Politician Read online

  Of course, all politicians calculate and scheme and send messages in the way they dress and the settings they occupy. During an energy crisis, Jimmy Carter turned the heat down at the White House and put on a cardigan. In order to appear as outdoorsmen, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush cleared brush on their ranches as though they couldn’t afford to hire someone else to do it. At a time when Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs had stirred public outrage, John and Elizabeth Edwards intentionally presented themselves as a blissfully married couple and their family as a close-knit and rambunctious bunch. If it wasn’t the whole truth, it was true enough, as far as I knew. And considering the fact that we were at Pinehurst to make an impression, the sight of Jack and Emma Claire running around was just one of many details in the picture.

  For me, the best Pinehurst moment came late on the night of the concert, when Cheri and I were invited to hang out with the band in the complex of suites they had been given at the hotel. I walked the senator in for a brief appearance, but like most of the others who stopped by, he departed early. Eventually, it was just Cheri and me, drinking beers and trying to stump the lead singer, Darius Rucker, by naming a song he didn’t know how to sing. We couldn’t do it. And let me tell you, hanging out with a guy who has won two Grammy Awards while he sang and another member of the band played drums on the coffee table for a few hours was an amazing experience.

  Even as it was happening, I understood that Cheri and I were privileged to have this experience, and I had the feeling of being both an insider and an outsider simultaneously. I mean, my association with the senator was the only reason we were there, rubbing elbows with powerful political figures by day and partying with Darius Rucker and the rest of the band at night. This thought made me feel grateful, but also very dependent. I knew that all of it was contingent on my continuing to do a good job for both Senator Edwards and his family.

  My success at Pinehurst that weekend was confirmed by the pledges of support that were offered by the wealthy supporters who attended, their enthusiasm for the senator’s candidacy, and their willingness to commit to serving as advisers and fund-raisers as we moved forward. I also got credit from the senator for making sure that every request made by a guest was promptly satisfied, whether it involved a room upgrade, a tee time, or something that required more discreet attention. At one big event the senator held during this period, I was summoned by one of the more powerful men in the room, who happened to be there with his wife. He asked me to come to his table partway through the meal and call him to the telephone. There would be no call, he explained, but he wanted me to act as if something urgent had come up.

  When the time came, I performed as requested, bustling over to the man’s table and whispering in his ear. He walked out of the room with me and explained that he was going to go back to the table and tell his wife that an emergency had arisen with one of his clients. She would stay for the rest of the weekend, he added. I would take him to the airport.

  The ruse went off without a hitch. I brought my car around and whisked the big dog off to the nearby airport, which was about five miles from the hotel. Once we got there I took him out to his private jet, which was parked on the tarmac. Three young women, each of them wearing a great deal of makeup and very little fabric, waited for him in the plane.

  “We’re goin’ someplace fun,” he said, adding, “Wanna come?”

  I said, “No thanks,” and wished him a good trip. I knew there was nothing to be gained—by me, the senator, or anyone else—by my uttering a word about what I had seen. In fact, I decided that it would be best if I put it out of my mind completely. I got some help with this task as soon as our life took another dramatic turn.

  I

  n the three days we had been away, Gracie had given Cheri’s mother constant worries. Despite reassurance from doctors who said her condition was not serious, she had been unable to feed well and her breathing was still labored. If anything, the high-pitched wheezing sound she made as she struggled for air was louder and more constant, and listening to it just about broke your heart. Cheri contacted a specialist she knew from work, who agreed to review the imaging done the previous week. He quickly found something the others had missed.

  It turned out that a fairly large artery—it comes directly from the heart and supplies blood to the head as well as the right shoulder and arm—had developed in the wrong place and was pressing on her trachea. Between the direct pressure and the irritation of the nerves and tissues in her throat, the innominate artery was making it very difficult for her to swallow and breathe. And based on its position, this problem wasn’t going to go away on its own. It was serious and life-threatening. However, we were told that surgery could correct the problem and help Gracie grow and develop normally. Like every parent faced with this kind of news, we were happy to have the medical mystery resolved but terrified by the idea of authorizing major surgery on our one-month-old daughter. But we had no choice, so on October 4 they took Gracie into the operating room and made the repair. It was by far the hardest day of my life.

  As a nurse who had worked in every corner of a hospital, including the pediatric intensive care unit, Cheri knew what to expect during Gracie’s recovery. As a mother, she was fiercely protective, which meant we were bound for a confrontation when we were allowed into the PICU and found alarms going off. Despite our daughter screaming out in pain, her chest sutures bulging, and her drain hanging out, no nurse was coming to help her. We found the one assigned to Gracie gabbing about movies with other nurses on her shift, and she said, “Oh yeah, I’ll get some pain medicine and be right there.” Twelve minutes later—yes, we counted them—she finally arrived, and as she helped Gracie settle down, she agreed that, yes, our daughter seemed to be in some distress.

  The state of our health care system is a topic for another book, so it’s enough to say here that I was grateful to be married to a professional who could watch over Gracie’s recovery. This was especially true when she developed postoperative complications that the staff didn’t want to recognize. While everyone else was marveling at the weight Gracie gained, Cheri kept asking why her heart and respiratory rates were climbing, why she hadn’t passed any urine, and why she looked so puff y. They brushed her off as a nervous mother—“Oh, Mrs. Young, little Gracie is fine”—until her cardiologist and surgeon finally discovered the next day that fluid was collecting around both of Gracie’s lungs. (This was the weight she was gaining.) They took Gracie to the ICU to drain some of this fluid and then sent someone from the “Risk Management Office” to calm as down. We endured scores of incidents like this that only a trained nurse like Cheri would recognize as incompetence. But after the surgery, we were thinking only about our daughter and making sure she would survive the hospital and come home to heal. (Just a few months later, the entire nation would focus on the doctor and unit that made so many critical mistakes with Gracie. A young woman named Jésica Santillán, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, died because our doctor mistakenly gave her a heart and lung transplant from a donor with an incompatible blood type.)

  Although we couldn’t know it at the time, the operation marked the end of the easygoing season that was the summer of 2002. Gracie’s recovery would be slow, as she still struggled to eat and breathe and seemed to catch a dozen colds in the span of three months. Cheri would have to nurse her along and care for Brody, with much less help from me because the senator’s push for the White House had become more intense and he had decided the national headquarters in Raleigh would open on January 1, 2003. The job of setting this up, which included finding space, furnishings, utilities, and more, was added to my ongoing duties as his North Carolina advance man, minder, and occasional proxy. I was so busy during this time—leaving early and coming home late—that a month passed before I realized that Cheri’s brother had moved in with us. Every step was exciting, from my filing the articles of incorporation to the first campaign e-mail.

  Campaigns on all levels are stressful, but preside
ntial campaigns, which attract the most competitive players, can be merciless. Most workers receive little or no pay, and most have little connection to the candidate other than seeing him or her on television. You work fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, and some people actually bring pillows and blankets and sleep under their desks. The first shift starts at four A.M. as the grunts begin searching the Internet for articles about the candidate and creating digests that run to a hundred pages or more. They will spend the whole day gleaning and or ganizing and distributing important items. The office can start to resemble a frat house, and if you don’t have protesters outside, you’re doing something wrong. E-mails and phone messages came in at a rate of ten or twenty at a time. And you have to answer them all, because everything is an emergency and everything has to be done perfectly. During the few hours I slept each night, I could feel the vibrations of my cell phones in my dreams.

  During this time, the senator gave a series of speeches that spelled out the positions he would take in his run for the White House. On the economy, he tried to find a place between President Bush on the right and the other Democrats on the left as he called for both steep cuts in spending and an end to tax cuts for the rich. For civil libertarians, he pledged to defend the public’s privacy rights against Bush administration efforts to gather information under the cover of homeland security; and for the hawks, who were numerous in the South, he came down hard on Saddam Hussein, calling his regime in Iraq a threat to U.S. security.

  Although I wasn’t part of the group who set his positions, the senator still relied on me for feedback based on my understanding of everyday Democrats who would cast votes in caucuses and primaries. I told him he was on target on the budget, tax, and privacy issues but too close to George Bush when it came to Iraq. As far as I could tell, Saddam had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and the president was rushing toward a war that would cost far more in terms of lives and money than it would be worth in terms of our national security. With these ideas in mind, I took a risk and challenged him.

  “Are you sure, Senator, that we need to move so quickly in Iraq?” I asked him. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  My question hit a nerve, and he raised his voice with me for the first time, insisting that he had attended intelligence briefings where the administration had presented damning evidence of Saddam’s work on weapons of mass destruction and of the atrocities he had committed against his own people. “Andrew, you haven’t seen what I have seen. Saddam Hussein is a monster.”

  No one would argue that the Iraq regime was anything but a brutal dictatorship, but I did ask what purpose would be served by the United States going after this monster when there were many equally monstrous rulers scattered around the globe. The senator held to his position, which he said would probably benefit him politically, because every Democrat who runs for president must prove he is tough on national defense. I didn’t change my position, either, and he would hear more of the same from Mrs. Edwards, who was more outspoken in her politics and more liberal than her husband and his key advisers.

  As I watched them interact, especially when I brought him home from the airport, I could see the Edwardses were able to express strong feelings without getting upset or damaging their personal relationship. She always greeted him with a hug and a smile, and you could see she loved him and respected him. But his candidacy, like his career, was a joint project, and because he respected her intelligence and instincts, he invited her criticisms. She would tell him when he flopped while giving prepared remarks—he was terrible at reading a speech—and she read, reread, and edited every statement he issued, no matter how minor.

  Elizabeth did all this work in addition to taking care of Emma Claire and Jack and supporting Cate, who was at Prince ton. Because I saw how hard she was working, I didn’t much mind that Mrs. Edwards called on me for help. The senator said that this assistance with his wife and family was more important than anything because it relieved some of the stress caused by his absence. As the holidays approached, I was spared the chore of taking the Christmas picture, but I got deeply involved in finding and transporting the family’s main Christmas tree (they had more than one) and helping to locate certain important presents for the family.

  Cheri and I argued about the time I devoted to the Edwards family, especially when I was busy doing household chores for them. She couldn’t understand why I had to take on responsibility for every practical dilemma that arose in the life of the Edwards family. Time and again I told her it was necessary and would be good for our family in the long run. I apologized and explained: I didn’t want to do it, but I had to. Cheri didn’t buy it, no matter how many times I said it.

  Cheri’s point, which I refused to accept, was that I had only so much time and energy and that I was allowing the senator and his wife to take advantage of me. No one could guarantee that John Edwards would ever become president or that I would be part of his team. But that was not an outcome I would even consider. I felt that John Edwards represented my best shot at real success, and I would be a fool to give him anything less than my full effort. Since I was one of the few who had been with him since his election, I also felt a special connection, a sense of pride in helping this man go from rookie senator to presidential contender.

  This all-or-nothing commitment drove me to answer every call and every request with immediate action and to approach every task with the utmost seriousness. Certain that I could do anything and everything at once, I found myself headed for Christmas with Cheri’s family in Illinois with my cell phone, my BlackBerry, and a briefcase full of work. I was going to celebrate the holiday and make sure the Edwards for President office in Raleigh would be up and running on New Year’s Eve, in time for its opening on the first day of 2003. (Since I had negative feelings about the holidays after my father’s affair broke apart my extended family, I was actually kind of glad to have work to keep me occupied.)

  The main problem I had with the office setup involved the telephones and so-called T1 high-speed Internet lines. If we were going to run a big national campaign with a major Internet presence, we needed an advanced and reliable communication system. I signed up BellSouth to handle it, but they ran into one problem after another. In Illinois, I commandeered the basement at Cheri’s sister’s house, turning it into an office where I sent out a stream of faxes and made hundreds of calls. While I did this work, everyone upstairs noticed my absence and started to resent that even when I was around, I seemed cranky and distracted. I overheard my skeptical mother-in-law asking what the heck I was doing down in the basement all day.

  The holiday debacle in Illinois reached its lowest point as a snowstorm kicked up on Christmas Eve. I had to wait until the last minute to sign various contracts to keep them from becoming public knowledge—it was critical not to steal the thunder of the senator’s announcement day. Because of this, I had to overnight signed documents for delivery on the day after Christmas. I wrote out what was needed and went out into the storm to find a FedEx office that was open, would accept a package, and would guarantee delivery on the morning of December 26. I made it with minutes to spare and considered the achievement a bit of a victory. Cheri and her family, on the other hand, watched me race around, ignoring the kids, the company, and the celebration they were enjoying, and concluded that my priorities were out of whack.

  I couldn’t see their point, and on the long drive home to North Carolina, I continued to defend myself. A presidential campaign is a once-ina-lifetime opportunity, I said. I had a duty to the senator that I had to fulfill. I made the same excuses on New Year’s Eve as I left the house to put the finishing touches on the office. BellSouth had finally completed its work on the phone and T1 lines, establishing consistent and reliable service at our site. The problem was, they wouldn’t run the lines inside the office to serve the phones and computers on the many desks where campaign workers would sit. With no volunteers available on New Year’s Eve, that task fell to me. I worked into the night, crawling
on the floor to run wires and tape them down where necessary to prevent anyone from tripping the next day. I didn’t get home until after midnight. It was bad enough that I missed seeing the New Year in with my wife, but I also missed a party that had taken place at my own house. By the time I got there, everyone was gone, along with the party spirit. Of course, I couldn’t spend a lot of time making apologies to Cheri. I had to be up early the next morning to meet the senator and the press at his house. It was going to be a big day.

  Five

  PRIMARY LESSONS

  T

  he New York Times gets everything first. This happens because even in the Internet age, the Times stills sets the media agenda, especially where TV network news operations are concerned. This is why it’s always a good idea to give the Times an early exclusive on an important story, especially if you think it might spin things your way. On the next to last day of 2002, the senator got just this kind of treatment when the nation’s “paper of record” quoted unnamed sources to report that Edwards was going to announce the formation of his presidential exploratory committee—the first step toward a real campaign—and that he would be perceived by many Democrats as “the anti-Gore.” As the anti-Gore, Edwards was handsome, energetic, and quick on his feet. He was also, as the Times said, “a more authentic Southerner who could have far more appeal in states like North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and the mother lode: Florida.”