The Politician (32 page)

H
eather North, the nanny, was one of the few people who knew what I knew about the Edwardses and Rielle Hunter, and there were times when she and I compared notes. These talks were part gossip and part mutual support, which we needed, considering the stress that comes with keeping secrets. We were both struck by the midlife crisis aspect of John Edwards’s affair and how he had obviously found in Rielle someone who was his wife’s opposite. A New Age drifter who made her own rules, Rielle was always working the “fun-and-single-blonde” angle. She was someone who offered sex, spiritual advice, or good company as you had a few drinks. Mrs. Edwards looked like who she was—a highly educated, middle-aged mother, cancer victim, and wife of thirty years.

As different as they were in style and background, Rielle and Mrs. Edwards were both ambitious and self-confident. Both were certain that John Edwards should be president and that if he was elected, the world would be a much better place. And they both believed in the power of their own insight and intuition. Mrs. Edwards followed hers to guide the campaign. Rielle relied on hers to advise the senator personally. Finally, they were both insecure about the future and the senator’s true intentions. These feelings led Mrs. Edwards to try to push me out of John Edwards’s life.
They led Rielle to depend on me to connect her to him. I was squarely in the middle.

On the day the senator went home to deal with the recurrence of his wife’s cancer, Rielle called me at least half a dozen times to complain about spending her birthday alone. “He loves
me,
” she would say, “and it’s just not right that we’re not together.”

In the weeks that followed, Rielle seethed over the attention Mrs. Edwards received from the media, but she also celebrated the jump in the senator’s poll numbers. We spoke every day, usually more than once. With his schedule in hand, Rielle was able to meet him in various hotels when he was campaigning without his wife. However, the rules of engagement, so to speak, had changed as Mrs. Edwards had become keenly aware of Rielle Hunter. She monitored call histories on phones (at least those she could locate) and called her husband many times a day when he was away. Mrs. Edwards also forbade hotel operators from transferring calls from women to his room and regularly changed his check-in pseudonym.

More concerned than ever about being caught, the senator required Rielle to be as furtive as possible. When he was in New York, she could no longer wait in the hotel lobby and then go up to his room. Instead, she had to hang out in a bar next door and hope to either catch sight of the entourage entering or wait to receive a cell phone call. During one of these stakeouts, she looked up to see John Davis, the body man, enter and take a seat at the counter, which was between her and the door. Panicked, Rielle ran to the restroom and hid. After a long wait, the woman who had served her a drink came to ask if she was all right. Rielle told her a tale about how she was hiding from one of the customers, and the kindly waitress let her slip out a back door.

The drama excited Rielle, as did the sense of power she felt as a secret insider with a direct line to a man who could become president of the United States. She followed his every move on the twenty-four-hour news channels and the Internet and spoke to him numerous times every day on the Batphone or via a three-way call. He felt calmed by Rielle and wanted
to talk to her before every debate and major event. She believed her spiritual blessings were vital to his success. When she couldn’t get through to him directly, because he was at home without the special phone or Elizabeth was around, she called me incessantly.

In late April, Rielle called and left me a message while she was watching a televised debate. It was the first to include all eight Democratic Party candidates. She seemed happy with the senator’s performance until the end, when he was asked to name a person he considered a moral leader. After mentioning Jesus Christ and before naming his father, he said, “My wife, who I think is the finest human being I have ever known, is a source of great conscience for me.” Over the phone, Rielle groaned and said that if Elizabeth Edwards was anyone’s moral leader, “we’re all going to hell.”

Although it’s difficult to say she showed a whole lot of conscience about the way she conducted herself (I never saw her troubled by doubt after she indulged in a tirade or fired a staffer), Mrs. Edwards was quick to criticize others for what she believed were displays of moral weakness or bad behavior. This trait was on full display when she publicly scolded Ann Coulter for lying about her husband.

The Coulter conflict arose after the right-wing commentator used the word
faggot
in connection with the senator and talked about how she wished he had been assassinated. Mrs. Edwards surprised her by calling into the Chris Matthews TV show
Hardball
and getting on the air to ask her to quit the personal attacks. It was good theater, but I didn’t understand why a potential First Lady would engage in debate with an insult comic like Coulter. But influencing Coulter was not the point. Mrs. Edwards called the show on an impulse. It caught the senator and the campaign staff by surprise. She wanted to defend her husband, and her ever stronger performance as a campaigner had given her the standing and the courage to act.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Edwards’s courage often empowered her to express frustration and anger in clumsy ways. In the call to
Hardball,
she was more emotional than reasoned, and she came off sounding like a scold. She was
similarly off pitch when she gave an interview in which she complained about the media focus on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the advantage minority status gave their campaigns.

“We can’t make John black, we can’t make him a woman,” she said. “These things get you a lot of press . . . [and] fund-raising dollars.”

These comments brought criticism from those who thought she was whining and found it awfully hard to work up sympathy for a white Southern man with enormous wealth and privilege. But like the
Hardball
call, they did energize Mrs. Edwards’s more fervent supporters, who saw her as the spunky wife saying what needed to be said on behalf of the best candidate. Of course, they didn’t know that even as she stood up for him, John Edwards was continuing to betray her and that the threat posed by the force of nature that was Rielle Hunter had already become much worse.

B
y May 2007, Rielle and I were in constant communication. I had never known a woman who needed more attention, but on the day I received four calls in the space of an hour, I knew something unusual was going on. The senator was traveling with his wife (no Batphone) and about to begin taping an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. Having deflected Rielle three times, I answered the fourth call feeling irritated and almost angry.

“Somebody better be dying or pregnant,” I said.

“Nobody’s dying,” sobbed Rielle. She then threatened to go to the press with evidence of their affair—she was Camera Girl, and she had plenty of pictures—if I didn’t find a way to connect her with Senator Edwards immediately.

The senator had told John Davis to always accept my calls, no matter where he was, and he was one of the few people in the campaign who had expressed suspicions about Rielle. He tried to brush me off, but I was adamant and said, “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.”

During a break in the taping, Davis managed to pull the senator aside and get him to call me from a private spot. I shouldn’t have been startled by
his initial response to what was happening—he asked me to “handle it”—since I had fixed a thousand problems for him in the past. This time I said, “I can’t handle this one,” and he agreed to talk to her.

Whatever he said kept Rielle quiet, temporarily. Later that day, cussing and barely under control, he would tell me that Rielle had long claimed she was physically unable to get pregnant and that since she was “a crazy slut” and they had an “open” relationship, he thought there was only a “one-in-three chance” that he could be the father of her baby. He told me she should get an abortion and asked me to help persuade her to do it.

The next time I spoke with Rielle, she said that the senator had told her to get an abortion. I am pro-choice, but when she asked me what I would do, I thought about my kids and said I wouldn’t go through with an abortion. She talked about how she was a forty-two-year-old woman who wanted to have a child before she got too old. She also believed that the baby she was carrying—a combination of his intellectual brilliance and her spiritual superiority—was some kind of golden child, the reincarnated spirit of a Buddhist monk who was going to help save the world. There was no way she was going to have an abortion.

Instead, pregnant Rielle would require more attention and support than ever before, and this would cost a lot of money. Even though he possessed a fortune worth tens of millions of dollars, the senator had no way to access this money without his wife finding out. This problem had become especially acute in the months since Mrs. Edwards had learned about Rielle, and was complicated by the financial stress related to their new home.

For years the Edwardses had spent freely, but as they built their mansion, they realized that more money was going out than was coming in. First they accused their closest aides—including me—of abusing the access to funds they had granted us in order to help keep their various households going. Once these spending streams were stopped, they then imposed stricter accounting for their own expenses. Unable to sneak any cash out of this system, the senator asked me to pay for Rielle’s silence. He suggested I draw on the profit Cheri and I had realized in the sale of our Lake Wheeler
house, which was reserved for the new place. (He promised I would be repaid.)

I had already covered some of Rielle’s expenses, and as a minor player in the macho games of scheming, high-powered men, I think a part of me would have felt proud to say I was rich enough to offer the senator this favor. But even as he asked me to use money that was, by rights, Cheri’s as well as mine, the senator begged me to hide everything about Rielle from her. He asked this because he understood that what he was doing was shameful, and sensed that Cheri had never trusted him as I did. Of course, I couldn’t do what he asked. I had already told Cheri everything. She was well aware of Rielle, and disapproved of the way the senator was putting his wife and children at risk. And now that Rielle was pregnant, this was obviously a long-term project and we didn’t have the funds to support her lifestyle.

Once I was crossed off the list of potential donors, Edwards suggested David Kirby. The senator thought that Kirby owed him support because of all the big jury awards he had won for their firm, but Kirby did not agree. I suggested an appeal to Fred Baron, but the senator said, “Fred’s got a big mouth, and he’s too close to the Clintons.” Finally we focused on Bunny Mellon, who had made it clear she would give Edwards money for extraneous expenses with no explanation required. Edwards called her, and “the Bunny money” began to flow. To make her feel rewarded for this aid, the senator stayed in touch by calling her from the road. In June, he called her from backstage in Manchester, New Hampshire, just prior to a nationally televised candidates debate. (On that same evening, I was attending a function at my kids’ school—it was “Spanish Night”—and the senator called demanding I help him contact Rielle. Cell phone reception was poor at the school, so I had to leave the event to facilitate a three-way call.)

Bunny’s checks, written for many hundreds of thousands of dollars, were made as payments to her decorator, Bryan Huffman, so that she wouldn’t have to offer an explanation to the professionals who handled her accounts. These funds (and the money that came from Fred Baron later) were gifts, entirely proper, and not subject to campaign finance laws. She did not
know that the money was being used in part for Rielle. Bunny sent the checks to Bryan hidden in boxes of chocolate and with notes discussing her contributions to “the confederacy.” Bryan sent them to me with notes of his own. One said, “A little table money,” because the memo line indicated it was payment for an antique table. Another said, “For the rescue of America,” which was how Bunny referred to the way she used her money on behalf of Democrats in general and John Edwards in particular. After I received each check, it was deposited in joint accounts I held with Cheri, to be used to keep Rielle happy and hidden from the media, Mrs. Edwards, and anyone who might divulge her existence. This was the arrangement the senator expected me to follow, so that he would have “plausible deniability.”

In accepting the checks and responsibility for Rielle, I plunged myself, Cheri, and my kids into hot water. The temperature wasn’t so high that it was uncomfortable, so we stayed in the pot. And like frogs that will remain submerged in a pot on a stove while an experimenter raises the temperature ever so slowly, we would stay in this situation far too long, enduring as each new demand increased the heat by a fraction of a degree. Unlike frogs, we would get out before it was too late. But looking back, I find it hard to believe that we didn’t hop away on the day Rielle arrived at our house with photographers from the
National Enquirer
hot on her trail.

F
or months, Rielle had complained to me about how her boyfriend, now the father of her child, neglected her. She also talked to her “close friends,” who she said would never betray her because of their “spiritual connections.” One of these friends was
Newsweek
writer Jonathan Darman, who spoke with her on the phone from time to time and once had lunch with her. (She talked with him about having an affair with a very powerful man but wouldn’t divulge his identity.) When I talked with her, Rielle requested my help with financial and emotional concerns and every once in a while threatened to go to the press and reveal the affair. Rielle was especially outraged on July 30 when the Edwardses marked their thirtieth anniversary by renewing their wedding vows and celebrating at Wendy’s.
The event got extensive coverage from the media, including pictures in
People
magazine and a bit of fawning from Diane Sawyer of ABC-TV’s
Good Morning America
.