politics is dirty, but I was starting to think it was disgusting. You do it because you hope that the good you accomplish outweighs the excesses that accompany the pursuit of power. That’s how you justify it to yourself morally. But the burden of secrets and the loss of innocence-and this included my own loss of innocence-is always painful.
When I left John, I felt sorry for him. I felt even worse a few days later when I tried to remind the senator to be careful about letting too many people in on his secrets. Edwards said that he believed firing Josh had sent an effective message to everyone who might go public with information about Rielle. And where John Davis was concerned, he said, “Don’t worry about him, Andrew, he’s one of us.” The next morning, Heather North, the nanny, called and said the senator “was gone again last night.”
With a single phrase, the senator had declared that John Davis was trustworthy. Remarkably, the senator assumed that everyone, including old friends who had known him and Mrs. Edwards for decades, would simply go along. I can think of no other explanation for his decision to continue seeing Rielle and to bring her into even more public settings.
In November, after the trip to Africa, the cell phone mishap, and Josh’s removal, the senator headed for Asheville and a weekend conference of the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers. (I went with him, as did John Davis.) When Rielle called from New Jersey, Edwards decided that it would be just fine if she joined the party at the Grove Park Inn. She flew in from Newark and found her way to the local campus of the University of North Carolina, where the senator was winding up a visit with students and faculty. At first she went into her Camera Girl routine, hauling out her equipment so she could capture the mome sptunt on tape, but I had to tell her she couldn’t do campaign work at an event sponsored by the UNC poverty center, so she put the camera away.
As we left the university to meet the lawyers at the inn, the senator beamed at Rielle like a lovesick teenager. He was thrilled that she had come and would spend the night with him at such a romantic hotel. Although a local staffer asked him to ride in her car so she could brief him on the next event, he insisted on riding with me and Rielle. The staffer glared at me. I rolled my eyes as if to say, What can I do? He’s the boss.
Later, at the hotel, we met his old friends Wade Byrd and David Kirby, who had been his original political backers and closest friends but had recently begun to feel neglected by him. Although he would give a brief talk to the academy on how he intended to protect trial lawyers from Republican-?backed tort “reforms” that would hinder lawsuits, the senator’s main goal for this overnight visit was to heal these relationships. As he turned on the charm, I could see his old friends begin to forgive him.
When dinnertime arrived, Edwards made the move that would signal that his friends were on the “inside” and everyone else was “outside.” Instead of attending the formal dinner where annual awards would be presented-“Andrew, I don’t want to sit through that shit”-he asked me to arrange something private at a local restaurant, where he could sit with Kirby, Byrd, and a few others. His host, my former boss and the head of the academy, responded angrily to this insult, but Edwards didn’t care. As we drove away, he was completely unaffected by how he had disappointed the crowd back at the inn, but he was annoyed by one thing: The car we piled into was too small, and Rielle wound up sitting on my lap for the short ride. She told me later that he didn’t like the sight of her sitting on my lap.
At the restaurant, the senator split up the party: John Davis and Rielle and I stayed in the bar to eat, while he went into the dining room with his lawyer friends. The senator often asked for privacy when he was with political or personal contacts, so John and I were accustomed to this kind of treatment. But Rielle hadn’t been in this situation before and resented it. She fumed and complained all through the meal, and when we got back to the hotel, she made it clear she wasn’t going to be hidden away.
The rest of the evening was spent drinking until Rielle, Edwards, David Kirby, and I were quite intoxicated. (I wasn’t driving.) At some point the senator declared, “I need to be around some people,” and we all went to the hotel bar, where he could soak up a little attention from the other guests. When he had had enough love, he began to ask about Wade Byrd, who had long before retired to his room.
“Where’s the Byrdman?” he kept asking me. “Let’s go get him.”
Byrd had checked into the Gatsby suite, which was reached via a private lobby. Outside the door, the furnishings included a table and chairs with an oversized chess set. After pounding on Byrd’s door to no avail, the senator sat at the tab ssatle and moved some pieces around. For the next half hour or so, we all loitered outside the suite while the senator moved pawns and rooks and knights and repeatedly wandered back to the door to pound away. Byrd never did come out, but I got a pretty good idea of how John Edwards may have acted on party nights in his college days.
When we finally concluded that Wade Byrd wasn’t going to show, we all went back to Senator Edwards’s suite. Within a few minutes, Rielle and the senator were cuddling on the couch. Feeling worse than awkward, Kirby and I left. Kirby was flabbergasted.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked when we were alone.
All I said in response was, “Mr. Kirby, you know him better than I do.”
That night, Rielle would have eventually retreated to her own room, because the senator couldn’t take the risk of her falling asleep and reflexively answering the phone if it rang. (Once when he had answered the phone in this kind of situation, Rielle got angry and bit him on the lip. The wound was difficult for him to explain.) Mrs. Edwards had begun to call her husband at all hours of the night just to make sure he was where he was supposed to be. In time, she would also develop protocols that campaign staffers were required to use so that groupies wouldn’t be able to find him in hotels. Her orders were that callers who asked for her husband would have to mention the name of a designated staffer before being put through. On the rare occasions when she called and the senator didn’t answer, she immediately requested that hotel security get the body man to go into the room to see if he was all right. This would happen at least half a dozen times to my knowledge, but it always turned out that Senator Edwards was alone and had simply slept through the ringing.
Because Mrs. Edwards was watching the senator closely, Rielle purchased a new cell phone we came to call “the Batphone,” which she gave to him so they could stay in touch. Whenever this phone was discussed, Rielle and the senator hummed the theme song from the old Batman TV show. I often held the phone for him, to keep it secret from Mrs. Edwards, or arranged for three-?way calls on his regular phone to keep Rielle’s number off his calling record.
Friends and staffers who had to deal with Elizabeth Edwards’s suspicions and saw signs of his infidelity tried not to think about the issue. I believe that David Kirby and I avoided having a frank conversation about the senator and Rielle because if we said out loud what we were thinking, we might have to deal with it directly. Also, we were powerless to do much about it.
The senator and Rielle made it difficult for me to ignore the affair, because he let me see them kiss and I had heard Rielle recount their sexual exploits and pledge her love. But he always used the lawyer’s trick of speaking in code so he could claim “plausible deniability” if it was ever needed. She would say she loved him and spoke so loudly that I s lo could hear her on the phone. He would say only, “Me too.” And if she asked him if he missed her, he would say, “That’s correct”-pronouncing it “cohhhhhhrect”-but never, “I miss you.”
I thought this practice was ridiculous, especially since we often talked about Rielle, but the senator would keep it up for months to come. Similarly, Mrs. Edwards chose to limit the questions she asked, because looking the other way could delay a confrontation and give the senator a chance to change his behavior. Of course, there was no intellectual trick that would help any of us with the feelings we had about the senator’s betrayal. I was disappointed and worried by what I was seeing. Mrs. Edwards, who had heard another woman expressing her love and lust on a strange cell phone, was hurt and angry. As Christmas approached-the first in their new mansion-she expressed her emotion by becoming more demanding and impatient with me as I tried to help her make everything perfect, from the arrangements for a tree to the presents.
The tree part was relatively easy, because Mrs. Edwards referred me to a local dealer who specialized in premium trees, which were delivered and set up in your home. As so often happened, since they were afraid of being cheated because of their fame and wealth, the Edwardses had me negotiate. I got a good discount on the asking price for a twelve-?foot Douglas fir but still had to explain to her why it was so expensive. Next came the presents and one of the most unlikely, but painful, fiascoes of my long association with the Edwards family.
It all started with the Sony Corporation’s diabolically clever marketing plan for its PlayStation 3 gaming system, which was scheduled for release on November 17. Sony had generated an avalanche of publicity about the game and its features but had manufactured only a limited supply. Like almost every other boy in America, Jack Edwards wanted one. On November 15, I stocked my Suburban with Diet Coke, beef jerky, and green peppers (Mrs. Edwards was on a diet) and went to pick her up at the airport. She arrived exhausted and crabby from her book tour and medical treatments. I told her to relax and we’d get her home quickly. After she caught her breath, she said, “Andrew, do you have a sleeping bag I can borrow tonight?”
I went along, asking why she would possibly need a sleeping bag, and she explained that she intended to camp out in front of a store so she would be among the first in line on the day the Sony gaming system became available. The idea of a middle-?aged, cancer-?stricken, “First-?Lady-?in-?waiting” huddling in the dark on a sidewalk for hours on end was ridiculous. I told her I would investigate the options and come up with a better solution.
The assistant I had hired as a driver heard me talk about the PlayStation problem and volunteered to jump in. I was extremely busy setting up the 2008 campaign, which had to be ready January 1, and gratefully accepted his offer. He promptly rang up the nearest Wal-?Mart store and talked his way to the manager of the electronics department. He left a voice mail dropping the senator’s name and discussed the availability of the new Sony system. The next day, as shoppers all over the country waited in line to plunk down their Christmas savings for the toy, Wal-?Mart issued a press release that said Senator John Edwards, a vocal spokesman for sspothe Wake-?Up Wal-?Mart campaign, had tried to jump to the front “while the rest of America’s working families are waiting patiently in line.”
With Wal-?Mart’s press release came a flurry of inquiries from reporters across the country. Forced to respond, Senator Edwards explained that a new volunteer who was unaware of the Wal-?Mart controversy had made the mistake of using his name in an overeager effort to get one of the gaming consoles. “He was not aware,” said the senator, “that Wal-?Mart doesn’t provide health insurance or decent pay for many of its employees or of my efforts to change the way Wal-?Mart treats its employees.”
If you subscribe to the belief that “all publicity is good publicity,” the PlayStation 3 blowup was a bonanza. With the campaign kickoff six weeks away, Senator Edwards was in the middle of a media blitz. In the previous week, he had appeared on Good Morning America, The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Late Show with David Letterman, and Meet the Press. When Wal-?Mart went after him, the senator used the attack to draw attention to his critique of the company’s employment practices. Most of the news outlets that went with the story referred to the Wake-? Up Wal-?Mart campaign, so I tried to convince myself that the reporting was balanced. Mrs. Edwards did not agree. Having worked hard to cultivate a “plain folks” public image, she believed nationwide publicity about John Edwards trying to jump the line at Wal-?Mart was a disaster. She sent me an e-?mail headed “This is what can happen” and wrote: “This is what can happen when we ask for special treatment. We cannot ever ask for special treatment. Ever.”
Below her note, she pasted a bunch of articles from newspapers and Web sites, all of which made fun of Edwards. A typical one said, “There are two Americas, one for rich people who can bypass the line, one for poor folks who can’t.”
For the next few weeks, Elizabeth searched for these items on the Internet and sent them to me by the dozens. They arrived on my BlackBerry on weekdays and weekends, in the middle of the night, and over the holidays as I drove with my wife and kids to visit with family in Illinois. Although I apologized, explained what had happened, and took responsibility, nothing seemed to satisfy her. She was certain that I had told my assistant to throw around the senator’s name, which I had not.
As the negative comments continued in the blogosphere, she sent me an angry note, the key sentence of which was written in capital letters: “I HAVE A LOT OF TROUBLE WITH YOUR APOLOGIES WHEN COMBINED WITH YOUR OWN BENIGN DESCRIPTION OF YOUR ROLE.” When another apology from me didn’t work, Mrs. Edwards switched from expressing her anger to trying to make me feel ashamed. On December 4, she wrote: “I noticed that although you have steered clear of me, you are bringing John home tomorrow. Think of that as an opportunity to be completely honest… not to complain that I am being too harsh on you. In my view, you are not harsh enough on yourself.”
At some point, even a good soldier gets angry at the brass, and after weeks of her har seksangues I got angry. I printed out many of the e-?mails I had received from her and brought them with me to the airport on a day when I was meeting the senator. Once he got in the car, I showed them to him and then told him I’d resign if necessary. When I finished, the senator recalled previous talks we had had about Mrs. Edwards, their marriage, and their difficulties. He said, “Andrew, this is fucking harassment. Don’t worry about this. And you’re not quitting.” The e-?mails about the PlayStation 3 stopped that evening.
On the day after Christmas, Mrs. Edwards wrote to tell me to make sure the Christmas tree supplier would come to collect the big Douglas fir at eight-?fifteen on the morning of December 29. “Also,” she added, “the kids loved their presents-thank you!”
While Mrs. Edwards, and much of America, spent the quiet days before the start of the New Year cleaning up wrapping paper and putting away ornaments, Senator Edwards jetted off to New Orleans, where dead trees and hurricane-?ravaged homes in the Lower Ninth Ward would serve as the backdrop for a speech announcing the start of his presidential campaign. (Two weeks earlier,
