Born off of East Africa in the middle of Ax, „ugust 1999, Dennis wandered north and west to the Caribbean, where he flexed his muscles and became a full-blown hurricane. He reached the North Carolina coast on September 1, lashing the state with dangerous winds and heavy rains. The sense of relief that came with the return of the sun didn’t last very long, as the storm actually came back a week later to dump as much as eighteen inches on towns at the shore. Much of what wasn’t flooded the first time got washed away with the second pass, including our wedding cake.
The cake was at the Holiday Inn Resort at Wrightsville Beach, where Cheri and I held our wedding reception in a moment of quiet weather on September 11. Months of planning produced a nearly perfect ceremony and celebration. We were married in a historic church, surrounded by family and friends, and walked outside to fountains, a horse-drawn carriage, rice, and the sounds of the church bells. It was a beautiful day, but the true meaning of it all didn’t hit me until we were on our honeymoon in St. Lucia. Marrying Cheri made me happier than I had ever been. I had gotten the girl of my dreams, and my tumultuous past seemed far away.
While we were in the Caribbean, North Carolina went through a nightmare as another hurricane, Floyd, slammed into the coast near Cape Fear on September 16 at three in the morning. Floyd packed winds over a hundred miles an hour and brought a ten-foot ocean surge that flooded towns up and down the coast. He dumped so much rain that rivers across the state overflowed their banks and flooded thousands of homes. Fifty-three people would die from storm-related causes, and the state would suffer more than $3.7 billion in property damage. More flooding came as a series of lesser storms swept through, and by the end of the month there was hardly a dry spot in the eastern part of the state. Cheri and I watched in horror from our honeymoon paradise as CNN showed footage of the steeple of the church where we were married being blown off.
As the news reports showed, Princeville, famous as the first community established by freed slaves after the Civil War, was hit the hardest. Every building in the town was flooded, and every citizen had to be evacuated. But it wasn’t Princeville’s displaced people and damaged structures that stuck in your mind after you visited, it was the coffins. The powerful floodwaters had undermined graves and lifted caskets out of the ground. The water was so deep that as it receded, some of the coffins actually got lodged in trees. Others were scattered in muddy yards and on streets that were strewn with debris. It was a ghastly sight, and something that no witness ever forgot.
I saw the destruction in Princeville and other communities as I drove the senator around the state in the aftermath of the storm, meeting with disaster officials and offering whatever solace we could. Floyd was such an intense storm, and the destruction was so widespread, that President Clinton visited two days after the rain stopped to assure people that federal help was on the way and to soak up some national media attention as he played comforter in chief. “We’re going to stand with you,” he told people in Tarboro, “until you get back on your feet again, as long as it takes.”
Clinton would be followed by a host of other officials, none of whom could change much of anything on the ground. Disaster agencies, charities, and communities were already di Ceregging out and cleaning up, and unless he was willing to grab a shovel or a hammer, all a politician could do was offer symbolic support. Edwards, who was always aware of press opportunities, spent lots of time in the disaster area and got his share of attention from TV and print reporters, but he wasn’t the only elected official looking for the limelight. A few days after the storm, while I was helping to shovel out a church filled with mud and debris, Congresswoman Eva Clayton scurried inside, noticed the Edwards staff T-shirt I wore, looked at the mask I was wearing to protect myself from fungus, and said, “Young man, gimme that thing, here come the TV cameras.” She took it so she could look as though she had been working. As soon as the news crews left, I got it back.
Fortunately, my boss wasn’t quite so brazen when it came to playing to the cameras. He knew they were there, but he also went out of his way to connect with the people who had lost homes and even loved ones in the storm. Almost every time we arrived at a site-church, school, or firehouse-he acknowledged the various dignitaries and VIPs but also made a point of heading for the back rooms and kitchens where the work was being done by folks most politicians overlook.
Given his interest in working people, I was a little surprised by Senator Edwards’s reluctance to roll up his sleeves and get a little dirty himself. Instead of picking up a hammer and driving some nails with Habitat for Humanity or throwing around some cut branches with a road-clearing crew, he would say something about his tight schedule and depart without risking a blister. I thought this was a politically tone-deaf choice that opened the door to people who might say he was too much style and too little substance. Eventually, I learned that while he wasn’t afraid of breaking a sweat, he was afraid of looking silly and wanted to avoid doing things that reminded him too much of the people he called “rednecks” that he grew up around in Robbins.
As I got to know the senator, I came to understand his ambivalence about his background. As a smart and sensitive young man, he had worked very hard to get an education, build a career, and separate himself from the rougher elements of the small-town South. He was proud of being one of Robbins’s favorite sons, along with the astronaut Charles E. Brady, who was pictured on a mural in town. (Brady would commit suicide in 2006.) And when he ran for office, the senator harkened back to his humble beginnings with real affection. But while he may have still loved Robbins, or the idea of a place like Robbins, he didn’t want to go back to being the boy who once lived there, even for a moment.
As flaws go, Edwards’s fear of looking stupid and his ambivalence about his past were small. He presented himself as someone who understood the strain people felt as they lived paycheck to paycheck and said he found it easy to imagine what the flood victims experienced. He often said to me, “There but for the grace of God.” I admired him for putting his arms around people and reassuring them. The Edwards staff worked overtime to help the victims of the disaster, and he returned to the area several times to check on the progress of the cleanup.
These inspections became part of an ambitious project-you might call it “The Hundred-County Campaign”-that I proposed to him Crop a few months after joining the staff in Raleigh. The project, which called for the senator to visit every county in the state no matter how small and isolated, grew out of the basic notion that if he was going to accomplish anything in Washington, he would need the voters’ support, especially in the next election. And while incumbency is usually an advantage, in the past thirty-five years no one in his seat had ever served more than one term. One of these senators, John East, had committed suicide. Another, Terry Sanford, was ousted when a close friend turned on him and ran for the same office. The job seemed jinxed.
I presented the idea of the hundred-county campaign with a written proposal that included a color-coded map showing where the senator had already spent time and where he had never shaken a single hand. I argued that with a deliberate effort he could get to all these places, where many people didn’t even know who he was, and raise his political profile while doing some official business. Mrs. Edwards absolutely loved the proposal, and since she was the senator’s closest adviser, it got the green light. The project would consume much of my time and put the senator and me in a car together for lots of long road trips. My job involved finding people and places to visit-we stressed education, medical care, the military, and law enforcement to beef up his standing on these issues-and all the logistics of getting him around. I poured days into the task of making sure everything went smoothly. In those days before people had global position systems in their cars, this preparation included actually driving the entire route, timing out the distances, and noting the directions down to a tenth of a mile on the backs of business cards. Sometimes I ran so short on time that I would have to make these test runs in the middle of the night on dark, windy, unlit country roads. I would often get lost, be forced to backtrack, and then find myself driving like one of the Dukes of Hazzard so I might get home in time to get a few hours of sleep.
The next day, I would have my Suburban all prepped with maps, cell phones, newspapers, briefing folders, Diet Cokes, water, and food, and we would attack the schedule like an army on the move. At each stop I’d reach into the backseat and grab a plastic plaque with the United States Senate seal and a roll of Velcro tape and make sure the plaque was fixed to the podium where he would speak. I tried to stage the events to capitalize on his trial lawyer’s skills. This meant keeping his formal remarks short, leaving plenty of time for questions and answers, and surrounding him with people. But while I followed a set routine, the senator would often deviate in a way that would charm the crowd and let him connect with people in a more direct and emotional way. A classic case in point occurred at a school in rural Greene County, where the staff had begun to turn around a long record of poor performance. They had done this with a new program that involved building discipline and pride and used many unconventional techniques, especially songs, to help students learn.
As he often did, Edwards began his improvising by suggesting that the event be expanded. Feigning irritation with me, he said, “Andrew, we shouldn’t be seeing just a few folks and leave everyone else out. Can’t we bring everyone into someplace like the auditorium and get ’em all involved?” The principal of the school, eager to please the senator, loved his suggestion and announced that everyone should come to the cafeteria for a special assembly. You could feel the excitement ripple through the bu Cthrilding as kids filed into the hallways. But I also noticed that these were the quietest, best-behaved children I had ever seen. No one ran. No one shouted. And they took their seats in the cafeteria without any ruckus at all. Walking with one of the teachers, I noticed there were no locks on the lockers and no graffiti on the walls. “We don’t need locks-these kids learn trust,” he told me. “And they learn pride. There is no graffiti.”
When everyone was gathered together, the principal gave the kids a chance to show the senator what they knew. One small girl got up from her seat, and a hush fell over the room. Then she started to sing:
When the little girl finished this first verse, every kid in the room joined her for the rest of the song, singing out prime numbers past one thousand. The performance took eight or nine minutes, but it was a breathtaking and inspiring thing to hear. These kids had a fraction of the resources of similarly sized schools and a hundred times the spirit. At the end, Edwards moved into the crowd and knelt to give the girl who had started the song a big hug. Whatever he might have said during a speech or question-and-answer session could never have the power of that gesture. Most important, it was moments like this (and there were many of them) that made me feel that my assessment of him as a leader was correct.
As we left the school, our hosts followed us to the car and waved goodbye. If anyone on the school staff had started the day with doubts about the senator, my bet is that they were resolved by the time he left. The same could be said for students who would go home and tell their parents about the assembly or cast their own votes in future elections. We were also happy to note that we had visited yet another county on the list. As we drove away in the Suburban, I said something like “Well, that’s another county,” and the senator responded by high-fiving me and saying, “Check!” with a wave of his arm, mimicking the gesture one would make to draw a huge checkmark on a blackboard.
On the day we visited Green County, we were close enough to home to sleep at our own houses. However, many of these expeditions were two-or three-day affairs, and we’d find ourselves spending nights at hotels and having three meals a day together. The first hotel I ever booked for us turned out to be a disaster. Located near Camp LeJeune, the Onslow Inn was very affordable and in the right spot. Unfortunately, every room reeked of mold and mildew. We stayed but C We the senator was miserable and he complained loudly.
In the days we spent touring the state, we talked about family, politics, our personal histories, marriage-like me, he said he loved his wife and was completely faithful-and everything else you can imagine. The subject of the senator’s son Wade came up often, and he frequently asked me to drive by the cemetery so he could visit his grave, which was marked by a ten-foot-tall marble statue of an angel emerging from the stone, with what appears to be Wade’s face cradled in her arms.
If we had company in the car, like a national reporter, the senator often discussed cases he had worked on as a lawyer, and whenever we passed a courthouse, he became nostalgic about performing in front of juries and judges and the thrill of winning a big victory for a deserving client. (He always gave some credit to Elizabeth for these victories, because she always studied his cases, offered advice, and even helped him with his closing arguments.) He would start to tell a story to a reporter, then stop and say, “Oh, have I told you this one, Andrew?” I would shake my head no. Then I would smile to myself and settle in to hear about another of his great legal conquests, for the twentieth time.
One of his favorite stories from his practice was about a case he tried in a small town close to Robbins. It was the first time his mother came to watch him work, and she was bursting with pride. Near the end of the trial, she ran into the jury foreman at the grocery store. She had known the man for years, and he told her, “We just think the world of your son.” Even I knew this was probably grounds for a mistrial, but the story ends with a victory for Edwards.
At other times, we talked about University of North Carolina basketball (college ball is a religion in the state), and we planned routes for our daily jogs. Edwards was thoroughly addicted to running and would get cranky on the days he couldn’t have an hour or more to change clothes, cover a few miles, shower, and cool down. I would join him, and as we pounded down city streets or dug our way across the sand at a beach, we would talk. Invariably, he’d say something about how much he preferred to be home in North Carolina and how disappointed he was by Washington and the life of a United States senator.
You’re forgiven if you can’t muster empathy for someone who complains about holding a prestigious elected office that brings him into the circles of power and requires him to be praised and honored wherever he goes. (Cue the world’s tiniest violin.) The life of a senator is not digging ditches. But if you do it well, it can consume your every waking hour, and the travel back and forth to your home state can become exhausting. Senators spend an inordinate amount of time fending off lobbyists and begging for political contributions, which most find to be degrading. Finally, as a freshman, a senator has hardly any power. In his first years, Edwards was permitted to take up one real issue, a proposed “patients’ bill of rights,” and he got lucky when his colleagues allowed him to put his name on the bill beside that of John McCain, who really did believe in working across party lines to get things done.
The legislation Edwards and McCain proposed would have given Am C haericans more say in their own medical care, making it easier for them to access services and giving them more power in dealing with health insurance companies. In the long run, the idea would be adopted by both the House and the Senate, but it was eventually vetoed by President Bush. In the short term, it gave Senator Edwards a very popular issue to talk about, and it brought him more attention from the national media than anyone else in his Senate class. Edwards couldn’t have risen so fast without some help, and as time passed I would learn what a powerful friend and mentor he had in Senator Ted Kennedy, who was coming to believe himself that Edwards might be a future president. In a party that was short on charisma, the old war horse saw promise in John Edwards and was going to do whatever he could to promote him.
More help would come from Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, who saw great potential in Edwards and came to Raleigh in the fall of 1999 to attend a fund-raiser. Because I had to pick him up at the airport, I asked Cheri to take care of things at the Angus Barn steak house, where the event would be held, and she did. Kerrey, who insisted on carrying his own bag when I met him, couldn’t have been nicer. He had just gotten a BlackBerry phone and was beguiled by its capabilities. “Look at this,” he said, showing me the screen. “I just texted my whole staff.”
Although he was a war hero who had run for president himself, Kerrey was unpretentious and undemanding. He drew a good crowd to the donors’ cocktail party, where he made my boss sound as though he were already a key player in the United States Senate. Afterward, when Edwards asked him to share a dinner in the restaurant, he turned to me and said, “Andrew, why don’t you and Cheri join us?”
For a local staffer with just a few months on the job, the invitation was like being asked to move up to the grown-ups’ table at Thanksgiving. And unfortunately, I discovered what a lot of young people learn when they join the adults: It’s not as great as you expect it will be. On this night, the Edwardses tried a little too hard to impress their guest, which was embarrassing, and then the senator put his foot in his mouth when he asked Cheri about her job as a nurse. Somehow he managed to get onto the subject of her salary and then insulted her by blurting out, “Jesus, how the heek do you survive on horrible pay like that?”
The comment bothered me on several levels, including the way it contradicted everything I had heard the senator say about how he respected working people. Cheri left the restaurant more than a little steamed. She actually made a very good living, just not relative to someone who made $10 million a year. Cheri never forgot it. I decided it reflected a flaw in a man who otherwise possessed a great many positive qualities, which balanced it out.
On the way home, as I agreed with Cheri about the senator’s insensitivity, I also thought about how, in the course of the evening, Senator Kerrey had referred many times to Edwards’s bright future as a national leader. It was hard for me to believe that a guy who had served less than a year in the one and only political job he had ever held was being described as a future star of the Democratic Party. It was so fast. But I also recalled what I had seen the first time I saw Edwards speak. Maybe, I thought, my intuition had been right.
Serious talk about John Edwards running for national office began long before the press and the public became aware of the possibility. It started in June 2000, when Vice President Al Gore came to North Carolina. As they planned the trip, Gore’s people knew only that they wanted to get him into the graduation ceremony at Tarboro High School, which served one of the areas most affected by Hurricane Floyd. Besides that one stop, they wanted a second setting for what they called “an education event” and a third for “a tech event.” The selection was complicated by the Secret Service, which required we consider sniper locations as we reviewed sites. I helped them settle on Broughton High School in Raleigh for a question-and-answer session with students and the North Carolina State University technology center, where Gore talked about the Internet. (I also pushed for these locations because the senator’s children had gone to Broughton and he graduated from State.)
Senator Edwards and I accompanied Gore for the full day. It was my first experience with a motorcade operated by the Secret Service, and I got a sense of their readiness when the driver of a stopped car pulled onto the highway. Suddenly the rear windows of a black Suburban popped open and two agents, their firearms visible, leaned out. The stray car was surrounded by motorcycle cops, and the motorcade proceeded at full speed. (For fun I called my parents and told them what was going on.)
At each stop that day, the vice president excelled at meeting people one on one but put them to sleep with his public performance. The senator, in contrast, knew how to work a crowd. He knew when he had them, knew when they were getting bored, and knew when to wrap things up. At the last stop, when the crowd applauded the end of Gore’s talk, I happened to be standing near two Secret Service agents. As Edwards and Gore waved to the crowd, one turned to the other and said, “If you ask me, the wrong one’s running for president.”
A few weeks later, the senator told me that he had gotten a few feelers from Gore’s people, who said he was being considered for the job of running mate. Some of the hints came from Harrison Hickman, the political pollster and consultant who had helped Edwards beat Lauch Faircloth and just happened to be one of Gore’s closest advisers. Edwards also shared a friend with Gore in Walter Dellinger, a prominent law professor at Duke. Both men knew how well the charismatic Edwards performed, how he could take apart a tough issue and explain it in terms anyone could grasp and win them over to his point of view.
In mid-July, on a day when I picked him up at the airport-Diet Coke chilling, AC blasting-and we stopped for some groceries, my cell phone buzzed while I was away from it. When I checked the message, I heard Warren Christopher’s soft voice saying he was trying to reach John Edwards. (Former secretary of state Christopher was helping to guide Gore’s vice presidential pick.) We took the groceries home and called him back. It was at just this moment that Emma Claire, the senator’s two-year-old daughter, decided to raise the volume on the television so she could hear every word of the song Cf t220;I love you. You love me!” being sung by Barney, the purple dinosaur. I raced to turn down the volume but couldn’t find the remote control.
Between Barney’s blaring voice and Christopher’s exceedingly soft one, Edwards couldn’t hear much of the call. Mrs. Edwards, who had been hanging on every confused word her husband said, pounced as soon as he hung up the phone.
“Well, what did he say?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean, you’re not sure?”
“Well, I think he was telling me I was one of two being considered.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“Well, the TV was so loud and I could barely hear him, but I think that was what he said.”
“Why didn’t you ask him to repeat himself?”
“I didn’t want to embarrass myself. Besides, I was pretty sure I got what he was saying.”
He was right. Christopher had called to say that while other names might be suggested, there were only two people under consideration, and Edwards was one of them. He and Elizabeth were thrilled by the news, and they asked me to arrange a little celebration with their “dinner club” friends at a local chain restaurant called Tripp’s. I got on the phone and set it up, and by the time I was finished, I could hear him trying to temper his wife’s expectations. He reminded her that he was still an inexperienced politician with no serious national profile. Like Gore, he was from the South, and most presidential nominees try to balance the ticket with a partner from a different region. Also, Edwards had absolutely no standing with party insiders across the country.
The man we believed was the other finalist, Dick Gephardt, had a political résumé as long as your arm. A member of Congress since 1977, he lost a bid for the presidential nomination in 1988 but became House majority leader the following year. He was from Missouri, which would give the ticket a Midwestern flavor, and he was both a policy wonk and a true insider with national party people. Everyone from New Hampshire to Iowa and beyond knew Gephardt, and half of them probably owed him a favor.
The main thing going against him was his style-he was almost as low-key as Gore.
When I got home with my news about the vice presidency, Cheri was shocked and a bit impressed. She had been skeptical about the senator. The idea that he might be moving up didn’t change her opinion completely, but it gave her a bit of confirmatio Cof n about my judgment, proof that I had placed my bet on a pretty good horse.
Days after Christopher’s call, Edwards went to meet with Gore at the vice president’s mansion on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. He did not think he had a good shot at the job, but he enjoyed the publicity he was getting. When I saw the senator next, he talked a little about Gore, saying he had been strangely shy and that there was no spark between them. He made fun of the vice president’s pointy-toed cowboy boots, which he wore with a suit, and he said he thought Gore was much too cautious. Eager to be his own man and distance himself from the Lewinsky scandal, Gore had all but banished President Clinton from his campaign. Edwards, who had used the president to great advantage while courting the black vote in North Carolina, thought this was a big mistake.
But although he was lukewarm about the man he met, the senator was extremely impressed by the vice president’s official residence. Built in 1893, Number One Observatory Circle is a three-story building with a round tower and a high-pitched main roof with dormers. It looks a lot like the faux Victorian mini-mansions you see in pricey developments all across the South, except it’s the real thing. The senator thought it was a nicer home than the White House and would be the ideal place to prepare for a run for the presidency in, say, 2008. He didn’t say what he intended to do if he became president, but as I came to learn, most big-time politicians don’t think much about what they will do when they get to the top of the mountain until they arrive. Until then, it’s all about the climb.
Of course, a place on the short list for vice president isn’t a guarantee of anything, especially if you are the guy’s in-state advance man. With this in mind, Cheri and I planned our future as if we were going to stay in North Carolina. She went off the birth control pill, and we hoped she would soon be pregnant. We had enough confidence in the future to buy a four-bedroom place on Lake Wheeler, on the south side of Raleigh, and start a major remodeling project.
We moved in at the end of July and were still unpacking on Saturday, August 5. I put a television on top of a cardboard box and turned on CNN. At some point while I was passing by, I heard a newscaster mention Edwards as they showed a video of the senator, Mrs. Edwards, and Julianna Smoot getting into his beat-up Buick in Georgetown surrounded by photographers. Minutes later, Julianna called to say that the Gore people had sent some sort of signal indicating Edwards was in. Then, almost in the same breath, she backed off a bit, insisting that while all the signs were positive, nothing was set in stone.
For the rest of the weekend, the cable news shows speculated about Gore’s choice, which meant he enjoyed a bonanza of free publicity and everyone connected with the senator suffered with nail-biting anxiety. Most of the reports followed the themes that appeared in a Wall Street Journal article-“ North Carolina ’s Edwards Gets a Shot at the Gore Ticket”-that ran through the pros and cons. The one line in the piece that stood out to me was, “When Republican nominee George W. Bush chose balding, 59-year-old Dick Cheney for his ticket, Mr. Edwards’s youth became an even bigger asset.”
The buzz had become a racket, and it was impossible to ignore the idea that John Edwards just might become vice president. (On Sunday, the Daily News in New York even published a story saying Gore favored Edwards and would take Massachusetts senator John Kerry if Edwards turned him down.) I had my own ambitions, and I thought about how well I had served the senator and the possibility that he might want me to work in the vice president’s office. For me, an offer to work in a Gore/Edwards administration would mean an instant jump from the minor leagues to the majors. And as much as my apolitical wife loved the life we were building in North Carolina, she said she would make the move and support me one hundred percent.
I tried to temper my own expectations, the way the senator had tempered his wife’s on the day Warren Christopher called. Gore had other people under consideration, and presidential candidates always float a bunch of names to see how people react and to grab as much free press as possible. I also kept in mind that a jump to Washington would be disruptive. Cheri and I had just moved into a new house, and we were serious about starting a family. There was no sense in getting all worked up about something that might never happen.
Gore would make his announcement on the coming Tuesday at his campaign headquarters in Nashville. The senator and I began another road trip on Monday morning, heading north to Asheville, where we would stay overnight before heading into the Great Smoky Mountains and three remote counties that we could check off our list. When we got in the car, he announced that he was going to share something special, something he hadn’t told anyone else. (I knew this wasn’t true, but I played along.) He then told me that on Saturday he had heard from one of Gore’s closest advisers, who said he was going to be picked for vice president. But then on Sunday, after the idea of Edwards for vice president was floated on the political talk shows, he got another call indicating the deal was not yet set.
“Today I don’t know any more than you,” he said. But this didn’t make much sense to me. If he was going to be the pick, he would have been informed. So any hope we had was slender at best.
All day long we kept waiting for the phone to ring with Gore on the other end, asking Edwards to come to Nashville. In the mountains the cell phone signals are so unreliable that we often lost service, so I would check every few minutes for messages. We heard from staffers and political advisers and Mrs. Edwards, but not Gore. At the events we held, where the crowds were suddenly massive and we saw more reporters than usual, the senator made sure I arranged to have him jokingly introduced as “the next vice president of the United States.”
That night in Asheville, we stayed at the historic Grove Park Resort, a massive hotel built in 1912 out of local granite by a patent medicine huckster who filled it with Arts and Crafts furniture and decorated it with quotations from Thoreau and Emerson and others. A few special rooms feature theme decorations. The “Great Gatsby” is Art Deco. The “Swinging Sixties” has a flower power motif.
As usual, I checked him into a su C hiite and put myself in a regular room. Even though it was in the basement, it still cost hundreds of dollars for the night. Before dinner, we took a long run in the streets of Asheville and even cut through the parking lot attached to the building where my sports pub (now a Chinese restaurant) had, in the good times before bankruptcy, buzzed with life. At some point during the workout, I turned to the senator and said, “Doesn’t it suck?” He wasn’t sure what I meant, so I explained that I was talking about Gore and the all-but-obvious fact that he wasn’t going to be selected.
In response, Edwards told me that his life experience, especially his son’s death, had taught him to control his expectations and never take anything for granted. He had thought about what Gore had to consider as he made his choice and concluded that John Edwards was not the ideal pick. Since he never had the job and never expected to get it, losing out wasn’t going to hurt. He also said something about how he had been a senator for only a short time and that the future would bring so many opportunities, it didn’t make much sense to get upset about this one.
The next morning, as we drove west toward a meeting on the banks of an isolated reservoir called Fontana Lake, radio news reports from Nashville noted that Gore was going to make his announcement at noon. I began to feel like the one kid in class who wasn’t invited to a birthday party. When we got to the lake, we were met by half a dozen officials from local communities and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The locals complained about the TVA’s policy of drawing water out of the river to generate hydroelectricity. They thought it discouraged tourism and fishing and the economic benefits that come with visitors. I watched closely to see if the senator was bored or distracted, but if he was, he didn’t show it. He left the lakeside assuring his hosts that he would look into the problem, and they were pleased.
Lunch was scheduled at a local school where the kids were on vacation, but we would meet with teachers and administrators. On the way there, we were shocked to hear that Gore had picked not Dick Gephardt, but Joe Lieberman, a senator from Connecticut with little national reputation and even less charisma than Gore. (We had heard rumors about Lieberman but had dismissed them as ridiculous.) In that moment, considering Lieberman’s and Edwards’s strengths, I believed that Gore had been afraid that if he picked Edwards, his running mate might outshine him. The senator insisted he never really expected to be picked and that he wasn’t very disappointed. He repeated what he had said the night before about all he had seen in life and how he had learned to roll with the punches. I kept thinking about how the whole country was focused on Gore and Lieberman.
It was a punch to the gut. At that point, we all felt that Gore would win and any future hopes of a presidential run for Senator Edwards were a long way off. It was confusing working in politics at times like this; you want what’s best for your team, but you want what’s best for yourself, too.
At the school, we were met by the principal and given the usual tour. Somewhere along the way, Gore and Lieberman called and I took the senator into an empty room to congratulate them and agree that he would contribute to the campaign in any way he could. When he came back, it seemed as if C senothing had happened. He sat down with a small group of educators and listened carefully to their concerns about the funding and technology needs of rural schools. No trace of disappointment showed on his face, and he was completely attentive. Looking back on that day ten years later, I can say he was never more presidential.
(Eventually, the senator told me what had happened with the Gore pick. According to Edwards, he had been anointed on the Saturday prior to the announcement, but the choice did not go over well among Democratic Party insiders and with various pundits. The next day, the Gore family met behind closed doors, and when the session ended Lieberman was in.)
Realistically, the nomination for vice president was too much to expect for a guy who had run for office only once and had served a grand total of nineteen months in the Senate. Knowing this, I found it easier to focus on the chores Cheri and I had to finish at our new house and enjoy what the summer had to offer. We went to a Jimmy Buffett concert at an outdoor venue called Walnut Creek and attended a good friend’s wedding at a country club down in Charlotte. Cheri wasn’t feeling quite like herself, but I figured she was just a little run-down. Besides, we managed to have a great time at both events.
I was free to relax because the boss was in great demand out of state. In the middle of the month, he attended the Democratic National Convention at the massive Staples Center arena in Los Angeles. He had a minor speaking role: five minutes and not in prime time. But he also got to visit state delegations, where he met dozens of people who could help him in the future, and he socialized with the glittery Hollywood wing of the party, which was out in force. No matter what you might think of the Democrats at any given moment, you cannot deny that it is by far the entertainment industry’s favorite party. Cher, John Travolta, Martin Sheen, Christie Brinkley, and many others turned out for the Democrats. Before he even left Los Angeles, the national media were describing John Edwards as a rising star and “the future” of the Democratic Party.
I heard all about the Hollywood scene when the senator finally returned and we resumed our routine, crisscrossing the state to meet constituents and officials. The senator was practically giddy with excitement about the convention and wide-eyed over the people he had met and the things he had learned. Always eager to tweak his technique, he was especially proud of learning how to address a vast but distracted audience like the crowd at the Staples Center. The party’s media consultants had coached him on how to stop for applause lines and pretend that he had looked into the crowd and caught someone’s eye. This bit of acting is essential for anyone who wants to look good while addressing weary delegates in midafternoon, and John Edwards was delighted to report that he had mastered it.
Others agreed with the senator’s self-assessment. A little more than a week after the convention, Senator Edwards was the subject of a column in The Wall Street Journal by the paper’s Capitol Hill veteran Al Hunt. The piece cited glowing assessments by big-name Democrats, but the comment that C costuck out came from Alex Castellanos, a Republican consultant who had tried to help Lauch Faircloth fend off the Edwards challenge in 1998: “Edwards is the Robert Redford of politics, a ‘natural.’ ” Of course, Castellanos was actually referring to the character Roy Hobbs, whom Redford played in a movie called The Natural, but his point was clear. John Edwards looked, walked, talked, and acted like a great leader, and he made it look effortless. And in a thirty-second sound bite age, these traits could be more valuable to a politician than decades of experience in public service.
I agreed with Castellanos, but I also knew the senator was sensitive about his natural gifts. He wanted people to remember that he came from a very small town and was raised in a lower-middle-class household where he got lots of love-his mom thought he could do no wrong-but no luxuries. “I’ve worked hard all my life,” he would say. “This isn’t easy.”
As the senator and I went back on the road, he continued to hone his political skills. He was at his best when he encountered resistance in a crowd, like the time we went to an American Legion hall in a small town and someone asked why he opposed a constitutional amendment that would ban flag burning. The room was full of war veterans who had risked their lives and seen their friends die in defense of the flag, and they felt deeply insulted by the thought of anyone desecrating it. The senator opposed the amendment because he considered it a free-speech issue and he believed the Constitution was so sacred that amendments should be rarely enacted. Somehow in that hall he managed to listen respectfully, offer a differing point of view, and reach an understanding with a group that met him with real hostility.
The legion appearance left the senator feeling energized and engaged. He had a much more easygoing experience at a gathering called the Fatherhood Summit. At this meeting, he spoke a bit about the importance of fathers, and because I had spent so much time in his home, I knew he spoke sincerely. I had seen how he related to his children, making them feel nurtured, protected, and secure. Whenever he was home, he watched movies with the kids and took charge of bedtime, making sure stories were read, pillows were fluffed, and blankets were tucked in. And on many occasions when Mrs. Edwards had reached her limit with the kids, he would take over and restore harmony almost instantly.
The routine at the Edwards home was familiar to me because with every passing day I was getting more deeply involved in the family’s life, even as I fulfilled my official duties. When they were in Washington, I took care of their houses in Raleigh and at Figure Eight Island near Wilmington. Home to about four hundred houses and no businesses, Figure Eight is a private gated community where seabirds outnumber people and security is so tight that it’s a favorite for celebrities such as Tom Cruise, Andy Griffith, and Tom Hanks. A typical maintenance-related e-mail from Mrs. Edwards to me about this house included dozens of items, for example:
• Shower door in MBR replaced with something stronger.
• Painting the white exterior trim around windows, over the walkway.
• Have the kitchen stools sanded and primed. Base color can be white.
• Hot tub removed. Deck replaced. Poles for hammock added.
• Replace microwave (shelf where cabinet is presently is okay, so you can just enlarge existing space, and we don’t have to buy built-in kit).
• Check all lightbulbs, replace those that need replacement (have 6-year bulbs for light fixtures in difficult locations), maybe label the switches as this is done.
• Have the crawl spaces on the top floor cleaned (presently too dusty etc. to use).
The Edwardses had similar expectations for their aides in Washington, who would often call me as they waited on the cable man, the repairman, or a delivery from eBay. (Strange as this may seem, many senators treat aides this way, as if they are personal assistants and not federally paid workers.) In North Carolina the list of chores was practically endless. I made sure the Edwardses were registered to vote and that their cars were properly inspected and maintained. More than once, I lent them Cheri’s car to use while theirs was in the shop. At other times, I gave the senator my Suburban to use for errands.
These little favors generally went off without a hitch, but one incident stood out as an indicator of things to come. I loaned the senator my new Suburban, which I had just bought to replace the one worn out during the hundred-county odyssey. He drove it to the Village Draft House in Raleigh, where a blogger, who later reported what she saw, observed him shaking a few hands, signing some autographs, and waiting at the bar for a take-out order of salmon and vegetables. She watched as he departed, got behind the wheel, and backed my new Suburban into a parked car. He got out, looked around to see if anyone had seen him, and drove away quickly. The right rear bumper on my brand-new car suffered a dent the size of a dinner plate. The senator never said a word to me about it. I couldn’t bring myself to confront him about the damage and ask him to pay for a repair. Cheri wasn’t about to pay for it to be fixed or file a claim and watch our insurance rates go up. In this stalemate, the dent remained, and every time we went out to the driveway, we got a reminder of John Edwards’s sense of entitlement.
In general, Cheri had trouble understanding why I worked long hours performing my regular duties for the senator and then serving as butler, personal shopper, and all-around handyman for the entire family. She thought the extra roles were demeaning for a man of thirty-four with a law degree. I saw her point, but I had reasons for my devotion. First, I was doing the job the only way I knew, saying C knyes to every request and doing my best all the time. Second, I truly believed that John Edwards was going to be president of the United States one day, and I thought that this would be good for the country and for our family.
Finally, I knew that I had become indispensable. I felt this because from time to time the senator would call from New York or California and ask me to perform some special duty, saying, “Anyone else would fuck it up, Andrew, but if I ask you to do something, I never have to worry about it again.” (He had complete confidence in me.) I believed that by staying close to John Edwards, I might rise along with him and earn a secure, comfortable future for myself and my family. I say “family” because in the late summer of 2000, Cheri discovered that the physical discomfort she had felt at the Jimmy Buffett concert and at my friend’s wedding was an early sign of pregnancy. We were going to have a baby come February, and I hoped it would be the first of many. Now that I had a family to support, I was especially concerned about being a good provider.
In the early months of the pregnancy, I was able to give Cheri a little extra attention because the senator was involved in the presidential campaign, speaking for the Gore-Lieberman ticket at different events around the country. Whenever I saw him during this time, Edwards complained about how lackluster the ticket seemed and said that by sidelining Bill Clinton, Gore was taking a star player out of the lineup. More critically, he was not using Clinton to attract every black vote he could get. It would cost him, he said. The way he saw it, people who liked Clinton might respond to him and go to the polls for Gore. Those who hated Clinton would never pull the lever for Gore anyway.
On election night, the senator asked me to watch the returns at his house in Raleigh with him, Mrs. Edwards, and their Country Club Hills friends. We all celebrated a little when some of the networks called Florida for the Democrats, because it was a key battleground state. Then, as more returns came in, the Florida count tightened, and by ten P.M. it seemed to belong to George W. Bush. The senator and I were intrigued by the reports coming from the networks, but as time passed I noticed that we were the only ones talking about it. The party at the Edwards house started to thin out before midnight. The senator’s former law partner and closest friend, David Kirby, departed before one o’clock, and then Mrs. Edwards went to bed. The senator and I were the last holdouts, and Cheri called a few times to ask when I was coming home. Every time I got up, he asked me to stay longer.
All night long, the senator had only hinted at the idea that he wouldn’t mind too much if Gore actually lost. Now that we were alone, two teammates dissecting the game, he spoke openly about how the Democrats were so short on future presidential contenders that he ranked near the top, despite his lack of experience. A Gore victory would mean he would have to wait eight years before taking his shot. If Bush won, Edwards could make a run at the 2004 nomination.
I had assumed that Edwards would spend at least six or more years in the Senate and I would glide along with him. This greater ambition, stated so boldly, surprised me a little. I asked, “Do you think you are really ready?” I had in mind his lack of exp Cis erience and what I thought was his reluctance to grapple with difficult new issues. (He still didn’t like to read the staff-prepared briefing books.)
He answered by confessing that he knew he was pushing things a little too quickly, but he added that “there are only so many times when that door cracks open. When it does, you’ve got to take the opportunity and push your way through, whether you think you’re completely ready or not. If you don’t, the chance may not come again.” He also spoke in a team mode, about “us” being in the White House. About “us” creating change. It was intoxicating.
At some point in our conversation, the senator noted, with the hint of a smile, that he was going to get serious about reading his briefing books and other materials on national and foreign affairs. In this moment, he reminded me of a bright but smart-alecky schoolboy who, upon hearing he’s about to fail, promises his teacher that he’s finally going to buckle down and do his homework.
That night, the topsy-turvy returns made it difficult to tell just who was going to wind up president, but the way Gore handled himself-conceding to Bush and then calling back to unconcede-did not bode well. As I left, in the predawn darkness, we both had a hunch that the Democrats would somehow be outfoxed and lose.
I considered what Edwards had said. There was merit to it. I had my own interests in mind as I turned the key to fire up the Suburban and realized that I was the one who had stayed up all night with the senator, watching and planning and scheming. If I stayed close to him, it was possible that I’d accompany him through national campaigns and, ultimately, find a job in the White House.
Sitting behind the wheel of the Chevy, I flicked on the wipers and let them clear the dew off the windshield. With sunrise still more than an hour away, I needed the headlights to get home, but as I drove my future seemed so bright that I could have used some sunglasses.
Two weeks after the election, more than twenty million Americans opened People magazine to find a glamour shot of John Edwards lounging on a sofa in a rust-colored Ralph Lauren sweater with a gilt-edged book in his hands. The magazine’s cover announced its annual Sexiest Man of the Year award-winner Brad Pitt-and the senator appeared as Sexiest Politician. (I thought back to the day of the People photo shoot, when the photographer had asked him to roll up his pants legs and stick his legs in the Edwardses’ backyard pool. Elizabeth had refused, saying it wasn’t “presidential.” The staff had just been glad they’d remembered to have the pool cleaned.) The brief article accompanying the photo quoted North Carolina secretary of state Elaine Marshall on his “clean-cut boyish charm” and noted that Mrs. Edwards said, “I feel very safe in his arms. He’s someone who’s there to protect you. That’s more enduring than someone who just looks good in a suit.”
For weeks, months, and even years to come, John Edwards would face some fairly merciless teasing about the People photo, and he would make a concerted effort to look less youthful and more senatorial. (The right haircut would help enormously.) But in a business where name recognition is essential to survival, his cameo appearance in the “sexy man” issue was priceless. This is because People reaches a huge number of people who never read a serious newsmagazine or tune in to Meet the Press. Short of appearing on a reality TV show, there was no better way to reach these voters than People.