, she connected me with the threat inherent in the haircut problem. I thought she should have realized that I had always protected the senator from similar unpleasant episodes and that this one arose because she had tried too hard to marginalize me. Mrs. Edwards also didn’t know that my work for the senator was going to yield a remarkable offer of aid that would prove essential to keeping alive the senator’s hope of becoming president and Mrs. Edwards’s dream of being First Lady.
In the midst of the negative publicity, which forced Senator Edwards to tell the press he didn’t know his haircuts were so expensive and confess the issue was “really embarrassing,” a letter from our friend in Upperville, Virginia, landed {ginon my desk. Written in delicate script on pale blue stationery, it was decorated with a sketch of a graceful tree with the Blue Ridge Mountains in the background.
As she wrote, Bunny Mellon was appalled by the treatment John Edwards was receiving. “I see jealousy coming from somewhere in this news report,” she said, and then she volunteered to pay whatever expenses the senator incurred that could not be covered by the campaign, including the employment of a valet. She instructed me to simply send the bills to her attorney, Alex Forger, and rest assured that they would be paid.
Bunny had written the letter as she sat in the room of her…