The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards's Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down

Prologue

Late on a spring afternoon, the soft Carolina sunlight filtering through the pines around our house reminds me of why I have always loved my corner of the world. The great universities in Raleigh-Durham and Chapel Hill draw extraordinary people from around the world, but like us natives, most of them stay, at least in part, because of the quiet, natural beauty. There is no better place to make a home, raise a family, and enjoy the simple pleasures of life. I thought about this as my wife, Cheri, packed some snacks—juice, apples, Goldfish crackers—into a cooler and I helped our eight-year-old son, Brody, pull on his Yankees uniform and find his mitt. It was time for the last game of the 2009 season, and he was excited.

Along with Cheri, Brody, and me, the crew in our minivan included our six-year-old daughter, Gracie, our four-year-old son, Cooper, and Tugger, the new chocolate Lab puppy. As we drove down the winding dirt lane that cuts through thick woods to the main road, Brody talked about whether his team would beat the Mariners and remain undefeated. Gracie and Cooper anticipated finding other children to play with on the sidelines. Cheri and I wondered whether we would meet, face-to-face, the former friend and boss who had betrayed my devotion and trust—given freely for more than a decade—and then made our existence a living nightmare.

Halfway to the ball field we passed the Bethel Hickory Grove Baptist Church, where the man in question had married his wife, Elizabeth. I knew the story as well as anyone. She showed up carrying a soda pop. He gave her a ring that cost eleven dollars. They had a one-night honeymoon in Williamsburg, Virginia, and then quickly settled into a life built around their law practices and then their children. In those early years, Elizabeth, who had grown up in Japan as a navy brat, was the sophisticated one and he was the diamond in the rough. She bought his clothes, coached him on his courtroom presence, and advised him on how to navigate the social scene.

We reached the end of the road and turned left onto Highway 54 and then left again at the park entrance. On one side of the lane, a few people walked dogs in a specially fenced area. On the other side, a couple of kids hacked away on a tennis court. My throat tightened a bit as we approached the baseball field and I saw kids and parents clustered on the bleachers and near the backstop.

It was an all-American scene—kids in baseball uniforms, families gathered on the grass, fireflies flashing in the air. But as any team parent knows, social intrigue often lurks beneath the Norman Rockwell surface. Real life comes with pettiness and gossip that can make people feel uncomfortable. In our case, the idle and mean-spirited talk wasn’t about some neighborhood dispute or a run-of-the-mill extramarital affair. Oh no. We had been caught up in one of the seamiest national political scandals in recent history. And just about everyone in the country, if not the world, believed they knew enough to judge us in the harshest terms.

I had hoped that the man at the center of the story would have had the sense to stay home. But as we parked I saw his familiar silver Chrysler Pacifica, which I had helped him purchase. (I was startled to see that the rear bumper of the car, usually plastered with half a dozen campaign stickers, was bare.) Cheri and I braced ourselves emotionally as we got the kids out of the car seats. When we closed the van doors and walked toward the diamond, it felt as if every head turned toward us. Every head, that is, except one.

Out on the field was the man who had once promised me the brightest future I could imagine and then abandoned me to national disgrace, hiding behind his sunglasses, talking on his cell phone and chatting with the boys on the Mariners team, including his own son Jack. The players, with big ball gloves on their hands, seemed as cute as floppy-eared puppy dogs as they chased pop flies and grounders. My former friend, who beamed at them with his world-famous smile, looked like America’s Father of the Year, an award he actually won in 2007.

We joined the Yankees sideline, where everyone except the kids felt the tension. Cheri and I sat alone, ignored as the other parents chatted. As the innings passed, we marveled at the way our old friend and his wife—two people who had been as close as family—refused to even look in our direction. Once we would have hugged as we said hello and then spent the entire game side by side, laughing and talking. Half the people at the park would have wandered by just to say hello. A few would have asked for favors, which were granted with a simple Call Andrew and he’ll take care of it. And I would.

This time there were no hugs and no jokes, and no one came to ask either of us for anything. Jack and his sister Emma Claire, who used to play with our kids, looked at Cheri with confusion in their eyes. We had no idea what their parents had told them about us. We overheard one of the mothers in the crowd whisper something about the Youngs.

When the game ended with our guys a few runs behind (so much for an undefeated season), my old friend, boss, and mentor walked the long way to his car so he could avoid us and everyone else. While other parents were still collecting empty juice boxes and tired little ballplayers, he and his family were halfway to their home. It was the last time I would ever see my former boss, John Edwards—once one of the most powerful politicians in the world. But it was hardly the last time I would be forced to deal with the shame, distress, and anguish that came out of my own dedicated effort to help him become president of the United States.

_______

As I write this, on a sunny midsummer morning in 2009, I am waiting for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to come sweep our home for listening devices. I called them after a couple of mysterious break-ins. (They will find nothing, but they wanted to make sure we weren’t being bugged.) I’m in regular contact with the United States Department of Justice because I have just completed testimony before a federal grand jury investigating allegations of corruption in John Edwards’s recent campaign for president. After I swore an oath to tell the truth, federal prosecutors questioned me for hours about huge sums of money that had quietly changed hands, and just who knew what, when. The process of giving testimony is what you might expect. I sat in the witness chair, and as the men and women of the grand jury scrutinized me, the prosecutors pressed me for exact information about checks that were written, the way the money was used, and the timing of events. They wanted names, dates, and amounts in very specific terms. The ordeal was grueling but also reassuring, because it forced me to recall and try to understand the people, events, and decisions that had almost ruined my life and the lives of people I love.

I found some real peace in finally telling the whole truth in the grand jury room, and I am continuing to follow this process as I write this book, which will set the record straight, and try to salvage some positive lessons from the scandal that brought down one of the most promising leaders of a generation. My critics will say I am writing this book for money. They are partly correct. The Edwards scandal has left me practically unemployable, and as a husband and father, I have serious responsibilities I can meet by publishing my story. But I also have every right after three years of silence to tell my story and clear up the many lies that have been told about me and John Edwards. I believe that anyone who cares about history and the way things work in politics has a right to the truth.

Of course, the lawyers in the office of the U.S. Attorney for North Carolina weren’t interested in my family responsibilities or my desire to make something worthwhile out of the ordeal of the last few years. They wanted to hear my story in order to resolve potentially criminal issues around the Edwards affair and its cover-up. And no one in the world knows more about these events, and more about the real John and Elizabeth Edwards, than I do. I was the man who took the bullet for then-candidate Edwards by falsely claiming that I had fathered the child he had with a mysterious woman named Rielle Hunter. It is an indisputable fact that I willingly participated in this ruse. I joined in the deception, and at the time, amazingly, I believed it was the right thing to do. Once the decision was made, Cheri, our children, and I went on the run with Rielle to escape the press. Flying in private jets and changing locations several times, we managed to disappear, under the direction of Senator Edwards and his biggest political backers. During this time, I arranged for Edwards and Rielle to stay in constant contact. I also played a key role in keeping the truth—about the depth of their affair, the paternity of her child, and his ongoing commitment to Rielle—from the candidate’s cancer-stricken wife.

Without knowing more of the details, anyone looking in from the outside would consider what I did and conclude that I must have been a cold-blooded schemer who was motivated by ego or greed or the desire for power. It’s true that I had hoped my sacrifice would be appreciated. Everyone who works in politics wants prestige, status, and a good salary. But when this misadventure began, I didn’t request a single specific thing. On his own, when he asked me for this favor, John Edwards did promise to tell the truth within a reasonable amount of time.

I was paid well while I was on the run, but I also took a huge risk with my reputation and my family’s future. In fact, I might have abandoned John and Elizabeth Edwards many years before, when I had proven myself as a fund-raiser, campaign aide, and overall political operative, and could have sold my services to the highest bidder. Instead I stayed with them for ten years, watching others come and go on to bigger and better things. I did this for one primary reason—I believed in John Edwards and all the things he said he stood for, especially his commitment to equal rights and opportunity for all, including the people who have been traditionally pushed to the side in Southern politics. Although it might be hard to recall in the Obama era, at one time John Edwards was heralded as a potential savior for a Democratic Party that had been hammered by Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and the conservative noise machine. Like many others, I believed he was destined to lead the party and the country.

In the beginning, and through most of our time together, John Edwards had given me an outlet for the powerful idealism that I had first felt as a small boy who sat awestruck every Sunday as my father, a big, charismatic Southern preacher, filled the prestigious Duke University Chapel with words of hope, wisdom, and inspiration. As university chaplain in the turbulent seventies, the Reverend Bob Young challenged prejudice and small-mindedness in a booming voice that was one part professor and one part Bible-thumping preacher. He confronted a comfortable white congregation with the legitimate grievances of the poor, blacks, and women. But he also offered hope and understanding. Accept your mistakes, errors, failures, sin, he said one Sunday. Acknowledge them, know them, and live.

When my father was pastor, the formerly staid chapel welcomed to the pulpit greats of the civil rights movement like Martin Luther King Jr. and heroic leaders like Terry Sanford. A former governor, president of Duke, and U.S. senator, Sanford was once John Kennedy’s choice to replace Lyndon Johnson as vice president in 1964. I often sat on his lap at the chapel while a thousand people listened in rapt silence to my father’s message. No experience could have been more inspiring. As light streamed in through stained glass and the great pipe organ literally shook the pews with sound, I learned to imagine myself as a part of something bigger. My father, Terry Sanford, and their friends had been involved in the civil rights movement and had witnessed and participated in historic events. Their stories gave me chills.

At home, I spied on my dad as he wrote his sermons late on Saturday nights and then practiced the lines. I came to walk and talk just like him, and his example became my guiding star. Of course, I knew I could never match my dad’s achievements. A tall, powerfully built man, he was the twelfth of thirteen children born to a farmer in the tiny town of Woodfin. With his intelligence, talents, and determination, he rose to the top of North Carolina society. My mother, a smart and beautiful woman, was equally accomplished and driven. At the University of North Carolina, when Dad requested a visit with her at her sorority house (back then the house mother played gatekeeper), she came downstairs to meet him only because she thought he was a basketball player named Bob Young. Confident and charming, my dad nevertheless swept Jacquelyn Aldridge off her feet. Soon they married. He was elected president of the UNC student body, and she was elected secretary.

In contrast to my outgoing parents, I was a naive, bookish kid, the youngest of four, who found adventures and heroes in books and got so nervous when called on in class that I could barely speak. I started to come out of my shell at fourteen, when I served as a page at the state legislature. I saw enough whiskey bottles and sexual intrigue in the statehouse to realize you take the good with the bad in politics. (From Raleigh to Washington, the bad always seemed to involve infidelity.) But I remained idealistic. I also developed into a young man who threw himself heart and soul into every challenge. When my brother insisted I try out for football, like every good Southern boy, I hated it at first but stuck it out and eventually started. I made friends easily, and the experience reinforced my belief that everything good was possible.

Then, when I was seventeen years old, came a series of events that shook me to the core. My dad, always strong as a horse, had several heart attacks that led to his first double bypass. It changed Dad and my family forever. The following year, my senior year in high school, my parents attended counseling and traveled extensively in a futile attempt to save their struggling marriage. The week after I graduated high school, my father left his Duke job for a much lower-profile pulpit in the little city of Statesville. Soon after, he was caught in an affair with a church deacon’s wife. The deacon videotaped my dad and his wife at a Red Roof Inn. I’ll never forget my father calling to tell me, They caught me, Andrew. They caught me. The scandal became widely known. My hero was exposed as an adulterer, and our family broke apart. While my father’s brilliant career was destroyed, my neat little world spun out of control.

Disillusioned and heartbroken, I stumbled through my early twenties, dropping out of Furman University and then opening a sports pub (ironically named Winners) in Asheville, which thrived until I lost control of the finances and it went belly-up. Bankruptcies were rare and shameful in those days, and when I locked the door and ran away from my debts, I left behind a great many angry and disappointed people who thought Andrew Young was the lowest son of a bitch in the world. I would have agreed with them. The lowest point may have been the night I used an expired key card to sneak into a hotel room and slept hidden on the floor between the bed and a wall because I was broke and desperate to get in out of the cold. During this time, I drank way too much and got into plenty of minorleague trouble, the worst of which involved a stupid attempt to steal a fifty-dollar sign from a bar. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

When I finally grew up and got serious about life, I went back to school for a bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina and a law degree at Wake Forest. The most difficult thing for me at law school was responding to the professors when it was time for me to stand in front of the class to review a case. Whenever this happened my heart would pound, I’d grow flushed and sweaty, my voice would tighten, and I found it almost impossible to express myself coherently. Despite this problem, I managed to get through the program, and along the way, I realized I didn’t want to practice law. I was far more interested in politics, especially the politics of my home state.

North Carolina has a unique, almost bipolar political history. In 1898, the coastal city of Wilmington saw the only violent coup in American history when a mob of white vigilantes called Red Shirts wielded a Gatling gun bought by the famous Daniels publishing family to take over the city and drive away thousands of black residents. (From that day to the Jesse Helms era, fear-based racism played a big role in the state’s political affairs.) But North Carolina is also home to great progressives like Terry Sanford, who broke down racial barriers and built some of the best public and private universities in the country. We gave the country Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, and we went for Barack Obama in 2008. Regressive, progressive, and everything in between: That’s North Carolina.

My first full-time involvement in politics came in 1994 when I became part of Democratic governor Jim Hunt’s campaign. As a volunteer, low-level fund-raiser, I saw old-fashioned politics firsthand. The four-term governor was a progressive, and his policy priority was a terrific education program called Smart Start. He was also a hard-driving politician who knew how to run his machine. At his quarterly fund-raising conferences—staff called them Come to Jesus meetings—Hunt would work himself into a lather urging his people to raise campaign funds for those kids. He would then display a color-coded map of the counties, which showed who was winning in the money game and who was losing. People would be publicly praised for meeting their quotas—like star salesmen at a convention—or criticized for falling short.

Everyone knew that campaign donations were rewarded with jobs or public works projects. More than a few men got rich because they knew to buy land where a new road was going to be built or received contracts to provide goods and services to the state. These connections also explained why one county might get a big new bridge or an eight-lane highway and another did not. Although this kind of horse-trading was common, it was obviously unfair to outsiders, and the participants liked to keep it quiet.

After Governor Hunt’s reelection, I worked briefly for the state Commerce Department, then with the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers in the state capital. My boss was the group’s main lobbyist, and my work revolved around fund-raising, staging events, and helping to keep the office going. It wasn’t the kind of work I had dreamed of doing while I listened to the sermons at Duke Chapel, but it was a responsible job in politics—by now I was a full-fledged political junkie—and I was on my way toward building a career. I knew I would never be a candidate or a very public figure, because my anxiety about speaking in front of people wasn’t getting any better. (If anything, it was worse.) But I could dream that I might one day become an insider who could have an exciting career and perhaps make the world a better place.

The pieces were coming together in my personal life, too. After I spent more than a decade as a committed bachelor, a kind and beautiful woman had finally broken my complacency. The chance meeting happened in the spring of 1997 in Cancún, in one of the most famous bamboo tourist bars in the world, Señor Frog’s. We had both gone to the bar to fetch drinks for friends. Cheri wore a sexy black dress. I wore a red polo shirt and a baseball cap. We fell to talking, and I was completely taken by her beauty, warmth, and openness. We forgot our friends and danced the night away. When I got back to my hotel, I was so partied out that I couldn’t remember her name or the name of her hotel. All I could recall was her room number—312—and I couldn’t find anything to write with. Finally, in desperation, I laid out three bottle caps (for the number 3) next to a single credit card and two room keys so I could remind myself in the morning and then fell asleep.

The next day, I telephoned hotel after hotel, asking for room 312 and then hoping that whoever answered would help me. Finally, on about the fifth call, I reached a room where a young woman answered and said, Oh, is this Andrew? You must want Cheri. Bingo!

Cheri spent almost all the rest of her vacation with me. She was the sweetest and most beautiful woman I had ever met, and I could tell we were falling in love. When the time came for her to depart, I met her in the lobby of her hotel and we waited for the airport shuttle to arrive. As the driver called for passengers, she started crying. I kissed her, told her I already loved her, and impetuously told her I believed we would get married someday. Cheri’s eyes grew wide, and she gripped me tightly. We both had been hurt in bad relationships, and as much as she wanted to believe me, it was crazy. I can’t explain it, but I already knew. She was unlike anyone I had ever met. Just believe, I whispered. For some reason, I knew it would happen.

Our long-distance romance took place in Denver, Raleigh, and Los Angeles, with side trips for a cruise and vacations along the California coast. Seven years younger than me, Cheri was twenty-three and had just begun a career as a traveling nurse. An agency booked her on three-month assignments that moved her from city to city so that she could see the world while making a living. After growing up in a small town in southern Illinois, she was pursuing the life of adventure she wanted. It was full of new friends, new sights, and new experiences. She was not ready to fall in love or settle into a serious relationship, but we had fallen head over heels.

We were so crazy in love that I skipped my family’s Christmas celebration and went to meet her family in the tiny town of Highland, Illinois. My first impression of the town was that it was small, cold, and windy—and had a lot of cornfields. When we got to her house, a gust of wind caught the door of my SUV as I opened it, and it banged me hard in the head. The blow opened an old wound, which started bleeding profusely just as her mother, father, and thirty close family members came to greet us. A bandage and some compression stopped the flow, but I wasn’t finished making an impression on my in-laws-to-be. I tossed and turned all night and finally got up early, took a walk, and bought a newspaper. As I was reading it at the kitchen table, her mother came in to cook breakfast. She lit a candle that was on the table. The paper went up in flames, singeing all the hair off my arm. Adding insult to injury, that night her mom walked in on Cheri and me as we were making up after having had a little spat.

Despite all the mishaps, Cheri’s family decided they liked me, which, given how close they all were, was extremely important. She and I settled into a life together in Raleigh, where we shared a little apartment in an old downtown building with huge windows, hardwood floors, and posters of Jack and Bobby Kennedy on the walls. Cheri’s favorite bit of decoration was a slogan I had found on a paper bag, cut out, and taped to the refrigerator. It said, Never Confuse Having a Career with Having a Life. To me, it meant that happiness could be found in a balance of work and love, and it seemed like a great piece of advice.

It was pretty easy to stick to the refrigerator motto in those days. Cheri worked long shifts as a nurse at the hospital—I usually drove her there and picked her up—but she had lots of days off. I put in my eight-hour days for the trial lawyers association, jogged at lunch, and at night I would cook dinner and we’d sit on the little balcony at our apartment, where we could watch the sun set over downtown. We’d spend weekends at a lake or the beach or traveling. We felt like the luckiest people in the world.

I offer all this background not to explain or excuse any choices that I made later, but to reveal, as best I can, the man I was before I tied my fate to John Edwards. I had been blessed in many ways. I had grown up in a comfortable home as the son of a prominent family who had introduced me to people and ideas that were exciting and inspiring. My mother and father both loved me and taught me that I should try to make the world a better place. I had the support of friends and extended family. I had a good big brother, two loving older sisters, a dog, and a horse. And in the community of Raleigh-Durham/Chapel Hill—known as the Research Triangle—we were respected even when my father’s more liberal ideas rubbed people the wrong way.

Life inevitably brings change, loss, and trauma to everyone. Growing up requires us to accept that people are deeply flawed and that sometimes, at least in the short run, evil seems to triumph over good. In my case, these realizations came in a shocking way as my father’s affair took away my hero, my family, and my community. I didn’t respond well at first. But in time, I recovered my equilibrium. By age thirty-two I had finished my education, started a career, and found someone to love (who also loved me), and I had begun to see a brighter future. It was the summer of 1998.

One

THE SPELLBINDER

That summer, the members of the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers went to Myrtle Beach for a meeting where they would network, do business, and attend professional seminars at a beach-front hotel called the Ocean Creek Resort. A palm tree paradise with secluded cottages, hotel towers, pools, and a white-sand beach, the setting was ideal for a working vacation. My job would require putting on a party where the group could meet political candidates and organizing a five-kilometer road race. Otherwise, Cheri and I were free to make the long weekend into a