The Politician

The senator’s personal finances were secure. He had raised a political war chest and he had a private jet at his beck and call. He began devoting all his attention to building relationships across the country, devising strategy, and putting people into key jobs. All the campaigns were performing this task. Hillary Clinton had her husband, the most experienced politician on the planet, as her top adviser. Barack Obama loaded his staff with extremely talented former Edwards loyalists like Julia

As the new body man, Davis would be in charge of the senator’s care and feeding whenever he left North Carolina. This meant keeping him on schedule, shepherding him to and from events, and traveling by his side. Like most new staff members, he turned to me, as the senator’s longest-​serving and closest aide, whenever he ran into an issue he couldn’t resolve or needed answers to questions he couldn’t ask the senator directly.

Recently married to a sweet young woman whom he obviously adored, Davis was a fairly proper and morally conservative guy who rarely swore or raised his voice or got overly excited. He was also smart and started calling me with questions about Rielle Hunter almost immediately after he took to the road with the senator. When I couldn’t give him satisfying answers, he pressed me harder. Finally, on a night when he was staying in North Carolina, I went to the hotel where he was staying (the same Courtyard by Marriott that issued the key card discovered by Heather) and sat with him and one of the senator’s top political advisers, David Medina. (Medina would eventually become First Lady Michelle Obama’s deputy chief of staff.)

As John and David worked their way through a supply of beer (I abstained because of my DWI), the conversation became more animated and John slowly grasped what was going on between the senator and Rielle. He also became quite profane, which I would discover was something that happened on the rare occasions when he drank.

After Medina left, he said, “C’mon, Andrew. You don’t think he could be so fuckin’ stupid as to think he can get away with it, do you?”

It was a good question, and the only answer was that the senator obviously did think he could get away with it. And why wouldn’t he? For all of his life he had been told he was special, and every year brought him ever more adulation. He had wealth, fame sd w, and a younger woman who called him “the king” and promised to do whatever he wanted her to do at any time.

For John Davis, who cared deeply about the issues and had come to the campaign as a true believer, the more important matter was, in my mind, protecting himself. My sense of commitment to John Edwards was becoming frayed, and I was not excited about working on a campaign for another year. Here I could offer some solid counsel. I told him that his best chance of avoiding trouble was to remain loyal to the senator, not Mrs. Edwards. (I suspected that some of the staff were actually more attached to her and may have been feeding her information about Rielle.) In the short term, I told him, “try to make his life as simple as possible.” In the long term, his goal should be to anticipate the boss’s needs so that he wouldn’t even have to ask. It’s like being the best friend of the quarterback in high school. You protect him even if that means helping him get away with stuff.

As I explained the facts of life to John, I recalled similar conversations with Edwards’s body men Hunter Pruette and Josh Brumberger, and the warnings I had received from Julia

When I left John, I felt sorry for him. I felt even worse a few days later when I tried to remind the senator to be careful about letting too many people in on his secrets. Edwards said that he believed firing Josh had sent an effective message to everyone who might go public with information about Rielle. And where John Davis was concerned, he said, “Don’t worry about him, Andrew, he’s one of us.” The next morning, Heather North, the na

With a single phrase, the senator had declared that John Davis was trustworthy. Remarkably, the senator assumed that everyone, including old friends who had known him and Mrs. Edwards for decades, would simply go along. I can think of no other explanation for his decision to continue seeing Rielle and to bring her into even more public settings.

In November, after the trip to Africa, the cell phone mishap, and Josh’s removal, the senator headed for Asheville and a weekend conference of the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers. (I went with him, as did John Davis.) When Rielle called from New Jersey, Edwards decided that it would be just fine if she joined the party at the Grove Park I

As we left the university to meet the lawyers at the i

Later, at the hotel, we met his old friends Wade Byrd and David Kirby, who had been his original political backers and closest friends but had recently begun to feel neglected by him. Although he would give a brief talk to the academy on how he intended to protect trial lawyers from Republican-​backed tort “reforms” that would hinder lawsuits, the senator’s main goal for this overnight visit was to heal these relationships. As he turned on the charm, I could see his old friends begin to forgive him.

When di