Cheri and I returned to Boston two weeks later, bringing Cooper to Children’s Hospital for his surgery. While doctors in North Carolina wanted to employ the same technique they had used on Gracie, the surgeon in Boston was a specialist who used three tiny incisions and high-​tech instruments to make the repair. Cooper’s recovery was quick. In a week we were home, and within a month he was pain-​free and growing like a weed. Although we faced an uncertain future in the aftermath of the election, our family was healthy and together for the holidays.

Just after New Year’s, I drove down to Fuquay-​Varina to pick up the senator’s brother, Blake, and drive him to the airport for a flight to Colorado, where he would surrender to the Arapahoe County sheriff and begin serving a sixty-​day sentence in the county jail. His plane departed at seven A.M., so I had to fetch him at about four-​thirty. He lumbered out of the house looking dejected and scared. The drive was tense and awkward, and our conversation was punctuated by his apologies. Blake was worried about how his problems reflected on his brother and how he had upset Mrs. Edwards. “Man, Elizabeth must be pissed,” he said.

As I said good-bye to Blake at th cto e airport, I tried to…

Seven

The silence that falls after a losing political campaign is almost total, like the quiet inside an abandoned mine. The senator said, “There’s no other business to compare it with. Based on how people vote, you go from almost leading the free world to not having a job in twenty-​four hours.” A few media types might call for help with their postmortem stories, but after a day or two you no longer hear from the thousands of people who a week earlier jammed the phone lines with advice, requests, and offers of support.

After John Kerry and John Edwards lost, they didn’t even call each other very much. In fact, they lost touch in a matter of weeks as Kerry prepared to return to the United States Senate and Edwards turned his attention to his wife’s health and his own uncertain future.

Mrs. Edwards’s prognosis seemed dire. Her cancer was aggressive, and by the time it was discovered it had already moved beyond the duct where it started and into surrounding tissue. When this occurs the cancer can spread almost anywhere in the body, and the best treatment is an all-​out assault with chemotherapy and radiation. It was a grueling regimen that took about six months to complete. During this time the senator divided his attention between her, their children, and his own struggle to get past his defeat and set a course for his political future. During a week when Elizabeth was between treatments and strong enough to be alone, the senator and I went together to Figure Eight Island, where we could rest and brainstorm.

The Edwards beach house sits on the Intracoastal Waterway, with a commanding view of the water. During our first few days, the senator spent much of his time walking on the beach and reading through a stack of books by or about Bobby Kennedy. Calls from political supporters brought the suggestion that he run for chair of the Democratic National Committee, and if he’d been interested in this kind of nuts-​and-​bolts party work, he could have had the job. However, he rejected the idea because he didn’t see how he could run for president from the DNC position, and he was probably right. When Howard Dean announced he wanted the job, he more or less accepted the end of his own desire to occupy the Oval Office.

Aside from occasional chats with his cronies, the senator’s main contact with the outside world during this beach retreat came from Elizabeth, whom he called about half a dozen times a day. I was impressed by their friendship and how he valued her input. Sometimes she’d ask to speak to me so that I could give her a report on his spirits. More than once she said, “I’m glad he’s with you, Andrew. It fmakes me feel safer.”

At night we would go to Wilmington, where restaurants that bustled with business in the summer were mostly empty and quiet. Although he sometimes seemed plagued by doubts about his campaigns for the White House, he also made arguments about why he had done it and even why he should try again. Invariably, the rationale would come down to his concern “for people who can’t help themselves” who needed him to be their champion, their white knight.

In all these conversations, the senator noted that Elizabeth was certain that he should mount another campaign, whether she was sick or not. During this time he admired her determination, but I noticed that he also complained more about her mood swings and demanding nature. Toward the end of the campaign, she had started picking fights with him as he was leaving for a flight or about to go onstage for some event, not caring how it might make him late or affect his performance. Often these arguments were about staffers she didn’t trust (she didn’t trust most of the senator’s aides) or about something he said or did that she didn’t like. “Sometimes I think she’s crazy,” he said.

We drank a little more than usual during this week, and as the wine took hold, the senator invariably talked about the tragedy of his son Wade’s death, going over the details as if repeating them might release some of the pain. On the day it happened, Wade’s companion, who survived virtually unscathed, had called friends in the neighborhood, who knew about it before the Edwardses. The senator told me about how the police came to their home and Elizabeth knew what was happening even before they spoke. She screamed, “Tell me he’s okay! Tell me he’s okay!” When they hesitated, she collapsed on the floor. One of the officers turned to Edwards and said, “I’m sorry, sir. Your son was killed instantly in a wreck.”

As he told this story, the combination of emotion and wine filled the senator’s eyes with tears. He said, “This is just between you and me, okay?” and then continued. The most poignant moment would come when he recalled that when he went to the medical examiner’s office to identify Wade, he actually climbed onto the table where he had been laid out so that he could embrace him one last time. This was the same story he told John Kerry, but unlike Kerry, I didn’t judge Edwards for repeating it. I know that people have to tell their tales of grief over and over again, so I didn’t mind. I hoped the process would help him recover his energy and optimism, and by the time our retreat was over, it seemed he had.

Despite the obstacles he might face, John Edwards believed he would occupy the Oval Office in January 2009. To get there, he would need some way to remain in public life and maintain an organization that could provide the base for a run at the nomination. I would continue to work for him as a sort of personal assistant, which meant I accepted some very unusual assignments. One required me to make good on a promise that Elizabeth made to a young woman who asked her for help getting trained to drive trucks. Elizabeth had said she would help. I wound up driving the woman, who had been Wade’s friend at school, more than an hour each way, at least a dozen times, so she could get to class. These round-​trips always started before dawn.

kwn.

I was not happy serving as a chauffeur so that Mrs. Edwards could fulfill a personal pledge of charity, but I did it because I believed in John Edwards and wanted to be part of his long-​term effort to win the White House. No out-​of-​office Democrat had won the nomination in modern times. But there were some advantages to being freed from the Senate. He wouldn’t be forced into voting on legislation related to issues like abortion and gay marriage that Republicans crafted in order to paint Democrats as lacking commonsense or morality. Freed from this trap, he could present himself as a person of faith, who held moral Christian views, and this was critical to him being elected president. We began the effort by creating two organizations: a PAC called the One America Committee and an institute at the University of North Carolina called the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.