The Politician: An Insider’s Account of John Edwards’s
Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him
Down
By Andrew Young
(Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 301 pages,
$24.99)
Can there be anyone left on the planet who has not yet heard of
the sex-and-money scandal involving the former North Carolina
senator and über-ambulance chaser, John Edwards, and his airhead
girlfriend, Rielle Hunter? The story, originally broken by the
National Enquirer, titillating supermarket patrons for
weeks before the mainstream media deigned to touch it, is now
enriched with further lurid detail in the memoirs of Edwards’s
longtime gofer, sometime Senate scheduler, “policy director,” and
fullservice aide, Andrew Young.
Mr. Young, it will be recalled, stepped forward at the time of
the original story in the Enquirer to claim that
he was the father of a baby daughter recently birthed by
Ms. Hunter, though there was already considerable evidence to the
contrary. Indeed, at the time nobody believed Young except,
ironically, Mrs. Edwards, who got this highly unlikely story from
her cheating husband.
Since then the plot has considerably thickened, since during her
pregnancy and thereafter Ms. Hunter received rather considerable
sums of money from Edwards. The Justice Department is investigating
whether these transfers involved a violation of federal election
laws, as they might have come from Edwards’s campaign chest. In the
midst of all this Young changed his story and denied that he
fathered the child; Mrs. Edwards no longer believes her husband —
who has rather tardily confessed the truth — and has announced her
intention to divorce him. The latest installment involves the
existence of a lurid sex tape filmed while Edwards and Ms. Hunter
were, as they say, in flagrante. (Hunter is something of a
camera buff, and originally met Edwards while filming a
“documentary” of his presidential campaign.) Young, who claims to
have come across the tape while emptying the Edwards family
garbage, was holding onto it as his ace in the hole against his
former boss. Alas, he has now been forced to surrender it to the
FBI. Stay tuned for further developments.
Meanwhile, there is this book, which in spite of itself is of
more than ordinary interest to students of American politics.
The Politician is the story of two fiercely ambitious (and
unscrupulous) men. One, Edwards, aspired to overcome his humble
origins and amass great wealth, crowning his achievements with the
presidency of the United States. The other, Young, a faceless young
man on the make, thought to hitch his wagon to Edwards’s star. At
one time the two were as close as brothers, and as Edwards’s
prospects seem to brighten, Young was prepared to do anything —
anything -- to advance both their careers. It started with
driving the senator all over his state, moved to picking up his
laundry and buying Thanksgiving turkeys for the Edwards family —
even at one point rising before dawn three times a week to drive a
young woman, a friend of Mrs. Edwards, to take lessons in how to
drive a truck.
From these trivial tasks Young graduated to more meaningful
assignments, for a time becoming Edwards’s gatekeeper (“scheduler”)
in his Washington senatorial office. After a season in the capital
he returned to North Carolina to run Edwards’s operation there.
Sometimes he dealt with real policy matters, but not always. Much
of his work involved the care and feeding of potential financial
contributors, an exacting business requiring much tact and
patience, as well as a willingness to suffer fools gladly.
But by the time of the 2004 presidential campaign Edwards had a
far bigger demand to make of Young. He asked him to nurse his
mistress through her pregnancy. As unbelievable as it may seem,
Young forced his wife and children to accompany him — pulling his
kids out of school, in fact — in order to babysit a petulant and
intellectually vacuous young woman in various “safe houses”
scattered about the country (the last of these in elegant
Montecito, a very pricy suburb of Santa Barbara, California,
courtesy of one of his wealthy trial lawyer friends) until the
“miracle child” (as Hunter referred to her) was brought to
birth.
The story of John Edwards and Andrew Young is really the story
of Southern White Liberal Politics as it has emerged in the
post-civil rights era. Both men were hatched from the same
misshapen egg that gave us Jimmy Carter — a protoplasm that
combines greed, power lust, hypocrisy, and sanctimony. The last
ingredient is particularly cloying; more than once while reading
this book I found myself reaching for my insulin needle. So much
sweetness and light! So much dedication to the poor and
underprivileged!
In truth, Edwards’s hackneyed campaign theme of “Two Americas”
was not totally fictitious, but it bore little resemblance to the
one to which he continually referred in his campaign speeches.
Rather, one America is made up of ordinary working people, folks
that (in Young’s telling) Edwards privately despises. The other is
the America of gated estates, private jets, landing strips, and
vast inherited wealth — where the White Knight of North Carolina
(again, according to Young) feels most comfortable. Together with
bloated trial lawyers, who saw Edwards as the surest protection
against tort reform, these people were ready to write large checks
to put their man in the White House. Alas, it all came to an end
when Barack Obama entered the race, sweeping Liberal America off
its feet.
Apparently it came to an end for Young as well. Exhausted at the
end of the presidential campaign and at the ceaseless demands of
Edwards and his wife — which by now included even perjuring
himself by acknowledging a fatherhood that was not his — he
expected to be rewarded with a well-paying sinecure at a “center
for the study of poverty” which, he claims, was to be funded by
Edwards admirer Bunny Mellon, a 90-year-old billionairess reputedly
the wealthiest woman in America. When Edwards abruptly told his
aide that Mrs. Mellon had backed out of her commitment, the
relationship instantly soured. Stung by this unexpected turn of
events, Young asks us to believe that this caused him to see the
light and break with his former boss.
Perhaps. But one could be forgiven for speculating that the real
reason that Edwards lost Young’s loyalty is that, like most wealthy
(and non-wealthy) politicians, he expects other people to pay his
bills. His lack of gratitude and his sense of entitlement proved to
be his downfall.
The facts of the case are that the senator is a very wealthy man
with assets in the neighborhood of $150 million, thanks to having
won several sensational class action suits during his years as a
trial lawyer. He could easily have sat down and written a large
check to Young. In that eventuality Ms. Hunter’s baby girl might
well have been baptized as one of Young’s children; and — assuming
that the unfortunately loquacious Ms. Hunter could be persuaded to
quietly wait out the death of cancer-stricken Mrs. Edwards so that
she could eventually marry the senator — we would have heard no
more of it.
Instead, we get this book, which is supposed to pay for Young’s
accumulating legal expenses as he faces investigation by federal
authorities. Given the lengthening developments that characterize
the case, Mr. Young may soon experience the poverty he was so eager
to study with Mrs. Mellon’s millio
