When I eventually testified before the grand jury, the U.S. attorneys questioned me for seven or eight hours. The members of the jury then got the chance to ask their own questions. They only asked one. A man in the back row raised his hand and said, “Is the government providing you and your family protection?” I didn’t answer but the prosecutor did, saying that the authorities would provide it if necessary. When I left the room, I bumped into Bryan Huffman, who was nervous about taking his turn in the witness chair. I told him the lawyers were actually “very nice.” Bryan called me when he was finished testifying. He told me that the prosecutors had asked him how Bunny Mellon would feel if she learned that the funds she sent for poor people in Greene County and the College for Everyone Program were used instead to support the senator’s girlfriend.
Even though I was relieved when I finished testifying, my…
I had no job prospects, and the house we had built in the woods was as yet unfinished and threatening to bankrupt me. But I had time to reflect on my experience with a most charismatic and deceptive politician and the factors that made me vulnerable to his spell. Most important, I had Cheri, and Brod›Chey, and Gracie, and Cooper. I realized that their love, and the love of the few people who never deserted us through the scandal, were the most valuable possessions I could claim.
EPILOGUE
In late summer 2009, my father, who had declined gradually over many years, suddenly became terribly sick and was hospitalized. Tests revealed that his degenerative heart disease had progressed to the point where his once-?mighty heart was reduced to five percent of its normal function. The doctors, who didn’t know how he was still alive, sent him to hospice, where they thought he would die in a few days. I went with him and stayed as his body fought death for nearly two weeks.
My dad’s dying came as I was about to finish writing this book, and the break that it forced me to take allowed me to reflect on my own choices in life, on the nature of such basic human values as love, loyalty, commitment, and justice. During long days and even longer nights of waiting and listening to the sound of my father breathing, I dwelled on my relationship with him, my attachment to John Edwards and his cause, and my own motivations, values, and actions.
With the exception of an admittedly long period-a decade-when I strayed, I have tried to live by the values given to me primarily by my father. He was my unquestioned hero and my role model until his fall from grace when I was a senior in high school. In his sermons and his daily life, he stood for the rights of every person to be treated fairly and to have an equal chance at success and happiness. He did this with a faith-?powered commitment that endured despite attacks that included a cross burning on our lawn. Listening to him as a child, I came to believe that once you adopt a cause, you stick with it, come what may.
But as an impressionable child, I couldn’t grasp the more subtle messages my father also tried to deliver. In between his calls to the best in us, he alluded to the darker side of human nature, to excessive ambition, selfishness, greed, and deceit, and he asked the people in his congregation to face these universal qualities in themselves.
When I learned of my father’s darker nature, of how he had betrayed my mother, I rejected all of him and was unable to allow the good to exist with the bad. Not surprisingly, as I committed my own errors, I could not accept them in myself. Instead, I felt ashamed and began to live in fear that every mistake I had ever made would be used against me. I couldn’t see that this was the fate I had imposed on my father in the years I had rejected him for his mistakes.
Armchair psychologists will say that when John Edwards came along, I adopted him as a substitute for my father. He became my hero, and my commitment to him was like a son’s commitment to his father. Inside the campaigns, I found a cultlike atmosphere that eroded my ability to resist his requests for ever more extreme behavior. This analysis is correct, as far as it goes. But if you want to understand how I could have aidedz and abetted the worst in John Edwards, it helps to know that I was also trying to grasp, as an adult, what it means to take the good with the bad. I had confronted my father, watched him seek redemption, and made peace with him. But I hadn’t developed a mature understanding of what I should do beyond accepting another person’s flaws and moving on.
Late one night as my father lay dying, I sat alone with him and turned for comfort to some audio recordings of his old sermons. The first one I heard included the following passage, preached in his deep and familiar voice:
Love yourself. Know yourself. Accept yourself. Remember Jesus’ words when he said, “You shall love your neighbor-how? As you love yourself.”
Most of us, me included, never learn that to “love yourself,” you must first see and understand your own failings, accept them without shame, and learn to consider them as you move through life. If I had truly loved myself, I wouldn’t have been ashamed of my own mistakes and lived in fear of being found out. If I had loved myself, I wouldn’t have felt the need to devote myself to a hero and his cause. If I had loved myself, I would have understood how much Cheri and the kids valued the time I spent with them and I would have said no to John and Elizabeth Edwards.
In my father’s sermon, he also said that too many of us get caught up in trying to be “little Jesuses.” By this he meant we try to be perfect, the way we imagine Christ was, and judge ourselves without mercy when we fail. Better, he said, to try to be a “big you” rather than a little Jesus. In fact, he thought that was all God ever expected of any human being.
With my dad’s help, I know now the difference between understanding human nature-the combination of good and evil-and being able to love yourself and others through it all. I am genuinely sorry for all that I have done wrong and for all the hurt I have caused others. I don’t want to be a little Jesus, and I don’t expect it of anyone else. With any luck, this is the lesson we learn from personal failure. If you face who you are, what you have done, and what you have lost, you can recover from almost anything. My dad did this. After his terrible failure he retreated, came to terms with his own sins, and began again as a preacher at a church in South Carolina. He healed his relationships, and at the time of his death, he was surrounded by family who loved him. His funeral, in a church packed by hundreds of people, was a celebration of all that he was. They knew about his shortcomings, accepted them as real, but loved him anyway and allowed him to give what he had that was good.
After my father’s death, as I returned to the work of writing, the press began to report on the grand jury investigation of Joh?tign Edwards, and this brought renewed interest in the scandal. The media revealed that I was going to “tell all” in a book, speculation swirled around the secrets I would spill, and commentators theorized about my motives. Some said I was greedy and bent on revenge. Others said I should go away and leave the sordid truth untold. I held my tongue, until now.
I have written this book to end years of gossip and lies about me, John Edwards, and a host of people who deserve better than to be remembered only as sinners or fools. I have written it to make money to support my family at a time when no other job was available to me. And I have written this book as an exercise in my own understanding, so that I could learn something from the trauma suffered by so many who believed in what they thought John Edwards represented and were willing to sacrifice for the greater good.
Gifted, charismatic, and mesmerizing, John Edwards knew what was right but was so blind to his own flaws-narcissism, greed, power lust-and so determined to hide his shame even from himself that he couldn’t correct them. Mrs. Edwards pursued noble ideals but never saw how she was changed by the privilege that comes with wealth, power, and fame. She got a vision of her husband in the White House and herself at his side, and she pursued it with an ambition that became blind and destructive. Her cancer diagnosis may have clouded her judgment for a time, but it does not excuse her from her duty to seek the truth, nor does it allow her to attempt to destroy others. (Nor do I believe she would expect her illness to exempt her from any of the realities of life, including what I have to say.) I do understand, however, that she resented me more because her husband had spoon-?fed her evil half-?truths about me.
Sadly, John and Elizabeth Edwards could have put themselves in a position to continue their good works, if they had told the truth when they had the chance. This is what Bill Clinton eventually did, and it has allowed him to return to a productive public life as a sinner who is also good. Instead, the Edwardses held to a lie they knew was a lie and refused to do the right thing. Faced with this reality, I had no choice but to write this book in order to move forward in some way. I hope our wounds will begin to heal as the truth comes to light.
If I achieve what I hope to achieve with this book, I will begin to build a new, positive future. I will create a record that will make some sense out of my life’s choices and a terrible political scandal, for my wife, family, friends, and you, the reader. Finally, I hope to give myself permission to be imperfect but nonetheless unbowed. Like my father, I want to begin again.
