The Politician (43 page)

In the days that followed the Beverly Hilton fiasco, the senator schemed to avoid future problems and actually suggested we move to Bunny Mellon’s estate. That way we would never run into Elizabeth at school events. For her part, Elizabeth would continue the effort to make Cheri feel the kind of pain that comes with intimate betrayal. One of her messages recommended that Cheri call one of John Edwards’s campaign supporters who lived near Figure Eight Island to hear about how I had used their home there as a love nest: “You need to call Russell at the beach and find out why we had the locks changed on the house . . . so that Andrew would not use it with his girlfriends. We were told about it by people at the beach. Ask Russell.”

When I learned what was happening at the Edwards estate during the time Elizabeth was troubling herself with calls to us, I was amazed to hear she had the time or energy to even think about us. According to Senator Edwards, she was consulting with advisers and even brought a bunch of them, including Jennifer Palmieri and Harrison Hickman, to the mansion for a big pow-wow about how to handle the
Enquirer
’s false story. In a whispered phone conversation, Edwards told me that while helicopters carrying photographers circled overhead, they’d decided, with Mrs. Edwards’s leadership, that honesty would be the best policy. The senator was going to go on television with a respected and fair-minded journalist—Bob Woodruff of ABC News—and tell the story. He would do it on August 8, as the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games in China were being broadcast, in hopes that most of the world would ignore him in favor of the spectacle at Beijing National Stadium.

This plan seemed idiotic to me. First of all, the story the senator was planning to tell, of a brief affair and blackmail, was still an incomprehensible lie. Second, the supposed “spy photos” the
National Enquirer
published on August 6 were, as far as I could tell, fakes. Edwards had gone to the Beverly Hilton wearing a blue button-down shirt. The pictures showed him holding a baby and wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt. It was the wrong shirt, and anyone who knew the guy understood that he would never walk through a hotel lobby looking like such a mess.

The senator and I discussed his decision by phone after my family and I had departed for Santa Barbara for good. With the press descending on our house, we had gone to Los Angeles to hide at Disneyland before our flight home. The motel we booked near Disneyland was a Fairfield Inn, where we had a room on an upper floor. With five of us sharing a room, the only privacy I could find for the call with him was next to an ice machine. I leaned against the wall, looked out over the busy street, and begged Edwards to delay his decision. As a candidate, he had sold himself to the public as an especially moral, Christian family man. His wife had cancer. It would be far wiser, I said, to wait to see what the press really had and tell the whole truth—the real truth—only when he couldn’t avoid it.

I was not alone in my assessment of the situation. Bunny Mellon, whose love for John Edwards was sincere, believed that he should simply stay silent and ride out the storm. Bunny had lived through JFK’s infidelity and knew of the affairs carried on by her men in her life. In her view, powerful men should be expected to behave this way—indeed, they might even have a right to break the rules—and only unsophisticated dolts expected anything else. Her advice? Tell the whole truth or nothing at all. (Bunny also offered to send another check and to let us stay at her home in Antigua to regroup.)

In the end, neither Bunny nor I could get him out of the trap he had created for himself. Using his considerable powers of persuasion, the senator had lied to Elizabeth repeatedly and was now boxed in by his story and her need to take action.

At two o’clock on August 5, I was standing in line for the Buzz Light-year ride when Fred called to tell me that Edwards had definitely decided to do the interview. Since the press would jump on the story, he wanted to get Rielle and the baby out of the country. Then he asked if I could get Rielle’s passport, which was stored somewhere in Chapel Hill, delivered to him.

“When?” I asked.

“Well, that’s the problem. She is flying out tomorrow morning.”

When she heard what Fred had asked, Cheri couldn’t believe they would request more favors. But I saw the drama coming to an end, and I was eager to see it all resolved even though there wasn’t much time to get the passport to FedEx. While she and the kids went off to have more fun, I went to a restaurant overlooking Tom Sawyer Island. Steamboat whistles and fake cannonfire sounded in the background as I made seventeen calls. During these calls, I made notes on a cardboard lunch box (Alvin and the Chipmunks) and the price tag from a Beanie Baby toy. Eventually, I was able to arrange to get the passport delivered to a company called Mobile Air in Mobile, Alabama, care of pilot Ronald Gehlken. (Gehlken would fly Rielle to a Caribbean island for a brief stay.)

After Rielle’s escape was arranged, the senator called three times. In one call, he thanked me. But in the others, he railed about reports popping up on the Internet.
Radar.com
had said that Cheri had told the whole story of Rielle and the senator to her hairstylist in Chapel Hill. Another blog said our landlords had been the source of the money used to fund Rielle’s life in hiding. Edwards yelled at me, saying that all along he had thought we had been “the leak.” Fred agreed with him. They were convinced and angry with us. I told them they were being ridiculous. “Think about it. Cheri hasn’t had her hair cut in Chapel Hill since we went on the run. She couldn’t have told anyone there anything.”

On Friday, August 8, prime-time viewers across the country saw Edwards, in shirtsleeves, sit with the ABC correspondent and answer every question with contrite and seemingly sincere statements that were absolutely false. Here are some key passages:

J
OHN
E
DWARDS
: In 2006, two years ago, I made a very serious mistake. A mistake that I am responsible for and no one else. In 2006, I told Elizabeth about the mistake, asked her for her forgiveness, asked God for His forgiveness. And we have kept this within our family since that time. All of my family knows about this, and just to be absolutely clear, none of them are responsible for it. I am responsible for it. I alone am responsible for it. And it led to this most recent incident at the Beverly Hilton. I was at the Beverly Hilton. I was there for a very simple reason, because I was trying to keep this mistake that I had made from becoming public.

 

B
OB
W
OODRUFF
: I know this is a very difficult question, but were you in love with [Rielle Hunter]?

 

J
OHN
E
DWARDS
: I’m in love with one woman. I’ve been in love with one woman for thirty-one years. She is the finest human being I have ever known. And the fact that she is with me after this having happened is a testament to the kind of woman and the kind of human being she is. There is a deep and abiding love that exists between Elizabeth and myself. It’s always been there, it in my judgment has never gone away.

Here’s what, can I explain to you what happened? First of all, it happened during a period after she was in remission from cancer; that’s no excuse in any possible way for what happened. This is what happened. It’s what happened with me and I think happens unfortunately more often sometimes with other people. . . . Ego. Self-focus, self-importance. Now, I was slapped down to the ground when my son Wade died in 1996, in April of 1996. But then after that I ran for the Senate and I got elected to the Senate, and here we go again, it’s the same old thing again. Adulation, respect, admiration.
Then I went from being a senator, a young senator, to being considered for vice president, running for president, being a vice presidential candidate, and becoming a national public figure. All of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism, that leads you to believe that you can do whatever you want. You’re invincible. And there will be no consequences. And nothing, nothing could be further from the truth.

The reaction to the interview was swift and mostly harsh, and the Olympics did not keep the media from covering the story. News outlets around the world published excerpts. Editorial writers, columnists, and bloggers flayed the senator in their commentaries, and political types announced the death of his relevance in national affairs. It was very strange to see reporters offering detailed accounts of a story we had lived with for so long.

Later I heard of additional developments that never reached the public. For example, Edwards told me that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton phoned his wife to say they were sorry about what was happening and to tell her she was in their prayers. Bill Clinton, a veteran of his own sexual disgrace and attempted cover-up, called the senator and said, in effect, “How’d you get caught?”

O
n the night of the Bob Woodruff interview, my phone rang constantly. Reporters from around the world were calling. I didn’t speak to one of them. My main concern was to protect Cheri and the kids from the cameras, and I was glad we were leaving for North Carolina in the morning. Then, at 10:33
P.M
., Fred sent a text saying that he couldn’t send his plane because it was “in Guatemala with Lisa until Sunday—sorry—DO NOT talk to press!!!!!!!”

I logged on to the Web site
FlightAware.com
and checked to see where the plane was. The site, which tracks the whereabouts of every aircraft with a tail number, showed it was parked at Dallas Love Field. It was
clear—Fred and John Edwards weren’t looking out for us anymore. I told Fred I knew where the plane was. He didn’t react to the fact that I had caught him in a lie but agreed we needed to travel covertly and offered to have a driver meet us near the Southwest Airlines arrival area when we landed in Raleigh-Durham. Fortunately, no one was looking for us at the airport when we arrived late Saturday. If they had been, it would have been a cinch to find us. All they’d have had to do was stand near the limo driver holding a big sign that read, “Andrew Young.”

On the Sunday morning after the interview, Elizabeth Edwards again lashed out at Cheri with two messages left on her phone. The first said:

Andrew told Rielle that he was the person responsible for the PlayStation 3 fiasco. Rielle told on her boyfriend and told John that Andrew is the one who did it. Shouldn’t confide things to your boyfriend . . . or your girlfriend.

The second Sunday message said:

Hey, Cheri, um, yeah, uh, when you move from North Carolina, Andrew and Rielle both asked if they could please be really close together. Uh, hope you like that!

The flailing nature of these remarks—recalling the years-old PlayStation issue, for example—reflected the paranoia that seemed to be falling over the Edwardses.

An army of media people had descended on Chapel Hill, and there were TV satellite trucks and photographers everywhere. My phone rang constantly with requests from Larry King, CBS News,
Good Morning America,
and every major newspaper and magazine in the country. On August 12, Fred Baron told me he believed that all the cell phones used by people close to the Edwardses were being “hit by the other side,” so he told me to use only landlines to call him.

Many months later, I can recall these anxious references and tell myself that Fred and the others were just upset and scaring themselves. At the time he spoke to me, Cheri and the kids and I were living four miles from the Edwardses’ mansion. We were in our yet-to-be-finished house, where the floors and plumbing were not quite completed, and we were sleeping on mattresses thrown on the floor. Unsure about the future of my job, where we might live, and where the kids would start school, we felt besieged and insecure. Very few of our old friends and colleagues would talk to us. Our friend Michael Cucchiara told us that Elizabeth was writing a book that would be extremely harsh on me. Regarded as pariahs for our role in the destruction of John Edwards, we felt self-conscious everywhere we went. However, we did try to keep a sense of humor.

When Cheri went to a grocery store, she grabbed the
National Enquirer
at the check out and flipped it over so no one could see it. The man standing behind her said, “Hey, are you embarrassed that you are buying that magazine?” She turned and saw he had an armful of similar magazines. After a flash of fear, she realized that the man didn’t know she was one of the players in the scandal and she had to fight to keep from laughing out loud.

Laughs were a rare commodity for us in August 2008. Cheri didn’t have any friends, other than me, who knew what she was going through and could talk to her with real understanding and laugh at the ridiculous elements of the scandal. I was lucky to have Tim Toben. “I’ve never known anyone who could do this,” he would say. “John Edwards can convince and compel in such a genuine and honest-seeming way but is really not authentic. He lies, but it’s like he believes it all and so do we.” His point made me think of the movie
True Lies
. That’s what John Edwards was all about—constructing lies that seemed like truth and had the power of truth, until he was found out.

My last encounter with Edwards came on August 18, when I got an urgent call from Fred Baron. He said that Mrs. Edwards had left the house and the senator would have access to David Kirby’s car for just a short time. He begged me to agree to see him. I was furious with Edwards and all the people around him, but I needed to meet with him to hear what he
had worked out with Bunny on the matter of the big poverty foundation. When I agreed, Fred told me to drive to an intersection on a deserted two-lane road near the Edwards estate. It was just before one o’clock in the afternoon. I got in our minivan, drove to the spot, and parked.