The Politician (28 page)

The tree part was relatively easy, because Mrs. Edwards referred me to a local dealer who specialized in premium trees, which were delivered and set up in your home. As so often happened, since they were afraid of being
cheated because of their fame and wealth, the Edwardses had me negotiate. I got a good discount on the asking price for a twelve-foot Douglas fir but still had to explain to her why it was so expensive. Next came the presents and one of the most unlikely, but painful, fiascoes of my long association with the Edwards family.

It all started with the Sony Corporation’s diabolically clever marketing plan for its PlayStation 3 gaming system, which was scheduled for release on November 17. Sony had generated an avalanche of publicity about the game and its features but had manufactured only a limited supply. Like almost every other boy in America, Jack Edwards wanted one. On November 15, I stocked my Suburban with Diet Coke, beef jerky, and green peppers (Mrs. Edwards was on a diet) and went to pick her up at the airport. She arrived exhausted and crabby from her book tour and medical treatments. I told her to relax and we’d get her home quickly. After she caught her breath, she said, “Andrew, do you have a sleeping bag I can borrow tonight?”

I went along, asking why she would possibly need a sleeping bag, and she explained that she intended to camp out in front of a store so she would be among the first in line on the day the Sony gaming system became available. The idea of a middle-aged, cancer-stricken, “First-Lady-in-waiting” huddling in the dark on a sidewalk for hours on end was ridiculous. I told her I would investigate the options and come up with a better solution.

The assistant I had hired as a driver heard me talk about the PlayStation problem and volunteered to jump in. I was extremely busy setting up the 2008 campaign, which had to be ready January 1, and gratefully accepted his offer. He promptly rang up the nearest Wal-Mart store and talked his way to the manager of the electronics department. He left a voice mail dropping the senator’s name and discussed the availability of the new Sony system. The next day, as shoppers all over the country waited in line to plunk down their Christmas savings for the toy, Wal-Mart issued a press release that said Senator John Edwards, a vocal spokesman for the Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign, had tried to jump to the front “while the rest of America’s working families are waiting patiently in line.”

With Wal-Mart’s press release came a flurry of inquiries from reporters across the country. Forced to respond, Senator Edwards explained that a new volunteer who was unaware of the Wal-Mart controversy had made the mistake of using his name in an overeager effort to get one of the gaming consoles. “He was not aware,” said the senator, “that Wal-Mart doesn’t provide health insurance or decent pay for many of its employees or of my efforts to change the way Wal-Mart treats its employees.”

If you subscribe to the belief that “all publicity is good publicity,” the PlayStation 3 blowup was a bonanza. With the campaign kickoff six weeks away, Senator Edwards was in the middle of a media blitz. In the previous week, he had appeared on
Good Morning America, The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Late Show with David Letterman,
and
Meet the Press
. When Wal-Mart went after him, the senator used the attack to draw attention to his critique of the company’s employment practices. Most of the news outlets that went with the story referred to the Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign, so I tried to convince myself that the reporting was balanced. Mrs. Edwards did not agree. Having worked hard to cultivate a “plain folks” public image, she believed nationwide publicity about John Edwards trying to jump the line at Wal-Mart was a disaster. She sent me an e-mail headed “This is what can happen” and wrote: “This is what can happen when we ask for special treatment. We cannot ever ask for special treatment. Ever.”

Below her note, she pasted a bunch of articles from newspapers and Web sites, all of which made fun of Edwards. A typical one said, “There are two Americas, one for rich people who can bypass the line, one for poor folks who can’t.”

For the next few weeks, Elizabeth searched for these items on the Internet and sent them to me by the dozens. They arrived on my BlackBerry on weekdays and weekends, in the middle of the night, and over the holidays as I drove with my wife and kids to visit with family in Illinois. Although I apologized, explained what had happened, and took responsibility, nothing seemed to satisfy her. She was certain that I had told my assistant to throw around the senator’s name, which I had not.

As the negative comments continued in the blogosphere, she sent me an angry note, the key sentence of which was written in capital letters: “
I HAVE A LOT OF TROUBLE WITH YOUR APOLOGIES WHEN COMBINED WITH YOUR OWN BENIGN DESCRIPTION OF YOUR ROLE
.” When another apology from me didn’t work, Mrs. Edwards switched from expressing her anger to trying to make me feel ashamed. On December 4, she wrote: “I noticed that although you have steered clear of me, you are bringing John home tomorrow. Think of that as an opportunity to be completely honest . . . not to complain that I am being too harsh on you. In my view, you are not harsh enough on yourself.”

At some point, even a good soldier gets angry at the brass, and after weeks of her harangues I got angry. I printed out many of the e-mails I had received from her and brought them with me to the airport on a day when I was meeting the senator. Once he got in the car, I showed them to him and then told him I’d resign if necessary. When I finished, the senator recalled previous talks we had had about Mrs. Edwards, their marriage, and their difficulties. He said, “Andrew, this is fucking harassment. Don’t worry about this. And you’re not quitting.” The e-mails about the PlayStation 3 stopped that evening.

On the day after Christmas, Mrs. Edwards wrote to tell me to make sure the Christmas tree supplier would come to collect the big Douglas fir at eight-fifteen on the morning of December 29. “Also,” she added, “the kids loved their presents—thank you!”

W
hile Mrs. Edwards, and much of America, spent the quiet days before the start of the New Year cleaning up wrapping paper and putting away ornaments, Senator Edwards jetted off to New Orleans, where dead trees and hurricane-ravaged homes in the Lower Ninth Ward would serve as the backdrop for a speech announcing the start of his presidential campaign. (Two weeks earlier, Joe Klein of
Time
magazine had heralded Edwards as the front-runner, with a two-to-one lead in the polls over Hillary Clinton, his nearest competitor.) Although he still mentioned the “two Americas,”
rich and poor, most of what Edwards said in New Orleans focused on the Bush administration’s post-Katrina failures, his call for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and proposals for dealing with global warming and America’s dependence on foreign oil.

The policy ideas were almost standard-issue Democratic talking points, but as any campaign expert would tell you, the words the senator spoke were not as important as the staging and images he hoped the media would transmit. He appeared in jeans and shirtsleeves, and between the muddy yard, the boarded-up windows, and the fallen tree, the scene around him all but screamed “disaster area.” A casual glance at the picture would have left you with the impression that a strong leader had come to New Orleans and was about to take charge and make things better.

The event attracted lots of press attention, which you can see in the video shot by Rielle Hunter, who accompanied the senator to New Orleans while Mrs. Edwards stayed home. Wearing tight-fitting jeans, a dark fleece top, a jester-style knit cap, and a big pink scarf, Rielle flitted between the senator and the hordes of journalists and camera operators, presumably documenting the moment as the official campaign filmmaker. If anyone in the press saw something unusual in the way Rielle interacted with Edwards, it wasn’t reported. But Rielle had awakened that morning in the senator’s room at the luxurious Loews hotel, where, she later told me, she “felt just like his First Lady.”

Rielle continued to play First Lady as she spent the next few days traveling to campaign events. In Iowa, where he was leading in the polls, he signaled his Internet savvy by conducting a town hall with online participants around the world. He went from there to New Hampshire, where people noticed he had accented his shirtsleeves wardrobe with a plastic “Save Darfur” wristband, and then to Nevada and finally South Carolina. Big crowds greeted the senator and Rielle at rallies in each of these early-voting states. At his last stop, before flying home, they were met by an adoring crowd of more than a thousand people.

At some point after they left the South Carolina rally, the would-be
president and the wannabe First Lady began a premature celebration. The senator had one last appearance to make, a late-afternoon address in the central square of Southern Village, a planned community organized around the shops and restaurants on the square. Our national headquarters was on the second floor of a building that overlooked the retail area. Outfitted with an amphitheater and lights, the square was the perfect backdrop for a rally.

As crowds gathered at Southern Village, I went to the airport to meet the senator and Rielle as they arrived on Fred’s jet. They got into my Suburban and shared sips from a plastic water bottle filled with Sauvignon Blanc. As we approached the square, we saw thousands of people gathered in front of a bandstand. Flags fluttered behind the stage. High-powered projectors threw images of stars onto the buildings. Disney couldn’t have done a better job.

Knowing that Mrs. Edwards would be waiting for him, the senator had me drop him in a parking garage, where he could take an elevator upstairs. Before he got out, he leaned over to me and said, “Don’t let Rielle get close to Elizabeth.”

I then parked and walked to the office with Rielle. To say that everyone noticed Rielle as we walked into the busy campaign office would be an understatement. With sunglasses perched on her bleached blond hair, tight designer jeans, and a black sweater, she looked like she was taking a meeting in Hollywood, not attending a rally in North Carolina. Everyone else was dressed in more businesslike clothes and had the pale, drawn look of exhaustion that comes with working for a presidential campaign. Eyes followed her as she turned toward the restroom, and just before she reached the door, it swung open and Elizabeth Edwards came out.

For a moment, the two women were face-to-face. Rielle knew instantly that she was staring at John Edwards’s wife. Mrs. Edwards glanced past her, caught my eye, and quickly realized that this must be “the other woman.” A look of pain flashed across her face, but as she turned to go look for her husband, that pain seemed to turn to anger.

Out on the square, the Del McCoury Band struck up some trademark
bluegrass and entertained the crowd gathered to celebrate the start of the campaign. Away from view, Elizabeth Edwards confronted her husband about the glowing blond woman who had obviously arrived with him from the road. However, they couldn’t discuss the issue at length because people were all around and they were about to go onstage.

When the Edwardses finally emerged from their private backstage hell, Mrs. Edwards looked stricken. At center stage, political consultant Mudcat Saunders, veteran of the 2004 campaign, took the microphone and declared himself a “redneck from Virginia Tech, a Hokie who is a recovering alcoholic.” He offered a little testimony about his struggle with alcoholism and how John and Elizabeth Edwards had given him a second chance. Eventually, he worked his way to an introduction of “the next president of the United States,” and the senator instantly transformed his demeanor and walked forward to accept the acclaim of thousands. (Both of the Edwardses had this ability to shift instantaneously from private rage or anguish to public benevolence, and I had seen it so many times that I no longer took much notice.)

The hour was late, and the weather was cold. Edwards’s brief talk covered health care, the war in Iraq, global warming, and the need for change in Washington. He finished with a call for everyone to roll up their sleeves, dig into their pockets, and wear out some shoe leather to win an election that “isn’t about me,” said the senator, “but is about all of us.”

As he finished and the cheering reached a crescendo, no one who looked at the scene could have guessed that the senator’s marriage was coming apart at the seams because his wife had just stumbled upon his mistress, who stood mere yards away. All anyone in the crowd knew was that by announcing early, John Edwards had landed the first punch in the fight for the nomination. Conventional wisdom held that Hillary Clinton was such a polarizing figure that she could never win a general election. Barack Obama was so little known that he seemed to be positioning himself to take the second seat on the ticket, as candidate for vice president of a future White House run. This left John Edwards as the logical and likely choice.

That night, I drove the Edwardses home in silence. The next day, I picked up the senator at his house for another drive to the airport. When he settled into his seat, he said, “What the hell was Mudcat talking about last night?” It was a nice icebreaker, and we both laughed. Then he told me that all the previous night, Mrs. Edwards had shouted, cried, and refused to stop until the senator told her about Rielle and promised to fire her. (I knew something about this because Heather, the nanny, had phoned me to say she was concerned about the arguing and how it was affecting Jack and Emma Claire.)

What I wouldn’t find out for many months was that the senator had told Elizabeth that although he had indulged in a “one-night” fling with Rielle, in recent weeks she had become
my
mistress! And that’s why we were together as we arrived at Southern Village.