then told me how the storm had developed.
According to the senator, once Rielle was dismissed, Elizabeth demanded that campaign manager Jonathan Prince gather all the videos Rielle had shot. She then locked herself in her crafts room to review them hour by hour, and then day by day, coming out only to use the bathroom and/or fetch a Diet Coke. She interrogated Heather, who told her about Rielle interviewing Jack and Emma Claire at the mansion. She knew that if all of the work had been turned over, she should be able to see this footage. None of it was in the collection she received. In fact, she saw nothing at all from the house, not even the interviews Rielle did with Wallace and Bobbi Edwards. Knowing that Rielle had held out this material made her furious, and she pored over the videos again and again, devoting days to the work, believing she saw things that suggested that a great deal of potentially incriminating evidence had been withheld.
During this time, Mrs. Edwards also focused on me in her effort to track down information about Rielle, including her phone number. She left me a voice mail saying, “Andrew, I am tired of playing games with you. I want every single number, every single person. And if you DARE, you can call John.”
As the senator discussed all of this with me, I could imagine his wife scanning for clues and then shaking with rage as she confronted him. Now I understood her fury. He said, “Let me take care of Elizabeth,” and he repeated that he needed me and would be terribly hurt if I walked away at the start of his big push for the White House.
What he didn’t say was that I was the only person in the world who knew everything about Rielle Hunter and his marriage, and he needed me to keep the charade going. The knowledge made me the one friend he would open his heart to and the one person besides Rielle who could hurt him the most. Years of service had also earned me a place as his most trusted adviser, and at the time no one was able to raise more money for him from big donors.
Taken together, everything I could do for John Edwards and everything I knew about him made him more loyal to me-a rare switch in roles-than he had ever been. I could hear a hint of desperation in his voice, and I knew that if I stayed working for his political action committee, I would be able to stop doing domestic chores at his house and enjoy more autonomy at work than I had ever known. I agreed to stay on. And from that day forward, my status changed. In the campaign office, people began making fewer demands on me, but they also began to shun me. I found out this happened because Mrs. Edwards had called many of the people I worked with and {ork informed them that I wasn’t to be trusted or included. I was soon banned from the house I had helped them build, and she stopped letting her children play with mine.
Elizabeth Edwards was able to control what happened at our office because for all intents and purposes she was the manager of the campaign. She set the strategy, determined the senator’s political positions, approved the schedule, and made all the key hires. (In most cases, she picked people with little or no experience.) There was a philosophy behind this approach. She and the senator believed that they were smarter than the big-?time consultants and that they were going to pioneer a new kind of campaign that would use the Internet in a huge way. Instead of old speechwriters and pollsters, they focused on hiring the hottest Web gurus they could find. (The key one was Matthew Gross, who had been a big influence on Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.) Elizabeth was right about the World Wide Web, but as far as I could tell she was wrong about the way she used these fellows. She told them what to do and then second-?guessed them. They were afraid to discuss issues with her because of her temper.
Ironically, the Web guys were very competent in their specialty and would have delivered the innovations Elizabeth wanted had they been managed properly. Similarly, the majority of the players who filled out the 2008 Edwards roster were smart and effective despite their inexperience. But in her rush to bypass so-?called party hacks, Mrs. Edwards had failed to bring in people with real passion for John Edwards and for the issues at the core of his campaign. In 2004, we may have been a bit behind the curve when it came to technology, but we were deeply committed to the cause, and Nick Baldick was an assertive and effective manager. This time around, we had no strong manager and seemed to be reactive instead of proactive.
John Edwards, however, was far improved as a candidate, willing to outwork everyone in the field and burning with real intensity. Everyone else felt the desire to win and harbored hope for a victory but made the effort as if it were a job instead of a crusade. I still recognized that John Edwards was a charismatic campaigner and that he was right about the issues. But my enthusiasm was flagging, and I was being shunted aside. I used the freedom I enjoyed to set my own agenda and schedule, and to focus on raising money from donors. I was able to enjoy my family more, and pay attention to our dream house project.
The acreage Cheri and I had purchased on a forested hilltop in Chapel Hill represented a dream come true for me. Before any construction started, we got a camper and set it up on the site so we could enjoy weekends in the woods with the kids. On Super Bowl Sunday 2007, we held a big party where we set up a television outside, made a big bonfire, and laughed and hollered into the night. That party was more fun than I could recall having in a long time, and the vision of our home-all stone, glass, and natural wood-rising among the pines gave me a powerful sense of optimism about the future.
Visits to the land became even more important for me and the rest of the family after we moved out of Lake Wheeler and into a rental in Southern Village. The new place was painted such an odd shade of violet that the kids took to calling it “the purple mansion,” and everything about the move was painful. For one thing, it required us to adjust {d u to living in a space less than half the size of our old place. For another, when the time came to make the transfer, I was busy with the campaign and unable to drive because of the DWI conviction. Cheri’s mom and dad came from Illinois to lend a hand, and they did it all without me. At one point, her mom was so angry about this that she literally turned her back on me. I couldn’t blame her, really; I was fed up with me, too.
The cramped space, the circumstances of the move, and the ugly paint weren’t the only reasons for our urge to flee for the trailer on the hilltop whenever we could. The previous occupants of the mansion had been pet lovers, and soon after we settled in and turned on the heat, we discovered that the whole place smelled of cat pee. Constant cleaning and deodorizing helped, but the scent never really went away. You would have wanted to escape, too. Our cat Pepper certainly did. A rambunctious boy we had adopted in 1999, he went outside as much as possible, and on a fateful night soon after we moved in, he was killed by a car. I found his body along a busy highway and rushed to dispose of it before the kids saw him.
Cheri and the kids spent far more time in the purple mansion than I did, because every day I walked over to the Southern Village town square office to work. This convenience was in contrast with the demands the move made on Cheri. The kids remained in their school in Raleigh, and she drove them back and forth for three months. She also brought them there for sports after school and visits with friends. She must have felt as though she spent her life on the road.
My workdays were devoted to chasing donations, fielding calls from the senator, and solving certain problems. Once, when he was on the road, he called sounding very upset and explained that he had lost the Outward Bound pin that Wade had received before he died. (Edwards had worn it to public events since 1998.) Many staff members dropped what they were doing to search in every vehicle or room he had occupied in the last twenty-?four hours. When they failed to find it, we bought a new one from the organization, but it was a new design and did not resemble Wade’s pin.
Aside from managing the senator’s personal crises, I dealt with inquiries from colleagues who knew I had Edwards’s ear and understood him better than anyone else. For example, when John Davis reported sighting Rielle on the trail, I reassured him that although she was no longer on the payroll, she and the senator were probably just friends and there was nothing to worry about.
Rielle’s travel arrangements required fancy footwork, and here my experience as a campaign aide came in handy. When I knew where the senator was staying, I made reservations in my own name, faxed copies of my credit card and state identification card, and told the hotel staff that my “wife” would be checking in on my account. This ploy allowed Rielle to get into the hotel and wait for the senator, who then called and signaled her to come to his suite. Rielle would leave before the aides came to get the senator at the start of the workday.
The routine worke {rod perfectly except for on one occasion in Florida, when the campaign bus left a swanky resort where the senator had spent the night so early that Rielle was still in the suite when he departed. She planned to go back to the room I had arranged for “Mrs. Young” but decided to get into the shower first. That’s when she heard pounding on the door. She got out, wrapped herself in a towel, and looked through the peephole to see someone from the campaign. (The staffer had a key card, but fortunately Rielle had fastened the security chain on the door.) Afraid to respond, she hid in the bathroom and called the senator on the Batphone. When the senator heard what was going on, he called me.
Accustomed as I was to having the phone ring at all hours with emergency requests from John Edwards, it still rattled me when the phone rang before the alarm clock, and it took me a few seconds to wake up. The senator, who was calling from the campaign bus, where he was surrounded by staff and press, spoke in an upbeat voice-as if nothing were wrong-but his breathing sounded panicked, and I could tell he was faking it.
“Our friend is having a problem,” he said. “Can you give her a call right now?”
I soon understood what was wrong. Someone from the staff had gone to the room with a key card to make sure the senator had not left behind any confidential papers. This was standard operating procedure, and whoever it was had been surprised to find the door bolted from the inside. I told him I would fix it, and as he hung up I immediately heard from Rielle. There were now two security guards and three campaign aides, including my old assistant, banging on the door. Rielle was scared, but also excited and giggly. (I think she wanted to get caught.) She agreed to tell them she needed to get dressed and would open the door in a few minutes.
While Rielle dressed, I called the hotel, which was the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood, Florida. Using my best presidential campaign aide voice, I asked for and got connected to the manager. “I had an old friend drive through the night to deliver confidential papers to the senator this morning,” I explained. “I told her that she could take advantage of the room-since it was paid for-and enjoy the resort after he left. If you want to check out who I am, call the campaign. They’ll confirm who I am.”
Five minutes later, the manager called me back and agreed to call his security men on the radio and have them leave the hallway. But this still left the Edwards staffers who were upstairs and wanted an explanation. I called Rielle again, then had her open the door a crack and, since Mrs. Edwards had turned my former assistant against me, I told her to hand the phone to one of the other staffers. When he got on I said, “Who the hell is this?” with as much authority and impatience as I could muster.
With my opponent back on his heels, I said, “This is Andrew Young.” I then said that all he needed to know was that the woman in the room was someone I had sent with confidential documents because every call I had made the previous night had gone unanswered by staff people, who were out partying. (This was an assumption that turned out to be true.) “I had to get one of my friends to do {fr your damn job, so leave her alone.”
The bluff worked and they left Rielle alone. I then instructed her to pack up and call me as she left the room. She did as I told her, and I kept her on the phone to calm her as she walked down the hallway, rode the elevator, crossed through the lobby, and went outside to a cab stand. She noticed the Edwards staffers who had come to the door of the room outside the hotel, but they saw her on the phone and didn’t intercept her. She breathed a huge sigh of relief and then started laughing as the cab departed the hotel, with her aboard, safe and still secret. I called the senator and told him the crisis was over.
Senator Edwards thanked me up and down on the day I got Rielle out of the Florida hotel, but the next time I saw him, he’d developed a case of amnesia about this event. Having had my daytime driving privileges restored, I had picked him up at the airport, following our usual routine. I had continued to tease him by putting down the armrest. He looked at me and said, “Why do you keep doin’ that?”
I stayed silent as he handed me the Batphone, enjoyed a sip of wine, and sighed with relief. I then casually mentioned the tight scrape we had just survived. He turned to me and with a perfectly straight face said, “I don’t know what you are talking about. Rielle wasn’t in Florida.”
I looked at him, amazed, and said something about how he must be joking. Of course Rielle was in Florida with him. She had been discovered by the staff, and I had come up with a brilliant scheme to explain why there was a woman in the shower of his suite. The senator looked at me blankly, repeated that “Rielle was never in Florida,” and asked me how I could say such a thing.
We were hurtling down the interstate, and since I had to keep my attention on the road, I didn’t stare into his eyes directly. But I could tell from his tone of voice that he truly believed what he was saying. I decided that he was either the best liar in the world or he was having some sort of psychological episode. My phone records showed more than thirty calls with him, Rielle, and the Westin on the day of this incident. Clearly, I could prove to him that something big had happened that day. But I decided to drop the subject.
The way I saw it, Rielle presented a problem with three possible outcomes. If Edwards ended the relationship, she would probably go to the press, reveal the affair, and, I assumed, supply enough solid evidence to make the story stick. Since he had presented himself to the country as the handsome and brilliant man of the people who was standing by his wife through her illness, news of an affair would end Senator Edwards’s political career. If he followed the second option, he could keep seeing Rielle and, if Elizabeth found out, risk a divorce that would expose him in the same way. The difference here was that Mrs. Edwards’s desire to live in the White House was as great as, if not greater than, his. She had already accepted his personal betrayals as part of the price for the real estate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The third option would be to continue to see Rielle and hope to keep Mrs. Edwards in the dark until after the election. Callous as it was, the senator chose this last option and pursued the presidency with all the energ {aly he could muster while talking to me about how much easier life would be without Elizabeth. I thought all of this was repulsive, but since she had forced me out of her life, I felt there was nothing I could do about it.
Ironically, once the senator was relaxed about discussing Rielle with me, he frequently aired the same kinds of complaints about her that he had expressed about Mrs. Edwards in the past. He said
