The Politician (39 page)

When I spoke to him next, Senator Edwards sounded defeated, but he was already scheming about how to turn his endorsement, and his hold on a few delegates, into a top position in the next administration. It was impossible to get him to focus on resolving Rielle’s status and mine. Fred Baron was similarly evasive when I pressed him.

But at night, when the house turned quiet, Cheri and I questioned every decision we had made in the previous year. As the days passed and the birth of Rielle’s baby drew closer, we became less confident about the promises the senator and Fred Baron had made to help us get back to our old life. When the kids asked for the umpteenth time, “When are we going back home?” and we said, “Soon,” we felt hollow. My decision to cover for John Edwards, a choice made out of loyalty, friendship, and hope for my own future as well as the country’s, was turning out to be a foolish mistake I was powerless to correct. As far as the world was concerned, I was now the guy who had confessed to an affair and taken responsibility. If I recanted, I would then be the guy who foolishly took the blame for the sin of a man who didn’t deserve to be protected.

J
ohn and Elizabeth Edwards held their “farewell and thank-you” party for the people who had worked for, volunteered for, and funded the 2008 campaign in the barn-style gym at their estate, where a stage and sound system had been included in the design for just such an occasion. The crowd numbered about five hundred and included friends, family, donors, staff, and a smattering of celebrities, including basketball coach Dean Smith and actor Danny Glover.

This kind of get-together is a lot like an old-fashioned Irish wake, where people have an opportunity to both celebrate and begin mourning. The comparison seems even more appropriate if you consider that those who idolize and devote themselves to a candidate come to feel that the campaign is like a big family. In this family, John and Elizabeth played the role of mom and dad, and at their party they were so obviously angry with each other that they made all the children nervous.

I’m confident writing about an event I didn’t attend because I received dozens of texts and phone calls from people who did—many came
during
the party—and they all reported the same thing: The senator mingled easily, thanked people profusely, and gave a brief talk that my friend Tim Toben reported was heartfelt and kind. Toben had once been captivated
by John Edwards, but unlike others, he had developed powerful doubts. He said that at the party Elizabeth told several people what a truly bad person I was.

Other friends who attended the farewell told me that the senator and his wife were noticeably cold to each other. They spent most of the night in different corners of the room and rarely came together. When it was time for them to speak, they stood at opposite ends of the stage. The way they related to each other made the members of the “family” feel as if the parents were fighting. If you recall from your own family what that’s like, then you know that the folks the Edwardses were supposed to be thanking felt awkward and uncomfortable. During the campaign, this kind of thing happened far too often, as the candidate and his wife argued while staffers waited and wondered what to do.

Hearing about how Mrs. Edwards had behaved made it easier for me to accept that I didn’t attend the party. I resented being shunned, especially when I thought about all I had done to help the Edwardses build their public lives and the very house where the party was held. And certainly the sacrifices that Cheri, the kids, and I continued to make as political fugitives made me feel angry. But giving up the stress of being around the Edwardses when they were fighting was no sacrifice at all.

As the weeks passed at our Santa Barbara hideaway, Cheri worked especially hard to make our existence normal. With their homeschool teacher coming every day, the kids made spectacular academic progress. We returned to the nightly routine of home-cooked dinners and enrolled the kids in various lessons and activities. Gracie went to a theater program, and Brody played every organized sport available. And at night when we said our prayers, we included blessings for “Fred, and Jaya and her baby” as well as Pepper (the cat) and Mr. Turtle.

In her part of the house, Rielle set up a nursery, lit candles to promote spiritual harmony, and talked on the phone with friends and her adviser Bob. We tried to give her privacy because it’s hard enough by itself to carry around a full-term, about-to-be-born child. She didn’t need us staring at
her all the time. The one thing we all did together, without fail, was gather around a TV set to watch the
American Idol
talent contest every week.

By the middle of February, almost everyone at the house had selected a favorite idol contestant. Rielle and Cooper liked David Archuleta. Cheri and Gracie favored David Cook, and Brody was fond of a pretty young woman named Brooke White. I had trouble settling on just one, so I changed my vote from week to week, which made the debates we had about the talents of the various singers that much more fun.

The
Idol
show moved from the audition phase to the true competition in mid-February, just as the due date for Rielle’s baby came and went. Feeling ever more uncomfortable, Rielle didn’t move much off the sofa, where she waited for the senator’s calls and scanned the TV news channels for stories about him. On February 17, I got a voice mail from Rielle saying she’d just seen a picture of the Edwardses meeting with Barack Obama, who had gone to Chapel Hill seeking an endorsement. “Johnny and Elizabeth could not be farther apart from each other,” she said, laughing. “I mean, like, they’re on separate sides of the driveway.”

Although she took pleasure in seeing the Edwardses look alienated from each other, Rielle was always pained by the sight of Elizabeth Edwards and frustrated over being unable to contact the senator whenever she wanted to talk. On the night after she saw the “Obama visits Edwards” TV report, Rielle found Cheri’s phone and used it to try to call him at his home. It was eleven
P.M
. there, and when Mrs. Edwards answered, Rielle hung up without saying a word. The senator’s wife promptly called back and left a message that began in a pleasant tone as she said, “Cheri, I don’t know whether it was you or Andrew who called us. You are welcome to call us anytime you want.” But then, as she got wound up, she became contradictory and scolding. “You have a pretty screwed-up life right now, I understand, with . . . uh, another child . . . [pause] and I am willing to talk to you, Cheri, but I don’t want Andrew to call us, and you all can’t be a part of our lives. We are trying to wash our hands of this filth.”

After we heard this message, I called the Batphone, which the senator
now kept hidden somewhere in the barn/gymnasium, where he spent most of his days and nights in a form of marital exile. The phone wasn’t set up to receive messages, but every once in a while he would tell Elizabeth he was going to exercise or shoot baskets so that he could check the call history. When I talked to him this time, he told me I needed to control Rielle more closely and to just ignore his wife. We talked politics for a while, and I encouraged him to find something to do that would connect him to his main issue of fighting for the poor and middle class.

“Imagine if instead of Hillary and Barack seeing you at your house, they met you at a Habitat for Humanity work site in New Orleans or even in Greensboro, a few miles away,” I said. “That would have been a better picture.”

He brushed off the suggestion by saying something about how he was going through a difficult time and needed to be home. He then went on to gush about his encounter with Obama. He said he was leaning toward endorsing him, but Elizabeth had been appalled by Obama’s lack of detailed ideas about health care reform. However, the senator was most excited by how his onetime adversary was impressed by the basketball court at the mansion, which is a replica of the floor at UNC, where they traded shots in a game of H-O-R-S-E. (Edwards crowed about how he had won.) Hillary Clinton had already made a similar pilgrimage to Chapel Hill (no H-O-R-S-E), and although Mrs. Edwards wanted her to get the endorsement, he wanted only to endorse the eventual winner. He believed his endorsement was influential enough to determine the winner. He told me he offered it to both Clinton and Obama—first come, first served—in exchange for their commitment to his being named vice president.

Three months would pass before the senator announced his preference for Obama. As he used that time to angle for either the vice presidency or a spot in the cabinet of a future administration, the one Chapel Hill friend who still spoke to me, Tim Toben, became ever more agitated about the man’s audacity.

A decade of being “the good soldier” had reinforced my tendency to be
loyal to the extreme. And besides being loyal to the senator, I had been boxed in by Elizabeth Edwards, who had called every person who might have helped me start over in a new job to say that I was a liar, a cheat, and a thief. She spread the rumor that Rielle was just “one of Andrew’s women” and I had delivered her to the senator as if I were a pimp. Under the cloud she had created, beginning when the campaign was still in full swing, only John Edwards was in a position to clear my name and help me start over. The only hope I had was that once his new child arrived, he would be moved to do the right thing.

O
n February 26, when she was roughly a week overdue, Rielle was scheduled to have her delivery induced. When she was ready to go to the hospital, she came to our side of the house and said, “Let’s take a picture.” She also said, “Will you call him for me, Andrew?”

Our kids knew what was going on and started to run around and shout, “The baby’s coming!” After we shushed them, Cheri went to call Bob McGovern to come with his car, and then she helped Rielle get ready. I tried the senator’s Batphone. When Rielle returned and I told her that he hadn’t answered, she barked, “Call Fred!” but then caught herself and said, “Sorry, Andrew. I’m a little emotional right now.” Fred did answer and spoke to Rielle, wishing her good luck.

When Bob arrived we took a few pictures and gave her a hug, and Rielle left for the hospital with him. About twenty minutes later, Edwards called me. I had trouble hearing because of the kids. He was abrupt and sounded irritated.

“Hey, what’s up?” he said.

I was in a good mood and said, joking, “The eagle is about to land.”

“What?”

“Just kidding. She is on the way to the hospital and wanted to talk to you. Hold on, I will patch you through.”

As I removed the phone from my ear to hit the buttons, I heard him raise his voice: “Andrew . . . Andrew, don’t patch me through!”

I put the phone back to my ear and said, “What?”

“I don’t want you to patch me through. Just tell her I couldn’t talk because of Elizabeth and I will call you later. Tell her I am thinking of her.”

“Senator, you have to talk to her. She will freak out if you don’t.” Pause. “Boss, you have to. Just for a minute.” He insisted it was a bad time and he would call back later. I didn’t hear from him all night.

While I talked to the senator, Bob McGovern delivered Rielle to Cottage Hospital in downtown Santa Barbara. In a photo taken before they went inside, Bob has his arm around Rielle. She’s wearing a white turtleneck that doesn’t quite cover her enormous belly and has her signature pink scarf looped around her neck. Over their heads, a sign announces,
EMERGENCY TRAUMA CENTER
.

At the admissions desk, Rielle signed in under the name Jaya James and let them run one of our credit cards to pay the bill. (Yes, the mother of John Edwards’s baby did not have health insurance.) The initial authorization was for five thousand dollars. When they went to the obstetrics ward, Bob blessed the room (“cleared the energy,” in Rielle’s words).

Rielle labored all night, but her cervix never dilated. Cheri was there at a little before nine
A.M
. on Wednesday, February 27, when Rielle agreed to a cesarean section, and a baby girl came into the world. She was twenty-one and a half inches long, weighed eight pounds one ounce, and had blue eyes and a full head of brown hair like her father. Although the baby scored high on the scale they use to assess neonatal health, she had had her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck during the labor and her heart rate was a little fast, which caused some concern among the professionals in the delivery room. After letting Rielle visit with her briefly, they transferred the baby to an intensive care unit for observation. Cheri and Bob followed the baby to the ICU, where the nurses, assuming Bob was the father, made sure he got to hold her first.

Fortunately, the baby’s heartbeat normalized quickly, and she was soon reunited with her mom. In a photo taken during this reunion, Rielle looks peaceful and relaxed as the baby rests on her chest. The picture also shows
that Rielle is wearing the long heavy gold chain that Bunny Mellon gave Senator Edwards as a good-luck charm.

When I got the news about the baby, I called and texted the senator again. I then called Fred. About an hour later, Edwards called me and I was short with him. “You need to call her. Let me give you Cheri’s cell. Be sweet—Rielle is very scared right now.” He gave me a vague assurance that he would call her, and I asked him if he wanted me to send her flowers from him.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea.” He paused. “But don’t sign it from me. Someone might see it.”

In this moment, I felt as though a switch had turned in my heart. After watching and hearing John Edwards practice a thousand little deceptions and tell a thousand different lies, ostensibly in the service of some greater good, I finally recognized that he didn’t care about anyone other than himself. A precious living, breathing human being—his daughter—had come into the world, and he wasn’t inclined to even call the woman who had given birth to her. Instead, I had to prompt him to do the right thing, to do the most basic, human thing. My faith in him died almost instantly, and I felt both ashamed of my naïveté and very afraid for the future of my family.