by Andrew Young
The senator and Mrs. Edwards were just about the only sources of conflict in our marriage, but they provided enough trouble to spark frequent arguments. Although I was disillusioned, I was stubborn about my commitment to the senator and to the issues he represented. Ever since 2000, when he was hailed as the future of the Democratic Party, I had operated as if I were helping to make history. Cheri had long since stopped trying to stand against the cause and agreed to follow my lead if possible. But this didn’t mean she was happy about it. In fact, eight years after I started working for a politician, she still didn’t like or trust any of them. And she was furious about the time one particular politician demanded from me. But it was a good time for me. In this period I raised almost $3 million in donations and was paid a percentage of the money I made, which increased my income substantially. It was a long way from the days of the phone banks.
I
would have had an easier time persuading Cheri to have a little faith in politicians if the one I worked for hadn’t become so reckless and selfish. These flaws had always been part of his character, along with the small-town insecurity bred in Robbins and the immaturity that comes with being Mama’s favorite boy who could never do anything wrong. But the more people told him he could and should be president and invested their time and money in making it happen, the more pronounced these flaws became. As he was welcomed into the seats of power in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and other places, Edwards came to believe his place there was part of the natural order of things. When he told me, “This thing is bigger than any one of us,” he meant that his destiny was practically born in the stars. This status could justify almost anything.
The senator wasn’t the only one who got intoxicated by power. Mrs. Edwards had knowledge of her husband’s affair and understood that if he won the nomination, the Democratic Party and the country could be traumatized if the truth about Rielle came out. She also had the power to demand he drop out, but she did not. Instead, she pressed on with the drive for the White House and became increasingly strident and critical. On November 9, 2007, after she and the senator had finally hired a few more professionals to help the campaign, she sent this blistering e-mail to Joe Trippi (who had helped make Howard Dean a star in 2004), Jonathan Prince, and pollster Harrison Hickman:
The videos I saw (which Kathleen forwarded me, as if it was somehow forbidden for anyone to speak to me directly) were well-shot (with the exception of the set piece that had the dismal background, a visual completely inconsistent with the message) but that is all I can say good about them.
The complaints that followed were numerous. Mrs. Edwards charged Trippi, Prince, and Hickman with “doing a lousy job” and being so focused on undermining one another that they had not developed any coherent advertising strategy. She dubbed them a dysfunctional “white boys’ club,” and her litany of failures criticized the negative content of the material, and bitterly complained about what she presumed was their expenditure of “money John raised (by being away from his family) to focus group that lousy bunch of advertisements. . . . Testing lousy material to see what is the least lousy is hardly the way to run a presidential campaign.” According to Mrs. Edwards, they had “the best candidate in the race with which to work,” but were “producing the worst possible product.” Rather than presenting John Edwards as a “contemplative” or “energetic” candidate, or a “candidate with hope,” she claimed the videos made him look like “[j]ust a sanctimonious bellower.” In a particularly vivid barb, she charged, “You may end up having crapped on one another, but it all sticks to John.” She claimed they hadn’t listened to her in the past, and doubted they would listen to her now. Finally, in closing, she issued the following imperitive: “And Jonathan, you can keep testing me but this is a test I will win. Send it now.”
These last two lines in the message, copies of which went to eight additional staffers, referred to Rielle Hunter’s phone number. For months, Mrs. Edwards had been demanding that Jonathan Prince hand it over, and he had dodged these requests. Eventually, he would be able to tell her that he didn’t have the number, because, in fact, we changed it many times. I thought he was wise to avoid being triangulated between the senator and his wife. Joe Trippi responded this way:
It has been an honor working for you and John. I have done the best I could under the circumstances. But I will step aside. Your email makes it clear to me that I have outlived any usefulness to the campaign. I am sorry for that.
Mrs. Edwards’s outburst had revealed how her dark side was coming to the fore to obscure all of her better qualities. The better parts of John Edwards were as real as his faults, and these gifts—his intelligence, compassion, energy, and courage—had led me, over the years, to invest my future in his success. In that same time I had learned that many, if not most, powerful men operate with the same sense of entitlement shown by the senator.
By the year 2008, Internet outlets had buzzed with rumored affairs involving Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and both John and Cindy McCain, so I thought that all of the viable candidates for president faced potential scandal. Republican rule had been such a disaster for America that I was almost desperate to see a Democrat win, and I believed Edwards had the best shot, especially since he might win a few states in the South that I believed were beyond the reach of the others. This concern, combined with our long-standing relationship, explains why, even after I knew so much about his shortcomings, helping him remained a reflex.
I thought we would get a break from Edwards duty at Thanksgiving. Cheri and I took the kids to her parents’ house in Illinois while Rielle entertained her old roommate from New Jersey, Mimi, and Mimi’s two adolescent sons. Most of the communication I got from her over the holiday was innocuous. Comically, after the turkey feast she sent me a text message that said she was watching the movie Knocked Up and “it’s great.” Two days later, she wrote that her holiday was going well except for the fact that she was “not hearing from him.” I was off duty until Sunday, when I would have to go home to North Carolina to get the Batphone and deposit it in the campaign jet before the senator left on a speaking tour.
Leaving Illinois ahead of my family, I flew into Raleigh and drove to the Montross house. Thinking I was late, I grabbed the phone and raced to the fixed base of operations (FBO) that served the jet Fred Baron had bought to lease to the campaign. The only help I had for this mission would come from a personal assistant (who was paid by the campaign) at the Edwards mansion who was still my friend. She called my cell phone to warn me when they left the house for the airport.
I was relaxed when I reached the FBO because I now thought I had plenty of time. I saw Fred’s plane, which had the tail number N53LB, and I talked my way past the maintenance crew and out to the stairway. Once on board, I could see the plane was dirty and hadn’t been stocked with food, drinks, or periodicals. Realizing something was wrong, I went back down the steps and noticed that one of the two engines had been removed for repair. This jet wasn’t going anywhere.
A quick call to the personal assistant brought me the name of a different FBO where Edwards was to board a replacement jet. I talked one of the ground crew into driving me over there in a golf cart. When we reached the plane, I persuaded the pilots to let me board. Here all the skills of bluff and bluster that I had acquired as a political operator came in handy. They had never handled a presidential candidate’s schedule, so I explained that they should always expect an advance man to come for a preflight cabin check. As I walked down the narrow aisle, I slipped the phone into the right seat-back pocket. After giving the pilots a thumbs-up, I emerged from the cabin doorway to see the Edwards caravan approaching. I jumped onto the tarmac, trotted to the golf cart, and left before I got caught. From a distance, I saw Elizabeth outside the plane, kissing her husband good-bye.
T
hey caught me, Andrew! It’s the National Enquirer. They surrounded my car taking pictures. What should I do?”
Rielle was callin
g from her BMW as she drove away from a supermarket near her obstetrician’s office. She was giddy with excitement, but also a bit worried about what it might mean for the paper to publish photos of her, heavy with child—and possibly not so pretty—running errands just a few miles from the Edwards mansion. She asked me to connect her with the senator, and I did, immediately. When their call was finished, he rang my phone. He sounded both desperate and demanding. “This is bad, Andrew,” he said. “You have to get her under control.”
In a rapid-fire conversation, we reviewed what had happened and concluded that Rielle should come to my house. Before he hung up, the senator asked me if I had any idea how the Enquirer had found Rielle in North Carolina. “Just between us,” he said, “I suspect she’s talking to them. Do you think so?”
I told him, “Hell yes. All she does is talk on her damn phone about you.”
He didn’t want to believe it. He preferred to theorize that the paper had staked out Mimi’s house and followed her by car to the Governors Club at Thanksgiving. Ultimately, it didn’t matter how Rielle had been discovered. All that mattered was the picture they had captured and the fact that the Iowa caucuses were three weeks away. Edwards was neck and neck with Barack Obama for the lead in the polls. (Hillary Clinton was a distant third.) After years of work and a huge investment in cash, the hopes of the millions who saw a bright future in John Edwards might be realized if he won Iowa and received the inevitable rush of donations that could power him through the primaries. Of course now, with the Enquirer guys chasing Rielle as if she were Princess Diana (a thought that both scared and thrilled her), the campaign could be ruined by scandal. After all, as Rielle said, she was “tired of living a lie.”
As far as I could tell, no one followed her to our place, but I had Rielle park in the garage behind the closed door just in case. She came inside grinning and shaking and talking excitedly about how the photographers had rushed up to her and barked questions while they took her picture. She was happy to think that she looked cute in her jeans, a flowing black top, Louis Vuitton handbag, and silver shoes. But she was also worried about how the senator might react.
By the end of the evening, after we fed Rielle dinner and Cheri started the roundup for bed, I drove the candidate’s mistress to her house, leaving her car in the garage. It was visible because we had opened the door to walk out. As I arrived back home, I saw that a dark-colored Jeep Liberty (a boxy sport utility vehicle with four doors) had been backed into our driveway. All of its doors were open, and no one was in sight. I stopped my car in a spot where I blocked the Jeep from leaving and walked into the garage. I could hear the kids squealing inside and thought for a moment that some friends must have come to visit. When I opened the door to the house, I saw they were all running around half-naked (it was bedtime), and Brody screamed, “There are two big men looking in the kitchen window!” Cooper and Gracie ran to me and grabbed my legs.
In an instant I figured it was probably the Enquirer guys, which meant they weren’t burglars or rapists. But I still felt we were being threatened, even violated, and I could feel anger rising through me. I called out to Cheri, telling her to take the kids upstairs and get behind a locked door. I went back out to the garage and, before reaching the driveway, grabbed a broom and hit the switch to close the big door.
It was now dark outside, which meant the prowlers would have trouble seeing me. I shouted, “Cheri, where’s our gun?” as if she could hear me and we actually had a gun (we didn’t), and then I pressed the broomstick against the driveway and used my foot to snap it in half. The noise was surprisingly sharp, almost like a gunshot, and in an instant two men came scurrying out of the darkness with their hands up.
One of these fellows was an older British-sounding man. The other was a young American. The Brit tried to explain that he and his colleague were from “the American Media Corporation of Los Angeles,” as if they represented a prestigious company, perhaps the Los Angeles Times. He did not say “the National Enquirer.”
At this point, Cheri came outside. She was shaking with both fear and anger. Above and behind her, the kids peeked out of the second-story windows, pushing apart the blinds so they could get a view of what was going on. I told her to go back inside “and call the sheriff.” Cheri was pleased to turn the tables on these guys with a call to the authorities.
As she retreated, the two men, who couldn’t leave because I had blocked their Jeep, tried to talk me into letting them go. They also pressed me for information about Rielle and the senator. “Why are you covering up for him?” they asked.
I wasn’t bothered by their questions. In that moment, I thought they were scummy guys who had terrified my kids, and I was hoping they would be arrested. But as it turned out, they knew more about the laws on trespass than I did.
The sheriff’s deputy soon explained to me that the local law would allow him to make an arrest only if our property was posted with “No Trespassing” signs (it wasn’t) or if they had been peeping at naked people inside. Since the kids had their pajamas on halfway, we couldn’t claim they were violated. The deputy had to let the two men go, but as he did he made sure to tell them, “If you had come to my house, I would have shot you first and asked questions later. That’s what we do in Chatham County.”
Once the deputy had informed us of the law and I had discovered how the skulking journalists had gotten inside the Governors Club—they had posed as golfers headed for the clubhouse—I moved my vehicle and let them depart. Inside, I apologized to Cheri for being so gruff in the middle of the confrontation. While we talked, the kids hugged us and asked about the men who had been peering in at them and about the deputy who had come to our house with the lights on his cruiser flashing. They were scared, and all we could say was that the men were not supposed to be on our property, they had made a mistake by coming to our house, and the deputy had protected us.
In the next hour, I spoke to the senator several times. He was remarkably calm and absolutely certain that he could control the Enquirer. Determined to stick with his denials about the affair, he decided to confront the editors and publisher with their Clinton connection and argue that going to press with baseless charges would make them look like a tool for his opponents. If this argument failed, he said, he would attack the Enquirer report as “tabloid trash” and offer to sign an affidavit denying that he was Rielle’s lover and the father of her child.
I thought his strategy was wrong. Attacking the paper would only invite more aggressive reporting, and a false affidavit is always a bad idea. I counseled him to wait. Even if the story leaked out, it would take many days, if not weeks, for it to reach a mainstream audience. By then the caucus would be over and we could have a more coherent strategy. Nothing was settled that night, in part because the senator was too busy preparing for the final debate of the Iowa campaign, which was set for the next day in the Des Moines area.
It was almost midnight by the time things got quiet at our house. The kids were so upset that we let them all come into our big bed to sleep. This would be the first night of many that all five of us slept together, heads and feet everywhere. It would also be the first night of many that I would keep a knife at the bedside and get up frequently to check the windows and doors. Somehow, we were supposed to go back to our regular lives in the morning. Cheri and I planned to drive the kids to school and then shop for a turtle habitat and food at a big pet supply store called PetSmart. We needed turtle stuff because Cheri had found a cute orange-and-brown eastern box turtle on the dirt road leading to our building site. She had put him in the car and brought him home for the kids. They loved Mr. Turtle, but Cheri and I worried they might handle him a little too roughly, or a little too often, and thought he would be happier in his own secure home. Anyone would.
Eleven
THE COVER-UP
A
lthough we had moved out of the purple mansion, for the sake of stability we had kept Gracie and Brody at Scroggs Elementary School in Southern Villag
e. It was just a few blocks from the campaign office I had helped set up for John Edwards but where I was no longer welcome. On the morning after the deputy sheriff came to our house, we actually saw several of my former colleagues on the street. They turned away, either pretending they didn’t see us or snubbing us intentionally. At school, Brody told his class that “the police were at our house last night.”
After we made sure the two older kids were safely inside Scroggs and delivered Cooper to his three-hour preschool class, Cheri and I ran a few errands together. (We were feeling a little paranoid and didn’t think we should separate.) The last stop on our schedule was the turtle supply department at PetSmart. If you have never been to one of these places, imagine a supermarket-size store filled with rawhide bones, aquariums, catnip toys, and every other item a family pet might require. As we went inside and looked for the right aisle, Cheri and I went through a little routine we have, where I predict that whatever we’re shopping for is going to be exorbitantly priced—say, five hundred dollars for a clear plastic turtle house—and she says we can get everything we want for next to nothing.
When we finally found the spot in the store where they sold the terrariums, heaters, misters, food, rocks, decorations, and other turtle items, I knew that outfitting Mr. T was going to cost us far more than Cheri expected. I became more certain when the young man in charge greeted us and began his monologue about what we owed this little critter when it came to his care and feeding. I was almost relieved when my cell phone rang and I saw it was the senator. I told Cheri I was going outside to speak to him, and she nodded.