The Politician (31 page)

As we exited the interstate and turned west toward Chapel Hill, the senator recalled that Rielle was waiting for him in Iowa. He used my cell phone to call her and explained why he would not be there to celebrate her birthday. When he finished going through his wife’s diagnosis and describing how it would be revealed to the press, he paused to let her respond. She cussed him out so loudly that I could hear almost every word. He let her complain and then kept saying he was sorry until we approached the long driveway that led to his house. The senator repeatedly tried to end the call and finally asked me to pull over since we were near his home, but Rielle wouldn’t stop talking. After the senator finished placating Rielle and ended the call, we then went up the drive, and I let him out. Before he went inside, he told me to send Rielle some flowers but to leave the name John off the card.

_______

T
he Edwardses told the world about the recurrence of her cancer at a packed press conference conducted in Chapel Hill at the Carolina Inn, a graceful old place made of soft red brick where they had held their wedding reception in 1977. Mrs. Edwards explained how she had broken her rib—the senator joked, “Actually, I was beating her”—and then recounted how her doctor had said there was no reason for her to give up the campaign. She also said that her treatment would consist of a less debilitating type of chemotherapy that could put the cancer into remission and be used again and again “for the rest of my life.”

After watching this performance, most people believed that Elizabeth Edwards was riddled with cancer and not long for this world. (Cheri and I thought she might live weeks or a few months at best.) At headquarters, where many people owed their jobs to her, talk of her courage and strength dominated conversations, and I heard more than one person say, “We should try to win it for Elizabeth.”

Outside of the campaign, the response to their decision to keep on with the quest was mostly positive. A few criticized the Edwardses for their ambition, but in the main they were honored for their courage and forthrightness. Frank Rich of
The New York Times
would even publish a column titled “Elizabeth Edwards for President.” Others cheered the open way they were dealing with the illness and said they were grateful that the news reports put breast cancer awareness on the public agenda, which might motivate more women to perform self-exams and go to the doctors themselves.

On the Saturday after they announced Mrs. Edwards’s cancer had returned, health care was the focus of a seven-candidate forum sponsored by the Service Employees International Union in Las Vegas. Senator Edwards mentioned his wife’s illness in the course of presenting the most complete prescription for fixing the health care system anyone offered. Compared with Barack Obama, who hemmed and hawed and never offered specifics when asked to cite his priorities, Edwards made a brilliant case that included
honest talk about how his plan would require raising taxes. As he made this point, he added, “I think it’s really important, particularly given what’s happened in the last six or seven years in this country, that the president of the United States be honest with the American people.”

In fact, he was being honest about the things he considered to be the public’s business, like taxes and health care, even as he maintained an elaborate fiction when it came to his personal life and the image he projected. Many politicians have taken this approach and said that the ends justified the means. In other words, the illusions they projected were merely the kind of advertising that is required in the age of mass media. Few mortals, and even fewer with the kind of narcissistic drive required to run for president, could really be as upright and decent as the public expects. Similarly, the unrealistic expectations of the press and the public discourage many qualified people from running for office.

A small but telling example of the art of political deception could be seen in the suit Senator Edwards wore for the Las Vegas union event. As he prepared to depart for the debate, he had realized that the label inside the coat read “Made in Italy,” because, in fact, he loved expensive Italian suits and wore them routinely. Trouble is, a union crowd is likely to harbor a wiseacre who will ask a politician if he’s wearing an American, union-stitched suit. When he thought of this possibility, the senator asked me about the label on my jacket—“Made in USA”—and had me take his to a tailor, where the tag from my coat was switched for the one in his. After the debate he said with some anger that he was disatisfied with the tailor’s work. He played a video of the debate and pointed out a wrinkle where the label was installed.

If other candidates haven’t switched labels in a suit, they have done comparable things to avoid embarrassment or promote themselves. Everyone who works at a high level in a campaign knows it goes on and goes along for the good of the candidate or, if you really believe in him or her, for the good of the country. On the day after the health care forum, John Edwards told the audience of
60 Minutes
that he was continuing with his
run for the White House because he had “a responsibility to this country.” In other words, he was so sure that America needed his leadership that he simply had to stay in the race. Mrs. Edwards agreed and explained that in the time she had lived with cancer, she had learned to accept and even live with the prospect of her death. When Katie Couric pressed her for a more complete explanation, Mrs. Edwards said:

You know, you really have two choices here. I mean, either you push forward with the things that you were doing yesterday or you start dying. That seems to be your only two choices. If I had given up everything that my life was about—first of all, I’d let cancer win before it needed to. You know, maybe eventually it will win. But I’d let it win before I needed to.

It was a good answer, and for the next few weeks the Edwardses offered a version of it in a series of interviews and at campaign stops. The attention they received was so broad, and lasted so long, that media commentators recognized it as a national phenomenon. Howard Kurtz of
The Washington Post
noted that John Edwards couldn’t get on
60 Minutes
with his proposal for health care, but the cancer story “mesmerized people who don’t give a fig about politics.” Polls taken after the publicity about Mrs. Edwards’s cancer showed that her husband was finally gaining ground on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. On the road, Mrs. Edwards drew big crowds and loud cheers. In Des Moines, she went to a TV station to do a live interview via satellite with Larry King as a solo act. In that performance, she was a far cry from the nervous lady who sat next to Teresa Heinz Kerry to speak to Lesley Stahl in 2004. She was confident and relaxed, and after it was over I heard people say she should be running for the United States Senate.

Rielle watched with envy as Mrs. Edwards became a star. With her growing popularity, she was able to stand in for her husband and double the amount of ground the campaign could cover in a day. But as she expanded
the reach of the organization, she also put more stress on the staff, most of whom were young and inexperienced. Although I continued to work as a fund-raiser, Mrs. Edwards had told the people in charge of the day-to-day campaign to take away all my responsibilities and to keep me away from her husband and her house.

I knew she was angry because she believed I had helped the senator communicate with Rielle. (I still didn’t know the senator had told her I was carrying on an affair with Rielle and thereby endangering her husband’s career.) Her fear that something was going on was well-founded, of course, because I had kept the senator’s secrets in the past and I was continuing to help him stay in touch with his onetime camera girl. For months I had been in charge of the Batphone. He kept it with him on the road and then gave it to me when he returned. It then became my job to sneak it back onto the campaign plane and into the pocket of the seat in front of his before he departed again. Security at the airport made this a difficult job, and one time I actually raced off the plane and out of sight as Elizabeth was bringing him by car to the waiting aircraft.

Because she identified me with her husband’s infidelity, but also knew I remained one of his trusted assistants, Mrs. Edwards obsessed over what I knew and what I may have done. She called me over and over again, demanding information I wouldn’t give her. If I didn’t answer, she left angry messages. At various times she accused me of lying, cheating, and even stealing from her household. In furious fights, she insisted her husband fire me, which he couldn’t do because he needed me to take care of Rielle. Of course I hadn’t taken anything from her family, and by pushing me out of campaign operations and putting untested people in charge, she set the stage for mistakes and mishaps.

For example, until Mrs. Edwards barred me from the campaign, I had managed many of the day-to-day expenses the senator incurred, including his haircuts, which were more of an issue than you might imagine. Naturally thick and lustrous, his hair was a fixation with him. He insisted on using just one kind of shampoo—HairTec Thick & Strong Shampoo for
Fine, Fragile Hair—which Mrs. Edwards bought by the case. His hair also had a tendency to grow in a way that made him look like Opie Taylor on the old
Andy Griffith Show
. A gifted barber could make him look mature and presidential, and when the senator found one with this skill, he was willing to pay whatever it cost to obtain his services. In 2006 his favorite was Joe Torrenueva, a Beverly Hills stylist who charged between three hundred dollars and five hundred dollars per appointment.

For years, I had used my credit cards or the Edwardses’ personal credit cards to pay for the senator’s personal items so that they wouldn’t be charged to the campaign and then turn up in the public reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. Political opponents and news reporters scoured these documents as they were submitted each quarter, hoping to see something juicy in the spending. The senator’s pricey haircuts would certainly catch the eye of any journalist interested to see if the man who was the champion of the poor was a spendthrift. I made sure that no one ever knew about them. When the new, inexperienced staff got the job of arranging for the senator’s personal on-the-road needs, they pushed two bills for four-hundred-dollar haircuts through the normal campaign channels, and the payments were included in the big public quarterly report submitted to the FEC.

The revelation of the four-hundred-dollar haircuts, which was discovered by the Obama campaign, would have been bruising for any candidate under any circumstances, but it was worse for Senator Edwards because of his antipoverty focus and because of a video on YouTube that showed him having makeup applied and fussing over his hair to the tune of “I Feel Pretty” as sung by Julie Andrews. For a few weeks the “Pretty” video, which went viral at the start of spring, was one of the most viewed political items on the Internet, and it revived a mean-spirited line of attack that officials in the Bush White House had devised to use against John Edwards in the 2004 campaign.

Back then, Maureen Dowd of
The New York Times
made public the Bush team’s decision to refer to Edwards as the “Breck Girl” and emasculate him by playing on his boyish good looks. Dowd has a habit of using
gender issues to attack people, often suggesting something’s wrong with any man showing so-called feminine traits. In this case, she gave currency to the Bush rhetoric, which just happened to be accurate.

Unstated, but always part of the context when it came to their public image, was the idea that John Edwards was actually prettier than his wife. This was an issue inside their marriage, and it contributed to her insecurity and his roving. It was also an unstated factor in the campaign and in the minds of many women voters who found him attractive and were reassured that his attachment to Mrs. Edwards remained strong as she aged more rapidly than he did and cancer stole some of her beauty. He gained political capital by loving the real Elizabeth, no matter what age and childbirth and illness did to her body. He lost a little of it when he spent too much time and money attending to his hair. And as they both knew, he risked losing all of it if his relationship with Rielle Hunter became known. Since Mrs. Edwards assumed that I was responsible for keeping Rielle around, she connected me with the threat inherent in the haircut problem. I thought she should have realized that I had always protected the senator from similar unpleasant episodes and that this one arose because she had tried too hard to marginalize me. Mrs. Edwards also didn’t know that my work for the senator was going to yield a remarkable offer of aid that would prove essential to keeping alive the senator’s hope of becoming president and Mrs. Edwards’s dream of being First Lady.

In the midst of the negative publicity, which forced Senator Edwards to tell the press he didn’t know his haircuts were so expensive and confess the issue was “really embarrassing,” a letter from our friend in Upperville, Virginia, landed on my desk. Written in delicate script on pale blue stationery, it was decorated with a sketch of a graceful tree with the Blue Ridge Mountains in the background.

As she wrote, Bunny Mellon was appalled by the treatment John Edwards was receiving. “I see
jealousy
coming from somewhere in this news report,” she said, and then she volunteered to pay whatever expenses the senator incurred that could not be covered by the campaign, including the
employment of a valet. She instructed me to simply send the bills to her attorney, Alex Forger, and rest assured that they would be paid.

Bunny had written the letter as she sat in the room of her disabled daughter, Eliza, something she did many afternoons, talking to her and conducting correspondence with prominent people all over the world. I was charmed to imagine her in her beautiful house, thinking up ways to use her fortune to make life a little easier for people she admired and believed in, like Senator Edwards. I remembered the story she had told of offering her plane to help Jackie Kennedy Onassis attend Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral and how she had accompanied her on the trip to Atlanta, carrying baskets of food. This woman had been coming to the rescue of various people for four decades. This offer to Senator Edwards was just the latest expression of quiet support for those she believed to be worthy. Little did I know how much support he would soon require or how generous a kind lady in Virginia would be.