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In Life As In Politics, Edwards Is Called On To Light A Fire All Over Again

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By Nancy Benac / The Associated Press

Published: December 29, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) - Sheer will has taken John Edwards far, but only so far. His is the storybook life, still waiting for the storybook ending.

His drive got him onto the football field at Clemson, an improbable achievement for a walk-on player without much bulk. But he wasn't big enough or rich enough to stay on the team or at the school.

His will — if not hubris — powered his presidential run in 2004 and won him the second slot on a national ticket, a huge stretch for a single-term senator.

Now, four years after a frustrating tour of duty as John Kerry's running mate, Edwards seems almost weary of the political profile he cultivated in that campaign — "young, Southern, dynamic, charismatic, beautiful family, all that," as he once summed it up.

This time, Edwards is out to convince voters that he is so much more.

"I'm a different candidate," he said in an AP interview. "I would hope you can see it; then I wouldn't have to explain it."

Just in case, though, he does explain: "It's just seasoning and maturity and depth."

Even before his wife, Elizabeth, was diagnosed in March with a recurrence of cancer, Edwards was projecting a greater sense of urgency and intensity in this campaign. He is running for the presidency this time with new policies, new passion, new pain.

The centrist candidate of 2004 is offering himself as the populist advocate for the poor in 2008. He is trying to make a virtue out of admitting that he was wrong to support going into Iraq. He says he is trying to "retrain" himself to avoid saying the cautious, politic thing.

"I actually want the country to see who I am," says Edwards, 54. "I'd rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll that you put up in front of audiences."

But if Edwards is being careful not to look or sound like a politician, isn't that what every politician tries to do?

It doesn't take much — the viral video of Edwards combing and re-combing his hair, for example — to undercut the carefully crafted image of Edwards as the uncrafted candidate.

Edwards' determination to rely more on his own instincts has energized his campaign, but it also has produced its share of bonehead moves.

He finds himself battling what have become known as the three Hs — the hair, the house and the hedge fund.

His pricey haircuts (one cost $1,250, including compensation for the stylist's time spent traveling), his new 28,000-square-foot estate in North Carolina and his recent consulting work for a hedge fund that caters to the superrich have struck a discordant note in a campaign centered on fighting poverty and looking out for the little guy.

The man who wants to eliminate poverty within 30 years seems almost perturbed that people should find anything inconsistent between the way he uses and amasses his personal wealth, and his dedication to the poor.

"It is just the truth today," he says, "that the lifestyle we live is blessed."

But he adds: "Those personal things that we've dealt with just teach us that the material stuff just doesn't mean much."

Whatever his new persona on the campaign trail, Edwards' life story remains an extraordinary up-by-the-bootstraps yarn: first in his family to graduate college, wildly successful career as a trial lawyer, meteoric rise in national politics. For all its triumphs, though, the story has a subtext of extraordinary pain — the death of son Wade, killed in a car accident at age 16, the incurable disease that Elizabeth lives with even as her husband runs the presidential campaign gantlet.

"He's lost a son and now he's faced with possibly losing his wife," says good friend David Kirby. "When you've seen your mortality in that way, it calls upon a certain urgency of, 'You only have one chance in life to leave your mark.'"

Wherever it ends, Edwards' story begins in the sandy mill towns of the South.

———

The '50s and '60s

Edwards' birth certificate reads Johnny Reid Edwards, born in Seneca, S.C., and he says he will never forget where he came from — nor does he want anyone else to.

His son-of-a-millworker story, repeated so often since the 2004 campaign, is familiar now. It is the canvas on which Edwards' life and campaign stories are sketched, the soil in which populist ideals first took root.

His parents, Bobbie and Wallace Edwards did shift work in the mills. Each time the Milliken textile company assigned Wallace to a new mill, the family would strike out for another mill house in another mill town, five of them before Johnny was 12.

For all of that, his was a happy, nurturing childhood.

John Frye remembers camping out with Edwards in Monkeyland — the far reaches of the Edwards' back yard in Robbins, N.C., the working-class town where the family settled for good when Johnny was in seventh grade.

His youth was a slice of "American Graffiti," with Friday night football games and trips to Sam's burger joint. Good grades came easily for Edwards, but he worked hard, too.

"There was absolutely no quit in John," says Frye.

Wallace Edwards worked his way up to textile management as the years went by, yet still saw less experienced but better educated young men pass him by. And when Johnny spent a summer cleaning the mill looms, slick with grease and lint and gobs of chewing tobacco, he saw for himself the gritty work that fueled the region's industrial engine.

"Now you see why you need to go to college," Edwards recalls his father telling him over the din from the looms.

———

The '70s

College gave Edwards his first taste of failure and first glimpse of his potential.

He enrolled at Clemson in the fall of 1971, eager to fulfill his father's missed dream of attending school there and maybe even playing football. Edwards made it onto the freshman team as a wide receiver, but then reality hit.

He wasn't good enough for a scholarship, and the tuition was too steep. He had to leave after one semester, miserable that he had failed his father.

Edwards bounced back at North Carolina State, and later found his calling — and his wife — at the University of North Carolina Law School. The boy who had loved watching "The Fugitive" and "Perry Mason" on TV would become a lawyer.

"I could see that he was getting it early on," says classmate Glenn Bergenfield. "It fit his intelligence very well, being a lawyer."

Bergenfield was the go-between who helped Edwards and another classmate, Elizabeth Anania, figure out that they were right for each other, even if he says the two weren't "an obvious fit." Anania, the poetry-quoting daughter of a Navy pilot, had lived all over the world and awed her classmates with her sophistication and confidence; Edwards, from tiny Robbins, was the mill-town boy trying to make good.

Something clicked between them, and one summer, John took a job in Washington to be close to Elizabeth's family in Alexandria, Va.

"Do you like Washington?" Elizabeth remembers asking hopefully.

"I don't know about a place where the punch lines to jokes are in French," he told her.

They passed the bar exam and married in the same week.

———

The '80s

To see how John Edwards connected with juries during his career as a trial lawyer — coaxing millions out of personal injury and medical malpractice cases — is to watch the previews for his political career.

"Juries liked him instantly," says Robert Clay, a Raleigh defense attorney who went up against Edwards more than once. "We all try really hard to be liked by the jury, but we just aren't as successful as he was. ... He pretty much had the total package."

Beyond his good looks and smooth delivery, Edwards was known for relentless preparation and an uncanny ability to speak directly to jurors' fears and hopes. Sometimes he trusted his gut in framing his words to the jury; sometimes he relied on insights gleaned from $300 focus groups.

"He'd call up after trying a case and say, 'Let me tell you what just happened,'" says Clay. "He liked to talk strategy, what worked and what didn't work."

Edwards made his millions by figuring out just the right thing to say to juries, mastering every nuance and inflection.

And juries, he likes to say, are a lot like voters.

———

The '90s

Edwards' stunning success as a lawyer seemed to know no limits, bringing in more than $150 million in settlements and verdicts in the 1990s alone.

Each case had a ritual. On the weekend before trial, Edwards and his family (by now, they had Wade and younger sister Cate) would go out to dinner at O'Charley's restaurant and talk through the case. Edwards remembers those nights as "quiet moments when my family was perfect," when work and family came together, and optimism was unbounded.

"I had a secret sense that it would go on like that forever," Edwards later wrote.

But on April 4, 1996, it all stopped.

Wade was killed when the wind blew his Jeep off the road as he drove toward a family vacation at the beach.

John, Elizabeth and Cate, then 14, each wrote letters to tuck into his cherrywood casket.

Edwards' legal career was put on hold, as was budding talk about a future in politics.

Cate slept in John and Elizabeth's room for the next two years, on two chairs pushed together with an ottoman in between.

The house was quiet. Elizabeth watched the Weather Channel with no sound.

Soon, though, John and Elizabeth threw themselves into what she calls "post-death parenting." They created a computer learning lab at Wade's high school in his honor. They started a fiction contest in his name. They installed a bench at his high school.

Wearing his scars mostly on the inside, John relit himself and after six months returned to work. In his most important case, he won $25 million for a young girl horribly injured by a defective swimming pool drain, giving voice to his own pain as he spoke about her family's loss.

John and Elizabeth decided to bring joy back into their lives by having more children, a difficult decision at Elizabeth's age. Against the odds, Emma Claire was born when Elizabeth was 48, and Jack arrived two years later.

Along the way, talk about politics resumed. Edwards decided to take on Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth in 1998, another difficult stretch. Against the odds, he won.

———

2000-2004

For a take-charge lawyer, the pace in the Senate sometimes felt glacial.

There was something unhealthy, he felt, about the fundraising, the lobbyists, the cocktail parties. He talks about his years in the Senate as "a great learning experience" — as if they were a stopover on the way someplace else.

Edwards quickly was noticed as a rising star, and within two years found himself on Democrat Al Gore's short list for a running mate in 2000. Edwards' cachet was more about his potential, though, than his achievements in the Senate.

Gore narrowed his list to Edwards and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman before settling on Lieberman. Edwards professed himself shocked to have made it so far in the veep-stakes. It got him thinking about the audacious notion of running for president himself.

Three years later, on Sept. 16, 2003, the junior senator from North Carolina stood in front of the empty textile mill in his hometown of Robbins and announced he was a candidate for president.

Edwards compared his decision to give up his Senate seat and run for the presidency to letting go of the edge of the swimming pool. But as a candidate, he played it safe — too safe, he says now. He laments the coaching of consultants, who he says preach to candidates: "cautious, careful, don't make a mistake, you could do something wrong that could do you in."

Whatever the reason, it became clear that voters saw Edwards as running-mate material, not presidential.

Kerry, lacking a strong personal connection with Edwards, was queasy at first but eventually came around to selecting him as his running mate. The happy pictures of the Kerry and Edwards families joshing on the lawn, however, soon gave way to internal tensions.

Edwards felt hemmed in by the Kerry campaign; Kerry didn't feel Edwards went all-out on his behalf. The two broke off contact after the race was lost and their relationship remains strained.

———

2004 and beyond

Edwards managed to deliver his concession speech at Boston's Faneuil Hall without uttering the words concede, defeat or lose. He'd wanted to explore legal options before giving up on Ohio, where the vote margin was thin and provisional ballots hadn't been counted yet, but lost that argument to the Kerry camp.

His speech was a small act of defiance that foreshadowed his next run for president.

But first, there was a more pressing matter. Edwards and his wife drove straight from his speech to the hospital, where doctors confirmed that a lump Elizabeth had recently found in her breast was cancer. It was fresh confirmation of a painful lesson they had learned when Wade died.

"You don't know what's coming," says Edwards. "You're not in control of it."

John sat with Elizabeth through her chemotherapy treatments. His Senate term ended in January 2005, and the family made plans to move back to Raleigh. The question of what next hung in the air.

By February he had founded the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina. It was a chance to work on an issue that Edwards had long cared about, a place to lay the groundwork for his next presidential race, a way to maintain a public profile.

Edwards says taking on poverty isn't an obvious winner politically. (However, it could play well with Democratic primary voters.) He says poverty is "the cause of my life" and holds it out as evidence of new resolve to follow his instincts rather than consultants.

His friend David Kirby sees it as part of the "evolving maturation of John."

"In a much more committed way, he is running this campaign based upon really his core personal beliefs," says Kirby.

Steve Jarding, a lecturer at Harvard who ran Edwards' political action committee for a year, says that Edwards' public rejection of political consultants is overstated rhetoric.

"All these guys will tell you they're not listening to consultants," Jarding said, "but John does. He's got them, and they're smart people and he should listen to them. ... He might take that advice with a little more discerning eye than he did four years ago."

After Wade died, Elizabeth Edwards promised herself that John never would have to hear bad news again — a promise she was powerless to keep. Her first cancer diagnosis came right after the 2004 election, already a wrenching time.

They attacked it with chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, defiance, optimism.

On March 21, 2007, they got the news that the cancer was back, this time incurable.

Speculation that Edwards would drop out of the presidential race was immediate, but Edwards banished it by announcing that he and Elizabeth were determined to press forward.

"You can go cower in the corner and hide or you can be tough and go out there and stand up for what you believe in," Edwards said.

"We choose to live our lives fully, and with strength and optimism. We get to make that choice."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.

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