The Politician (24 page)

Of course, once you allow someone to get away with being pushy, they become only more demanding, and this is what happened with Mrs. Edwards. The clearest illustration of this truth came on Thanksgiving weekend 2005, when I bought the turkey her family would eat for the holiday, left it in the refrigerator, and tried to enjoy the long weekend with my family. On Saturday I was with about twenty members of my family and had turned off my cell phone so I could enjoy the holiday. When I turned it back on, I discovered eight or nine voice mails about a flood at the Edwards home. In one of them, Mrs. Edwards accused me of leaving the water on and causing the flood. In fact, the hose that supplied water to a washing machine had broken and Wade’s room was flooded. Senator Edwards said he and his wife would meet me at the house, where neighbors, a cleanup company, and the fire department were on hand. When I arrived, I found the senator and his wife in the backyard, spreading things out to dry. Noting that his wife was distraught, he asked me to take charge so they could leave.

The plumbing disaster at that house occupied much of my time for several months. First I had to clear out the soaked furnishings and property—everything from rugs to a baseball card collection—and dry whatever might be dried. I then had to have hundreds of items put in storage along with household goods that would be packed away pending the family’s move to the mansion under construction. Between the mess and the valuables such as Lladró figurines that were supposedly damaged in the move, I devoted hundreds of hours to physical labor, managing contractors, and
haggling with insurance firms. Mrs. Edwards was initially very pleased with all this work, but this episode would come back to haunt me years later.

Gratitude was often in short supply with the Edwardses, as was empathy. When I was working with the senator, I accepted that he would always be the center of attention, but even when we were alone and I was supposedly “off duty,” he would never express much interest in me, which was a change from our early days. Now he was focused on politics to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes I would tease him by saying, “Okay, now let’s talk about you!” but even this joke failed to make him less self-centered.

I trained myself to ignore his self-centeredness and overlook incidents where he seemed hypocritical—remember when Kerry stopped being an asshole?—and refused to notice when things he said or did made no sense or conflicted with the image he wanted to project. When he flirted repeatedly with a young waitress in Wrightsville Beach, I forced the memory of it out of my head. When I heard about him having extramarital affairs, I refused to believe the stories. And when he arranged for the campaign to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a video project to a woman with almost no experience, I didn’t let myself ask the questions that needed to be asked. Instead, I listened as Josh Brumberger told me to put this mysterious person, named Rielle Hunter, a woman the senator had met in a bar, on the payroll. It was a strange request because the senator knew I wasn’t in charge of the payroll, but I promised to relay it because he was the boss.

T
he senator first met Rielle in early 2006 when he was in New York during a cross-country speaking tour with actor Danny Glover on behalf of hotel workers who wanted his help at union rallies. As she eventually told me herself, she saw Edwards in the lounge of the Regency, a five-star hotel on Park Avenue. A tall, slender blonde with blue eyes and a warm smile, Rielle was the kind of woman who moved comfortably in a place like the Regency lounge, where at any given time half the tables are occupied by
big-money power brokers and celebrities. Her sense of ease in such settings had been acquired over time, as she had tried to climb the social ladder in the world’s most important city. As I heard it, she moved like someone who was practiced at identifying rich men, married or not, and connecting with them—at least temporarily.

Born Lisa Druck and raised in Ocala, Florida, she had dropped out of college and moved to New York City in her early twenties. Drawn to the cocaine-fueled fast life enjoyed by young artists, writers, and fashion models, she quickly earned a reputation as a sexually liberated party girl. She briefly dated the writer Jay McInerney (
Bright Lights, Big City
) and inspired the repulsive character Alison Poole, who appears in two of his books. In 1991, she married attorney Alexander Hunter and changed her name to Rielle Hunter. (This new name allowed her to escape the shame associated with her infamous father, who had participated in a horse-killing insurance scam.) Rielle did a little acting, produced a short film, and in 2002 appeared on a TV game show. She had studied Eastern and New Age religion for years, seeking some special understanding of her place in this world and whatever lies beyond. By the time she saw John Edwards, she had lived much of her life on the edge of glamour, wealth, and enlightenment but was, at forty-one, divorced, unemployed, and living rent-free with a friend in New Jersey named Margaret “Mimi” Hockman.

According to Rielle, when she first saw John Edwards, she noticed “an aura” of energy floating over him. When she made eye contact with the senator, she knew their destinies were intertwined, and that she had been sent to Earth to serve him. His “old soul” had known her “old soul” in a previous life, she said. She asked him if he was the candidate she had seen on television. After he identified himself, she said, “You’re so hot, but on television that doesn’t come through. You seem distant. I can help you with that.”

Rielle said that Edwards gave off an “energy” that told her he could be a powerful force for peace and progress, like Martin Luther King Jr. She
decided immediately that she would devote herself to helping him reach this potential. This assistance would begin later, after she arranged to bump into him on the sidewalk, where she would flirt some more.

As Rielle later told Cheri and me, she recognized that the senator was married and her attraction was mixed with a feeling that he was somehow “dangerous.” But when he gave her one of the key cards for his room, she waited a few minutes and then followed him upstairs. Inside the room, they sat for a while on separate beds (she was trying to play hard to get). Rielle said he got her to come over to the bed where he was relaxing by saying, “Hey, c’mere and watch some TV with me.”

I
 first encountered Rielle Hunter in the flesh at Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, when I met a plane bringing the senator in for a meeting I had arranged with a donor who would become one of his most important supporters. Rielle was with him as they walked into the baggage claim area, and when I went to grab the senator’s luggage, he said, “No, Andrew, help Rielle with hers.”

He introduced her to me as a filmmaker who was going to make brief documentaries—called “webisodes”—that would air on the Internet and bypass the media to connect the senator directly to voters. The idea fit perfectly into Edwards’s desire to make his campaign the first to take full advantage of the World Wide Web. Although he hardly ever used a computer himself—I never saw him send an e-mail or surf the Web—he understood that this approach would appeal to younger voters and wealthy backers in Silicon Valley, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and other centers of innovation. He also understood the Web’s potential for raising campaign donations, dollar by dollar, from vast numbers of people.

On that day at the airport, Rielle and I weren’t in each other’s company for more than a few minutes, as she took her bag and went off on her own. But something in the way the senator looked at her, or maybe it was the way she looked at him, made me decide I wouldn’t say a word about her to the senator during the hour-long drive to a district of estates and
Thoroughbred horse farms called Upperville in Virginia. I needed him to focus on the person we were going to visit and the opportunity she represented.

At ninety-five years of age, Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, whose deceased husband, Paul, was the son of the great banker Andrew Mellon, was one of the richest women in the world, but her public profile was so low that few Americans outside of high society knew of her. In fact, when she contacted our 2004 campaign to offer her help, no one recognized her name or followed up on her offer. Nevertheless, Bunny spent large sums buying pro-Edwards newspaper ads on her own.

In 2006, Bunny contacted me with the assistance of her close friend Bryan Huffman, a decorator whose sister had been in my law school class at Wake Forest. When Mrs. Mellon reached me on my cell phone, I was driving home for the night, so I pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s and listened carefully. She told me that she was terrified by the imperial rule of George Bush and Dick Cheney at home and abroad—war, torture, bullying allies—and was sure that John Edwards could be the great president who would save the country from ruin.

As I recalled for the senator, Mrs. Mellon had sent her private jet—a Dessault Falcon capable of transatlantic flights—to bring Bryan and me from Raleigh to the mile-long private airstrip at her estate. (The interior of the jet was decorated with paintings from the National Gallery of Art, to which she was a major donor.) When we arrived, one of her staff drove me past statues of Paul Mellon’s four greatest horses, including Sea Hero, a Kentucky Derby winner.

Mrs. Mellon was the last of a dying breed, the closest thing to royalty in America. As a child she played in the White House, and as a woman she dined with kings and queens. But I was impressed to discover that she lived in a relatively small, graceful home in a secluded spot, where she welcomed us with Bloody Marys, lunch, and fascinating stories of her relationships with John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy (later Jacqueline Onassis). In the Camelot years, Bunny had redesigned the Rose Garden, aided the
decoration of the White House, and mentored Jackie in art and fashion. She was Caroline Kennedy’s godmother.

Remarkably, the senator had actually resisted going to meet Mrs. Mellon, and he had come only because I had insisted. Now, as we drove through Upperville and his jaw dropped at the sight of the houses, he said, “Shit, Andrew, these people have real money,” and was glad he’d said yes. (The senator often gawked at the homes, offices, airplanes, and similar signs of wealth displayed by others. He would also ask me if the people he met were “rich like me” or “really, really rich.”)

After we were admitted to the Mellon property by an armed guard, we drove past a North Carolina flag and
EDWARDS FOR PRESIDENT
signs that Bunny had set out to welcome us. I reminded the senator that she had already offered at least a million dollars on her commitment to see him elected president “and save the world.”

In the few hours we spent with Bunny, who was warm and unpretentious, she concluded that John Edwards was the best of John and Robert Kennedy combined. She said he had JFK’s intelligence and wit and RFK’s intensity and drive. She also bonded with the senator based on the loss of his son Wade and her daughter Eliza’s terrible auto accident, which had left her profoundly brain-damaged and bedridden. Bunny took the senator into Eliza’s room, where they sat together for a while.

Before we left, she assured the senator that his PACs would soon receive the first of two $1 million donations.

“Have Andrew stay in touch,” she told him. “We’re going to do whatever it takes to make you president.”

With a laugh, Bunny recalled her late husband, a staunch Republican, and added, “Paul is going to roll over in his grave.” (Later, I would learn that Paul had kept a mistress through much of their marriage, something that hurt Bunny but which she accepted as such a common practice for powerful men that it was hardly worth noting.)

As we drove out of Upperville, the senator was high with excitement. Aside from trial lawyers like Fred Baron, he had no backers ready to make
the kind of unconditional commitment Bunny had made. Others asked for more in return than they gave.

I was happy because Bunny and I had established a very good rapport. For the next few years she would call me regularly and I would send her video and news clips almost every day. She would work with me and Bryan to help her “beloved senator save America.” Eventually, “whatever it takes” would amount to more than $6 million.

W
hen someone like Bunny Mellon invites you to her guarded estate, declares you superior to John F. Kennedy, and makes a multimillion-dollar commitment to see you elected president, it has an effect. Ever since he ran for the Senate in 1998, John Edwards had experienced similar encounters on a regular basis, and by 2006 he had evolved into a man who was absolutely certain he should be the leader of the free world. This change had also been aided by countless people who added their ambition to his because they hoped to get carried into the White House with him. I count myself in this group, along with various other professionals and Mrs. Edwards.

Committed to her political ideology, Elizabeth Edwards was even more excited about addressing the country’s serious problems—in health care, foreign policy, and economics—than the senator himself. And when she talked about living in the White House with him, it was with the assumption that she would remain his closest confidante and adviser. Mrs. Edwards showed plenty of ego as she made these plans, but she had the brains and courage to back up her dreams. These qualities saw her through her cancer treatment, which came with all the terrible side effects—hair loss, anemia, insomnia, terrible pain, and nausea—and I admired her bravery. Despite her outbursts and the times when her demands seemed excessive, I loved her and prayed for her to recover. I also admired her strength, which got her to her computer keyboard day after day to work on a book about her life, including her battle with cancer. It was to be called
Saving Graces,
and I was honored to be among the half dozen people she thanked in its pages for making the book possible.