by Andrew Young
By morning, when it seemed they had lost Ohio by about one hundred thousand votes, Edwards spoke to Kerry and could tell he was devastated. Although Edwards thought he should wait and perhaps contest the Ohio result, Kerry soon conceded to Bush via a phone call and then scheduled a public appearance for ten-thirty at historic Faneuil Hall. While he waited for this event, the senator asked me to find his parents and bring them to his suite. When I brought Wallace and Bobbi to the room, I could see that something other than the election was going on. The senator told his parents and then told me that they thought Mrs. Edwards had cancer.
At Faneuil Hall, Senator and Mrs. Edwards seemed untroubled, smiling for the audience and applauding as John Kerry thanked them for their hard work and friendship. She had seen a doctor four days earlier and with his support delayed further tests so they could continue the campaign. As soon as the event ended, they went to see a specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who performed a biopsy that confirmed the cancer was present and showed it had spread in a way that was extremely serious.
As public figures who had made their life experience part of their political appeal to the nation, the Edwardses didn’t wait to tell the world about their crisis. Their statements to the press, and background provided by aides, helped reporters present them as bravely soldiering on—Mrs. Edwards went to a dozen events after she learned she might have cancer—for the good of her husband, the Democratic Party, and the country. Ironically enough, the news of Mrs. Edwards’s diagnosis appeared in the press at the same time the media was filled with analysis of the election and articles predicting the senator’s political future. Although he was widely regarded as the Democrat most likely to challenge Hillary Clinton for the 2008 presidential nomination, he downplayed his prospects, noting that for the foreseeable future he would be focused on his wife’s health. I felt a chill when he talked privately about how her cancer affected his chances for attaining a higher office.
Cheri and I returned to Boston two weeks later, bringing Cooper to Children’s Hospital for his surgery. While doctors in North Carolina wanted to employ the same technique they had used on Gracie, the surgeon in Boston was a specialist who used three tiny incisions and high-tech instruments to make the repair. Cooper’s recovery was quick. In a week we were home, and within a month he was pain-free and growing like a weed. Although we faced an uncertain future in the aftermath of the election, our family was healthy and together for the holidays.
Just after New Year’s, I drove down to Fuquay-Varina to pick up the senator’s brother, Blake, and drive him to the airport for a flight to Colorado, where he would surrender to the Arapahoe County sheriff and begin serving a sixty-day sentence in the county jail. His plane departed at seven A.M., so I had to fetch him at about four-thirty. He lumbered out of the house looking dejected and scared. The drive was tense and awkward, and our conversation was punctuated by his apologies. Blake was worried about how his problems reflected on his brother and how he had upset Mrs. Edwards. “Man, Elizabeth must be pissed,” he said.
As I said good-bye to Blake at the airport, I tried to encourage him by saying that everyone makes mistakes and that he would soon be home again. He asked me to make sure that the senator wrote to him while he was in jail. I got out of the car, gave him a hug, and thought it was bizarre that no one in his family had come to see him off. I passed along Blake’s request several times, but I heard the senator never called or wrote him while he was in jail.
Seven
IT’S GOOD TO BE KING
T
he silence that falls after a losing political campaign is almost total, like the quiet inside an abandoned mine. The senator said, “There’s no other business to compare it with. Based on how people vote, you go from almost leading the free world to not having a job in twenty-four hours.” A few media types might call for help with their postmortem stories, but after a day or two you no longer hear from the thousands of people who a week earlier jammed the phone lines with advice, requests, and offers of support.
After John Kerry and John Edwards lost, they didn’t even call each other very much. In fact, they lost touch in a matter of weeks as Kerry prepared to return to the United States Senate and Edwards turned his attention to his wife’s health and his own uncertain future.
Mrs. Edwards’s prognosis seemed dire. Her cancer was aggressive, and by the time it was discovered it had already moved beyond the duct where it started and into surrounding tissue. When this occurs the cancer can spread almost anywhere in the body, and the best treatment is an all-out assault with chemotherapy and radiation. It was a grueling regimen that took about six months to complete. During this time the senator divided his attention between her, their children, and his own struggle to get past his defeat and set a course for his political future. During a week when Elizabeth was between treatments and strong enough to be alone, the senator and I went together to Figure Eight Island, where we could rest and brainstorm.
The Edwards beach house sits on the Intracoastal Waterway, with a commanding view of the water. During our first few days, the senator spent much of his time walking on the beach and reading through a stack of books by or about Bobby Kennedy. Calls from political supporters brought the suggestion that he run for chair of the Democratic National Committee, and if he’d been interested in this kind of nuts-and-bolts party work, he could have had the job. However, he rejected the idea because he didn’t see how he could run for president from the DNC position, and he was probably right. When Howard Dean announced he wanted the job, he more or less accepted the end of his own desire to occupy the Oval Office.
Aside from occasional chats with his cronies, the senator’s main contact with the outside world during this beach retreat came from Elizabeth, whom he called about half a dozen times a day. I was impressed by their friendship and how he valued her input. Sometimes she’d ask to speak to me so that I could give her a report on his spirits. More than once she said, “I’m glad he’s with you, Andrew. It makes me feel safer.”
At night we would go to Wilmington, where restaurants that bustled with business in the summer were mostly empty and quiet. Although he sometimes seemed plagued by doubts about his campaigns for the White House, he also made arguments about why he had done it and even why he should try again. Invariably, the rationale would come down to his concern “for people who can’t help themselves” who needed him to be their champion, their white knight.
In all these conversations, the senator noted that Elizabeth was certain that he should mount another campaign, whether she was sick or not. During this time he admired her determination, but I noticed that he also complained more about her mood swings and demanding nature. Toward the end of the campaign, she had started picking fights with him as he was leaving for a flight or about to go onstage for some event, not caring how it might make him late or affect his performance. Often these arguments were about staffers she didn’t trust (she didn’t trust most of the senator’s aides) or about something he said or did that she didn’t like. “Sometimes I think she’s crazy,” he said.
We drank a little more than usual during this week, and as the wine took hold, the senator invariably talked about the tragedy of his son Wade’s death, going over the details as if repeating them might release some of the pain. On the day it happened, Wade’s companion, who survived virtually unscathed, had called friends in the neighborhood, who knew about it before the Edwardses. The senator told me about how the police came to their home and Elizabeth knew what was happening even before they spoke. She screamed, “Tell me he’s okay! Tell me he’s okay!” When they hesitated, she collapsed on the floor. One of the officers turned to Edwards and said, “I’m sorry, sir. Your son was killed instantly in a wreck.”
As he told this story, the combination of emotion and wine filled the senator’s eyes with tears. He said, “This is just between you and me, okay?” and then continued. The most poignant moment would come when he recalled that when he went to the medical exa
miner’s office to identify Wade, he actually climbed onto the table where he had been laid out so that he could embrace him one last time. This was the same story he told John Kerry, but unlike Kerry, I didn’t judge Edwards for repeating it. I know that people have to tell their tales of grief over and over again, so I didn’t mind. I hoped the process would help him recover his energy and optimism, and by the time our retreat was over, it seemed he had.
Despite the obstacles he might face, John Edwards believed he would occupy the Oval Office in January 2009. To get there, he would need some way to remain in public life and maintain an organization that could provide the base for a run at the nomination. I would continue to work for him as a sort of personal assistant, which meant I accepted some very unusual assignments. One required me to make good on a promise that Elizabeth made to a young woman who asked her for help getting trained to drive trucks. Elizabeth had said she would help. I wound up driving the woman, who had been Wade’s friend at school, more than an hour each way, at least a dozen times, so she could get to class. These round-trips always started before dawn.
I was not happy serving as a chauffeur so that Mrs. Edwards could fulfill a personal pledge of charity, but I did it because I believed in John Edwards and wanted to be part of his long-term effort to win the White House. No out-of-office Democrat had won the nomination in modern times. But there were some advantages to being freed from the Senate. He wouldn’t be forced into voting on legislation related to issues like abortion and gay marriage that Republicans crafted in order to paint Democrats as lacking commonsense or morality. Freed from this trap, he could present himself as a person of faith, who held moral Christian views, and this was critical to him being elected president. We began the effort by creating two organizations: a PAC called the One America Committee and an institute at the University of North Carolina called the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.
The PAC, which was named by Mrs. Edwards, would fund a small staff in Washington and pay for the senator’s travels and other expenses. The antipoverty center would support research and education and host conferences that would bring together experts on jobs, education, housing, health care, and other issues that would become the core of the senator’s 2008 campaign. He would draw only a modest stipend from this organization, but he did ask me to try to get the university to grant him certain benefits—tickets and parking for basketball games, for example—in exchange for lending his name and presence to the school. He didn’t receive these wish-list items, but he did get a beautiful office to share with his wife. However, she never actually worked there, and on the rare occasions when he was at the center, he did mostly political work, including fund-raising.
In choosing a populist, antipoverty focus, Senator and Mrs. Edwards threw out the advice of prominent consultants like Bob Shrum and David Axelrod, whom they blamed for the timid Kerry-Edwards campaign that failed in 2004. They were determined to run the next campaign themselves and as they saw fit, and they thought it didn’t matter if poverty was not a popular cause with a majority of Americans. They believed that people just wanted to see that a candidate stood for something important, as had Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms, and was strong in his resolve. (You might not agree with them, but you knew what they stood for.) They also thought that the issue would appeal to the small number of intensely political folks, especially labor leaders, who participate in the Iowa caucuses and can give a contender the momentum to win the nomination.
Edwards dreamed of getting more political legitimacy from an independent grassroots movement that would demand that he run for president. Since no one in the country was actually building such a movement, he explored the idea of creating one, on the Internet, but in a way that he could deny having anything to do with it. I attended a meeting with the senator, Mrs. Edwards, and a consultant named Zack Exley, who they hoped might pull off this trick. (Exley had been a major force in the online efforts of the liberal activist organization called MoveOn.org.) It was a giddy session, with lots of excitement about how they could start an online petition to make it seem as if thousands, if not millions, of people were begging Edwards to run. However, in the end, the Edwardses decided Exley wanted to have too much influence on the campaign. The senator would have to find support the old-fashioned way, by meeting people face-to-face and winning them over.
Once the plan was set, the Edwardses embarked on a schedule of visits to homeless shelters, union halls, universities, and other places where he gave speeches and joined forums that allowed him to remain in the public eye. He used his appearances to test ideas for his platform. One of his favorites was a College for Everyone program that would fund the first year of study for poor students willing to work ten hours a week. When he wanted to test the idea in a pilot demonstration, I raised a million dollars to fund a College for Everyone trial in Greene County, a poor community in eastern North Carolina.
Money is the fuel that runs every think tank, every political action committee, and, for that matter, every aide to an out-of-office politician. I worked hard to fuel-up all three of the Edwards organizations, raising more than $4 million, which freed him from having to spend much time on the phone asking for cash. Sometimes the hardest part of this job involved getting the senator and Mrs. Edwards to participate. For example, when I recruited a Chapel Hill businessman named Michael Cucchiara, one favor he asked for in return for his donation was that I get tickets for his wife to see The Oprah Winfrey Show. He also asked for dinner with the Edwardses.
As everyone knows, Oprah tickets were a tough get, but I managed to score some through her friend Gayle King. Cheri went to the show with Mrs. Cucchiara. She received a video camera from Oprah, who gave them to audience members willing to film themselves doing something positive in their communities. Cheri raised $30,000 for soldiers at Fort Bragg.
Getting the Edwardses to drive across town for dinner with the Cucchiaras was much harder than finagling the tickets to Oprah. I finally had to pitch a fit to get them to do it. Despite this kind of resistance, I helped to get the three Edwards organizations rolling and then maintained them with a flow of cash. Fred Baron purchased a jet, which he remodeled according to the senator’s specifications and then gave to him to use.
While most of his expenses and staff were covered by the money I raised, and favors from supporters like Fred, Senator Edwards wanted to continue to generate personal income as a matter of both financial security and pride. His political contacts and experience made him an attractive commodity for influence-and information-based operations like law firms, lobbying outfits, management consultants, and investment houses. Always alert to opportunity, he went to the industry with the most money—finance—and got a part-time gig with a hedge fund called Fortress Financial for a salary of roughly $500,000 per year.
As he did with the poverty center, the senator put very little time into his Fortress job, but it allowed him to become an investor in exclusive funds generally closed to newcomers. He put $16 million into Fortress, which before the economic collapse of 2008 used a variety of creative and controversial schemes to deliver high rates of return. If you think that hiring on with a hedge fund that avoided taxes by incorporating offshore accounts conflicted with Edwards’s political concerns about “two Americas,” rich and poor, you aren’t alone. The irony wasn’t lost on his critics, and they would eventually catch up to him; but before they did, he would profit handsomely. He added to this income by making speeches about poverty, some of which netted him up to $55,000 apiece. One of these appearances was in the United Arab Emirates, where he was accompanied by a new body man, Josh Brumberger, who later told me that the service at the seven-star luxury hotel in Dubai was “the kind of attention Edwards always wanted.”
With his need for a political base and personal income met, the senator next turned attention to his home and his appearance. Using my name to register under, he checked into a hospital for extensive dental work and plastic surgery to remove a mole from his upper lip. The
new teeth were susceptible to stains, so after he got them he switched from Diet Coke to Diet Sprite and diet orange soda. Still holding to the routine, I bought these drinks by the caseload and had them waiting whenever I met him with the car, but at this time I also began a quiet exercise in rebellion by making sure the left armrest for his seat was always lowered when he got in. It may seem like a small thing, but he preferred to have it raised so he could move around in the seat. I put it down and smiled to myself whenever an annoyed look flashed across his face before he pushed it up. I also took silent pleasure in waiting for the moment he would demonstrate that he had become truly spoiled rotten by voicing a complaint about this tiny inconvenience.
The senator got lots of opportunities to complain to me during this time because I was his only North Carolina–based aide, and he needed to be home as much as possible as Mrs. Edwards planned the construction of her dream house in Chapel Hill. The process began when they put their house in Washington up for sale and bought more than a hundred acres to accommodate a sprawling house, as well as a barnlike athletic building housing a basket ball court, racquetball court, exercise room, and indoor swimming pool along with living quarters. Emma Claire and Jack got adjoining tree houses, complete with working windows, measuring more than one thousand square feet each. Mrs. Edwards, who added rooms for Christmas ornaments and gift wrapping to the plans, had found inspiration for this project at John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s estate in Pennsylvania, which is a beautiful collection of rambling old structures set amid rolling farmland.