The Politician (44 page)

At 1:15
P.M
., Fred sent me a text to tell me, “He is in a black suv.” Just then, Edwards pulled up in a black Chevy Tahoe and waved at me through the open window. I rolled down the window on the minivan, not knowing what to expect.

“Follow me,” he called out. Then he drove off.

I followed as he drove down the country roads, making one awkward turn after another. (He was talking on a cell phone and anxiously checking the rearview mirror as he drove the borrowed car.) Finally, he stopped and signaled for me to get in his car.

When I opened the door of the Tahoe, I saw that Edwards looked fit and tanned as usual, but when I got in I noticed he was fidgety, and as he drove off, he seemed to have a little trouble controlling the car and maintaining his train of thought.

Two months had passed since I’d last seen John Edwards, and in that time I had come to understand that I had never really known him at all. I began to worry just a bit about my own safety. In the movies, this would be the scene where the rich guy would deliver the man who knows too much to an assassin in the woods. I knew this was probably a paranoid thought, but it remained in the back of my mind as he actually tried a little small talk.

“How are you doing?” he said. “How are the kids?”

“We’re doing pretty shitty,” I answered. “Where’s your car?”

“Elizabeth’s taken all my keys.”

“Elizabeth’s taken your keys?” I wanted to embarrass him by making him explain.

“Yeah, and she’s got me sleeping in the barn. She yells at me all night, and when I sleep she gets in my face and screams.”

As this line of conversation died, Edwards grew nostalgic. He said he missed hanging out with me. “I don’t have anyone to talk to anymore.”

I wasn’t interested in his loneliness. I asked him what he was going to do about me now that my reputation was trashed and I had no chance of finding a job. What about the foundation he was supposed to start with a big donation from Bunny Mellon? The last I heard, he was increasing his request to $50 million.

He said that when he saw Bunny, her lawyer and accountant had attended the meeting and told him she wasn’t in a position to give him what he wanted. The senator then started talking about the checks Bunny had written to cover Rielle’s expenses and the cost of our great escape.

“I didn’t know anything about this,” he said. “Did you?”

I didn’t know what was going on. I wondered if he was secretly recording our conversation. Panicked, I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“What about your promise to take care of things?” I asked him. “What about you coming clean?”

“If you apply for a job, I’ll give you a good reference. Just let me know who to call.”

After a decade of devoted service, untold sacrifice on the part of my wife and children, and an act of extreme loyalty that left my reputation ruined, John Edwards proposed to compensate me with a good reference. I could no longer contain myself. I looked at him and in dead seriousness said, “You know, I’m not sure we can really control what happens next.” I then explained that I had the sex video, a small library of pertinent text messages, voice-mail recordings by the score, and contemporary notes I had made almost every day since I began working for him. If he wasn’t willing to clear my name by telling the truth, then I would do it.

“Andrew, I’ve told Elizabeth everything,” he said. “You can’t hurt me.”

With this statement, Edwards communicated two important things. First, in the strange universe he occupied, he and his wife were the only two beings who mattered. Second, he was a remorseless and predatory creature, unaffected by the suffering of others, even suffering he had caused with his reckless behavior. I told him to take me back to my car. When we
got there I got out, closed the door of the Tahoe, and stepped aside. As he drove away, I stole one last glance through the window of the driver’s door. I saw a man I couldn’t recognize at all.

A
lmost a year would pass before I would be near John Edwards again, on a ball field where our two boys played for different teams, and he would look past me. I heard nothing from him directly in those ten months, but his wife would continue to bad-mouth me and Cheri to folks in Chapel Hill and around the country. The worst of what she did was accuse me of trying to bilk a helpless old woman—Bunny Mellon—out of funds for a fake foundation her husband knew nothing about. She said this much and more in a voice-mail message recorded and played for me by Tim Toben:

. . . I thought that perhaps you should know that John visited Bunny Mellon, Andrew Mellon’s widow, with whom Andrew had met in the course of fund-raising. And Andrew apparently tried to . . . told her that Andrew was starting a foundation, that she needed to give several million dollars in cash to the foundation.

She said she didn’t have that cash, and he suggested that she should mortgage her property. She is ninety-eight years old . . . she should mortgage her property for John’s foundation. The only problem is John didn’t have a foundation, did not ask Andrew to do anything. This was a totally bogus scam of a ninety-eight-year-old woman.

The senator later told Tim that I had been setting up a fake foundation without his knowledge. Tim reminded him that they had actually discussed the foundation long ago over dinner, when Edwards was under consideration as the Democratic candidate for vice president. Tim recalled this because he had been impressed when Edwards explained that Bunny had said she was going to help him “be to poverty what Al Gore is to climate change.”

Despite the fact that Tim had revealed Edwards to be lying about me, the senator and his wife would continue to spread such stories about me for many months. They even accused me of stealing a baseball card collection that had belonged to their son. On the day Cheri and I celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary, Mrs. Edwards left a message on my phone that said, among other things:

Andrew, it’s Elizabeth, mother of Wade, who wants Wade’s cards back. I know that you took them . . . they gave lie detector tests to everybody else . . . it leaves you . . . Are you that low that you would steal from a dead boy?

(For the record, Elizabeth knew the police had arrested someone who tried to pawn the cards. When she couldn’t identify the cards in detail, he had to be released.)

Five days after Elizabeth Edwards left her final message, Fred Baron died. In 2009, Elizabeth published a book that she called a reflection on “facing life’s adversities.” In it I was no longer the young man she asked to be “family.” I was some sort of deranged groupie or “obsessed fan.” When I read this I was hurt, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. The FBI and federal prosecutors had been to my home to talk about an investigation of the Edwards campaign. With the help of David Geneson, a brilliant and compassionate lawyer, I began putting together all the records they requested for a grand jury that had been convened.

Edwards started telling people he wanted to “get this baby mess” behind him so he could return to national politics. He and his wife continued to tell people that I was responsible for all their problems, from the failure of his campaign to the discord in their marriage. As my grand jury testimony approached, few of our old friends even spoke to us. Among the notable exceptions were Glenn Sturm, a former big Edwards supporter, and my brother-in-law, Joe Von Kallist. These two stood up for us when no one else would and immediately offered to represent me pro bono. Glenn
spoke to me several times a day and would even fly us to his ranch in Wyoming for a break.

When I eventually testified before the grand jury, the U.S. attorneys questioned me for seven or eight hours. The members of the jury then got the chance to ask their own questions. They only asked one. A man in the back row raised his hand and said, “Is the government providing you and your family protection?” I didn’t answer but the prosecutor did, saying that the authorities would provide it if necessary. When I left the room, I bumped into Bryan Huffman, who was nervous about taking his turn in the witness chair. I told him the lawyers were actually “very nice.” Bryan called me when he was finished testifying. He told me that the prosecutors had asked him how Bunny Mellon would feel if she learned that the funds she sent for poor people in Greene County and the College for Everyone Program were used instead to support the senator’s girlfriend.

Even though I was relieved when I finished testifying, my advisers reminded me that I might be required in the future to appear as a witness at a trial if John Edwards was indicted. This concern was added to all the other worries I carried as I tried to recover from my decade-long involvement with him.

I had no job prospects, and the house we had built in the woods was as yet unfinished and threatening to bankrupt me. But I had time to reflect on my experience with a most charismatic and deceptive politician and the factors that made me vulnerable to his spell. Most important, I had Cheri, and Brody, and Gracie, and Cooper. I realized that their love, and the love of the few people who never deserted us through the scandal, were the most valuable possessions I could claim.

I
n late summer 2009, my father, who had declined gradually over many years, suddenly became terribly sick and was hospitalized. Tests revealed that his degenerative heart disease had progressed to the point where his once-mighty heart was reduced to five percent of its normal function. The doctors, who didn’t know how he was still alive, sent him to hospice, where they thought he would die in a few days. I went with him and stayed as his body fought death for nearly two weeks.

My dad’s dying came as I was about to finish writing this book, and the break that it forced me to take allowed me to reflect on my own choices in life, on the nature of such basic human values as love, loyalty, commitment, and justice. During long days and even longer nights of waiting and listening to the sound of my father breathing, I dwelled on my relationship with him, my attachment to John Edwards and his cause, and my own motivations, values, and actions.

With the exception of an admittedly long period—a decade—when I strayed, I have tried to live by the values given to me primarily by my father. He was my unquestioned hero and my role model until his fall from grace when I was a senior in high school. In his sermons and his daily life,
he stood for the rights of every person to be treated fairly and to have an equal chance at success and happiness. He did this with a faith-powered commitment that endured despite attacks that included a cross burning on our lawn. Listening to him as a child, I came to believe that once you adopt a cause, you stick with it, come what may.

But as an impressionable child, I couldn’t grasp the more subtle messages my father also tried to deliver. In between his calls to the best in us, he alluded to the darker side of human nature, to excessive ambition, selfishness, greed, and deceit, and he asked the people in his congregation to face these universal qualities in themselves.

When I learned of my father’s darker nature, of how he had betrayed my mother, I rejected all of him and was unable to allow the good to exist with the bad. Not surprisingly, as I committed my own errors, I could not accept them in myself. Instead, I felt ashamed and began to live in fear that every mistake I had ever made would be used against me. I couldn’t see that this was the fate I had imposed on my father in the years I had rejected him for his mistakes.

Armchair psychologists will say that when John Edwards came along, I adopted him as a substitute for my father. He became my hero, and my commitment to him was like a son’s commitment to his father. Inside the campaigns, I found a cultlike atmosphere that eroded my ability to resist his requests for ever more extreme behavior. This analysis is correct, as far as it goes. But if you want to understand how I could have aided and abetted the worst in John Edwards, it helps to know that I was also trying to grasp, as an adult, what it means to take the good with the bad. I had confronted my father, watched him seek redemption, and made peace with him. But I hadn’t developed a mature understanding of what I should do beyond accepting another person’s flaws and moving on.

Late one night as my father lay dying, I sat alone with him and turned for comfort to some audio recordings of his old sermons. The first one I heard included the following passage, preached in his deep and familiar voice:

Love yourself. Know yourself. Accept yourself. Remember Jesus’ words when he said, “You shall love your neighbor—how? As you love yourself.”

Most of us, me included, never learn that to “love yourself,” you must first see and understand your own failings, accept them without shame, and learn to consider them as you move through life. If I had truly loved myself, I wouldn’t have been ashamed of my own mistakes and lived in fear of being found out. If I had loved myself, I wouldn’t have felt the need to devote myself to a hero and his cause. If I had loved myself, I would have understood how much Cheri and the kids valued the time I spent with them and I would have said no to John and Elizabeth Edwards.

In my father’s sermon, he also said that too many of us get caught up in trying to be “little Jesuses.” By this he meant we try to be perfect, the way we imagine Christ was, and judge ourselves without mercy when we fail. Better, he said, to try to be a “big you” rather than a little Jesus. In fact, he thought that was all God ever expected of any human being.