That summer, the members of the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers went to Myrtle Beach for a meeting where they would network, do business, and attend professional seminars at a beach-front hotel called the Ocean Creek Resort. A palm tree paradise with secluded cottages, hotel towers, pools, and a white-sand beach, the setting was ideal for a working vacation. My job would require putting on a party where the group could meet political candidates and organizing a five-kilometer road race. Otherwise, Cheri and I were free to make the long weekend into a minivacation.
We were dressed in bathing suits and flip-flops when we walked through the hotel lobby and I insisted on stopping in one of the meeting rooms to hear at least the start of a presentation by a Raleigh-based lawyer named John Edwards, who had surprised the state a month before by winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for the United States we„Senate. (Edwards had spent millions of his own dollars to defeat a big field that included favorite D. G. Martin, who had run for Congress twice before.) It was one o’clock in the afternoon; even if we wasted an hour on this talk, there would be plenty of time for the beach.
In this crowd, Edwards was a superstar. He had amassed a personal fortune in the tens of millions of dollars by suing on behalf of those who had been terribly injured by corporations, hospitals, or individual defendants. By the mid-1990s, he was so highly regarded that other lawyers jammed into courtrooms whenever he made a closing argument. His most famous case involved a little girl who barely survived after being disemboweled by the suction of a pool pump. At the end of the trial, Edwards gave a ninety-minute closing in which he evoked the recent death of his teenage son, Wade, who had been killed in a freak car accident in 1996. His performance won a $25 million verdict for his clients and solidified his legendary stature. But it was just one of more than sixty victories-totaling over $150 million-that he won in roughly a decade. This record helped him become the youngest person ever admitted to the prestigious Inner Circle of Advocates, a group comprising the top trial lawyers in the nation.
All of Edwards’s success had given him the means to do anything he wanted with his life, but he would say that it was his son’s death that pushed him toward politics. By all accounts, sixteen-year-old Wade was a smart, talented, and high-spirited young man who loved the outdoors and music, collected sports cards, and owned a future that was as bright as a star. Three weeks before he died, he had attended a White House ceremony for finalists in an essay contest. The theme for entries had been “What it means to be an American.” Wade wrote about accompanying his father to a firehouse to vote.
Wade’s death devastated John and Elizabeth Edwards, who grieve to this day. But as John explained when he ran for office, Wade had often told his father he should consider public service. After a period of mourning, Edwards began to think about his son’s advice. He made his decision to jump into politics after watching the movie The American President, in which a widowed president falls in love with a lobbyist. The movie helped him imagine a life of purpose following a great personal loss.
Wealthy, powerful men don’t think small, so when John made the decision to follow his son’s advice, he focused not on the city council or state legislature, but on the United States Senate. He then hired a staff of more than two dozen workers, bought help from some of the top consultants in the country, and easily captured the 1998 Democratic primary.
Edwards’s talk at the Ocean Creek Resort was a chance for people to hear a potentially powerful new political figure, but less than half the seats were filled when Cheri and I entered the conference room where he was going to speak. We took seats in the back, on the aisle, so we could escape quickly, if necessary. (Cheri, who is apolitical, did not want to be stuck in the middle of the crowd.)
Edwards came into the room from behind us, and as he passed me, on the way to the podium, he put his hand on my left shoulder. For a moment, I thought it was heought imy boss trying to get my attention, but when I turned I saw a young-looking guy in a blue suit, white shirt, and striped tie, grinning as though he were my best friend. He had a head of thick, perfectly combed brown hair, steel blue eyes, and a cleft chin. On his lapel was pinned not the usual enamel American flag most politicians wear, but a pin showing the compass-style symbol of the wilderness program for kids called Outward Bound. It had belonged to Wade.
At age forty-five, John Edwards looked like he was in his mid-thirties and moved with the energy of a college quarterback. He brimmed with confidence, but there was nothing overbearing in the way he presented himself. The way he looked at the people in the room, as if he knew each and every one of them, made it easy to understand why he was successful in the courtroom. Juries gotta love this guy, I thought.
Having been a candidate and politician for less than six months, Edwards didn’t have many policy specifics to offer. But the trial lawyers knew he would be on their side in upcoming battles over so-called tort reform efforts by insurance companies, doctors, and Republicans who wanted to restrict our rights to sue when we are harmed. He was one of them and could be counted on to fight for the preservation of the tort system. With this in mind, they were satisfied with his generalizations about other issues like health care and education and helping out the poor and the middle class.
Having grown up the son of a millworker in the textile company town of Robbins, North Carolina, Edwards spoke about these issues with some personal authority. (“I’m the son of a millworker” was a staple phrase in his speeches.) Robbins neighbored the exclusive Pinehurst Resort area, and the contrast between the two communities-one working-class, the other extremely wealthy-was a stark illustration of what Edwards later called “the two Americas.” During high school, he worked cleaning the soot off of ceilings in the mill. In college, he was a package deliveryman. Burdened with the insecurity of coming from a rural town, he found it difficult to believe in himself; thus, whenever he started at a new job or a new school, he thought he was going to fail. He studied textiles as an undergraduate with the thought of returning to Robbins. He was surprised when he got into law school and surprised again when the most worldly, sophisticated, and beautiful woman in his class, Elizabeth Anania, agreed to marry him.
As someone who had heard preaching and speechifying my whole life, I noticed right away that Edwards had a gift. He didn’t just talk about kids who needed help. He painted a picture of a poor kid without health insurance who goes to a rundown school without books and lives in a violent inner-city neighborhood needing somebody’s help to beat the odds and succeed.
Edwards took control of the room, and people started to come in and fill the empty chairs. Trial lawyers are a tough audience, but he captured them so completely that when he came to the end of his talk and asked everyone to “humor me a minute and close your eyes,” they actually went along with him. (I know, because I sneaked a peek.) As the spellbound crowd grew quiet, Edwards asked us to picture in our minds all the people-children, poor families, millworkers, middle-class parents, older folks, and so forth-who had been left behind in the era of Reaganomics and Wa-clnomics ll Street booms, and who deserved better. He then borrowed a quote from Gandhi and told us we could “be the change” that we all hoped would make things better.
“We are a country that speaks out for those without a voice,” he said, “a country that fights for what we believe in. When we stand up for people without health care, for people who live in poverty, when we stand up for veterans, America rises.”
At about this moment, with everyone practically hypnotized by his words, Edwards stopped and asked us to open our eyes and stand. “Come on now,” he said, “just join me.” As the audience complied, Edwards’s voice got a little stronger and he scanned the crowd, trying to catch every eye he could and connect, if just for a second.
“I promise you, if you join me, we will change this country!” he said. “And the folks in Washington and on Wall Street will hear you loud and clear. They will know that their grip on power and money is coming loose. They will know that America is rising. Thank you for standing up.”
The applause that answered Edwards’s speech was loud and sustained. In a room filled with litigators who considered themselves to be highly skilled advocates and public speakers, he had proven himself to be in a league of his own. I was as impressed and inspired as anyone, and I turned to Cheri and said, “This guy is going to be president one day… I’m going to find a way to work for him.” She looked at me, unimpressed, rolled her eyes, and said, “Let’s go to the beach.”
After the noise died down, a crowd of people gathered around Edwards. Although I would have liked to talk with him, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get close. Cheri and I stuck to our plan, heading for the sand and the ocean. But later in the afternoon, I spotted Edwards as he left the hotel and headed for his car alone. I couldn’t help but notice that it was a beat-up Buick Park Avenue-dark blue, dirty, and dented-and that when he opened the door, an empty Diet Coke can and assorted papers fell out onto the pavement. Edwards chased down the trash and picked it up. The dirty car and the fact that he was so dedicated that he was driving it himself to campaign stops helped convince me that he was entirely sincere. He really did want to make the world a better place, and believed he could. (Much later I would learn that the car was a bit of a ruse. A multimillionaire, Edwards started driving the Buick and put away his BMW and Lexus coupe to effect an “everyman” image.)
Money-for advertising, travel, events, workers, and the like-is the lifeblood of politics at every level, and while John Edwards would pour millions of his own dollars into his first campaign, he also needed donations, which would fill his war chest and show he had serious support. Trial lawyers were a natural target for his fund-raising effort, and soon after Edwards spoke to the trial lawyers academy, I was asked to put together a phone bank operation that would contact our members and raise money to help fy"oney tohis campaign.
Although almost everyone hates working the phones to raise campaign money, I don’t. My usual fear of public speaking doesn’t affect me on the phone, and I actually enjoyed the challenge. I would gather a group of six or eight telemarketers and back them up with the candidate and a few of our prominent academy members like Edwards’s law partner, David Kirby, and Wade Byrd, who was a big Edwards supporter from Fayetteville. (A character and a half, Byrd was a profane, boisterous guy who looked a lot like the actor Nick Nolte, roared around in a convertible Jaguar, and enjoyed expensive cigars and The Macallan single-malt Scotch.) The telemarketers would do the work of trying to get folks on the phone, which was roughly a one-in-five proposition. Whenever they got through, they’d pass the call to me, Edwards, or one of the prominent attorneys. It was a bit like fishing. Sometimes the clock would tick for half an hour and you’d get nothing. At other times we’d hit a lucky streak and everyone would get a bite at the same time. I added to the buzz by posting tallies on big sheets of paper stuck up on the wall. This made the whole thing like a game.
The keys to success with a telephone bank include conviction-you absolutely must believe in your candidate-keen listening, and a sense of timing. You aren’t going to raise much money if you spend twenty minutes on the phone with each person, and if you listen carefully, you can tell fairly quickly whether someone is likely to respond. I got pretty good at figuring out when I was wasting my time, and then saying, “Lordy, I’ve got another call coming in. I’ve gotta go.” I also knew how to land a fish when I got him hooked. Once, as I talked to a guy who was offering to give us the maximum donation allowed, I realized he thought he was actually talking to John Edwards, who was sitting next to me. I passed him a note that read, “He thinks he’s talking to you.” When I tried to hand him the phone, Edwards laughed and mouthed, “Keep going.” I did, and the fellow wound up “maxing out,” which meant he sent checks for the maximum amount under his name and his wife’s.
Edwards took a lot of calls during our first phone bank session, which he attended with his chief fund-raiser, Julianna Smoot. A native North Carolinian, thirty-one-year-old Julianna was just beginning to establish herself as a political consultant and finance expert for Democrats. With blue eyes and brown hair streaked with blond, she looked a little like Hillary Clinton and could match her when it came to smarts and intensity. In a business dominated by type A personalities, she was type A+ and an extremely effective and loyal right-hand woman. She helped Edwards home in on the health-care issues-a lot of people were angry with their insurance companies-and pick apart the weaknesses in the positions and campaign of the incumbent, Lauch Faircloth. Edwards was also guided by a first-time campaign manager named Josh Stein. A sincere, talented guy who grew up in Chapel Hill and graduated Harvard Law School, he was the kind of guy you want working for you in politics. Edwards also hired a top consultant/pollster named Harrison Hickman.
The incumbent, Republican Faircloth, was rich like John Edwards, but the similarities ended there. A seventy-year-old who had made his fortune in hog farming, Faircloth was an uninspiring speaker, and he looked terrible on television. After thirty or more years as a Democrat, he haxt mocrat,d switched to Republican in order to win the support of Jesse Helms. In 1992, he ran a nasty campaign where he used coded racist messages to unseat Terry Sanford. In Washington, Faircloth gained notoriety as a rabid critic of President Bill Clinton. He was obsessed with the Whitewater real-estate deal and Monica Lewinsky. In North Carolina, he failed to respond to constituents with the efficiency that made Helms so popular, and his plodding style was a handicap on the stump.
From the start of the campaign for Senate, Edwards stressed education, health care, and Social Security and was so good at rallies and on television that he excited even lifelong Republicans. (Typical was a “man on the street” named James Walker, who told the Winston-Salem paper he felt as though Edwards was “talking to me” when he appeared on TV.) Edwards spoke about restoring “integrity” in Washington, and his support for the death penalty helped him deal with charges that he was “ultraliberal.” He used his inexperience to claim to be a true outsider who would shake up national politics.
In his campaign, Faircloth had to do without his former guru/consultant Arthur Finkelstein-a slash-and-burn strategist-because Finkelstein had recently been outed as gay, and a superconservative senator couldn’t allow himself to be associated with a homosexual. Nevertheless, he followed the Finkelstein recipe, painting Edwards as an irresponsible ambulance chaser and running incendiary anti-Clinton TV ads attempting to make Edwards guilty by association. Both national parties threw big resources into the race. Clinton campaigned for Edwards. Former president George Herbert Walker Bush and his son, the future president, stumped for Faircloth. The last independent polls of the campaign gave Faircloth a slight lead, within the margin of error.
Like everyone else volunteering on the campaign, I threw myself into the effort, especially in the final weeks. I made hundreds of phone calls and used every connection I could to drum up donations and votes. Julianna had me put out hundreds of yard signs, including daily replacements of the signs in the Edwardses’ yard, which were shredded nightly by his Republican neighbors.
On election night, Cheri and I went to the ballroom of the North Raleigh Hilton, which was the Democratic Party’s headquarters for the evening. We were settling in for a long night when suddenly the results were announced by CNN at 8:45 P.M., with a graphic that showed Edwards the winner, 51 percent to 47 percent. (A third-party candidate got 2 percent of the vote.) Analysis would later show that Edwards won with a big majority among blacks and women and that he benefited from a national backlash against the Republican moralizers who had hounded President Clinton. (I also believed I saw in this the beginning of the end for the old Republican strategy of exploiting racism for votes.) But at the moment, all anyone knew was that Edwards had been elected. We shouted and hugged and cried as if we were members of a team that had just won the Super Bowl.
During the party that ensued, Wade Byrd brought me up to the Edwards suite in the hotel, where the senator-elect was getting used to the idea that he had won. Earlier in the day, he had refused to believe Harrison Hickman when he predicted a victory. In fact, he was so certain he was going t"1ee was go lose that he prepared only a concession statement and no victory speech. Now he seemed overjoyed as he celebrated with his wife, Elizabeth, teenage daughter, Cate, and infant daughter, Emma Claire, as well as his friends and campaign folks. But while he was the center of attention, Edwards impressed me when he noticed Emma Claire starting to cry and quickly picked her up and found a pacifier to help soothe her.
After a brief chat on the phone with President Clinton, Edwards went downstairs to the ballroom. Backstage, Elizabeth grabbed him and said, “You are a senator now. Act like one. The whole country is about to get their first impression of you.” The place exploded when he appeared, and he had trouble controlling the celebration as he praised his opponent, paid homage to Terry Sanford, who had recently died, and thanked everyone who had helped him. But the lines that struck me in the heart were near the end of the speech. “A very important thing happened today,” he told the happy crowd. “The people of North Carolina voted their hopes, instead of their fears.” To native Tar Heel Democrats like me, long distressed to be represented by a divisive figure like Jesse Helms, this was an amazing outcome.
The rest of the night was a blur of celebration and optimism. More than a few people considered Edwards’s smashing success, good looks, and obvious talents, and compared him with the Kennedys. Others wondered aloud if he might wind up in the White House. I certainly thought it was a possibility, and I was hoping to help him get there. Although Cheri was a decidedly nonpolitical person, she stayed by my side into the early-morning hours, listening to endless talk about the election and Edwards’s future. I drank enough so that she handled the drive home, but I didn’t worry about a hangover. On this night, Edwards had fulfilled my expectations and the state had, as he said, turned toward hope. I felt proud and happy, as if a great new dawn were breaking.
Okay. Is everybody ready to smile?”
“No. Not yet. Hold on just a minute.”
This was take number twelve-or maybe one hundred and twelve-and once again the members of the Edwards clan were out of position and both Elizabeth and I were getting a little frustrated by the effort it was taking to get a nice photo of the family in front of a Christmas tree. The struggle, which also had something to do with Mrs. Edwards’s perfectionism, included a little bit of sniping and complaining, and endless shifting and rearranging. In between shots, I found myself wondering, Just how did I get into this?
In fact, Julianna Smoot had called me at the last minute, asking if I could drive to the Edwards house in posh Country Club Hills (a rich Republican neighborhood he had failed to carry in the election) and take the Christmas photo because she had something else demanding her attention. Julianna had remembered sending me over on election day to put campaign signs in their yard. The picture had to be taken immediately, because the family had waited until the last minute and needed to place their order for cards. I haaidr cardsppily agreed to do it because I had already applied for a job on Edwards’s staff, and it couldn’t hurt to spend some time with the senator-elect and to meet his wife, who everyone knew was his best friend and most important adviser.
Though small in stature-she’s about five feet two-Mrs. Edwards was known as a powerful person in her own right. She graduated near the top of her class at the University of North Carolina Law School (just behind the senator) and had had a successful legal career under her maiden name, Elizabeth Anania. After their son Wade was killed, she retired and underwent fertility treatments and gave birth to Emma Claire when she was forty-eight years old. She changed her name to Elizabeth Edwards when her husband entered politics. When I saw her on photo day, she had been through an incredible couple of years that included losing a child, guiding her husband’s election, and having a baby. (Another child, a boy named Jack, would come in the year 2000.) She wanted a perfect picture, and it didn’t seem to be working out.
Part of the problem was the camera, or rather the guy working it. Mrs. Edwards had a fancy digital setup with a telephoto lens, and it took me some effort to learn how to work it. But the whole operation was also affected by the time pressure-we needed a great photo now-and Mrs. Edwards’s desire for every detail to be perfect. I also thought that Mrs. Edwards, who looked like a normal woman of forty-nine-pretty but a bit overweight-was self-conscious about getting her picture taken with her husband, who was very youthful and photogenic. Finally, there was the pressure that surrounds every big politician’s Christmas card. These cards are more than mere messages of good tidings. They promote the family’s image, communicate Christian values, and signal who is favored by the powerful and who is not. People left off the list never forget it. People on the list feel honored, show off their cards to friends as status symbols, and keep them as historical mementos.
With so much riding on the photo, I had to struggle to stay cool as I snapped away and Elizabeth came over to check the images in the viewer on the back of the camera. She hated the way she looked in almost every frame, but in the end she had to accept one for the card. I had no idea whether anyone actually liked the picture. All I knew for sure was that it had not been the best time to get to know the Edwards family, and I hoped I’d get a second chance.
While I waited to see how my professional future might work out, I had no doubts about my personal life. Cheri and I had bought a house, and we moved in with my dog, a boxer named Meebo (a mash-up of My Boy), and a pair of cats named Pepper and Granny. We all got along so well that in January 1999 I ordered an engagement ring, which the jeweler told me would take several weeks to make. On the morning of Friday, February 12, a clerk at the store called to say the ring had been finished early and was ready to be picked up. I hadn’t planned to pop the question so soon, but I was suddenly filled with inspiration and set about creating a night Cheri would never forget.
Fortunately for me, everyone, includi. Pyone, ing the caterers I called-a company called the Food Fairy-loves a romantic. They agreed to go to our house at a little after five o’clock, find a key I would hide for them, and prepare both the meal and a beautiful table-china, crystal, flowers-and put Stan Getz on the stereo. (I wanted a violinist but couldn’t find one who was available.) At about three o’clock, I called Cheri and said my boss had suddenly assigned me-which meant us-to attend a black-tie event that evening. She didn’t like the idea of racing around to find something to wear and getting ready on such short notice, but when I told her that the governor would be there and it was important for me to attend, she agreed to do it.
By six o’clock, Cheri, who had worked until three-thirty, had somehow found something to wear, and she looked beautiful, although she was tired and a bit frustrated with me. I managed to get her in the car and down the road just as the Food Fairy truck whizzed past us. “I wonder where they’re going,” said Cheri. As she mused about the truck, I suddenly realized I needed to kill an hour so they could get things ready. I decided I’d drive to one of the city’s few venues for black-tie galas-the Sheraton Raleigh Capital Center -and use up half an hour or so figuring out that it was “the wrong place.”
The ruse would have worked better if the lot and entrance at the Sheraton hadn’t been deserted, but as we drove up it was obvious that no one was having any kind of event there. Nevertheless, I had Cheri wait in the car while I ran inside to “check.” When I came back out to report it was the wrong place, Cheri pushed for me to call my boss for the proper address. I resisted her. Finally, I said I didn’t feel well and maybe we should go home. I don’t recall her exact words, but they were something like “You don’t ask me to get all dressed up like this on short notice and then just go home. Suck it up, buddy.”
Since I needed to waste more time, I suggested we go to a McDonald’s, where I could get a Sprite to settle my stomach (which to a nurse was ridiculous). When the soft drink didn’t work-“I really feel bad; I think we should go home”-Cheri gave up on me and agreed to call it a night. She fumed on the ride home, though, and when we got to the house she got out of the car without saying a word. She was stomping mad, and I had to hustle to catch up with her at the front door. When I opened it she could smell our dinner cooking, hear the music, and see rose petals on the floor and a table set.
That night we had a candlelight feast that included the juiciest steak I ever had, topped with a concoction of crab and lobster. Cheri’s dessert-a chocolate torte-came with whipped cream, raspberry drizzle, and her engagement ring. When I got down on my knees, my stomach didn’t hurt, but it was filled with butterflies as I said, “You are the woman of my dreams, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?” She said yes. After dinner, we called our family and friends and gave them the news. (Her father wasn’t surprised. I had asked for his permission.) We soon set September 11 as the date for our wedding.
On the day Cheri and I were engaged, the United States Senate acquitted President Clinton in his impeachment trial, ending thirteen months of crisis over his sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky and his stupid, lying attempt to escape the truth. Senator Edwards played a role in the investigation, helping to preside over depositions of Lewinsky and Clinton ’s friend Vernon Jordan. He also made his first speech to the full Senate during the closed-door impeachment trial, which was one of those rare moments when all one hundred members actually occupied the chamber. A lot of staff time and effort was put into preparing Edwards’s remarks, but when the time came he put away the text and spoke, as he said, “from the heart.” (He later authorized the release of a transcript of his remarks.)
In considering the charge, Edwards said, “I think this president has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen.” But he did not agree with those who thought Clinton acted with a criminal’s intent to avoid prosecution. Instead, he saw a politician’s instincts at work: “I suspect the first thing he thought about is, ‘I’m going to protect myself politically.’ He was worried about his family finding out. He was worried about the rest of the staff finding out. He was worried about the press finding out.”
Urging the Senate to focus on the question of whether the evidence against Clinton exceeded the standard of “reasonable doubt,” Edwards said he had poured long hours into studying the case, often staying up till three in the morning. In the end, although he suspected Clinton might be guilty of “a lot that has not been proven,” he couldn’t join those who thought the president had committed perjury or obstructed justice.
Considering John Edwards’s gift for courtroom drama, I’m certain he held the Senate’s attention with his explanation for his votes against the charges. But once I read the speech and thought about the clubby culture of the Senate, I realized that he probably won them over at the end, when he talked about how he had come to admire, respect, and even love his colleagues.
“An extraordinary thing has happened to me in the last thirty days,” he told the one hundred senators. “I have watched you struggle, every one of you. I have watched you come to this podium. I have listened to what you have had to say. I talked to you informally; I watched you suffer. I believe in my heart that every single one of you wants to do the right thing. The result of that for me is a gift. And that gift is that I now have a boundless faith in you.”
Edwards told me that after his address, he was practically bowled over by colleagues who wanted to congratulate him. Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, one of the great old lions, even wandered to the back of the chamber, where the newest members of the Senate were given their desks, to shake his hand. Kennedy saw almost unlimited potential in this young, energetic, well-spoken, and good-looking Southerner who shared his position on most issues. All the other freshmen in Edwards’s class were veteran politic822teran pians who could be seen as part of the “system” that needed fixing. At a time when the public was sick of partisan politics and business as usual, this “outsider” status made him even more attractive.
Of course, you didn’t need to be a Kennedy to see something in John Edwards. All you needed was a subscription to Capital Style magazine, which put him alone on the cover of its February issue with the cover line building the perfect senator. The article, titled “Senator Perfect,” presented Edwards as an almost accidental politician. The author noted that Edwards had failed to vote in six different elections and couldn’t recall if he registered first as a Republican or a Democrat, but also argued that this inexperience was balanced by Edwards’s many obvious gifts. Quoting the political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, the magazine said of Edwards, “He may well be Clinton without the baggage. That’s what we’re watch-ing and waiting to find out.” At a time when the Republicans and Karl Rove looked unstoppable, the Democrats needed someone like John Edwards. This is why Time called him “The Democrats’ New Golden Boy.” Senator Edwards loved all the attention but was also wary of it. “Andrew,” he told me, “they just build you up so they can tear you down.”
Washington seemed to love Edwards, and from the beginning he attracted attention from the kingmakers in his party. But he was still burdened with the ordinary chores that come with joining the world’s most exclusive club. He had to get up to speed for his committees-Small Business; Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; Intelligence; and Judiciary-and hire staff for his Washington office on the second floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building and for outposts around the state. To keep in touch with his constituents, he began holding weekly events called Tar Heel Tuesdays, which were open to the public. In D.C., he gave key jobs to his top campaign aides, Josh and Julianna, and then hired dozens more. In North Carolina, he tapped a mix of political pros and old friends and neighbors.
I first asked for a job with Edwards on the day after the election, but as time passed I started to worry that his staff was overwhelmed with applicants and might overlook me. I didn’t have a strong personal connection to the senator, but Wade Byrd, Edwards’s friend and top donor, had told me to call him if I ever needed help. I drove down Interstate 40 to I-95 South and found the stately Victorian house where he kept his offices. He brought me into his private study, sat behind his desk, and talked about his friend “Johnny” Edwards and how he’d helped plot his candidacy. At the end of our talk, he promised to call Johnny on my behalf. He followed through, and in July I joined the Edwards team in Raleigh.
We worked out of space on the third floor of the historic Century Post Office, which was the first federal building constructed in North Carolina after the Civil War. Mr. and Mrs. Edwards picked the building for its architectural character and because it was some distance from where North Carolina ’s other senator, archconservative Jesse Helms, kept his office. Equipped with used federal chairs and desks (I found old Helms papers in mine), the placudine), the was furnished in a drab government style except for the personal items people added to the décor. I put up a framed tourism poster from the 1930s that showed the U.S. Capitol and declared, “Your National Capital Beckons You.” Some of the people in the office worked every day on constituent issues like passports and Social Security concerns. My job involved working with state and local governments and helping citizens with complicated issues.
Everything you can imagine flows through a senator’s local office, from immigration appeals to reports about unidentified flying objects. One lady left rambling messages about her sexual fantasies-all of them involved Senator Edwards-on the office answering machine every night. Agents of the Office of the U.S. Marshal eventually paid a visit to her trailer and asked her to stop making these calls. She didn’t. We heard almost as often from a federal inmate who wrote the senator on ten-foot stretches of toilet paper. Every sheet was filled with his carefully penciled grievances about the government. Each time one of these communiqués arrived, I got a kick out of watching an intern try to use an official stamp to record receipt of the letter without tearing it.
Most of the real business I did required me to steer questions to the right federal agency or untangle red tape. People who had seen campaign ads saying that Senator Edwards was going to Washington to use his trial lawyer experience to be an advocate for the little people called to seek clemency for relatives on death row. I did a lot of listening and a lot of sympathizing but could offer them very little concrete assistance.
I was so gung ho that I worked overtime almost every day and often left the old building so late that when I tried to take the elevator to the street level, it would get locked and I would be trapped inside. I’d use the emergency phone and call for help. The officers who responded probably thought I was crazy to work all alone so late into the night. In fact I was just a young, ambitious guy who saw a real opportunity in Edwards. At every chance I volunteered to do more, so when everyone else turned down the job of driving the senator when he came to town-picking him up at the airport, ferrying him around the state, bringing him back to the airport-I grabbed it.
Having been around politicians my whole life, I understood that when they travel, major political figures need an assistant-usually called the “body man”-who will be available during every waking hour. (You’ll know him when you see him because he’s the one who has to collect every gift or piece of paper handed to his boss and has a Sharpie marker at the ready for the hordes of autograph seekers.)
The person chosen for this job is granted a high level of trust and responsibility, and a good performance can lead to big opportunities. President Clinton’s body man Kris Engskov became head of public policy for Starbucks. Reggie Love, body man for Barack Obama, has become a genuine celebrity in his own right. Since trust brings with it a sense of duty and responsibility, the job also encourages a fierce kind of loyalty that is rarely seen outside of families. The body man can develop a sense of mission and commitment that is practically fanatical, and his sense of duty, to a boss who may influence the fate of the world, could lead him to overlook, indulto erlook,ge, and even enable things he might not countenance in another person. For example, David Powers, who served President Kennedy, never uttered a word about JFK’s many relationships with women other than his wife. Likewise, many of the people who served Governor and then-President Clinton knew about his affairs and said nothing.
I wanted to set a new standard for body men. Whenever the senator was flying in, I would call the airline and arrange for an agent to meet him at the gate. (Since airlines have a lot of dealings with the federal government, they were eager to help.) The agent would escort the senator through the crowds to baggage claim and out the door, where I would be standing at the curb beside my white Chevy Suburban, which was running with either the heat or air-conditioning on. Inside, I’d have a cooler with cold Diet Cokes (he preferred cans) and snacks. National and local newspapers would be displayed for him to read, along with briefing pages. If it was dinnertime and he wasn’t going to be able to eat, I’d have a take-out meal and a chilled glass of Chardonnay. The menu would depend on whether he had made a request or was on the Atkins diet at the time. Diet meals generally involved salmon and a salad with ranch dressing and no croutons from the Glenwood Grille or 518 West. At other times it was ribs, or country fare from Cracker Barrel. He loved Cracker Barrel-once, he was so excited to see a new Cracker Barrel near his house that he almost made me crash.
Like many people who travel for work, the senator would complain about how much his life “sucked” because he was often away from home. Everyone on the staff did everything possible to make travel easier on him. We did it because our fate was tied to his. Every once in a while, he would notice one thing that I had forgotten and mention it. I would apologize, but he would quickly laugh it off, saying I so rarely forgot things that he was just giving me a hard time. It became like a game to me. My goal was to make things run as smoothly as possible for a man I believed was a future president of the United States. For this reason, I didn’t talk unless he wanted to talk, and I learned how to say “Yes, sir” to every request he ever made. “No” wasn’t in my vocabulary.
I quickly became the senator’s “go-to guy,” whether the task was to obtain last-second tickets to Leno for a niece, retrieve his daughter Cate’s lost purse at Christmas (she’d left it on a flight), or borrow a private jet for some urgent flight in a few hours. John and Elizabeth Edwards both acted as if nothing were beyond my reach and tested me on it. I was proud when I passed their tests and proud to tell my parents and friends about my adventures.
The senator and I quickly developed a routine where he would get in the Suburban, take a deep breath, and then reach over with his left hand, pat me on the shoulder, and say, “Andrew, it’s good to see you.” Often he needed to vent about the frustrations of working in the Senate, which is ruled by seniority, moves slowly, and is set up to promote compromise. He also complained about the volume of work dumped on him every day, especially the so-called briefing books prepared by his staff. These binders contained background materials on major issues ranging from domestic economic problems to foreign affairs. Smart people put many hours of effort into these books, and they were designed for quick study. To their frustration, the senator never seemed to get around to thget aro reading them. Even when he had time in the car, he preferred to talk with me about local politics or Carolina basketball or family. The conversation was easy because we had so much in common. We were both small-town Southern boys who enjoyed the same food, loved the same sports, and cared deeply about our families. Unlike almost everyone else in his life, I never asked him for anything.
When we got to the house and parked, I jumped out and grabbed the bags. I had a key (he always misplaced his) and would open the door and follow him inside. Mrs. Edwards would light up when he came home and give him a big hug. I had rarely seen two people who loved each other more. She was his most trusted adviser-on everything from politics to wardrobe-and he would ask for her input on every important decision.
As she got to know me as a reliable aide, Mrs. Edwards couldn’t have been friendlier. She was so at ease, in fact, that if it was late and she was already in bed, she told me to just come on into the bedroom and put the suitcases in the closet while her husband went to look in on the kids. “It’s all right, Andrew,” she would say. “You’re family.”
It was a warm but also surprising statement. I had worked for the senator for only a few months, and my direct contact with Mrs. Edwards couldn’t have added up to more than a few hours total time. But they were exceptional people, and being with them made you feel you were putting your time and energy into a noble cause. We were trying to make things better for people, to make the country and the world a better place. And because this kind of mission couldn’t be squeezed into a nine-to-five box, I saw the Edwards family in their home and at odd hours. If that didn’t make me family, it made me something more than an employee, and it felt pretty good.
Even so, I resisted when the Edwardses told me to address them by their first names. For some reason-maybe it was to remind myself that we would never be on equal footing or that he might be the next JFK-I would always call him “Senator” and her “Mrs. Edwards.” I did this even on the night I dropped the senator at his home and got an emergency phone call before I had reached my own house, asking me to come back right away.