Politician

by Andrew Young

  As the wine flowed and Heather put the kids to bed, the senator and Rielle became more comfortable touching each other and dropped the pretense that they weren’t involved. At one point, they started musing about how the house seemed like a happy place with Elizabeth and her “negative energy” removed. Rielle talked about living in the mansion once Mrs. Edwards was out of the way. A new family would be formed, the senator said, after he and Rielle married on some rooftop in Manhattan with a celebration that would include music from Dave Matthews. As Rielle listened to the senator spin this fantasy, she smiled like a little kid who had gotten her way.

  As the night wore on, clouds rolled in, followed by thunder and lightning and the heaviest rain I had ever seen. Protected and dry under the roof, we watched the water come down in sheets, and in a quiet moment the senator said, “This is the way it should be—no stress, no fighting.”

  “It’s good to be king,” said Rielle.

  I left the house during the downpour, shaken by everything I had seen and heard. As I turned the key in my Suburban and flipped on the wipers, my once-bright future seemed to be in peril.

  The next time I spoke to Rielle, she happily told me that she had spent that night in the Edwardses’ bed and slept in while the senator made breakfast for the kids and then drove them to school. She said that when he returned, he got into bed and they “made love.”

  Eight

  MEN BEHAVING VERY BADLY

  I

  had my own problems.

  While the senator had been in Africa, Cheri and I had tried to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Our occasional lifesaver (“babysitter” doesn’t do her justice), Melissa Geertsma, came to care for the three kids while we got dressed and went to a nice restaurant. We ordered wine and food, but at a moment when we might have marveled at how far we had come together in life, we talked instead about my twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to the Edwards family and my scheme for moving us out of Raleigh and into a house in the woods at the end of a long dirt road.

  We had already purchased the land from an Edwards donor and friend named Tim Toben, and I was ready to put the house on Lake Wheeler up for sale. Cheri loved this house, the church we attended, the preschool where our kids were enrolled, and the friends who lived nearby. She dreaded packing up everything and moving a two-year-old, a four-year-old, and a five-year-old to a temporary home we would occupy while the house in the woods was constructed. I was motivated by the good offer we had for the house we were selling and the prospect of eliminating a tiresome commute. The move would require us to take on a much bigger mortgage, and though I was finally earning a very good salary and getting some respect from the powers-that-be in national politics, Cheri knew I was not guaranteed a position over the long term. We were dependent on John and Elizabeth Edwards for our income and health insurance, and these people had not shown themselves to be paragons of stability, especially since the arrival of Rielle Hunter.

  Cheri was right. I was wrong. But I wasn’t going to admit it that night. Instead, I said what I always said—“John Edwards is going to be president one day”—and reminded her that I had been right about him so far. Cheri had heard this before and didn’t want to hear it again on our anniversary. True to our style, we didn’t shout or bark at each other but instead seethed with emotion. With both of us feeling too upset to eat, we asked to have our food boxed to take home. The wine was on the table, so I finished it, and when the boxes came we left. The argument got worse during the forty-five-minute ride home.

  Having eaten next to nothing during the day and consumed just wine and a little bread at dinner, I was not exercising good judgment when I got behind the wheel of the car. We made it home safely, but in the privacy of our house, Cheri and I went from seething to an open argument. I couldn’t hear all of her resentment for my devotion to the Edwardses and her fear that I trusted them too much. I wasn’t sensitive to how she felt about Rielle Hunter and the idea that my boss, who was supposed to be one of the “good guys,” was apparently cheating on his wife. All I heard was that she was criticizing me for how I did my job, the same job that supported our family. In the heat of the moment, I stormed out.

  What happened next holds a special place in the little Hall of Shame that occupies a corner of my heart. While I was essentially driving nowhere, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw flashing lights. I pulled over (again into a McDonald’s parking lot), and my heart sank as the police car slid in behind me. Part of me was glad I had been stopped before something worse had happened. (I was still under the effects of the wine I’d had at dinner.) But I also knew immediately that an arrest for driving under the influence could hurt me and my position with Senator Edwards, especially if it got into the press. Panicked, I refused to take a Breathalyzer test. The police officer, who could tell I had been drinking, put me in handcuffs and took me to a police station I knew well from having visited with Senator Edwards during our hundred-county tour.

  From the first words I exchanged with the officer who arrested me to the moment a judge released me to take a taxi home, I refused to cooperate beyond giving the police and court officials the barest information about my identity. When asked about my employer, I mentioned the names of the organizations that paid me, not John Edwards. In the end, as the process led to my release, I became completely sober and terrified about my future.

  At home I found Cheri sick with worry and anger, but she quickly grasped the seriousness of what we faced, namely the loss of my reputation and, quite possibly, my job and health insurance for our family. With my DWI arrest, every other concern faded in importance as we tried to protect our financial foundation.

  The practical problems that befall anyone stupid enough to drive under the influence in North Carolina are more than enough to teach an important lesson. First, you automatically lose your driver’s license, which rendered me unable to work. The courts also require you to attend frequent alcohol awareness meetings (much like sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous), and you face even more punishment, including possible jail time, once you go before a judge.

  With the help of Cheri and her brother, who lived nearby, I managed to get to the meetings, and I had to hire an assistant to help me get around for work. However, I still had to deal with the damage the arrest might do to my reputation and relationship with the Edwardses. I agonized for a few days, feeling the way I used to in my shameful twenties. Finally, I followed the advice I got from Wade Byrd and David Kirby and picked up the phone to call the Edwardses. Cheri sat beside me and listened as Mrs. Edwards answered, and I decided to begin by telling her what had happened. Her response confirmed all the good feelings I had ever felt for her.

  “Andrew, you are family,” she said. “You don’t worry about this. John will call you in a few minutes. It’s going to be all right.”

  The senator, who had been exercising on a treadmill when I phoned, called me about half an hour later. This time I was alone on our back porch. After I laid out the story and told him I was worried about my future with him, the senator’s voice dropped into a reassuring tone as he insisted that everyone faltered at some point, and he would not abandon me. “We’ve all done something like this, Andrew. I have. I know you feel like the lowest person on earth right now, but I love you. You are like a brother to me.” I felt as if a great weight had been lifted off my heart.

  W

  ords like “love” and “family” make you feel a powerful bond, one that suggests an us-against-the-world kind of loyalty that is very comforting at times when you feel threatened. But this bond can also be a trap. When I told them about the drunk driving arrest, which the press did not report at the time, I handed the senator and Mrs. Edwards a bit of information about myself that I wanted to hide. It gave them a type of leverage that matched whatever power I held through my knowledge of the senator’s relationship with Rielle and of Elizabeth’s more unattractive qualities: ambition, haughtiness, impatience.

  Although we never actually spoke of it this
way, years of intimacy had brought us to a point where we were all forced to ignore certain truths and devote ourselves to the shared goal of putting John Edwards in the White House. If this sounds to you like the unspoken pact that binds members of the Mafia, you are correct. Mob loyalty is based on fear, and with the crisis around my arrest, the basis for my loyalty to John Edwards was shifted from hope for a better future to an almost desperate dread of being exposed and losing my livelihood.

  The similarities with the Mafia go beyond mutual blackmail. Like the Mob, the Edwards clan was willing to “whack” those who got out of line. A prime example of this ruthlessness arose as I was dealing with my DWI issue. A staffer who had developed deep suspicions about Rielle Hunter during the trip to Africa had taken his concern to Nick Baldick, who was still running operations for the senator. The aide, Josh Brumberger, was one of several people who had spoken to me about Rielle, but unlike the others, he wasn’t satisfied with my evasive reassurances. Soon after Brumberger talked to Nick, the senator brought him into the American Airlines Admirals Club at LaGuardia Airport and suggested he leave the Edwards team. Edwards made sure that Josh would remain discreet by arranging for him to have a job at Fortress Financial, but his dismissal sent a signal to everyone in the inner circle of the campaign.

  The sudden disappearance of Josh Brumberger made me even more concerned about my future and the senator’s judgment. He should have taken Josh’s questions as a warning about the dangers of indiscretion, but he did not. In the fall of 2006, he and Mrs. Edwards traveled extensively to promote themselves (she for her book, he for the White House), and the senator saw Rielle and spoke to her by phone as often as he could.

  A

  lthough he had not formally declared, the senator had been operating as a candidate for the 2008 Democratic Party nomination ever since the 2004 defeat. He faced two main opponents in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who were similarly undeclared but already campaigning. (Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and Ohio representative Dennis Kucinich were declared candidates, but they were not given much of a chance to win.) Some analysts would say that Clinton and Obama enjoyed an advantage in their offices, which gave them credibility with voters. They also received an inordinate amount of press coverage because of the historic prospect of a woman or a black man reaching the White House.

  The senator’s personal finances were secure. He had raised a political war chest and he had a private jet at his beck and call. He began devoting all his attention to building relationships across the country, devising strategy, and putting people into key jobs. All the campaigns were performing this task. Hillary Clinton had her husband, the most experienced politician on the planet, as her top adviser. Barack Obama loaded his staff with extremely talented former Edwards loyalists like Julianna Smoot and David Axelrod. Abandoning the practice they followed in 2004, when they tapped highly experienced professionals, Senator and Mrs. Edwards chose a host of relative newcomers. Shrum and Baldick were gone, replaced by malleable young people. Our new chief of staff, Kathleen McGlynn, had been Mrs. Edwards’s scheduler and director of “special affairs” for the clothier Kenneth Cole. Jonathan Prince, a speechwriter for Clinton, ran the campaign day to day. Josh Brumberger was replaced by John Davis, a pale, mild-mannered Midwesterner who had been hired because of his contacts in Iowa.

  As the new body man, Davis would be in charge of the senator’s care and feeding whenever he left North Carolina. This meant keeping him on schedule, shepherding him to and from events, and traveling by his side. Like most new staff members, he turned to me, as the senator’s longest-serving and closest aide, whenever he ran into an issue he couldn’t resolve or needed answers to questions he couldn’t ask the senator directly.

  Recently married to a sweet young woman whom he obviously adored, Davis was a fairly proper and morally conservative guy who rarely swore or raised his voice or got overly excited. He was also smart and started calling me with questions about Rielle Hunter almost immediately after he took to the road with the senator. When I couldn’t give him satisfying answers, he pressed me harder. Finally, on a night when he was staying in North Carolina, I went to the hotel where he was staying (the same Courtyard by Marriott that issued the key card discovered by Heather) and sat with him and one of the senator’s top political advisers, David Medina. (Medina would eventually become First Lady Michelle Obama’s deputy chief of staff.)

  As John and David worked their way through a supply of beer (I abstained because of my DWI), the conversation became more animated and John slowly grasped what was going on between the senator and Rielle. He also became quite profane, which I would discover was something that happened on the rare occasions when he drank.

  After Medina left, he said, “C’mon, Andrew. You don’t think he could be so fuckin’ stupid as to think he can get away with it, do you?”

  It was a good question, and the only answer was that the senator obviously did think he could get away with it. And why wouldn’t he? For all of his life he had been told he was special, and every year brought him ever more adulation. He had wealth, fame, and a younger woman who called him “the king” and promised to do whatever he wanted her to do at any time.

  For John Davis, who cared deeply about the issues and had come to the campaign as a true believer, the more important matter was, in my mind, protecting himself. My sense of commitment to John Edwards was becoming frayed, and I was not excited about working on a campaign for another year. Here I could offer some solid counsel. I told him that his best chance of avoiding trouble was to remain loyal to the senator, not Mrs. Edwards. (I suspected that some of the staff were actually more attached to her and may have been feeding her information about Rielle.) In the short term, I told him, “try to make his life as simple as possible.” In the long term, his goal should be to anticipate the boss’s needs so that he wouldn’t even have to ask. It’s like being the best friend of the quarterback in high school. You protect him even if that means helping him get away with stuff.

  As I explained the facts of life to John, I recalled similar conversations with Edwards’s body men Hunter Pruette and Josh Brumberger, and the warnings I had received from Julianna Smoot and Will Austin when I took the job in D.C. I felt as if I was forcing him to abandon the idealism that had brought him to the Edwards campaign and to recognize the dark side of politics. Everyone thinks politics is dirty, but I was starting to think it was disgusting. You do it because you hope that the good you accomplish outweighs the excesses that accompany the pursuit of power. That’s how you justify it to yourself morally. But the burden of secrets and the loss of innocence—and this included my own loss of innocence—is always painful.

  When I left John, I felt sorry for him. I felt even worse a few days later when I tried to remind the senator to be careful about letting too many people in on his secrets. Edwards said that he believed firing Josh had sent an effective message to everyone who might go public with information about Rielle. And where John Davis was concerned, he said, “Don’t worry about him, Andrew, he’s one of us.” The next morning, Heather North, the nanny, called and said the senator “was gone again last night.”

  W

  ith a single phrase, the senator had declared that John Davis was trustworthy. Remarkably, the senator assumed that everyone, including old friends who had known him and Mrs. Edwards for decades, would simply go along. I can think of no other explanation for his decision to continue seeing Rielle and to bring her into even more public settings.

  In November, after the trip to Africa, the cell phone mishap, and Josh’s removal, the senator headed for Asheville and a weekend conference of the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers. (I went with him, as did John Davis.) When Rielle called from New Jersey, Edwards decided that it would be just fine if she joined the party at the Grove Park Inn. She flew in from Newark and found her way to the local campus of the University of North Carolina, where the senator was winding up a visit with students and faculty. At first she went into her Ca
mera Girl routine, hauling out her equipment so she could capture the moment on tape, but I had to tell her she couldn’t do campaign work at an event sponsored by the UNC poverty center, so she put the camera away.

  As we left the university to meet the lawyers at the inn, the senator beamed at Rielle like a lovesick teenager. He was thrilled that she had come and would spend the night with him at such a romantic hotel. Although a local staffer asked him to ride in her car so she could brief him on the next event, he insisted on riding with me and Rielle. The staffer glared at me. I rolled my eyes as if to say, What can I do? He’s the boss.

  Later, at the hotel, we met his old friends Wade Byrd and David Kirby, who had been his original political backers and closest friends but had recently begun to feel neglected by him. Although he would give a brief talk to the academy on how he intended to protect trial lawyers from Republican-backed tort “reforms” that would hinder lawsuits, the senator’s main goal for this overnight visit was to heal these relationships. As he turned on the charm, I could see his old friends begin to forgive him.

  When dinnertime arrived, Edwards made the move that would signal that his friends were on the “inside” and everyone else was “outside.” Instead of attending the formal dinner where annual awards would be presented—“Andrew, I don’t want to sit through that shit”—he asked me to arrange something private at a local restaurant, where he could sit with Kirby, Byrd, and a few others. His host, my former boss and the head of the academy, responded angrily to this insult, but Edwards didn’t care. As we drove away, he was completely unaffected by how he had disappointed the crowd back at the inn, but he was annoyed by one thing: The car we piled into was too small, and Rielle wound up sitting on my lap for the short ride. She told me later that he didn’t like the sight of her sitting on my lap.