The Politician (26 page)

The Africa tour was sponsored by the International Rescue Committee, which was trying to address a humanitarian crisis caused by a civil war that had displaced more than one million people. Rielle filmed Edwards, clad in khaki pants and a Tar Heel blue T-shirt, inspecting refugee camps and listening as groups of children greeted him with songs. On video he looked
like the great white leader who had come to save the country. Later he and Rielle would tell me that during this trip, when they spent every night together, he said “I love you” to her for the first time.

When the senator and Rielle returned to the United States, he stumbled into the house exhausted, brought his luggage into the huge dressing room where he kept his wardrobe, undressed, and then flopped into bed. At some point a secret cell phone he had left in his suitcase began to ring. Mrs. Edwards heard it, found it, and, noting a number from a New York City area code, answered.

Without hearing a “Hello,” Rielle Hunter launched into a romantic monologue about how much she missed the man who was supposed to answer the phone. In her defense, this particular phone had been purchased by Rielle for the sole use of John Edwards, and she was the only person who had the number. Still, unless she intended to force some kind of showdown, Rielle’s blurted professions of love and adoration were a big mistake.

After ending the call, Mrs. Edwards, carrying the phone in her hand, went to the senator and demanded to know what was going on. He confessed to having had a one-night stand but didn’t say with whom. For some reason, she accepted this explanation but demanded he return the call and, as she watched, end the relationship. He did as he was told, but as soon as he was able, he telephoned Rielle again to tell her what had happened and reassured her that they were still in a relationship.

The senator explained all of this to me soon after it happened. We were alone backstage at an event, and as often happened, the conversation got around to the fact that he was unhappy in his marriage. He said that Mrs. Edwards was being overly demanding, obsessive, even “crazy.” But he also said that he would never seek a divorce. For one thing, he still loved Elizabeth in certain ways. And he believed that his wife was more popular with many voters than he was and that if he left her, he might as well forget ever becoming president. (I cringed when he said this.) When I thought about how it would look if he divorced a wife of almost thirty years, who had lost a child
in a car wreck and was living with cancer, I had to agree with him about the political impact. And since becoming president was his single driving ambition, it was never going to happen.

W
hen Mrs. Edwards left Chapel Hill to start her book tour, the senator brought Rielle to his home, where she met Jack and Emma Claire and even interviewed them briefly while holding a video camera to capture their replies. (She also interviewed Edwards’s parents, who were there that afternoon.) When I went to the house to see him, I discovered her sitting in the living room curled up in a chair like a cat, with her shoes and socks off. She wore blue jeans and had a colorful scarf around her neck and sunglasses perched atop her head.

The mood in the house was relaxed and upbeat. Instead of the news blaring out of various TVs, which Elizabeth kept tuned to C-SPAN. I heard music playing. I noticed because the senator had told me he had stopped listening to music when Wade died, and I had seen him turn off music whenever it was playing. We went on a run together, following our usual route past a cow pasture full of mooing heifers and waving to neighbors who hailed us from their front porches. While we were gone, Rielle napped in Cate’s room.

That evening, we ate take-out ribs from a place called Nantucket Grill and sat on the senator’s back porch, a huge space covered by a sturdy roof. The group included me, the nanny, Heather, and her husband, Jed, the senator, his kids, and Rielle, who talked excitedly about everything from national politics to astrology. She said she had been a spiritual teacher and that she believed the future was foretold by the stars. Rielle took great pleasure in noting that John Edwards’s future was limitless, and every once in a while she punctuated her observations about him with a laugh and the line “It’s good to be king.”

As the wine flowed and Heather put the kids to bed, the senator and Rielle became more comfortable touching each other and dropped the pretense that they weren’t involved. At one point, they started musing about
how the house seemed like a happy place with Elizabeth and her “negative energy” removed. Rielle talked about living in the mansion once Mrs. Edwards was out of the way. A new family would be formed, the senator said, after he and Rielle married on some rooftop in Manhattan with a celebration that would include music from Dave Matthews. As Rielle listened to the senator spin this fantasy, she smiled like a little kid who had gotten her way.

As the night wore on, clouds rolled in, followed by thunder and lightning and the heaviest rain I had ever seen. Protected and dry under the roof, we watched the water come down in sheets, and in a quiet moment the senator said, “This is the way it should be—no stress, no fighting.”

“It’s good to be king,” said Rielle.

I left the house during the downpour, shaken by everything I had seen and heard. As I turned the key in my Suburban and flipped on the wipers, my once-bright future seemed to be in peril.

The next time I spoke to Rielle, she happily told me that she had spent that night in the Edwardses’ bed and slept in while the senator made breakfast for the kids and then drove them to school. She said that when he returned, he got into bed and they “made love.”

I
had my own problems.

While the senator had been in Africa, Cheri and I had tried to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Our occasional lifesaver (“babysitter” doesn’t do her justice), Melissa Geertsma, came to care for the three kids while we got dressed and went to a nice restaurant. We ordered wine and food, but at a moment when we might have marveled at how far we had come together in life, we talked instead about my twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to the Edwards family and my scheme for moving us out of Raleigh and into a house in the woods at the end of a long dirt road.

We had already purchased the land from an Edwards donor and friend named Tim Toben, and I was ready to put the house on Lake Wheeler up for sale. Cheri loved this house, the church we attended, the preschool where our kids were enrolled, and the friends who lived nearby. She dreaded packing up everything and moving a two-year-old, a four-year-old, and a five-year-old to a temporary home we would occupy while the house in the woods was constructed. I was motivated by the good offer we had for the house we were selling and the prospect of eliminating a tiresome commute. The move would require us to take on a much bigger mortgage, and though I was finally earning a very good salary and getting some
respect from the powers-that-be in national politics, Cheri knew I was not guaranteed a position over the long term. We were dependent on John and Elizabeth Edwards for our income and health insurance, and these people had not shown themselves to be paragons of stability, especially since the arrival of Rielle Hunter.

Cheri was right. I was wrong. But I wasn’t going to admit it that night. Instead, I said what I always said—“John Edwards is going to be president one day”—and reminded her that I had been right about him so far. Cheri had heard this before and didn’t want to hear it again on our anniversary. True to our style, we didn’t shout or bark at each other but instead seethed with emotion. With both of us feeling too upset to eat, we asked to have our food boxed to take home. The wine was on the table, so I finished it, and when the boxes came we left. The argument got worse during the forty-five-minute ride home.

Having eaten next to nothing during the day and consumed just wine and a little bread at dinner, I was not exercising good judgment when I got behind the wheel of the car. We made it home safely, but in the privacy of our house, Cheri and I went from seething to an open argument. I couldn’t hear all of her resentment for my devotion to the Edwardses and her fear that I trusted them too much. I wasn’t sensitive to how she felt about Rielle Hunter and the idea that my boss, who was supposed to be one of the “good guys,” was apparently cheating on his wife. All I heard was that she was criticizing me for how I did my job, the same job that supported our family. In the heat of the moment, I stormed out.

What happened next holds a special place in the little Hall of Shame that occupies a corner of my heart. While I was essentially driving nowhere, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw flashing lights. I pulled over (again into a McDonald’s parking lot), and my heart sank as the police car slid in behind me. Part of me was glad I had been stopped before something worse had happened. (I was still under the effects of the wine I’d had at dinner.) But I also knew immediately that an arrest for driving under the influence could hurt me and my position with Senator Edwards, especially if it got
into the press. Panicked, I refused to take a Breathalyzer test. The police officer, who could tell I had been drinking, put me in handcuffs and took me to a police station I knew well from having visited with Senator Edwards during our hundred-county tour.

From the first words I exchanged with the officer who arrested me to the moment a judge released me to take a taxi home, I refused to cooperate beyond giving the police and court officials the barest information about my identity. When asked about my employer, I mentioned the names of the organizations that paid me, not John Edwards. In the end, as the process led to my release, I became completely sober and terrified about my future.

At home I found Cheri sick with worry and anger, but she quickly grasped the seriousness of what we faced, namely the loss of my reputation and, quite possibly, my job and health insurance for our family. With my DWI arrest, every other concern faded in importance as we tried to protect our financial foundation.

The practical problems that befall anyone stupid enough to drive under the influence in North Carolina are more than enough to teach an important lesson. First, you automatically lose your driver’s license, which rendered me unable to work. The courts also require you to attend frequent alcohol awareness meetings (much like sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous), and you face even more punishment, including possible jail time, once you go before a judge.

With the help of Cheri and her brother, who lived nearby, I managed to get to the meetings, and I had to hire an assistant to help me get around for work. However, I still had to deal with the damage the arrest might do to my reputation and relationship with the Edwardses. I agonized for a few days, feeling the way I used to in my shameful twenties. Finally, I followed the advice I got from Wade Byrd and David Kirby and picked up the phone to call the Edwardses. Cheri sat beside me and listened as Mrs. Edwards answered, and I decided to begin by telling her what had happened. Her response confirmed all the good feelings I had ever felt for her.

“Andrew, you are family,” she said. “You don’t worry about this. John will call you in a few minutes. It’s going to be all right.”

The senator, who had been exercising on a treadmill when I phoned, called me about half an hour later. This time I was alone on our back porch. After I laid out the story and told him I was worried about my future with him, the senator’s voice dropped into a reassuring tone as he insisted that everyone faltered at some point, and he would not abandon me. “We’ve all done something like this, Andrew. I have. I know you feel like the lowest person on earth right now, but I love you. You are like a brother to me.” I felt as if a great weight had been lifted off my heart.

W
ords like “love” and “family” make you feel a powerful bond, one that suggests an us-against-the-world kind of loyalty that is very comforting at times when you feel threatened. But this bond can also be a trap. When I told them about the drunk driving arrest, which the press did not report at the time, I handed the senator and Mrs. Edwards a bit of information about myself that I wanted to hide. It gave them a type of leverage that matched whatever power I held through my knowledge of the senator’s relationship with Rielle and of Elizabeth’s more unattractive qualities: ambition, haughtiness, impatience.

Although we never actually spoke of it this way, years of intimacy had brought us to a point where we were all forced to ignore certain truths and devote ourselves to the shared goal of putting John Edwards in the White House. If this sounds to you like the unspoken pact that binds members of the Mafia, you are correct. Mob loyalty is based on fear, and with the crisis around my arrest, the basis for my loyalty to John Edwards was shifted from hope for a better future to an almost desperate dread of being exposed and losing my livelihood.

The similarities with the Mafia go beyond mutual blackmail. Like the Mob, the Edwards clan was willing to “whack” those who got out of line. A prime example of this ruthlessness arose as I was dealing with my DWI
issue. A staffer who had developed deep suspicions about Rielle Hunter during the trip to Africa had taken his concern to Nick Baldick, who was still running operations for the senator. The aide, Josh Brumberger, was one of several people who had spoken to me about Rielle, but unlike the others, he wasn’t satisfied with my evasive reassurances. Soon after Brumberger talked to Nick, the senator brought him into the American Airlines Admirals Club at LaGuardia Airport and suggested he leave the Edwards team. Edwards made sure that Josh would remain discreet by arranging for him to have a job at Fortress Financial, but his dismissal sent a signal to everyone in the inner circle of the campaign.