The Politician (29 page)

I
f you’re not from the South, where these places seem to be on every other corner, the first thing to know about the Golden Corral buffet is the price. Our family of five could eat there for about thirty dollars. The second thing is clown night. Once a week, the management at our local corral brought in a clown to work the dining room. With the kids gaping at his makeup and big rubber shoes and occupied with balloon animals, the clown gave weary mothers and fathers a chance to breathe.

On a clown night in early 2007, Cheri and I balanced the nutritional hazards of turning our kids loose on a pile of fried and sugary food against our need for a little stress relief and decided the rewards outweighed the risk. After we worked our way through the line and found a table, my cell phone began to ring. A check of the screen told me the call was from Mrs. Edwards. All I had to do was show it to Cheri, and she just sighed with acceptance and glanced toward the door, which let me know I could take it outside.

I answered the phone as I walked through the dining room, past the clown and tables filled with families like mine. The first words I heard were, “Hey, Andrew, how are you? How are the kids?”

The pleasant opening made me wary. She hadn’t been nice to me since
the PlayStation 3 conflict. She told me the refrigerator at the new house had been acting up, and I thought that perhaps she wanted me to call the repairman again. But as I stepped outside onto the sidewalk and leaned against the wall, her tone changed abruptly. She said that she and the senator had been discussing Rielle Hunter and that while she believed she knew the entire story, she wanted to clear up a few details with me.

Once I agreed to talk, Mrs. Edwards turned from friendly to prosecutorial. The interrogation began with questions about Rielle’s visits to her home. She knew that Rielle had been there to interview the senator’s parents and the children, but she had spent hours reviewing the tape handed over when Rielle was fired and couldn’t find the stuff shot at her house. This only made her more suspicious, and she wanted to know how many other times I had helped this “other woman” invade her sanctuary, to sit on her furniture and enjoy her food and drink.

As my mind raced, I couldn’t think of any other time I may have transported Rielle to the estate, but the shock of being questioned made me feel uncertain and confused. Whenever the senator was home, I might bring half a dozen parties a day to see him. Rielle could have been in one of those groups. But I didn’t think this had happened more than once, and I told her so.

“Andrew,” she replied, “I
know
you are lying.”

Here she was acting like a detective, using the old technique of suggesting she possessed some kind of incriminating evidence when in fact she did not. It worked a little, making me scour my memory for something I may have forgotten. But then I got a little angry. After all I had done for the Edwards family, I didn’t deserve to be pushed into a triangular drama with the senator and his wife. (He should be answering those questions, not me.) When I stood my ground, she applied one last bit of pressure: “And I have Heather standing here beside me. I know you are lying to me, and if you don’t tell the truth to me, I’ll have John fire you.” When I repeated my answer, insisting I was telling her the truth, she abruptly hung up the phone.

The call gave me something to discuss with Cheri when I got back to the table. She was accustomed to hearing about my difficulties with the
Edwardses and had grown bored with their complaints about household problems like broken refrigerators. However, Rielle Hunter had introduced a new level of drama and danger into the Edwards saga, which made any scene involving her far more compelling. At the table, we agreed that Mrs. Edwards’s investigation was not over and that Rielle was not going to go away. Of course, we didn’t know that Mrs. Edwards believed I had become Rielle’s lover after her husband saw the error of his ways.

After dinner, we went home and I decided to get on the treadmill to work off some of the mashed potatoes I’d eaten. I was still angry when our home phone rang. I checked the caller ID and answered because it was Mrs. Edwards again. Cheri, who had glanced at a phone in another room and knew who was on the line, came to listen to my side of the conversation. It was a good move, because this was one of the few times that my end of an exchange with Elizabeth Edwards was worth hearing.

She began by saying that she thought I hadn’t been given a full opportunity to “tell the truth” and now she was willing to listen. After I asked whether she wanted the truth or “what you want to hear,” she opted for the straight story and I launched into a minor diatribe.

“Mrs. Edwards, I love you like a big sister, and I love your husband like a big brother,” I continued, “and after ten years of me working for you, for you to treat me like this is wrong, utterly wrong.”

She was not impressed. As far as she was concerned, the real issue was her “thirty-year marriage” and not “about you working for us” as a staff person. “Andrew, you are
not
family. You
work
for us. Nothing more. You get paid for all you do.”

For a decade, I had heard the senator and Mrs. Edwards use that word—“staff”—to dismiss certain people as if they were interchangeable parts. Hearing it used to describe me was too much. “I don’t do the things I do because I get paid,” I answered. “I’ve changed your kids’ diapers. I helped your parents move twice. That’s not what a staff person does. You take advantage of people. You chew them up and spit them out. I’ve done everything
in my power to help you and your family because I believe in you and your goals.”

My resistance and anger only made her come on stronger. She said that her husband wore “blinders” when he looked at me, not noticing that I had worked my way into a tight relationship with the family so I could exploit them. “Andrew, you hold us close so you can advance yourself.”

“What do I get for changing your kids’ diapers?” I asked. “What do I get out of helping your parents move?”

After telling me that household chores were part of my job, Mrs. Edwards said I had “thirty seconds to tell the truth” or I would be fired. This time I was the one who ended the call. As I clicked off the phone, I turned to see Cheri staring in amazement. “Fuck her,” I said. “It looks like I no longer work for the Edwardses.”

“Yeah, right,” said Cheri. She didn’t believe they would let me go.

Later I thought about the commitment we had made to build a new house (I had really forced that decision on her) and about our kids and their needs, like health insurance. Then the senator called to ask about my argument with his wife. “Did you just yell at Elizabeth?” he asked. I told him I had and explained why. He laughed in amazement and then asked, “You said that to Elizabeth?” He then told me how the storm had developed.

According to the senator, once Rielle was dismissed, Elizabeth demanded that campaign manager Jonathan Prince gather all the videos Rielle had shot. She then locked herself in her crafts room to review them hour by hour, and then day by day, coming out only to use the bathroom and/or fetch a Diet Coke. She interrogated Heather, who told her about Rielle interviewing Jack and Emma Claire at the mansion. She knew that if all of the work had been turned over, she should be able to see this footage. None of it was in the collection she received. In fact, she saw nothing at all from the house, not even the interviews Rielle did with Wallace and Bobbi Edwards. Knowing that Rielle had held out this material made her furious, and she pored over the videos again and again, devoting days to the work,
believing she saw things that suggested that a great deal of potentially incriminating evidence had been withheld.

During this time, Mrs. Edwards also focused on me in her effort to track down information about Rielle, including her phone number. She left me a voice mail saying, “Andrew, I am tired of playing games with you. I want every single number, every single person. And if you DARE, you can call John.”

As the senator discussed all of this with me, I could imagine his wife scanning for clues and then shaking with rage as she confronted him. Now I understood her fury. He said, “Let me take care of Elizabeth,” and he repeated that he needed me and would be terribly hurt if I walked away at the start of his big push for the White House.

What he didn’t say was that I was the only person in the world who knew everything about Rielle Hunter and his marriage, and he needed me to keep the charade going. The knowledge made me the one friend he would open his heart to and the one person besides Rielle who could hurt him the most. Years of service had also earned me a place as his most trusted adviser, and at the time no one was able to raise more money for him from big donors.

Taken together, everything I could do for John Edwards and everything I knew about him made him more loyal to me—a rare switch in roles—than he had ever been. I could hear a hint of desperation in his voice, and I knew that if I stayed working for his political action committee, I would be able to stop doing domestic chores at his house and enjoy more autonomy at work than I had ever known. I agreed to stay on. And from that day forward, my status changed. In the campaign office, people began making fewer demands on me, but they also began to shun me. I found out this happened because Mrs. Edwards had called many of the people I worked with and informed them that I wasn’t to be trusted or included. I was soon banned from the house I had helped them build, and she stopped letting her children play with mine.

Elizabeth Edwards was able to control what happened at our office because
for all intents and purposes she was the manager of the campaign. She set the strategy, determined the senator’s political positions, approved the schedule, and made all the key hires. (In most cases, she picked people with little or no experience.) There was a philosophy behind this approach. She and the senator believed that they were smarter than the big-time consultants and that they were going to pioneer a new kind of campaign that would use the Internet in a huge way. Instead of old speechwriters and pollsters, they focused on hiring the hottest Web gurus they could find. (The key one was Matthew Gross, who had been a big influence on Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.) Elizabeth was right about the World Wide Web, but as far as I could tell she was wrong about the way she used these fellows. She told them what to do and then second-guessed them. They were afraid to discuss issues with her because of her temper.

Ironically, the Web guys were very competent in their specialty and would have delivered the innovations Elizabeth wanted had they been managed properly. Similarly, the majority of the players who filled out the 2008 Edwards roster were smart and effective despite their inexperience. But in her rush to bypass so-called party hacks, Mrs. Edwards had failed to bring in people with real passion for John Edwards and for the issues at the core of his campaign. In 2004, we may have been a bit behind the curve when it came to technology, but we were deeply committed to the cause, and Nick Baldick was an assertive and effective manager. This time around, we had no strong manager and seemed to be reactive instead of proactive.

John Edwards, however, was far improved as a candidate, willing to outwork everyone in the field and burning with real intensity. Everyone else felt the desire to win and harbored hope for a victory but made the effort as if it were a job instead of a crusade. I still recognized that John Edwards was a charismatic campaigner and that he was right about the issues. But my enthusiasm was flagging, and I was being shunted aside. I used the freedom I enjoyed to set my own agenda and schedule, and to focus on raising money from donors. I was able to enjoy my family more, and pay attention to our dream house project.

The acreage Cheri and I had purchased on a forested hilltop in Chapel Hill represented a dream come true for me. Before any construction started, we got a camper and set it up on the site so we could enjoy weekends in the woods with the kids. On Super Bowl Sunday 2007, we held a big party where we set up a television outside, made a big bonfire, and laughed and hollered into the night. That party was more fun than I could recall having in a long time, and the vision of our home—all stone, glass, and natural wood—rising among the pines gave me a powerful sense of optimism about the future.

Visits to the land became even more important for me and the rest of the family after we moved out of Lake Wheeler and into a rental in Southern Village. The new place was painted such an odd shade of violet that the kids took to calling it “the purple mansion,” and everything about the move was painful. For one thing, it required us to adjust to living in a space less than half the size of our old place. For another, when the time came to make the transfer, I was busy with the campaign and unable to drive because of the DWI conviction. Cheri’s mom and dad came from Illinois to lend a hand, and they did it all without me. At one point, her mom was so angry about this that she literally turned her back on me. I couldn’t blame her, really; I was fed up with me, too.

The cramped space, the circumstances of the move, and the ugly paint weren’t the only reasons for our urge to flee for the trailer on the hilltop whenever we could. The previous occupants of the mansion had been pet lovers, and soon after we settled in and turned on the heat, we discovered that the whole place smelled of cat pee. Constant cleaning and deodorizing helped, but the scent never really went away. You would have wanted to escape, too. Our cat Pepper certainly did. A rambunctious boy we had adopted in 1999, he went outside as much as possible, and on a fateful night soon after we moved in, he was killed by a car. I found his body along a busy highway and rushed to dispose of it before the kids saw him.