The Politician (30 page)

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heri and the kids spent far more time in the purple mansion than I did, because every day I walked over to the Southern Village town square office
to work. This convenience was in contrast with the demands the move made on Cheri. The kids remained in their school in Raleigh, and she drove them back and forth for three months. She also brought them there for sports after school and visits with friends. She must have felt as though she spent her life on the road.

My workdays were devoted to chasing donations, fielding calls from the senator, and solving certain problems. Once, when he was on the road, he called sounding very upset and explained that he had lost the Outward Bound pin that Wade had received before he died. (Edwards had worn it to public events since 1998.) Many staff members dropped what they were doing to search in every vehicle or room he had occupied in the last twenty-four hours. When they failed to find it, we bought a new one from the organization, but it was a new design and did not resemble Wade’s pin.

Aside from managing the senator’s personal crises, I dealt with inquiries from colleagues who knew I had Edwards’s ear and understood him better than anyone else. For example, when John Davis reported sighting Rielle on the trail, I reassured him that although she was no longer on the payroll, she and the senator were probably just friends and there was nothing to worry about.

Rielle’s travel arrangements required fancy footwork, and here my experience as a campaign aide came in handy. When I knew where the senator was staying, I made reservations in my own name, faxed copies of my credit card and state identification card, and told the hotel staff that my “wife” would be checking in on my account. This ploy allowed Rielle to get into the hotel and wait for the senator, who then called and signaled her to come to his suite. Rielle would leave before the aides came to get the senator at the start of the workday.

The routine worked perfectly except for on one occasion in Florida, when the campaign bus left a swanky resort where the senator had spent the night so early that Rielle was still in the suite when he departed. She planned to go back to the room I had arranged for “Mrs. Young” but decided to get into the shower first. That’s when she heard pounding on the
door. She got out, wrapped herself in a towel, and looked through the peephole to see someone from the campaign. (The staffer had a key card, but fortunately Rielle had fastened the security chain on the door.) Afraid to respond, she hid in the bathroom and called the senator on the Batphone. When the senator heard what was going on, he called me.

Accustomed as I was to having the phone ring at all hours with emergency requests from John Edwards, it still rattled me when the phone rang before the alarm clock, and it took me a few seconds to wake up. The senator, who was calling from the campaign bus, where he was surrounded by staff and press, spoke in an upbeat voice—as if nothing were wrong—but his breathing sounded panicked, and I could tell he was faking it.

“Our friend is having a problem,” he said. “Can you give her a call right now?”

I soon understood what was wrong. Someone from the staff had gone to the room with a key card to make sure the senator had not left behind any confidential papers. This was standard operating procedure, and whoever it was had been surprised to find the door bolted from the inside. I told him I would fix it, and as he hung up I immediately heard from Rielle. There were now two security guards and three campaign aides, including my old assistant, banging on the door. Rielle was scared, but also excited and giggly. (I think she wanted to get caught.) She agreed to tell them she needed to get dressed and would open the door in a few minutes.

While Rielle dressed, I called the hotel, which was the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood, Florida. Using my best presidential campaign aide voice, I asked for and got connected to the manager. “I had an old friend drive through the night to deliver confidential papers to the senator this morning,” I explained. “I told her that she could take advantage of the room—since it was paid for—and enjoy the resort after he left. If you want to check out who I am, call the campaign. They’ll confirm who I am.”

Five minutes later, the manager called me back and agreed to call his security men on the radio and have them leave the hallway. But this still left
the Edwards staffers who were upstairs and wanted an explanation. I called Rielle again, then had her open the door a crack and, since Mrs. Edwards had turned my former assistant against me, I told her to hand the phone to one of the other staffers. When he got on I said, “Who the hell is this?” with as much authority and impatience as I could muster.

With my opponent back on his heels, I said, “This is Andrew Young.” I then said that all he needed to know was that the woman in the room was someone I had sent with confidential documents because every call I had made the previous night had gone unanswered by staff people, who were out partying. (This was an assumption that turned out to be true.) “I had to get one of my friends to do your damn job, so leave her alone.”

The bluff worked and they left Rielle alone. I then instructed her to pack up and call me as she left the room. She did as I told her, and I kept her on the phone to calm her as she walked down the hallway, rode the elevator, crossed through the lobby, and went outside to a cab stand. She noticed the Edwards staffers who had come to the door of the room outside the hotel, but they saw her on the phone and didn’t intercept her. She breathed a huge sigh of relief and then started laughing as the cab departed the hotel, with her aboard, safe and still secret. I called the senator and told him the crisis was over.

Senator Edwards thanked me up and down on the day I got Rielle out of the Florida hotel, but the next time I saw him, he’d developed a case of amnesia about this event. Having had my daytime driving privileges restored, I had picked him up at the airport, following our usual routine. I had continued to tease him by putting down the armrest. He looked at me and said, “Why do you keep doin’ that?”

I stayed silent as he handed me the Batphone, enjoyed a sip of wine, and sighed with relief. I then casually mentioned the tight scrape we had just survived. He turned to me and with a perfectly straight face said, “I don’t know what you are talking about. Rielle wasn’t in Florida.”

I looked at him, amazed, and said something about how he must be joking.
Of course Rielle was in Florida with him. She had been discovered by the staff, and I had come up with a brilliant scheme to explain why there was a woman in the shower of his suite. The senator looked at me blankly, repeated that “Rielle was never in Florida,” and asked me how I could say such a thing.

We were hurtling down the interstate, and since I had to keep my attention on the road, I didn’t stare into his eyes directly. But I could tell from his tone of voice that he truly believed what he was saying. I decided that he was either the best liar in the world or he was having some sort of psychological episode. My phone records showed more than thirty calls with him, Rielle, and the Westin on the day of this incident. Clearly, I could prove to him that something big had happened that day. But I decided to drop the subject.

The way I saw it, Rielle presented a problem with three possible outcomes. If Edwards ended the relationship, she would probably go to the press, reveal the affair, and, I assumed, supply enough solid evidence to make the story stick. Since he had presented himself to the country as the handsome and brilliant man of the people who was standing by his wife through her illness, news of an affair would end Senator Edwards’s political career. If he followed the second option, he could keep seeing Rielle and, if Elizabeth found out, risk a divorce that would expose him in the same way. The difference here was that Mrs. Edwards’s desire to live in the White House was as great as, if not greater than, his. She had already accepted his personal betrayals as part of the price for the real estate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The third option would be to continue to see Rielle and hope to keep Mrs. Edwards in the dark until after the election. Callous as it was, the senator chose this last option and pursued the presidency with all the energy he could muster while talking to me about how much easier life would be without Elizabeth. I thought all of this was repulsive, but since she had forced me out of her life, I felt there was nothing I could do about it.

Ironically, once the senator was relaxed about discussing Rielle with me, he frequently aired the same kinds of complaints about her that he had
expressed about Mrs. Edwards in the past. He said Rielle was overly demanding and emotional, and he frequently called her “crazy.” But just as he counted on his sometimes “crazy” wife for counsel and support, he depended on “crazy” Rielle’s input and advice. Along with her commitment to do everything and anything he requested as part of her spiritual mission to see him become a world leader, she offered political guidance, comments on strategy, and criticisms on every aspect of his performance from wardrobe to cadence. Although it came mixed with horoscope readings and other New Age mumbo jumbo, the senator genuinely valued Rielle’s input. He called her before every debate or major public appearance and generally called her afterward for a critique. I know, because I was the go-between who used three-way calling to connect them so no record of Rielle’s number would appear on his phone.

Strange as it may sound for a man raised a Southern Baptist, I think the senator was open to the idea that Rielle might have a special power to see into the future—a startling number of powerful people believe in such things—and that her age and social background meant she could speak for a part of the electorate he wanted to reach. Finally, in listening to her and including her in the campaign, he rewarded her for accepting the mistress role and staying in the background. She clearly loved playing secret adviser to a future president, and he fed her feeling of importance by having me send her the daily schedule, clippings from the national press, and important memos so they could discuss them. Regardless of her flakiness, she did provide an interesting and creative perspective on his campaign.

Besides information, Rielle needed money. She had worked in the past as a spiritual adviser, but now believed her life’s purpose was serving John Edwards. The senator wanted to keep her happy but had difficulty getting money to her. He once gave her his bank card, but when Mrs. Edwards saw that a large sum had been withdrawn in New York when her husband was in California, she sent out an alarm. He was able to make some kind of excuse to cover up this incident, but from that point on he asked me to handle Rielle’s finances. I used my credit card to book hotel rooms and airline
flights for Rielle. I even gave him cash to give her—a few hundred dollars at a time—when I took him to the airport for outbound flights. He promised I would be repaid when a wealthy benefactor was recruited to cover these costs or when Mrs. Edwards died.

“I’ll take care of you, Andrew,” he said. “You know I’m good for it.”

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lizabeth Edwards’s cancer had hung over her family and the senator’s various organizations ever since it was discovered in 2004. At that time, it was described as a metastatic form of breast cancer that is almost always fatal, and the senator talked about the future in the bleakest terms. But three years after it was discovered and her treatment was begun, Mrs. Edwards seemed as robust as ever. She was so active that I sometimes forgot she had been diagnosed.

In many ways, the senator acted as if she were gone already. In March he arranged to celebrate Rielle’s birthday at the Hotel Fort Des Moines while he campaigned in Iowa. When the date arrived, I got an urgent call from John Davis, who was with him. The plans had been changed, he said, and the boss was coming home. He gave me the time to pick him up at the private hangar at Raleigh-Durham International and warned me that the senator was “very upset.” He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew it was bad.

At the airport, Edwards skipped the usual handshakes he offered the ground crew and hustled to my Suburban. He didn’t say a word until we had left the airport proper and had merged onto the interstate. “Elizabeth’s cancer is back,” he said, “and it’s bad.”

The senator looked out the window and cried as he told me that Elizabeth’s cancer had spread to her bones. He told me she had heard one of her ribs break as she was moving a box “and cussing you out, Andrew, for putting it in the wrong place.” Publicly, she would say the fracture happened when Senator Edwards had hugged her too hard. I wondered what she thought she gained from this version of events.

Imaging done at the hospital had turned up a fracture on one side of
Mrs. Edwards’s rib cage and a mass on the other. A biopsy had shown a malignancy in one rib, and further tests indicated the cancer had spread to other areas of the body. As he talked about his wife’s condition, the senator used words like “fatal” and “terminal” and seemed to be genuinely grief-stricken. But then, as we reached a point halfway to his house, the conversation turned to the campaign and he made it clear that they both wanted it to continue. Within days they agreed that this diagnosis would generate positive publicity after frustrating months when the press ignored him. They actually believed the cancer would give the senator’s poll numbers a boost.

From a coldly political perspective, they were correct. If people believed the campaign was intended to serve others, the brave pursuit of a victory despite the cancer would seem heroic. Anyone else whose spouse had received a death sentence diagnosis might decide to chuck all current plans and devote the time to a sail around the world or anything else his or her heart desired. But the White House was what the Edwardses desired most, and they weren’t going to give up the dream just because of a fatal illness. Instead, they planned to bring them on the campaign trail so the family could be together as much as possible. (They would be “homeschooled” along the way, with lessons taught from books and trips to museums and historic sites wherever they traveled.)