The Politician (27 page)

The sudden disappearance of Josh Brumberger made me even more concerned about my future and the senator’s judgment. He should have taken Josh’s questions as a warning about the dangers of indiscretion, but he did not. In the fall of 2006, he and Mrs. Edwards traveled extensively to promote themselves (she for her book, he for the White House), and the senator saw Rielle and spoke to her by phone as often as he could.

A
lthough he had not formally declared, the senator had been operating as a candidate for the 2008 Democratic Party nomination ever since the 2004 defeat. He faced two main opponents in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who were similarly undeclared but already campaigning. (Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and Ohio representative Dennis Kucinich were declared candidates, but they were not given much of a chance to win.) Some analysts would say that Clinton and Obama enjoyed an advantage in their offices, which gave them credibility with voters. They also received an inordinate amount of press coverage because of the historic prospect of a woman or a black man reaching the White House.

The senator’s personal finances were secure. He had raised a political war chest and he had a private jet at his beck and call. He began devoting all his attention to building relationships across the country, devising strategy, and putting people into key jobs. All the campaigns were performing
this task. Hillary Clinton had her husband, the most experienced politician on the planet, as her top adviser. Barack Obama loaded his staff with extremely talented former Edwards loyalists like Julianna Smoot and David Axelrod. Abandoning the practice they followed in 2004, when they tapped highly experienced professionals, Senator and Mrs. Edwards chose a host of relative newcomers. Shrum and Baldick were gone, replaced by malleable young people. Our new chief of staff, Kathleen McGlynn, had been Mrs. Edwards’s scheduler and director of “special affairs” for the clothier Kenneth Cole. Jonathan Prince, a speechwriter for Clinton, ran the campaign day to day. Josh Brumberger was replaced by John Davis, a pale, mild-mannered Midwesterner who had been hired because of his contacts in Iowa.

As the new body man, Davis would be in charge of the senator’s care and feeding whenever he left North Carolina. This meant keeping him on schedule, shepherding him to and from events, and traveling by his side. Like most new staff members, he turned to me, as the senator’s longest-serving and closest aide, whenever he ran into an issue he couldn’t resolve or needed answers to questions he couldn’t ask the senator directly.

Recently married to a sweet young woman whom he obviously adored, Davis was a fairly proper and morally conservative guy who rarely swore or raised his voice or got overly excited. He was also smart and started calling me with questions about Rielle Hunter almost immediately after he took to the road with the senator. When I couldn’t give him satisfying answers, he pressed me harder. Finally, on a night when he was staying in North Carolina, I went to the hotel where he was staying (the same Courtyard by Marriott that issued the key card discovered by Heather) and sat with him and one of the senator’s top political advisers, David Medina. (Medina would eventually become First Lady Michelle Obama’s deputy chief of staff.)

As John and David worked their way through a supply of beer (I abstained because of my DWI), the conversation became more animated and John slowly grasped what was going on between the senator and Rielle. He
also became quite profane, which I would discover was something that happened on the rare occasions when he drank.

After Medina left, he said, “C’mon, Andrew. You don’t think he could be so fuckin’ stupid as to think he can get away with it, do you?”

It was a good question, and the only answer was that the senator obviously
did
think he could get away with it. And why wouldn’t he? For all of his life he had been told he was special, and every year brought him ever more adulation. He had wealth, fame, and a younger woman who called him “the king” and promised to do whatever he wanted her to do at any time.

For John Davis, who cared deeply about the issues and had come to the campaign as a true believer, the more important matter was, in my mind, protecting himself. My sense of commitment to John Edwards was becoming frayed, and I was not excited about working on a campaign for another year. Here I could offer some solid counsel. I told him that his best chance of avoiding trouble was to remain loyal to the senator, not Mrs. Edwards. (I suspected that some of the staff were actually more attached to her and may have been feeding her information about Rielle.) In the short term, I told him, “try to make his life as simple as possible.” In the long term, his goal should be to anticipate the boss’s needs so that he wouldn’t even have to ask. It’s like being the best friend of the quarterback in high school. You protect him even if that means helping him get away with stuff.

As I explained the facts of life to John, I recalled similar conversations with Edwards’s body men Hunter Pruette and Josh Brumberger, and the warnings I had received from Julianna Smoot and Will Austin when I took the job in D.C. I felt as if I was forcing him to abandon the idealism that had brought him to the Edwards campaign and to recognize the dark side of politics. Everyone thinks 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.”

W
ith 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 moment 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 table 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.

F
riends 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 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.