The Politician

by Young, Andrew

  For years, I had used my credit cards or the Edwardses’ personal credit cards to pay for the senator’s personal items so that they wouldn’t be charged to the campaign and then turn up in the public reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. Political opponents and news reporters scoured these documents as they were submitted each quarter, hoping to see something juicy in the spending. The senator’s pricey haircuts would certainly catch the eye of any journalist interested to see if the man who was the champion of the poor was a spendthrift. I made sure that no one ever knew about them. When the new, inexperienced staff got the job of arranging for the senator’s personal on-the-road needs, they pushed two bills for four-hundred-dollar haircuts through the normal campaign channels, and the payments were included in the big public quarterly report submitted to the FEC.

  The revelation of the four-hundred-dollar haircuts, which was discovered by the Obama campaign, would have been bruising for any candidate under any circumstances, but it was worse for Senator Edwards because of his antipoverty focus and because of a video on YouTube that showed him having makeup applied and fussing over his hair to the tune of “I Feel Pretty” as sung by Julie Andrews. For a few weeks the “Pretty” video, which went viral at the start of spring, was one of the most viewed political items on the Internet, and it revived a mean-spirited line of attack that officials in the Bush White House had devised to use against John Edwards in the 2004 campaign.

  Back then, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times made public the Bush team’s decision to refer to Edwards as the “Breck Girl” and emasculate him by playing on his boyish good looks. Dowd has a habit of using gender issues to attack people, often suggesting something’s wrong with any man showing so-called feminine traits. In this case, she gave currency to the Bush rhetoric, which just happened to be accurate.

  Unstated, but always part of the context when it came to their public image, was the idea that John Edwards was actually prettier than his wife. This was an issue inside their marriage, and it contributed to her insecurity and his roving. It was also an unstated factor in the campaign and in the minds of many women voters who found him attractive and were reassured that his attachment to Mrs. Edwards remained strong as she aged more rapidly than he did and cancer stole some of her beauty. He gained political capital by loving the real Elizabeth, no matter what age and childbirth and illness did to her body. He lost a little of it when he spent too much time and money attending to his hair. And as they both knew, he risked losing all of it if his relationship with Rielle Hunter became known. Since Mrs. Edwards assumed that I was responsible for keeping Rielle around, she connected me with the threat inherent in the haircut problem. I thought she should have realized that I had always protected the senator from similar unpleasant episodes and that this one arose because she had tried too hard to marginalize me. Mrs. Edwards also didn’t know that my work for the senator was going to yield a remarkable offer of aid that would prove essential to keeping alive the senator’s hope of becoming president and Mrs. Edwards’s dream of being First Lady.

  In the midst of the negative publicity, which forced Senator Edwards to tell the press he didn’t know his haircuts were so expensive and confess the issue was “really embarrassing,” a letter from our friend in Upperville, Virginia, landed on my desk. Written in delicate script on pale blue stationery, it was decorated with a sketch of a graceful tree with the Blue Ridge Mountains in the background.

  As she wrote, Bunny Mellon was appalled by the treatment John Edwards was receiving. “I see jealousy coming from somewhere in this news report,” she said, and then she volunteered to pay whatever expenses the senator incurred that could not be covered by the campaign, including the employment of a valet. She instructed me to simply send the bills to her attorney, Alex Forger, and rest assured that they would be paid.

  Bunny had written the letter as she sat in the room of her disabled daughter, Eliza, something she did many afternoons, talking to her and conducting correspondence with prominent people all over the world. I was charmed to imagine her in her beautiful house, thinking up ways to use her fortune to make life a little easier for people she admired and believed in, like Senator Edwards. I remembered the story she had told of offering her plane to help Jackie Kennedy Onassis attend Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral and how she had accompanied her on the trip to Atlanta, carrying baskets of food. This woman had been coming to the rescue of various people for four decades. This offer to Senator Edwards was just the latest expression of quiet support for those she believed to be worthy. Little did I know how much support he would soon require or how generous a kind lady in Virginia would be.

  RIELLE

  H

  eather North, the nanny, was one of the few people who knew what I knew about the Edwardses and Rielle Hunter, and there were times when she and I compared notes. These talks were part gossip and part mutual support, which we needed, considering the stress that comes with keeping secrets. We were both struck by the midlife crisis aspect of John Edwards’s affair and how he had obviously found in Rielle someone who was his wife’s opposite. A New Age drifter who made her own rules, Rielle was always working the “fun-and-single-blonde” angle. She was someone who offered sex, spiritual advice, or good company as you had a few drinks. Mrs. Edwards looked like who she was—a highly educated, middle-aged mother, cancer victim, and wife of thirty years.

  As different as they were in style and background, Rielle and Mrs. Edwards were both ambitious and self-confident. Both were certain that John Edwards should be president and that if he was elected, the world would be a much better place. And they both believed in the power of their own insight and intuition. Mrs. Edwards followed hers to guide the campaign. Rielle relied on hers to advise the senator personally. Finally, they were both insecure about the future and the senator’s true intentions. These feelings led Mrs. Edwards to try to push me out of John Edwards’s life. They led Rielle to depend on me to connect her to him. I was squarely in the middle.

  On the day the senator went home to deal with the recurrence of his wife’s cancer, Rielle called me at least half a dozen times to complain about spending her birthday alone. “He loves me,” she would say, “and it’s just not right that we’re not together.”

  In the weeks that followed, Rielle seethed over the attention Mrs. Edwards received from the media, but she also celebrated the jump in the senator’s poll numbers. We spoke every day, usually more than once. With his schedule in hand, Rielle was able to meet him in various hotels when he was campaigning without his wife. However, the rules of engagement, so to speak, had changed as Mrs. Edwards had become keenly aware of Rielle Hunter. She monitored call histories on phones (at least those she could locate) and called her husband many times a day when he was away. Mrs. Edwards also forbade hotel operators from transferring calls from women to his room and regularly changed his check-in pseudonym.

  More concerned than ever about being caught, the senator required Rielle to be as furtive as possible. When he was in New York, she could no longer wait in the hotel lobby and then go up to his room. Instead, she had to hang out in a bar next door and hope to either catch sight of the entourage entering or wait to receive a cell phone call. During one of these stakeouts, she looked up to see John Davis, the body man, enter and take a seat at the counter, which was between her and the door. Panicked, Rielle ran to the restroom and hid. After a long wait, the woman who had served her a drink came to ask if she was all right. Rielle told her a tale about how she was hiding from one of the customers, and the kindly waitress let her slip out a back door.

  The drama excited Rielle, as did the sense of power she felt as a secret insider with a direct line to a man who could become president of the United States. She followed his every move on the twenty-four-hour news channels and the Internet and spoke to him numerous times every day on the Batphone or via a three-way call. He felt calmed by Rielle and wanted to talk to her before every debate and major event. She believed her spiritua
l blessings were vital to his success. When she couldn’t get through to him directly, because he was at home without the special phone or Elizabeth was around, she called me incessantly.

  In late April, Rielle called and left me a message while she was watching a televised debate. It was the first to include all eight Democratic Party candidates. She seemed happy with the senator’s performance until the end, when he was asked to name a person he considered a moral leader. After mentioning Jesus Christ and before naming his father, he said, “My wife, who I think is the finest human being I have ever known, is a source of great conscience for me.” Over the phone, Rielle groaned and said that if Elizabeth Edwards was anyone’s moral leader, “we’re all going to hell.”

  Although it’s difficult to say she showed a whole lot of conscience about the way she conducted herself (I never saw her troubled by doubt after she indulged in a tirade or fired a staffer), Mrs. Edwards was quick to criticize others for what she believed were displays of moral weakness or bad behavior. This trait was on full display when she publicly scolded Ann Coulter for lying about her husband.

  The Coulter conflict arose after the right-wing commentator used the word faggot in connection with the senator and talked about how she wished he had been assassinated. Mrs. Edwards surprised her by calling into the Chris Matthews TV show Hardball and getting on the air to ask her to quit the personal attacks. It was good theater, but I didn’t understand why a potential First Lady would engage in debate with an insult comic like Coulter. But influencing Coulter was not the point. Mrs. Edwards called the show on an impulse. It caught the senator and the campaign staff by surprise. She wanted to defend her husband, and her ever stronger performance as a campaigner had given her the standing and the courage to act.

  Unfortunately, Mrs. Edwards’s courage often empowered her to express frustration and anger in clumsy ways. In the call to Hardball, she was more emotional than reasoned, and she came off sounding like a scold. She was similarly off pitch when she gave an interview in which she complained about the media focus on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the advantage minority status gave their campaigns.

  “We can’t make John black, we can’t make him a woman,” she said. “These things get you a lot of press . . . [and] fund-raising dollars.”

  These comments brought criticism from those who thought she was whining and found it awfully hard to work up sympathy for a white Southern man with enormous wealth and privilege. But like the Hardball call, they did energize Mrs. Edwards’s more fervent supporters, who saw her as the spunky wife saying what needed to be said on behalf of the best candidate. Of course, they didn’t know that even as she stood up for him, John Edwards was continuing to betray her and that the threat posed by the force of nature that was Rielle Hunter had already become much worse.

  B

  y May 2007, Rielle and I were in constant communication. I had never known a woman who needed more attention, but on the day I received four calls in the space of an hour, I knew something unusual was going on. The senator was traveling with his wife (no Batphone) and about to begin taping an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. Having deflected Rielle three times, I answered the fourth call feeling irritated and almost angry.

  “Somebody better be dying or pregnant,” I said.

  “Nobody’s dying,” sobbed Rielle. She then threatened to go to the press with evidence of their affair—she was Camera Girl, and she had plenty of pictures—if I didn’t find a way to connect her with Senator Edwards immediately.

  The senator had told John Davis to always accept my calls, no matter where he was, and he was one of the few people in the campaign who had expressed suspicions about Rielle. He tried to brush me off, but I was adamant and said, “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.”

  During a break in the taping, Davis managed to pull the senator aside and get him to call me from a private spot. I shouldn’t have been startled by his initial response to what was happening—he asked me to “handle it”—since I had fixed a thousand problems for him in the past. This time I said, “I can’t handle this one,” and he agreed to talk to her.

  Whatever he said kept Rielle quiet, temporarily. Later that day, cussing and barely under control, he would tell me that Rielle had long claimed she was physically unable to get pregnant and that since she was “a crazy slut” and they had an “open” relationship, he thought there was only a “one-in-three chance” that he could be the father of her baby. He told me she should get an abortion and asked me to help persuade her to do it.

  The next time I spoke with Rielle, she said that the senator had told her to get an abortion. I am pro-choice, but when she asked me what I would do, I thought about my kids and said I wouldn’t go through with an abortion. She talked about how she was a forty-two-year-old woman who wanted to have a child before she got too old. She also believed that the baby she was carrying—a combination of his intellectual brilliance and her spiritual superiority—was some kind of golden child, the reincarnated spirit of a Buddhist monk who was going to help save the world. There was no way she was going to have an abortion.

  Instead, pregnant Rielle would require more attention and support than ever before, and this would cost a lot of money. Even though he possessed a fortune worth tens of millions of dollars, the senator had no way to access this money without his wife finding out. This problem had become especially acute in the months since Mrs. Edwards had learned about Rielle, and was complicated by the financial stress related to their new home.

  For years the Edwardses had spent freely, but as they built their mansion, they realized that more money was going out than was coming in. First they accused their closest aides—including me—of abusing the access to funds they had granted us in order to help keep their various households going. Once these spending streams were stopped, they then imposed stricter accounting for their own expenses. Unable to sneak any cash out of this system, the senator asked me to pay for Rielle’s silence. He suggested I draw on the profit Cheri and I had realized in the sale of our Lake Wheeler house, which was reserved for the new place. (He promised I would be repaid.)

  I had already covered some of Rielle’s expenses, and as a minor player in the macho games of scheming, high-powered men, I think a part of me would have felt proud to say I was rich enough to offer the senator this favor. But even as he asked me to use money that was, by rights, Cheri’s as well as mine, the senator begged me to hide everything about Rielle from her. He asked this because he understood that what he was doing was shameful, and sensed that Cheri had never trusted him as I did. Of course, I couldn’t do what he asked. I had already told Cheri everything. She was well aware of Rielle, and disapproved of the way the senator was putting his wife and children at risk. And now that Rielle was pregnant, this was obviously a long-term project and we didn’t have the funds to support her lifestyle.

  Once I was crossed off the list of potential donors, Edwards suggested David Kirby. The senator thought that Kirby owed him support because of all the big jury awards he had won for their firm, but Kirby did not agree. I suggested an appeal to Fred Baron, but the senator said, “Fred’s got a big mouth, and he’s too close to the Clintons.” Finally we focused on Bunny Mellon, who had made it clear she would give Edwards money for extraneous expenses with no explanation required. Edwards called her, and “the Bunny money” began to flow. To make her feel rewarded for this aid, the senator stayed in touch by calling her from the road. In June, he called her from backstage in Manchester, New Hampshire, just prior to a nationally televised candidates debate. (On that same evening, I was attending a function at my kids’ school—it was “Spanish Night”—and the senator called demanding I help him contact Rielle. Cell phone reception was poor at the school, so I had to leave the event to facilitate a three-way call.)

  Bunny’s checks, written for many hundreds of thousands of dollars, were made as payments to her decorator, Bryan Huffman, so that she wouldn’t have to offer an explanation to
the professionals who handled her accounts. These funds (and the money that came from Fred Baron later) were gifts, entirely proper, and not subject to campaign finance laws. She did not know that the money was being used in part for Rielle. Bunny sent the checks to Bryan hidden in boxes of chocolate and with notes discussing her contributions to “the confederacy.” Bryan sent them to me with notes of his own. One said, “A little table money,” because the memo line indicated it was payment for an antique table. Another said, “For the rescue of America,” which was how Bunny referred to the way she used her money on behalf of Democrats in general and John Edwards in particular. After I received each check, it was deposited in joint accounts I held with Cheri, to be used to keep Rielle happy and hidden from the media, Mrs. Edwards, and anyone who might divulge her existence. This was the arrangement the senator expected me to follow, so that he would have “plausible deniability.”

  In accepting the checks and responsibility for Rielle, I plunged myself, Cheri, and my kids into hot water. The temperature wasn’t so high that it was uncomfortable, so we stayed in the pot. And like frogs that will remain submerged in a pot on a stove while an experimenter raises the temperature ever so slowly, we would stay in this situation far too long, enduring as each new demand increased the heat by a fraction of a degree. Unlike frogs, we would get out before it was too late. But looking back, I find it hard to believe that we didn’t hop away on the day Rielle arrived at our house with photographers from the National Enquirer hot on her trail.