Politician Page 5

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  orn off of East Africa in the middle of August 1999, Dennis wandered north and west to the Caribbean, where he flexed his muscles and became a full-blown hurricane. He reached the North Carolina coast on September 1, lashing the state with dangerous winds and heavy rains. The sense of relief that came with the return of the sun didn’t last very long, as the storm actually came back a week later to dump as much as eighteen inches on towns at the shore. Much of what wasn’t flooded the first time got washed away with the second pass, including our wedding cake.

  The cake was at the Holiday Inn Resort at Wrightsville Beach, where Cheri and I held our wedding reception in a moment of quiet weather on September 11. Months of planning produced a nearly perfect ceremony and celebration. We were married in a historic church, surrounded by family and friends, and walked outside to fountains, a horse-drawn carriage, rice, and the sounds of the church bells. It was a beautiful day, but the true meaning of it all didn’t hit me until we were on our honeymoon in St. Lucia. Marrying Cheri made me happier than I had ever been. I had gotten the girl of my dreams, and my tumultuous past seemed far away.

  While we were in the Caribbean, North Carolina went through a nightmare as another hurricane, Floyd, slammed into the coast near Cape Fear on September 16 at three in the morning. Floyd packed winds over a hundred miles an hour and brought a ten-foot ocean surge that flooded towns up and down the coast. He dumped so much rain that rivers across the state overflowed their banks and flooded thousands of homes. Fifty-three people would die from storm-related causes, and the state would suffer more than $3.7 billion in property damage. More flooding came as a series of lesser storms swept through, and by the end of the month there was hardly a dry spot in the eastern part of the state. Cheri and I watched in horror from our honeymoon paradise as CNN showed footage of the steeple of the church where we were married being blown off.

  As the news reports showed, Princeville, famous as the first community established by freed slaves after the Civil War, was hit the hardest. Every building in the town was flooded, and every citizen had to be evacuated. But it wasn’t Princeville’s displaced people and damaged structures that stuck in your mind after you visited, it was the coffins. The powerful floodwaters had undermined graves and lifted caskets out of the ground. The water was so deep that as it receded, some of the coffins actually got lodged in trees. Others were scattered in muddy yards and on streets that were strewn with debris. It was a ghastly sight, and something that no witness ever forgot.

  I saw the destruction in Princeville and other communities as I drove the senator around the state in the aftermath of the storm, meeting with disaster officials and offering whatever solace we could. Floyd was such an intense storm, and the destruction was so widespread, that President Clinton visited two days after the rain stopped to assure people that federal help was on the way and to soak up some national media attention as he played comforter in chief. “We’re going to stand with you,” he told people in Tarboro, “until you get back on your feet again, as long as it takes.”

  Clinton would be followed by a host of other officials, none of whom could change much of anything on the ground. Disaster agencies, charities, and communities were already digging out and cleaning up, and unless he was willing to grab a shovel or a hammer, all a politician could do was offer symbolic support. Edwards, who was always aware of press opportunities, spent lots of time in the disaster area and got his share of attention from TV and print reporters, but he wasn’t the only elected official looking for the limelight. A few days after the storm, while I was helping to shovel out a church filled with mud and debris, Congresswoman Eva Clayton scurried inside, noticed the Edwards staff T-shirt I wore, looked at the mask I was wearing to protect myself from fungus, and said, “Young man, gimme that thing, here come the TV cameras.” She took it so she could look as though she had been working. As soon as the news crews left, I got it back.

  Fortunately, my boss wasn’t quite so brazen when it came to playing to the cameras. He knew they were there, but he also went out of his way to connect with the people who had lost homes and even loved ones in the storm. Almost every time we arrived at a site—church, school, or firehouse—he acknowledged the various dignitaries and VIPs but also made a point of heading for the back rooms and kitchens where the work was being done by folks most politicians overlook.

  Given his interest in working people, I was a little surprised by Senator Edwards’s reluctance to roll up his sleeves and get a little dirty himself. Instead of picking up a hammer and driving some nails with Habitat for Humanity or throwing around some cut branches with a road-clearing crew, he would say something about his tight schedule and depart without risking a blister. I thought this was a politically tone-deaf choice that opened the door to people who might say he was too much style and too little substance. Eventually, I learned that while he wasn’t afraid of breaking a sweat, he was afraid of looking silly and wanted to avoid doing things that reminded him too much of the people he called “rednecks” that he grew up around in Robbins.

  As I got to know the senator, I came to understand his ambivalence about his background. As a smart and sensitive young man, he had worked very hard to get an education, build a career, and separate himself from the rougher elements of the small-town South. He was proud of being one of Robbins’s favorite sons, along with the astronaut Charles E. Brady, who was pictured on a mural in town. (Brady would commit suicide in 2006.) And when he ran for office, the senator harkened back to his humble beginnings with real affection. But while he may have still loved Robbins, or the idea of a place like Robbins, he didn’t want to go back to being the boy who once lived there, even for a moment.

  As flaws go, Edwards’s fear of looking stupid and his ambivalence about his past were small. He presented himself as someone who understood the strain people felt as they lived paycheck to paycheck and said he found it easy to imagine what the flood victims experienced. He often said to me, “There but for the grace of God.” I admired him for putting his arms around people and reassuring them. The Edwards staff worked overtime to help the victims of the disaster, and he returned to the area several times to check on the progress of the cleanup.

  These inspections became part of an ambitious project—you might call it “The Hundred-County Campaign”—that I proposed to him a few months after joining the staff in Raleigh. The project, which called for the senator to visit every county in the state no matter how small and isolated, grew out of the basic notion that if he was going to accomplish anything in Washington, he would need the voters’ support, especially in the next election. And while incumbency is usually an advantage, in the past thirty-five years no one in his seat had ever served more than one term. One of these senators, John East, had committed suicide. Another, Terry Sanford, was ousted when a close friend turned on him and ran for the same office. The job seemed jinxed.

  I presented the idea of the hundred-county campaign with a written proposal that included a color-coded map showing where the senator had already spent time and where he had never shaken a single hand. I argued that with a deliberate effort he could get to all these places, where many people didn’t even know who he was, and raise his political profile while doing some official business. Mrs. Edwards absolutely loved the proposal, and since she was the senator’s closest adviser, it got the green light. The project would consume much of my time and put the senator and me in a car together for lots of long road trips. My job involved finding people and places to visit—we stressed education, medical care, the military, and law enforcement to beef up his standing on these issues—and all the logistics of getting him around. I poured days into the task of making sure everything went smoothly. In those days before people had global position systems in their cars, this preparation included actually driving the entire route, timing out the distances, and noting the directions down to a tenth of a mile on the backs of business cards. Sometimes I ran so short on time that I would have to make th
ese test runs in the middle of the night on dark, windy, unlit country roads. I would often get lost, be forced to backtrack, and then find myself driving like one of the Dukes of Hazzard so I might get home in time to get a few hours of sleep.

  The next day, I would have my Suburban all prepped with maps, cell phones, newspapers, briefing folders, Diet Cokes, water, and food, and we would attack the schedule like an army on the move. At each stop I’d reach into the backseat and grab a plastic plaque with the United States Senate seal and a roll of Velcro tape and make sure the plaque was fixed to the podium where he would speak. I tried to stage the events to capitalize on his trial lawyer’s skills. This meant keeping his formal remarks short, leaving plenty of time for questions and answers, and surrounding him with people. But while I followed a set routine, the senator would often deviate in a way that would charm the crowd and let him connect with people in a more direct and emotional way. A classic case in point occurred at a school in rural Greene County, where the staff had begun to turn around a long record of poor performance. They had done this with a new program that involved building discipline and pride and used many unconventional techniques, especially songs, to help students learn.

  As he often did, Edwards began his improvising by suggesting that the event be expanded. Feigning irritation with me, he said, “Andrew, we shouldn’t be seeing just a few folks and leave everyone else out. Can’t we bring everyone into someplace like the auditorium and get ’em all involved?” The principal of the school, eager to please the senator, loved his suggestion and announced that everyone should come to the cafeteria for a special assembly. You could feel the excitement ripple through the building as kids filed into the hallways. But I also noticed that these were the quietest, best-behaved children I had ever seen. No one ran. No one shouted. And they took their seats in the cafeteria without any ruckus at all. Walking with one of the teachers, I noticed there were no locks on the lockers and no graffiti on the walls. “We don’t need locks—these kids learn trust,” he told me. “And they learn pride. There is no graffiti.”

  When everyone was gathered together, the principal gave the kids a chance to show the senator what they knew. One small girl got up from her seat, and a hush fell over the room. Then she started to sing:

  Two, three, five, seven, and eleven,

  Thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, too,

  Twenty-three and twenty-nine.

  It’s so fine,

  Only two factors make a number prime.

  When the little girl finished this first verse, every kid in the room joined her for the rest of the song, singing out prime numbers past one thousand. The performance took eight or nine minutes, but it was a breathtaking and inspiring thing to hear. These kids had a fraction of the resources of similarly sized schools and a hundred times the spirit. At the end, Edwards moved into the crowd and knelt to give the girl who had started the song a big hug. Whatever he might have said during a speech or question-and-answer session could never have the power of that gesture. Most important, it was moments like this (and there were many of them) that made me feel that my assessment of him as a leader was correct.

  As we left the school, our hosts followed us to the car and waved goodbye. If anyone on the school staff had started the day with doubts about the senator, my bet is that they were resolved by the time he left. The same could be said for students who would go home and tell their parents about the assembly or cast their own votes in future elections. We were also happy to note that we had visited yet another county on the list. As we drove away in the Suburban, I said something like “Well, that’s another county,” and the senator responded by high-fiving me and saying, “Check!” with a wave of his arm, mimicking the gesture one would make to draw a huge checkmark on a blackboard.

  On the day we visited Green County, we were close enough to home to sleep at our own houses. However, many of these expeditions were two-or three-day affairs, and we’d find ourselves spending nights at hotels and having three meals a day together. The first hotel I ever booked for us turned out to be a disaster. Located near Camp LeJeune, the Onslow Inn was very affordable and in the right spot. Unfortunately, every room reeked of mold and mildew. We stayed but the senator was miserable and he complained loudly.

  In the days we spent touring the state, we talked about family, politics, our personal histories, marriage—like me, he said he loved his wife and was completely faithful—and everything else you can imagine. The subject of the senator’s son Wade came up often, and he frequently asked me to drive by the cemetery so he could visit his grave, which was marked by a ten-foot-tall marble statue of an angel emerging from the stone, with what appears to be Wade’s face cradled in her arms.

  If we had company in the car, like a national reporter, the senator often discussed cases he had worked on as a lawyer, and whenever we passed a courthouse, he became nostalgic about performing in front of juries and judges and the thrill of winning a big victory for a deserving client. (He always gave some credit to Elizabeth for these victories, because she always studied his cases, offered advice, and even helped him with his closing arguments.) He would start to tell a story to a reporter, then stop and say, “Oh, have I told you this one, Andrew?” I would shake my head no. Then I would smile to myself and settle in to hear about another of his great legal conquests, for the twentieth time.

  One of his favorite stories from his practice was about a case he tried in a small town close to Robbins. It was the first time his mother came to watch him work, and she was bursting with pride. Near the end of the trial, she ran into the jury foreman at the grocery store. She had known the man for years, and he told her, “We just think the world of your son.” Even I knew this was probably grounds for a mistrial, but the story ends with a victory for Edwards.

  At other times, we talked about University of North Carolina basketball (college ball is a religion in the state), and we planned routes for our daily jogs. Edwards was thoroughly addicted to running and would get cranky on the days he couldn’t have an hour or more to change clothes, cover a few miles, shower, and cool down. I would join him, and as we pounded down city streets or dug our way across the sand at a beach, we would talk. Invariably, he’d say something about how much he preferred to be home in North Carolina and how disappointed he was by Washington and the life of a United States senator.

  You’re forgiven if you can’t muster empathy for someone who complains about holding a prestigious elected office that brings him into the circles of power and requires him to be praised and honored wherever he goes. (Cue the world’s tiniest violin.) The life of a senator is not digging ditches. But if you do it well, it can consume your every waking hour, and the travel back and forth to your home state can become exhausting. Senators spend an inordinate amount of time fending off lobbyists and begging for political contributions, which most find to be degrading. Finally, as a freshman, a senator has hardly any power. In his first years, Edwards was permitted to take up one real issue, a proposed “patients’ bill of rights,” and he got lucky when his colleagues allowed him to put his name on the bill beside that of John McCain, who really did believe in working across party lines to get things done.

  The legislation Edwards and McCain proposed would have given Americans more say in their own medical care, making it easier for them to access services and giving them more power in dealing with health insurance companies. In the long run, the idea would be adopted by both the House and the Senate, but it was eventually vetoed by President Bush. In the short term, it gave Senator Edwards a very popular issue to talk about, and it brought him more attention from the national media than anyone else in his Senate class. Edwards couldn’t have risen so fast without some help, and as time passed I would learn what a powerful friend and mentor he had in Senator Ted Kennedy, who was coming to believe himself that Edwards might be a future president. In a party that was short on charisma, the old war horse saw promise in John Edwards and was going to do whatever he could to promote him
.

  More help would come from Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, who saw great potential in Edwards and came to Raleigh in the fall of 1999 to attend a fund-raiser. Because I had to pick him up at the airport, I asked Cheri to take care of things at the Angus Barn steak house, where the event would be held, and she did. Kerrey, who insisted on carrying his own bag when I met him, couldn’t have been nicer. He had just gotten a BlackBerry phone and was beguiled by its capabilities. “Look at this,” he said, showing me the screen. “I just texted my whole staff.”

  Although he was a war hero who had run for president himself, Kerrey was unpretentious and undemanding. He drew a good crowd to the donors’ cocktail party, where he made my boss sound as though he were already a key player in the United States Senate. Afterward, when Edwards asked him to share a dinner in the restaurant, he turned to me and said, “Andrew, why don’t you and Cheri join us?”

  For a local staffer with just a few months on the job, the invitation was like being asked to move up to the grown-ups’ table at Thanksgiving. And unfortunately, I discovered what a lot of young people learn when they join the adults: It’s not as great as you expect it will be. On this night, the Edwardses tried a little too hard to impress their guest, which was embarrassing, and then the senator put his foot in his mouth when he asked Cheri about her job as a nurse. Somehow he managed to get onto the subject of her salary and then insulted her by blurting out, “Jesus, how the heek do you survive on horrible pay like that?”

  The comment bothered me on several levels, including the way it contradicted everything I had heard the senator say about how he respected working people. Cheri left the restaurant more than a little steamed. She actually made a very good living, just not relative to someone who made $10 million a year. Cheri never forgot it. I decided it reflected a flaw in a man who otherwise possessed a great many positive qualities, which balanced it out.