In the spring of 2002, I was one of the few people in the world who knew that Raleigh, North Carolina, was certain to become an important hub for national politics. Presidential candidates usually set up their headquarters in their home area-Jimmy Carter in Plains, Al Gore in Nashville, Bill Clinton in Little Rock -and for John Edwards this meant that a national organization would be run from the capital of the Tar Heel State. As the campaign’s first employee in Raleigh, I was positioned to play an important role that would depend on the skills and contacts I had developed in the state as well as the education I had received on Capitol Hill.
God couldn’t have arranged life better for me. After months of separation and unhappiness, Cheri, Brody, and I were together again. Our lakeside house was finally finished and ready for our second child, who was expected near the end of summer. I figured that now I would be able to spend more time with my wife and child-like a real father-because the senator would be traveling around the country as a president Nial hopeful.
By the time I got back to North Carolina in March, Senator Edwards had already visited six states, including repeated trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, where he announced that his goal was to “make the American dream stronger than it ever has been.” It was a vague theme, but it was enough for a handful of Democrats in New Hampshire, who told the national press corps that they were impressed with him. Behind the scenes, Steve Jarding and Mudcat Saunders were raising money and winning friends for the senator in unusual ways. In one of their schemes, our political action committee loaned computers to Democrats running for state offices in places like Iowa, who agreed to give them back to us at the end of the year. The arrangement helped them with the expense of campaigning, and built goodwill. When we got the machines back, they came loaded with information-e-mail lists, telephone lists, addresses-that we thought would be invaluable to us.
Supported by the money collected by Jarding and Saunders, the senator traveled from state to state, refining his pitch. At eight different Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners (banquets held to give candidates a forum), he railed against “Washington insiders” and “rich fat cats” like the disgraced executives at the bankrupt Enron Corporation, who had become symbols of the greed enabled by Washington. This kind of talk was red meat for Democrats in the hinterlands, and they ate it up.
Although I saw less of the senator during this period, he came home often enough for me to notice that he was changing. A year before, he had seemed bored and disappointed by life in the Senate. Now, with the presidency as a goal, he was focused and alert. Sure, he complained about fatigue and run-ins with people who made him uncomfortable (he still struggled to feel at ease rubbing elbows with some poor and working-class folks), but I had never seen him more energized and excited. The way he talked, I could tell that he was mastering the issues and getting to know Iowa and New Hampshire better than he knew North Carolina.
Veterans of presidential campaigns say that the early days are the easiest, and this was true for Edwards, who raced into the lead in the competition for donors and national party backers. In both New Hampshire and Iowa, he won over key political figures with his charm and audiences with his Robbins-to- Washington story. “I believe I can be the champion for regular people,” he said in his standard stump speech. “My own life experience allows me to see things through their eyes. They are the people I grew up with, the people who worked with my father in the mill, the people I fought for as a lawyer.”
As she accompanied him on campaign trips, Mrs. Edwards turned out to be popular, too. Unlike other political wives, she wasn’t pretentious or cautious, and she openly tried to make sure the country’s sexiest politician didn’t get too full of himself. At one press event, she even asked the local reporters, “Have you met anyone up here who knows who he is?” In another encounter with the press, she let a writer see her stash her cell phone in her bra as she rushed out the door of her house. People, especially women voters, loved this stuff. She knew it, he knew it, and they played it to the hilt.
The national press loved it, too. U.S. News & World Report put Senator Edwards on its cover at the end of April and made Mrs. Edwards a big part of their story on the presidential hopefuls. A week later, The New Yorker made the senator the subject of a glowing profile that suggested he might be the next Bill Clinton. Writer Nicholas Lemann described Mrs. Edwards as “vibrant” and “fiercely ambitious for and protective of her husband.”
In protecting the senator, Mrs. Edwards didn’t shield him from her own criticism, which she offered every time she saw him perform at a rally or conduct an interview. She was the one person he trusted to give him honest feedback, which meant that when he bumbled through an appearance on Meet the Press in the spring of 2002, she agreed with the critics who said he looked unprepared for host Tim Russert’s questions and sounded evasive in his responses. In fact, it was the worst TV performance of his career, such an awful and embarrassing display of political sidestepping that he would remember it for years with a combination of shame and anger.
Fortunately, he didn’t stumble very often, and he was a quick study. Months later, he went back on national television-this time it was Face the Nation-and scored points with pointed attacks of Bush administration policies that had squandered a huge federal surplus in order to lavish tax cuts on the rich.
As he grew more confident, just being around John Edwards gave me the sense he was going to be the positive leader the country needed. This feeling motivated me, as did some of the early prep work-scouting locations, getting bids on phones and furnishings-for establishing a national campaign office. Because the senator was away more, it fell to me to nurture his relationship with friends, political allies, and potential donors. The work brought me into regular contact with the rich and powerful, including former ambassadors, millionaires, and billionaires.
Although I was only an aide, I was his only longtime staffer, so many of these people came to see me as a surrogate for the senator. Whenever close friends or members of the family had a question or a problem-like an inquiry from the press corps-they turned to me for help. Gradually, many of these relationships became friendly. One big donor invited my family to visit at his luxurious beach house. Another, Boyd Tinsley of the Dave Matthews Band, became a friend who came to my house for veggie burgers.
My relationship with Tinsley offers a perfect illustration of the benefits that come to a political aide thanks to fame by association. When he first called and I didn’t know who he was, our senior campaign consultant Nick Baldick, who worked in Washington, told me Tinsley was rich and important. When we finally connected, Tinsley explained that he was a bit of a political junkie. We talked regularly, and Tinsley said he liked what he had seen and heard about Edwards’s dedication to working people and wanted to help.
In this period, Cheri and I began rubbing elbows with people we would never have met otherwise. At every turn, it seemed, I was encountering another celebrity or walking through a doorway to an exclusive environment that I would never have seen if I weren S if217;t working for a presidential candidate. A case in point was the all-star fund-raiser I helped arrange at the start of the summer of 2002. The hosts were Reynolds Tobacco heir Smith Bagley and his wife, Elizabeth. The politically liberal Bagleys were stalwarts of the Democratic Party who, like their friends, had contributed millions of dollars to various candidates and causes. Mrs. Bagley had been rewarded, during the Clinton administration, with the ambassador’s post in Portugal. Former Gore supporters, the Bagleys were leaning toward Edwards for 2004 and opened their compound on St. Simons Island, Georgia, for a gathering of national supporters, most of whom were wealthy trial lawyers.
Called Musgrove, the Bagley property covers six hundred acres in one of the richest zip codes in America. It is also one of many almost-secret sites around the country where powerful people can find seclusion and comfort while they share ideas and plans. (Allies would call it strategizing. Enemies would see sinister scheming.) Most Americans have never heard of the place, but over the years Musgrove had been the locale for dozens of exclusive conferences and meetings where national leaders discussed everything from relations with Cuba to tax policy. Before Jimmy Carter went to Washington to take the oath of office as president, he gathered his future cabinet at Musgrove.
The gathering for Senator Edwards was not about policy; rather, it concerned politics or, to be more precise, how John Edwards might become president. Strategists and consultants offered briefings on the process that led from Iowa to the nomination and dissected the strengths and weaknesses of our opponents. We talked about Senator Edwards’s appeal as an outsider and a Southerner (Democrats felt they needed to break the GOP hold on the region in order to win the White House) and his populist positions.
The guests-who were often referred to as “future ambassadors”-were there because they had already shown they were willing to supply the money required to get a candidate elected. Together, the participants-between forty and fifty men and women-could claim hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars in personal wealth and connections to a network of thousands of men and women with comparable resources. Those who were trial lawyers were more than willing to pony up for Edwards because they knew him as one of their own and could expect that as a senator and a president, he would protect plaintiff s’ rights and their ability to sue and win big awards.
Republicans had been attacking trial lawyers for years, claiming that lawsuits filed against corporations and individuals, especially in the health care industry, were driving up the cost of malpractice insurance and making life miserable for good, honest businesses and practitioners. They liked to call the trial lawyers “ambulance chasers” who concocted ridiculous claims that won outlandish awards from gullible juries. For their part, the lawyers brushed off the ambulance chasers as a low-rent minority and described themselves as heroes who sought justice when people were maimed or killed by faulty products and incompetent professionals. (When Edwards appeared to be the front-runner for the nomination, President Bush traveled to North Carolina to give a speech on tort reform.)
For me, the highlight of the weekend was Friday night, which began with a cocktail party wh Sktaere I spent a substantial amount of time chatting with Smith Bagley, who is a very tall and distinguished-looking man. My mother’s father had been a foreman for Reynolds Tobacco for thirty-three years, and her mother had worked for the company as a secretary. As I stood with the man who held much of the company’s fortune, I had to struggle to grasp how I had come so far and what it meant for me to be there. My mind was further boggled when we went down to the waterside for an oyster bake, which was served by an all-black waitstaff who then performed songs that could have come out of a nineteenth-century minstrel show. This kind of thing happens every once in a while in the place we liberals like to call “the New South.” You get lulled into thinking that the sins of the past are long gone, and then suddenly some evidence of the old racism comes into view. It made me uncomfortable.
Later that night, I met up with the senator’s former law partner, David Kirby, and a famous litigator from Biloxi named Paul Minor, who had been one of the first lawyers in the suit against tobacco companies that produced a $200 billion settlement in 1998. (Only in the New South would a lawyer who sued Big Tobacco be welcomed at the home of an heir to a cigarette fortune.) The three of us were hungry-it’s hard to fill up on oysters-so we went to a local hee-haw bar. The kitchen was closed, but they let us have a pizza delivered. Kirby insisted that Minor tell me a story about the settlement, and he immediately launched into a tale that begins with a phone call he received from an attorney friend named Ron Motley.
As the story goes, Motley had begun a massive suit against the major tobacco companies (which at this point had never lost a case), alleging that the industry had knowingly hidden health risks associated with their products and a history of deceptive marketing. Recent changes in federal rules and regulations gave the litigants a fighting chance, but Motley needed $100,000 to keep his effort alive. Minor resisted at first but eventually gave him the money, although he hid the loan from his own wife. Years later, Motley called again. This time, it was the middle of the night and both of the Minors awakened as Motley was leaving a message about “that one hundred thousand dollars you gave me.”
The number brought both Mr. and Mrs. Minor fully awake. Anger flashed across her face as he grabbed the phone to hear his drunken friend report that the $100,000 would soon be repaid and followed by millions more. The case had been settled, he explained, and the attorneys for the plaintiffs were going to reap fees totaling billions of dollars. After he hung up the phone, Minor explained it all to his wife, who quickly forgave him for hiding the $100,000 loan, and they jumped on the bed like little kids.
Minor told the story with the kind of matter-of-fact pride you’d hear in the voice of a former high-school star recounting his best game twenty years after the event. But instead of being a local hero, he was one of the richest lawyers in the world and I was being let into his confidence. Many of the other people I met over the weekend could match Minor when it came to power and influence. Altogether, this group donated enough money to the Edwards campaign effort to put him over $3.5 million for the year. This was much more than the amount raised by his nearest competitors, and it signaled to the national party and pundits that he was a powerful candidate.
The weekend at Musgrove gave me great stories to share with Cheri when I got home. She was entertained but never got as excited about high-flying politics as I did. She’s a practical person who lives in the moment and resists getting swept up in flash and show. For her, happiness was found mostly at home, and she was satisfied to have us together again, without the pressure we felt in Washington or the round-the-clock demands that came when the senator was in town.
In many ways, the summer of 2002 was the best season of my life. For the most part I worked normal hours, which meant that I was home for dinner every night and helped put Brody to bed. Cheri and I then relaxed on our back porch, listening to music and gazing at the lake. The schedule also allowed me to run every day, which meant that my body was fit and my mind was clear. When I run, I say my prayers and let myself dream. During this period, I kept a notebook and a pen in our mailbox, so after I ran laps in our neighborhood, I could write down any ideas or flashes of insight before going inside to shower. I was so excited about the impending arrival of our next child-by this time, we knew it was a girl-that most of my notes were about baby names.
My favorite name was Grace. Cheri’s favorite was Lauren. When our daughter was finally born on September 1, 2002, we named her Lauren Grace and called her by the nickname Gracie. A bit smaller and quieter than Brody, she had trouble breathing, and Cheri noticed that as she struggled to get air she made a high-pitched noise called stridor. Doctors told us the problem was not serious, but when it didn’t get better and she had trouble feeding, we took her to the hospital. Only two weeks old, she stayed for several days of tests that gave us no definitive diagnosis. Worn out from the stress, Cheri asked her mother to come care for the kids while she went with me for a long weekend-half work and half fun-at the famous Pinehurst Resort.
Set for the last three days of the summer, the Pinehurst event had been the main focus of my work in the month of August. Like the event at Musgrove, the “retreat” was supposed to be an organizing and rallying point for about a hundred of the senator’s key supporters from around the country. Many were “big dogs” in the nation’s trial law profession, and we needed to offer some special amenities to draw them in. The resort is a golf mecca, where our guests would have eight courses to choose from, including Pinehurst #2, one of the best in the world. For those who didn’t golf (and those who did), we included a concert by the band Hootie & the Blowfish, who were Edwards supporters from South Carolina. The band members donated their services but sent a list of more than two dozen requirements that included transportation, suites, free rounds of golf, five cases of beer, three fifths of Jim Beam, and “orange juice (no pulp).”
For attendees, the per-person cost for the three days, including accommodations at the Victorian-era Carolina Hotel, was about $1,200, which was hardly a consideration for the people we invited. In fact, the hotel didn’t have enough fancy suites to satisfy this crowd. Almost everyone we asked agreed to come, and we had a full house for the pig roas Sr tt/reception on Friday night and the lunchtime meetings held on Saturday and Sunday. At these two sessions, our backers heard from the senator and a group of experts, including two of Bill Clinton’s closest advisers, Doug Sosnik and Gene Sperling. A high-energy person, Sosnik talked urgently about the public’s hunger for a likable candidate who shared their values, and naturally he thought Edwards was that guy.
Sperling began with a self-deprecating story about delivering his first major policy program-for jobs creation-to Bill Clinton. In the moments before being ushered in to see the boss, he had chewed on his pen, which leaked ink all over his mouth and chin. When Sperling entered the Oval Office, President Clinton asked, “Whatcha been eatin’, boy?” and political consultant James Carville, who was in the room, grinned and cackled, “What a Maalox moment, your big day, meeting the leader of the free world. What an idiot!” It was the perfect story to grab the attention of those people, who were daydreaming about helping to create the next “Bubba” like Bill Clinton.
After winning the crowd over, Sperling spoke about Edwards as a progressive whose values and Southern roots could appeal to moderates and independents. He acknowledged President Bush’s strengths coming out of the September 11 attacks but noted that Bush’s father had been popular after the first Iraq war and led Clinton in many early public opinion polls. The right Democrat would have a very good chance to make Bush II another one-termer, and Edwards was the right Democrat.
By the time the senator spoke, the participants had been primed to consider him presidential material, and I saw a more serious and less relaxed man than I had known before. He was clearly acting in a more careful and deliberate way, and so was Mrs. Edwards. I noticed, too, that they brought Emma Claire, who was four, and Jack, now two, into meetings and as usual allowed them to run around among the adults. Like any other little kids, they were adorable some of the time, but even when they got a bit cranky and the nanny volunteered to take them to the pool, the senator and his wife insisted they stay around. They said having the kids around would be appealing to the donors-that no president in recent times had young kids. I realized the kids were being used as props to show that the family was young and lively like, say, the Kennedys circa 1962, when Caroline was five and John Junior was two.
Of course, all politicians calculate and scheme and send messages in the way they dress and the settings they occupy. During an energy crisis, Jimmy Carter turned the heat down at the White House and put on a cardigan. In order to appear as outdoorsmen, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush cleared brush on their ranches as though they couldn’t afford to hire someone else to do it. At a time when Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs had stirred public outrage, John and Elizabeth Edwards intentionally presented themselves as a blissfully married couple and their family as a close-knit and rambunctious bunch. If it wasn’t the whole truth, it was true enough, as far as I knew. And considering the fact that we were at Pinehurst to make an impression, the sight of Jack and Emma Claire running around was just one of many details in the picture.
For me, the best Pinehurst moment came late on the night of the concert, when Cheri a S, wnd I were invited to hang out with the band in the complex of suites they had been given at the hotel. I walked the senator in for a brief appearance, but like most of the others who stopped by, he departed early. Eventually, it was just Cheri and me, drinking beers and trying to stump the lead singer, Darius Rucker, by naming a song he didn’t know how to sing. We couldn’t do it. And let me tell you, hanging out with a guy who has won two Grammy Awards while he sang and another member of the band played drums on the coffee table for a few hours was an amazing experience.
Even as it was happening, I understood that Cheri and I were privileged to have this experience, and I had the feeling of being both an insider and an outsider simultaneously. I mean, my association with the senator was the only reason we were there, rubbing elbows with powerful political figures by day and partying with Darius Rucker and the rest of the band at night. This thought made me feel grateful, but also very dependent. I knew that all of it was contingent on my continuing to do a good job for both Senator Edwards and his family.
My success at Pinehurst that weekend was confirmed by the pledges of support that were offered by the wealthy supporters who attended, their enthusiasm for the senator’s candidacy, and their willingness to commit to serving as advisers and fund-raisers as we moved forward. I also got credit from the senator for making sure that every request made by a guest was promptly satisfied, whether it involved a room upgrade, a tee time, or something that required more discreet attention. At one big event the senator held during this period, I was summoned by one of the more powerful men in the room, who happened to be there with his wife. He asked me to come to his table partway through the meal and call him to the telephone. There would be no call, he explained, but he wanted me to act as if something urgent had come up.
When the time came, I performed as requested, bustling over to the man’s table and whispering in his ear. He walked out of the room with me and explained that he was going to go back to the table and tell his wife that an emergency had arisen with one of his clients. She would stay for the rest of the weekend, he added. I would take him to the airport.
The ruse went off without a hitch. I brought my car around and whisked the big dog off to the nearby airport, which was about five miles from the hotel. Once we got there I took him out to his private jet, which was parked on the tarmac. Three young women, each of them wearing a great deal of makeup and very little fabric, waited for him in the plane.
“We’re goin’ someplace fun,” he said, adding, “Wanna come?”
I said, “No thanks,” and wished him a good trip. I knew there was nothing to be gained-by me, the senator, or anyone else-by my uttering a word about what I had seen. In fact, I decided that it would be best if I put it out of my mind completely. I got some help with this task as soon as our life took another dramatic turn.
In the three days we had been away, Gracie had given Cheri’s mother constant worries. Despite reassurance from doctors who said her condition was not serious, she had been unable to feed well and her breathing was still labored. If anything, the high-pitched wheezing sound she made as she struggled for air was louder and more constant, and listening to it just about broke your heart. Cheri contacted a specialist she knew from work, who agreed to review the imaging done the previous week. He quickly found something the others had missed.
It turned out that a fairly large artery-it comes directly from the heart and supplies blood to the head as well as the right shoulder and arm-had developed in the wrong place and was pressing on her trachea. Between the direct pressure and the irritation of the nerves and tissues in her throat, the innominate artery was making it very difficult for her to swallow and breathe. And based on its position, this problem wasn’t going to go away on its own. It was serious and life-threatening. However, we were told that surgery could correct the problem and help Gracie grow and develop normally. Like every parent faced with this kind of news, we were happy to have the medical mystery resolved but terrified by the idea of authorizing major surgery on our one-month-old daughter. But we had no choice, so on October 4 they took Gracie into the operating room and made the repair. It was by far the hardest day of my life.
As a nurse who had worked in every corner of a hospital, including the pediatric intensive care unit, Cheri knew what to expect during Gracie’s recovery. As a mother, she was fiercely protective, which meant we were bound for a confrontation when we were allowed into the PICU and found alarms going off. Despite our daughter screaming out in pain, her chest sutures bulging, and her drain hanging out, no nurse was coming to help her. We found the one assigned to Gracie gabbing about movies with other nurses on her shift, and she said, “Oh yeah, I’ll get some pain medicine and be right there.” Twelve minutes later-yes, we counted them-she finally arrived, and as she helped Gracie settle down, she agreed that, yes, our daughter seemed to be in some distress.
The state of our health care system is a topic for another book, so it’s enough to say here that I was grateful to be married to a professional who could watch over Gracie’s recovery. This was especially true when she developed postoperative complications that the staff didn’t want to recognize. While everyone else was marveling at the weight Gracie gained, Cheri kept asking why her heart and respiratory rates were climbing, why she hadn’t passed any urine, and why she looked so puff y. They brushed her off as a nervous mother-“Oh, Mrs. Young, little Gracie is fine”-until her cardiologist and surgeon finally discovered the next day that fluid was collecting around both of Gracie’s lungs. (This was the weight she was gaining.) They took Gracie to the ICU to drain some of this fluid and then sent someone from the “Risk Management Office” to calm as down. We endured scores of incidents like this that only a trained nurse like Cheri would recognize as incompetence. But after the surgery, we were thinking only about our daughter and making sure she would survive the hospital and come home to heal. (Just a few months later, the entire nation would focus on the doctor and unit that made so many critical mistakes with Gracie. A young woman named Jésica Santillán, an illegal immigrant from Mexic Santo, died because our doctor mistakenly gave her a heart and lung transplant from a donor with an incompatible blood type.)
Although we couldn’t know it at the time, the operation marked the end of the easygoing season that was the summer of 2002. Gracie’s recovery would be slow, as she still struggled to eat and breathe and seemed to catch a dozen colds in the span of three months. Cheri would have to nurse her along and care for Brody, with much less help from me because the senator’s push for the White House had become more intense and he had decided the national headquarters in Raleigh would open on January 1, 2003. The job of setting this up, which included finding space, furnishings, utilities, and more, was added to my ongoing duties as his North Carolina advance man, minder, and occasional proxy. I was so busy during this time-leaving early and coming home late-that a month passed before I realized that Cheri’s brother had moved in with us. Every step was exciting, from my filing the articles of incorporation to the first campaign e-mail.
Campaigns on all levels are stressful, but presidential campaigns, which attract the most competitive players, can be merciless. Most workers receive little or no pay, and most have little connection to the candidate other than seeing him or her on television. You work fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, and some people actually bring pillows and blankets and sleep under their desks. The first shift starts at four A.M. as the grunts begin searching the Internet for articles about the candidate and creating digests that run to a hundred pages or more. They will spend the whole day gleaning and or ganizing and distributing important items. The office can start to resemble a frat house, and if you don’t have protesters outside, you’re doing something wrong. E-mails and phone messages came in at a rate of ten or twenty at a time. And you have to answer them all, because everything is an emergency and everything has to be done perfectly. During the few hours I slept each night, I could feel the vibrations of my cell phones in my dreams.
During this time, the senator gave a series of speeches that spelled out the positions he would take in his run for the White House. On the economy, he tried to find a place between President Bush on the right and the other Democrats on the left as he called for both steep cuts in spending and an end to tax cuts for the rich. For civil libertarians, he pledged to defend the public’s privacy rights against Bush administration efforts to gather information under the cover of homeland security; and for the hawks, who were numerous in the South, he came down hard on Saddam Hussein, calling his regime in Iraq a threat to U.S. security.
Although I wasn’t part of the group who set his positions, the senator still relied on me for feedback based on my understanding of everyday Democrats who would cast votes in caucuses and primaries. I told him he was on target on the budget, tax, and privacy issues but too close to George Bush when it came to Iraq. As far as I could tell, Saddam had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and the president was rushing toward a war that would cost far more in terms of lives and money than it would be worth in terms of our national security. With these ideas in mind, I took a risk and challenged him.
“Are you sure, Senator, th Se, at we need to move so quickly in Iraq?” I asked him. “It doesn’t feel right.”
My question hit a nerve, and he raised his voice with me for the first time, insisting that he had attended intelligence briefings where the administration had presented damning evidence of Saddam’s work on weapons of mass destruction and of the atrocities he had committed against his own people. “Andrew, you haven’t seen what I have seen. Saddam Hussein is a monster.”
No one would argue that the Iraq regime was anything but a brutal dictatorship, but I did ask what purpose would be served by the United States going after this monster when there were many equally monstrous rulers scattered around the globe. The senator held to his position, which he said would probably benefit him politically, because every Democrat who runs for president must prove he is tough on national defense. I didn’t change my position, either, and he would hear more of the same from Mrs. Edwards, who was more outspoken in her politics and more liberal than her husband and his key advisers.
As I watched them interact, especially when I brought him home from the airport, I could see the Edwardses were able to express strong feelings without getting upset or damaging their personal relationship. She always greeted him with a hug and a smile, and you could see she loved him and respected him. But his candidacy, like his career, was a joint project, and because he respected her intelligence and instincts, he invited her criticisms. She would tell him when he flopped while giving prepared remarks-he was terrible at reading a speech-and she read, reread, and edited every statement he issued, no matter how minor.
Elizabeth did all this work in addition to taking care of Emma Claire and Jack and supporting Cate, who was at Prince ton. Because I saw how hard she was working, I didn’t much mind that Mrs. Edwards called on me for help. The senator said that this assistance with his wife and family was more important than anything because it relieved some of the stress caused by his absence. As the holidays approached, I was spared the chore of taking the Christmas picture, but I got deeply involved in finding and transporting the family’s main Christmas tree (they had more than one) and helping to locate certain important presents for the family.
Cheri and I argued about the time I devoted to the Edwards family, especially when I was busy doing household chores for them. She couldn’t understand why I had to take on responsibility for every practical dilemma that arose in the life of the Edwards family. Time and again I told her it was necessary and would be good for our family in the long run. I apologized and explained: I didn’t want to do it, but I had to. Cheri didn’t buy it, no matter how many times I said it.
Cheri’s point, which I refused to accept, was that I had only so much time and energy and that I was allowing the senator and his wife to take advantage of me. No one could guarantee that John Edwards would ever become president or that I would be part of his team. But that was not an outcome I would even consider. I felt that John Edwards represented my best shot at real success, and I would be a fool to give him anything less than my full effort. Since I was one of th S wae few who had been with him since his election, I also felt a special connection, a sense of pride in helping this man go from rookie senator to presidential contender.
This all-or-nothing commitment drove me to answer every call and every request with immediate action and to approach every task with the utmost seriousness. Certain that I could do anything and everything at once, I found myself headed for Christmas with Cheri’s family in Illinois with my cell phone, my BlackBerry, and a briefcase full of work. I was going to celebrate the holiday and make sure the Edwards for President office in Raleigh would be up and running on New Year’s Eve, in time for its opening on the first day of 2003. (Since I had negative feelings about the holidays after my father’s affair broke apart my extended family, I was actually kind of glad to have work to keep me occupied.)
The main problem I had with the office setup involved the telephones and so-called T1 high-speed Internet lines. If we were going to run a big national campaign with a major Internet presence, we needed an advanced and reliable communication system. I signed up BellSouth to handle it, but they ran into one problem after another. In Illinois, I commandeered the basement at Cheri’s sister’s house, turning it into an office where I sent out a stream of faxes and made hundreds of calls. While I did this work, everyone upstairs noticed my absence and started to resent that even when I was around, I seemed cranky and distracted. I overheard my skeptical mother-in-law asking what the heck I was doing down in the basement all day.
The holiday debacle in Illinois reached its lowest point as a snowstorm kicked up on Christmas Eve. I had to wait until the last minute to sign various contracts to keep them from becoming public knowledge-it was critical not to steal the thunder of the senator’s announcement day. Because of this, I had to overnight signed documents for delivery on the day after Christmas. I wrote out what was needed and went out into the storm to find a FedEx office that was open, would accept a package, and would guarantee delivery on the morning of December 26. I made it with minutes to spare and considered the achievement a bit of a victory. Cheri and her family, on the other hand, watched me race around, ignoring the kids, the company, and the celebration they were enjoying, and concluded that my priorities were out of whack.