The Politician

by Young, Andrew

  The senator talked as if he had all the time in the world, even though the Des Moines debate was just two hours away. (His demeanor made me think that he possessed at least one presidential quality: the ability to stay cool in a crisis.) Gradually, he came around to the real purpose of his call. He wanted me to issue a statement taking responsibility for Rielle’s baby—to insist I was the father—and then disappear with her, Cheri, and the kids for a few weeks. The senator’s rich trial lawyer friend Fred Baron would let us use his private jet and pay for our expenses as we enjoyed the equivalent of a multiweek luxury vacation.

  I was dumbfounded. How, I asked, was I supposed to explain to my wife that I should confess to an affair I never had, claim an unborn child that was not mine, and then bring her along with our family as we attempted to vanish into thin air? Although he couldn’t begin to tell me how I might accomplish these tricks, the senator did appeal to my commitment to the cause that is “bigger than any one of us” and to our friendship. When I told him that he was asking me to ruin my career and my ability to support my family, he said that was not true. He would make sure I had a job in the future, he said. “You’re family. A friend like no friend I’ve ever had,” he added before concluding that if I helped him, I would make Mrs. Edwards’s dying days a bit easier. “I know you’re mad at her, Andrew, but I love her. I can’t let her die knowing this.” He said he thought her days were short.

  Sitting there on the curb in front of PetSmart, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. My wife and children had been so shaken by the creeps from the National Enquirer that they were no longer comfortable at the Governors Club. My colleagues at the office I had opened, but where I no longer had a desk, were shunning me. All of my professional contacts, made through my work for Senator Edwards, were slowly evaporating. And the much beloved and respected Elizabeth Edwards was telling mutual friends, donors, politicians, and anyone else who would listen that I was the worst kind of scoundrel. (The senator had obviously told her the lie about my being the baby’s father long ago.) In short, I was fucked, and at that moment I couldn’t see that I had any options but to continue playing John Edwards’s game.

  As I hung up the phone, Cheri came out of PetSmart hauling turtle stuff. When I didn’t say anything about her purchases, she realized that the content of the phone call must have been serious. I told her that I needed a few minutes to think before I tried to tell her about it. With about a half hour left before Cooper would be ready for pickup at preschool, I steered the car toward McDonald’s.

  The drive-through was backed up with the cars of other parents buying Happy Meals, so we moved slowly toward the intercom station where you place your order. After I finally got to holler for Chicken McNuggets with chocolate milk and the right toy, I turned to Cheri and in the time it took us to reach window number one (where you give them the money), I said, “Edwards wants me to say I’m the father of Rielle’s baby, and then Fred’s gonna fly us off to someplace where we can all hide.”

  At this point in the “conversation,” I had reached the pay window, so I pulled out my wallet and handed the young McDonald’s cashier a twenty-dollar bill. She gave me the change, and as I pulled forward to collect the food, Cheri began to sputter.

  “Are you out of your mind? Why would you even tell me about this? Why didn’t you just say no?”

  Cheri wasn’t exactly yelling, but she was loud. At the delivery window, I reached out and took the McDonald’s Happy Meal box from the clerk and said, “Thank you.” The clerk didn’t bat an eye. My guess is that she had seen plenty of women talking loudly to their husbands at the drive-through.

  Once she had vented her outrage, Cheri sat quietly for a few minutes. Among the thoughts that raced through my mind in the silence was that I had gotten us stuck in a big mess involving two billionaires, a presidential candidate, a pregnant mistress, and a whole lot of money. Cheri was having the same thought, and she was recalling the run-in with the men from the Enquirer. That ruckus had only added to the sleep debt she had been accumulating ever since Thanksgiving, as Gracie and Cooper seemed to get one cold or ear infection after another. We were both exhausted and afraid, and once we started talking about the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter problem, we could see it only in the most threatening way. What if the press kept hounding us? Who would ever hire me after the collapse of my career and Mrs. Edwards savaging my reputation? I started to feel light-headed, and Cheri could see I was upset. We were already deep into this mess. I had signed an expensive lease for Rielle’s rental house. I had bought her a car, and I had agreed to be responsible for her into the foreseeable future. These facts hung over our decisions.

  The trip from McDonald’s to Cooper’s school was so short that we got there before we could settle anything. We stopped talking when Cooper got into the car and let him tell us about his experience in class. He chattered all the way home, where we went inside so he could eat his Happy Meal and we could get ready for Rielle to come over. She wanted to watch the Iowa debate with me, and since I couldn’t go to the campaign office anymore, and Cheri was not the least bit interested in what John Edwards had to say, I had told her she could come over for it.

  According to the analysis I read later, the debate was a boring one. Hillary Clinton talked about the looming Social Security and Medicare deficits. Obama pandered to the locals by saying he would cut federal payments to agribusiness and give more aid to family farms. Edwards made a faux pas in his opening statement, saying, “We should make this country better than we left it.” Laughter from the audience made him correct himself. During the rest of the session, he talked about the “two Americas” and fighting corporate greed and otherwise went through the motions, as though he were distracted. Rielle and I were distracted, too, as I laid out the plan the senator had suggested.

  Initially, Rielle was foursquare against it. “There’s no damn way I’m doing this,” she said. “I’m not going to live a lie.” But as we talked, she said she could “handle” the prospect of having both a wealthy presidential candidate and a billionaire benefactor devoted to her care and support. “Not too bad, considering I was sleeping in my car a few years ago,” she said. She could keep up contact with Senator Edwards and, in the meantime, live in luxury until events played out. With these thoughts in mind, her nay vote quickly turned to yea.

  My wife was not so receptive. She pointed out that the senator had offered no definitive end point for the scheme, other than a vague assurance that it would be over in a few weeks and then he would take responsibility for Rielle’s baby. She also didn’t trust the senator’s promise that if I continued to be a good team player, I would have a job for life with either him or Fred.

  Cheri reminded me of promises the senator had made and broken, including his offers to give me more prominent roles in his campaigns. With her words in mind, I called Fred, who assured me that my salary—including a recent 130 percent raise—would be continued along with my health insurance until my new career was established. “You can do anything,” said Fred. “We will make it happen.”

  Exhausted and under intense pressure to make a decision, we finally agreed that even if we followed through on the senator’s plan, no one who knew us would actually believe the story he wanted everyone to tell, so we took the plunge. I would work with a lawyer named Pam Marple, who was recommended by Fred Baron, to craft a statement to release to the media. Once that was done, we would fly off in Fred’s plane to a place where no one could find us.

  As he listened to me accept his scheme, a prospect that anyone outside the situation would say was ridiculous, the senator breathed a huge sigh of relief. Over and over again he said that he loved me, he loved Cheri, and he was going to support us in every way he could for many years to come. When we discussed the details, he said, “It’s going to be a one-day story, Andrew. No offense, but the press doesn’t give a shit about you. They want me. But if we give them a story they can understand, a story about two staffers, they’ll go away.”

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  hile Pam Marple and I worked on the statement that would be issued to the press, the senator and his allies failed to persuade the editors at the Enquirer to hold the story. No one knew what they planned to say exactly, but we assumed that as soon as a photo of Rielle with child went into circulation, Elizabeth Edwards would go on a furious emotional rampage. The senator was as concerned about this as he was about the prospect of his candidacy being destroyed. On many levels, he still loved Elizabeth and didn’t want to hurt her. We all knew that in her fury Elizabeth could do a lot of damage to innocent people.

  To get ahead of the situation, the senator said, he would have to tell his wife a version of the story—the version in which I was the baby’s father. (In fact, he had done this already.) He said he expected that she would make him call to confirm the tale while she listened. With this in mind, he left a message on my cell phone. It said, among other things, “I’m gonna leave you this message just in case you get a call from me where I ask you what’s going on . . . the reason we are calling is because Elizabeth is standing there . . . so, be aware of that. If I am calling saying, ‘What happened? How did this happen?’ or ‘What’s going on?’ then that’s because Elizabeth is standing there with me. . . . I’ve gotta tell her about this because it’s moving.”

  For once, I didn’t give John Edwards what he wanted. I refused to be on any call involving the two of them. In five days, he left half a dozen messages, asking me to return his call. Mrs. Edwards, who officially loathed me, even left one asking me to call back on a “hard line” instead of a cell phone, presumably for security purposes. I continued to ignore her, but I did stay true to my word, approving the following statement, drafted by Pam Marple, on December 15, 2007:

  As confirmed by Ms. Hunter, Andrew Young is the father of her unborn child. Senator Edwards knew nothing about the relationship between these former co-workers, which began when they worked together in 2006. As a private citizen who no longer works for the campaign, Mr. Young asks that the media respect his privacy while he works to make amends with his family.

  This single paragraph was to be offered to the National Enquirer or any other media person who called the Edwards campaign about Rielle Hunter. The senator and the advisers who worked closely with him on this issue—Jonathan Prince and Mark Kornblau—expected the onslaught to begin on Wednesday, December 19, when the new edition of the Enquirer would be posted online. Accordingly, Cheri flew with our kids to Illinois, where they would stay for a while with her parents. She couldn’t tell them exactly why we needed their help, where she was going, or when she might come back. This frightened her mom and dad, but they were supportive. I offered a similar nonexplanation to my family, telling them we were going away, that we were safe, but that I couldn’t tell them anything more.

  The Enquirer story, posted online on a Wednesday and distributed to the nation’s newsstands on a Thursday, was as damaging as it could be. The front-page headline screamed john edwards love child scandal! and Rielle’s picture was included. The most important part of the text came in the first two paragraphs:

  Presidential candidate John Edwards is caught up in a love child scandal, a blockbuster Enquirer investigation has discovered.

  The Enquirer has learned exclusively that Rielle Hunter, a woman linked to Edwards in a cheating scandal earlier this year, is more than six months pregnant and she’s told a close confidante that Edwards is the father of her baby!

  Besides these most pertinent paragraphs, I was struck, of course, by a reference to “Andrew Young, who’s been extremely close to Edwards for years.” The paper added:

  And in a bizarre twist, Young—a 41-year-old married man with young children—now claims HE is the father of Rielle’s baby! But others are skeptical, wondering if Young’s paternity claim is a cover-up to protect Edwards.

  The Enquirer was right: From any outsider’s perspective, the explanation we had offered to the questions about Rielle was bizarre. But to our relief, no serious newspaper or TV network picked up the story because they couldn’t find a source to confirm it. Our phones and those of our friends and relatives rang constantly with calls from reporters and producers, but we ignored them all. Rielle and the campaign followed the same strategy, and since they still play by the multi-source rule, the big print and broadcast news organizations were stymied.

  The reaction was different in the online world, which exploded with speculation. Two prominent bloggers—Mickey Kaus and Matt Drudge—simply ignored the claim that I was the baby’s father and announced that Edwards had a girlfriend who was six months pregnant. A few radio talkers, most notably Don Imus, also made snarky remarks, but since these comments were all based on unconfirmed facts, the news didn’t seem to affect the candidate or the campaign. As I talked to the senator and Fred Baron, we began to think that perhaps our strategy had worked. All that remained was for us to disappear until the more persistent reporters and photo graphers got frustrated enough to give up the hunt.

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  hile Cheri had been in Illinois, Mr. Turtle ended up in a lake, and Meebo went to stay with her brother along with Granny, the cat. Rielle took charge of the decisions about where we might hide out and chose the same resort—the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in South Florida—where she had been caught in the senator’s room by the campaign staff and hotel security. The destination dictated a light wardrobe, so I packed summer-style clothes for Cheri and me. I also grabbed a small number of the Christmas presents Cheri had bought, because I couldn’t be sure where we might spend the holidays, but I knew I would demand that we be together with the kids.

  At four A.M., Cheri and I left the Montross house in my car and went to pick up Rielle, who traveled light—just a few clothes and a bag of makeup—and wore a black bandanna over her hair and her signature bright pink scarf around her neck. Although Cheri and I were both exhausted, Rielle was wide awake and excited. We drove around aimlessly for a bit, making sure no one was following us, and then went to the acres in the woods where our new house was going up. My friend Tim Toben met us there so I could hide the car and he could drop us at the airport. He didn’t ask a single question about why we were dashing out of town or where we were going. (Later, Tim explained that he had supported Edwards’s campaign because of his interest in energy policy. He wasn’t much interested in the nuts and bolts of electioneering, like who was flying where and when.)

  At the FBO, we drove into the hangar and parked next to the jet so no one could see Rielle get out of the car. We were met by a pilot and copilot who ushered us aboard. I noticed that the cabin had been stocked with food, coffee, and liquor. We were the first flight out when the airport opened for the day. The takeoff was smooth, and the plane climbed sharply until it reached an altitude where we could see the sun breaking over the eastern horizon. Rielle grabbed a copy of The New York Times and pored over it for political news. She and I talked quietly about politics while Cheri fell asleep.

  A hired car and driver met us at our destination airport and took us to the hotel, where Rielle went into full diva mode. Unwilling to accept just any room, she left the luggage in the lobby while we all traipsed upstairs to inspect the accommodations. The first room had “bad energy,” the second exuded the wrong “ambience,” and the third simply “didn’t feel right.” Since, as she said, “Fred was paying and wouldn’t care,” she kept harassing the desk clerks until we wound up in expensive adjoining suites overlooking the ocean from the top floor. While I booted up my laptop and began nervously checking for news about us, Rielle took off her traveling clothes, put on the thick robe she found hanging in the closet, and called room service.

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  hile Rielle kept the resort staff busy by returning half the food she ordered from the kitchen—including toast—Cheri and I found it difficult to relax at the Westin. I kept checking the Internet for news stories about me and my philandering, and although I got lots of hits on gossipy Web sites, I saw nothing in the mainstream media. My phone
rang constantly with calls from reporters, whom I ignored. I also heard from Heather North, who said, “You’ve been nothing but good to every person you have ever encountered, especially to the Edwards family.” And Tim Toben offered a joking observation about a USA Today article on rising fertility rates and said, “Way to be a trendsetter!” (I would later learn that Tim didn’t believe I would ever betray Cheri, and he suspected the senator was the father of Rielle’s child.)

  Of all the people who tried to contact me during this first stage of our life on the run, the most persistent was John Edwards, who, despite being on the road as a presidential candidate, managed to leave a message every few hours:

  12:51 A.M.: “Uh, Andrew, it’s John. If you could call me back at 402-998-3400, room 8030.

  6:47 P.M.: “Andrew, it’s John. Call me back on this number. Thanks.”

  6:49 P.M.: “Andrew, if you get this message, too, you can call back on this number. Thanks.”

  7:13 P.M.: “Uh . . . Andrew, call me back as soon as you can on this phone. It’s now—” (Cuts off.)

  7:26 P.M.: “Andrew, I keep trying to reach you. I have called you a bunch of times. I have talked to Elizabeth and I think it’s under control, so I just wanted to talk to you about it, but I have to go into an event now. I will try to call you guys later. Thanks. Bye.”

  9:09 P.M.: “Andrew, it’s John. It’s nine-ten P.M. East Coast time. I just got out of my last event. I’m on my way to the airport to get on a plane. I’ve got about ten or fifteen minutes if you can call me back. If not, I will talk to you from Des Moines. Thanks.”