“Thank you,” Edwards said, apparently relieved. “I’m lucky you saw that, because those women, I don’t think they would have quit.”
Brumberger would always wonder about that evening: Was Hunter’s presence really an accident? Had she and Edwards met before? Did she slink into the hotel and spend the night with him after Brumberger went home to his New York apartment? Because a few months later, without warning, Hunter was back—in a big way.
“Get ready to get mic’d up,” Edwards told Brumberger in June, before a speech the candidate was set to deliver at the National Press Club. We’re gonna have a camera operator and a documentarian traveling with us, Edwards said. We’re gonna show the world what it’s really like to be John Edwards.
The idea was that Hunter would produce a series of Web videos documenting life on the road with Edwards. Edwards told Baldick, now running his PAC, that he liked the concept, that they should do it. Baldick objected for any number of reasons—but not because he had the slightest worry that Edwards was fooling around with Hunter. That was one thing the people in the Edwardsphere never stressed over when it came to John, who they believed had long ago made the decision not to fall into that trap. And, anyway, he had always seemed . . . well, sorta asexual, at least to his staff.
No, Baldick’s concerns revolved around the way the project would feed the ego monster. Oh, great, a camera with you, he thought when Edwards raised the subject. This is gonna be a really good idea. Baldick also quailed at the cost—the proposed budgets Hunter submitted ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars. For months, Baldick used the price tag as a reason to resist signing her contract. But Edwards kept poking at him, calling him weekly, saying, It’ll be really cool! It’ll be on the Web! We’ve got to push the envelope! Eventually, a big check came in from one of Edwards’s donors, and that gave John his trump card. “Now Nick can’t tell me no,” he said to Brumberger triumphantly.
By then, Hunter was already a constant presence on the road with Edwards. Who needed a contract? There was history to be made! All summer long and into the fall, she traveled with him everywhere—Pennsylvania, Texas, Iowa, Ohio, and New York, even on a trip to Africa, where they visited Uganda. Nothing about it was secretive: her name was always on the flight manifests, and even Elizabeth’s allies thought Hunter was legit, that Elizabeth had probably approved the project, given her fascination with the Web.
There was nothing legit, however, about Hunter’s behavior. It was freaky, wildly inappropriate, and all too visible. She flirted outlandishly with every man she met. She spouted New Age babble, rambled on about astrology and reincarnation, and announced to people she had just met, “I’m a witch.” But mostly, she fixated on Edwards. She told him that he had “the power to change the world,” that “the people will follow you.” She told him that he could be as great a leader as Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. She told him, “You’re so real. You just need to get your staff out of your way.” She reinforced everything he already believed, told him everything he wanted to hear.
Edwards swooned, of course. Gobbled up her every word like so much pop-psych popcorn. He spent hours talking to her, listening patiently to her ideas about the state of American democracy and her advice on media strategy. (She had intuitions about Chris Matthews.) He ate every meal with her, sat next to her on the plane and in the car, offered to wheel her bags through airports. He told the staff to treat her like a principal. He behaved as if she were a combination of an adviser and a spouse. When Baldick suggested that she not take this or that trip—It’s all meetings, he would say; we don’t need footage of those; let’s save some money—Edwards would resist. When Hunter wanted access to some event that Brumberger thought she shouldn’t attend, Edwards would order, “Let her do it.” Or plead, “C’mon, just let her do it.” Or lean over and whisper conspiratorially, “Just let her do it this one time.”
It didn’t take a genius to suss the warning signs, and Brumberger was no fool. He had been worried about Hunter since she first came on the road, when he Googled her and discovered that, in her party girl past, she had been the model for the “ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious” character Alison Poole in Jay McInerney’s novel Story of My Life. It took Josh a while to screw up his courage, but he finally did, knocking on Edwards’s hotel room door one day that summer in Ohio.
I’m not accusing you of anything, Brumberger nervously said. But I need you to know there’s a perception out there that you have a different relationship with Rielle than you do with everybody else, and we’re in the perception game, and we know that perception becomes reality. I just need you to be cognizant of it, because your staff is starting to talk.
Edwards nodded and smiled reassuringly. I get it, he said. Thank you. Say no more. I hear you loud and clear.
Brumberger exhaled and walked out of the room thinking, Yes! Home run!
But nothing changed.
If anything, Edwards’s behavior became even more brazen. At the end of August, he brought Hunter over to the family’s new mansion outside Chapel Hill. She spent the whole afternoon and evening exploring the place, shooting footage of his family with her video camera. His parents were there, happily answering questions about their son. His two younger children were there, too, and Rielle lingered with them, interviewing both one-on-one on camera, delighting them by showing an interest in their opinions.
Elizabeth was up in Cambridge that day, dropping off their oldest daughter, Cate, at Harvard Law School. Hunter made herself at home, prowling comfortably around the big house, taking off her shoes, curling up on the sofa. She stayed for dinner with Edwards, the children’s nanny, and some family intimates.
Brumberger’s dealings with Hunter, meanwhile, were getting testy. Increasingly, she treated him and the rest of the staff as if they worked for her—and Edwards was doing nothing to stop it. On a trip to Missouri over Labor Day weekend, it had been decided that Edwards would fly back east on the private plane alone, with the staff traveling commercial. Hunter objected, demanding a seat on the jet with Edwards. An argument ensued. Edwards sided with Hunter. Brumberger was fed up. Arriving back home in New York, he picked up the phone and called his boss.
This is hard, Brumberger began. I don’t know how to say this, but I’m really worried about where your head is. I came to you in Ohio, I thought I got through, but the problem has just escalated and gotten a lot worse, and I’m really, really worried.
“Okay,” Edwards said frostily. “Anything else?”
Brumberger was beside himself now. He flew down to Washington and met with Baldick, Peter Scher, who’d been Edwards’s chief of staff for the 2004 general election, and Kim Rubey, Edwards’s press secretary. For Baldick, the alarm bells had already started ringing, when he got a look at the first webisode produced by Hunter. It was filled with so much flirty banter and overfamiliarity between her and Edwards that it made Baldick cringe. When he and his wife watched it at home in bed on Baldick’s laptop, she turned to him at once and said, Oh, my God! He’s fucking her!
Somebody senior had to confront Edwards, they all agreed. The first to try was Hickman, who’d known him the longest and was often tapped for difficult conversations with John. Hickman phoned and gingerly said that people were talking about him and Hunter. One of the things people most admire about you is your commitment to Elizabeth, he said. You don’t want to mess that up. “I know what you’re saying,” Edwards replied. “I’ll deal with that.”
Scher was next to raise the issue, traveling up to New York from Washington and meeting Edwards in his room at the Regency.
“So you think I’m fucking her?” Edwards asked.
Well, are you? Scher pressed.
Edwards said he wasn’t.
Well, if you’re not, everyone thinks you are, Scher replied. So unless she’s going to play some vital role in your future that I don’t understand, he continued, it seems to me that she shouldn’t be traveling with you anymore.
Edwards calm
ly agreed—so calmly, in fact, that Scher took it as a clear indication that he and Hunter were having an affair. If someone accused me of cheating on my wife, I’d say, “Go fuck yourself!” he thought.
A few days later, Brumberger flew from New York to Chicago to join Edwards, who’d come in from North Carolina, for the start of a trip to China. “Hey, I need to talk to you,” Edwards said abruptly when they met in the terminal at O’Hare. They walked together to the airline’s premium lounge, where Edwards had reserved a private meeting room for their conversation. “Sit,” Edwards said—and then tore into Brumberger.
Stuff from the road is getting back to people, and it’s obviously you who’s doing it, Edwards said angrily, his southern drawl rapidly rising. You didn’t recognize who you work for. You don’t work for Nick and Peter. You work for me. I trusted you like a son, but you broke my trust. I can’t have you around me anymore. You’re not coming to China and you’re never working for me again.
Brumberger’s heart sank. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said. “I always thought my goal in all of this was to do everything I could to help you become the next president of the United States.”
“Why didn’t you come to me?” Edwards asked.
“I did come to you! I came to you in Ohio. I called you after Labor Day! I tried!”
“No,” Edwards said. “Why didn’t you come to me like a fucking man and tell me to stop fucking her?”
They were both yelling now at the top of their lungs, red-faced and teary-eyed. (“You’re a twenty-seven-year-old kid and I’m a grown man!” Edwards railed. “Don’t you think I’ve thought about this?”) But when Edwards finally regained his composure, he seemed to recognize the implications of sacking Brumberger. Let’s talk about all this when I get back, he said.
But Brumberger had had enough. Crushed and mortified, he was finished with Edwards. It would be a very long time before they spoke again.
Brumberger’s firing sent shock waves through the Edwardsphere. Baldick, Rubey, and longtime communications adviser David Ginsberg followed him out the door. All three gave Edwards other pretexts for quitting, but there was no escaping the conclusion that the candidate was diddling Hunter, and that he was hell-bent on resisting the efforts of the people closest to him to save him from himself.
The departure of much of Edwards’s inner circle only weeks before he planned to declare his candidacy didn’t seem to trouble him. Most of his team had clashed with Elizabeth, so he could chalk it up to that. The valley of staff was getting smaller; so much the better. Hunter was still traveling with him everywhere, while Elizabeth had been a distant figure from the campaign for much of the fall. Her new book, Saving Graces, was a huge success, charting high on the bestseller lists. She was even more famous now, more iconic, more beloved than her husband by a mile. She appeared on Oprah and countless other TV shows, establishing a broad constituency of fans.
Elizabeth had never crossed Hunter’s path—until the afternoon of December 30, 2006, in Chapel Hill, at the last stop on the announcement tour for John’s presidential bid, which Rielle was on hand to shoot.
Elizabeth and her family were waiting at the campaign headquarters in a small room with big windows overlooking an expansive lawn below. Hundreds of people were there for the rally, milling around outside, listening to a bluegrass band. Edwards and his aides arrived straight from the airport and breezed into the room. Hunter was toting her camera, sticking like glue to Edwards, acting the way she always did—too familiar, too intimate. Always jealous of anyone, male or female, who seemed close to John, Elizabeth watched Hunter working the room. The expression on Mrs. Edwards’s face said: Who is this woman? And what is she doing here? Icily, Elizabeth asked Hunter to back off. “Excuse me, we’re trying to have some privacy,” she said.
As Edwards took the stage, Hunter rushed to get into position to film his speech. Elizabeth, her brother, and her sister-in-law observed Hunter’s movements. Onlookers watched them engage in an animated conversation in which Elizabeth was visibly upset.
When the whole wretched business eventually became public, Elizabeth would claim that her husband revealed to her the next morning that he had slept with Hunter—but that it had happened only once and afterward he was consumed with remorse. Her first reaction, she would say, was that John should leave the race, but he convinced her that dropping out immediately after the announcement would raise suspicions that would be hard to put to rest.
Whatever was actually said between them, by the next afternoon, Elizabeth was on the phone with members of Team Edwards, issuing marching orders: Hunter’s contract was to end, the webisodes pulled from the Internet, the raw video retrieved as soon as possible.
That woman is crazy—get rid of her, Elizabeth said.
And John professed agreement.
“We have to get the tapes back,” he told one of his aides. “She’s dangerous.”
And with that, Rielle Hunter disappeared. But not really. And not for long.
THEY ALL SAT IN silence around the square table in the middle of the Edwardses’ living room in the new estate on Old Greensboro Road. It was late in the afternoon on March 21, 2007, and John and Elizabeth had called their closest aides together to talk about her health. It had been a roller coaster of a day, with Elizabeth at the hospital for hours of tests and difficult talks with her doctors. The news had been dark, pitch-black dark, for a while, but now it was merely bad, which made it seem almost good. John explained that Elizabeth’s cancer had returned and moved from breast to bone. Calmly, clinically, he explained the diagnosis and prognosis: it was treatable, but incurable.
Among the handful of aides gathered in the room and listening in by phone, more than a few wished that Edwards would use the development as an excuse to leave the race. And if Elizabeth really wanted him to quit after learning about the affair with Hunter, this presented the perfect opportunity for him to do so, no questions asked. For the past three months, as the campaign got under way, Elizabeth and John had been fighting savagely on the road, sometimes causing events to be delayed. She was telling friends that John had changed, that he no longer cared about anybody but himself. To a longtime aide, she put the question “Don’t you think he’s kind of messianic?”
But Elizabeth didn’t ask her husband to get out. She insisted that he stay in. We can’t let my cancer impact the future of the country, she told the group that day. He has to run. He has to be president. I believe it’s the most important thing that we can do.
Their decision set off a national debate: Should a candidate continue with a grueling campaign when there was serious illness at home? Was it fair to Elizabeth? Was it fair to their children? Would it be fair to the country if he won to have a president with such a trauma consuming his attention?
But John and Elizabeth insisted they were doing what they knew was best—for themselves, their family, and the voters. And despite whatever doubts existed in some quarters, it generally was accepted that Elizabeth had a right to determine how she spent her time, even if she preferred to continue the exhausting fight to get her husband elected president rather than rest quietly at home.
Edwards’s position in the race was strong at the start. He’d come flying out of the gate, offering up a flurry of bold and concrete policy plans, notably on health care and global warming. He was in the driver’s seat in Iowa. His relationship with labor was tight. His early fund-raising was surprisingly robust: $14 million in the first quarter of the year, not nearly as much as Clinton or Obama, but double his take in the same period four years earlier. Obama’s entry, John and Elizabeth believed, didn’t alter their original assessment of the contest. Barack was a phenomenon, no doubt about that, but one that would pass.
In the wake of the Hunter flare-up and the recurrence of Elizabeth’s cancer, the dynamic between husband and wife shifted in the context of the campaign. He was more deferential to her; she was even more assertive. Former congressman David Bonior, the campaign’s new manager, h
ad no experience running a presidential operation and struck much of the staff as an extremely nice but very clueless guy. Elizabeth seemed to love having Bonior nominally in charge, because it meant that, in effect, she was in charge. On everything from hiring to advertising, her influence was singular.
She pushed John hard on policy—always to the left. On health care, in particular, she lobbied vociferously, in meeting after meeting, for him to embrace a single-payer plan as the route to universal coverage. In television interviews, on blogs, and on the trail, Elizabeth was outspoken in support of her causes, at times advocating policies—in favor of gay marriage, for instance—more progressive than her husband’s. In 2004, Edwards’s campaign had been sunny, centrist, and thematic. Elizabeth prodded him toward being hotter, more populist, and more sharply ideological and anti-establishment. And in that cause she enlisted a new ally, bringing into the campaign that spring the consultant Joe Trippi—for whom tilting at the Establishment was akin to breathing.
Trippi was a piece of work. At fifty, he had toiled for seven previous presidential hopefuls, from Ted Kennedy to Gary Hart to Dick Gephardt to Howard Dean. Brilliant, eccentric, and mildly unbalanced, he’d long been a pioneer in applying new technology to politics. Though John Edwards was interested in Trippi mainly because he thought the shaman had some magic formula for turning the Web into a fund-raising spigot, Elizabeth was enamored of his heady talk of transforming the campaign into a movement.
Trippi thought John was high on his own vapors in considering himself equal to Clinton and superior to Obama. But he also believed that if Edwards could beat them both in Iowa, it might be enough of a game changer to propel him to the nomination.
The day after Trippi joined the campaign in mid-April, he got a call from a reporter inquiring about whether Edwards had received a $400 haircut. (Another question he heard early on from a member of the Edwardsphere struck him as even more unsettling: “What are you gonna do about the girlfriend?” Dude, what are you talking about? Trippi wondered.) Trippi soon learned that the haircut was, in fact, just one of three interrelated imbroglios that would plague Edwards for months. Inside the campaign, they called them “the three Hs”: the haircuts, the hedge fund, and the house.
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