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Author of the new tell-all book "The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards's Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down," Andrew Young was an aide and friend to the former senator and his family for a decade. The book details a tsunami of scandal surrounding Mr. Edwards, his mistress, a sex tape and the baby he fathered. Mr. Young is candid about his own ambitions and career being tied to the fortunes of the Edwards' family, and the fact that his own father -- a preacher -- had an affair, which ended his parents' marriage. (Two days after this interview was conducted on March 7, a North Carolina Superior Court judge ordered Mr. Young and his wife, Cheri, to jail for contempt over the handling of the sex tape. The case is pending.)
Is it safe to say there is a certain type of personality that runs for public office?
Oh, very definitely. I think anybody who runs for public office, especially national office, has to have a level of arrogance that makes them feel they, like Sen. Edwards thought, [are] destined to be president. It's not a fun life.
From the book you get the impression John Edwards didn't like reading the briefs, meeting the regular people or much about the job.
See the What he liked was the feeling of power. He fed off doing Q & A in front of large audiences. As much as he's known as a gifted speaker, if he was giving a speech he didn't know by heart it was painful. [Laughing.] He was almost mechanical. He could give the same speech five, six times a day, and he would move his arm at the exact same time in the speech. But when he was on, he was amazing. The awful shame of this thing is he finally learned the intricacies and learned international politics and domestic politics. I mean, he really understood it in 2008.
So he did his homework.
He finally did his homework, but by that point he had lost his soul.
Did you ever feel creepy or disloyal when you lied to Elizabeth for Sen. Edwards?
Of course I did. When you were in their orbit you were caught between a very dysfunctional couple. You had to pick whose side you were on. He would always say to me, "Look, do this for me, but don't tell Elizabeth." Like a lot of married couples they had issues that are sometimes normal, but when you magnify that by deciding to have two young children at the age of 50, decide to run for president, and have the national media and everybody following your every move, the pressure becomes very intense. I knew how unhappy he was with Elizabeth. I had found out later that there had been previous affairs, but up until 2006 I had no knowledge of any other affairs. It's kind of a reverse thing, and my therapist explained this to me [laughing]. Surprise, surprise I went to see a therapist. I had adopted them as my second family, and I was kind of trying to save their family from going through the same thing my family went through.
Did your wife, Cheri, ever get concerned that if you could lie for John you might be able to lie to her?
The whole time working for them put a tremendous strain on our family. I was gone all the time. We had two kids with heart surgery. Cheri was working full time at the hospital. What she was most worried about, especially when I was in Washington was, she would always say, "You are becoming like them." It's hard when you are a competitive person and you are around all these A++ personalities.
Once you knew, did you worry he would become president?
Before Edwards did what he did to me and showed himself for being cold and calculating, I never in a million years would have thought he would have done what he did to me and my family and continues to do to me and my family. But when this whole thing started I truly believed he was the best candidate. Just imagine (forgetting all the presidential stuff), if a close, close friend came to you and said, "Hey, I screwed around on my wife. She's about to die of cancer very soon. I don't want her to die in disgrace with this on the front page of the newspaper. Will you cover for me?" I think most people would be lying if they would say they wouldn't consider it. The second part was this was our career. We had dedicated a decade to making these people the first family. It was my career.
As you put it all down on paper what struck you the most about what you had witnessed?
When we came back here and they were threatening us and I was subpoenaed by the grand jury, I was trying to figure out what all had transpired over the preceding 31/2 years. When I was finishing the book, I sat back and I realized how long this had been going on. You know, how long he'd been throwing me under the bus anytime he did anything wrong. Anytime he had an affair or did anything to Elizabeth, he blamed it on me.
Have you ever feared for your own safety?
Absolutely, yeah. I think any rational person would. I mean, you are talking about people who have billions of dollars. Up until when he was caught on July 22, we were the biggest obstacles to him becoming vice president or attorney general. If you are not scared in that situation, what situation would you be scared in? [Laughs.]
Was having the sex tape a kind of insurance?
Having the sex tape, the voice mails they left on my phone and the e-mails very definitely made us feel like we had something, and that was why I preserved them. If something did happen to me, you know, like when he took me on that bizarre car ride, all I could think of was Vince Foster [the former aide to President Bill Clinton who committed suicide in a Washington, D.C., park]. But if something did happen to me before I was able to write a book and tell what really happened, then that was something that proved how manipulative and deceitful they were. So, yeah, if you want to call it insurance, I would say it is something that collaborates our story and how incredibly crazy he was to think that he was bulletproof enough to do that. I mean not only did he make a sex tape while he was running for president, he left it unattended at my rental house, which had Realtors coming in and out of it for almost a year.
It seems like they forgot about it, but Rielle claims she threw it out.
[Laughing.] She threw it out in a box in a linen closet. All she did was tear it out a little bit. She didn't destroy it. I mean, she trashed it and left it behind. The one I have looks like a dupe, so I think she has several and I think she wanted it to come out.
Why do you think Washington heiress and socialite Bunny Mellon was willing to support non-campaign efforts financially?
She didn't know. I know [that] for a fact. Bunny, she is just a living piece of American royalty. She's amazing. Two things I think made her fall in love with John Edwards. One, she had a daughter who was a victim of a hit-and-run car accident. She also said repeatedly that he was a combination of J.F.K. and Bobby [Kennedy] and really believed he could change the world.
The book illustrates how looks and superficial things make such a difference to a candidate's fortunes.
If nothing else comes out of my book I hope that people look at the fact that the press up until the 1990s were the unofficial vetters of presidential candidates. There was some real responsibility held by the press in doing that. As of 2000, the mainstream media is more concerned about ratings and how much money they are making.
Being from Pittsburgh, I was curious about Teresa Heinz and her husband, 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, and how you describe them in the book.
It's the system. The only people who can run anymore are filthy rich or have some type of group like the trial lawyers backing them. There was stuff five times worse that I didn't put in the book. [Laughing.] Stuff I'd seen and experienced but I couldn't prove. I've thought about writing a fictional story about all the other escapades.
Do you think the increasing adulation former Sen. Edwards got caused Elizabeth to be jealous, competitive?
Very definitely. She was the person behind the scenes and micromanaged everything. She had a public speaking fear like I did and to see how she came from that to being as polished a speaker as she was, but there was very definitely a rivalry between the two of them. She openly made fun of him for being dumb. I kept on saying to him when the affair started, "If you are caught, this will ruin you." "No," he said. "Politicians have affairs every day." I said, "You've built yourself up as this moralistic, all-American boy. When you saw Bill Clinton you knew he was a rogue. You're not like that." We were doing an event and we argued about it because he had me clear the room because he and Elizabeth had such a bad fight. I said, "Senator, you need to figure out what you are going to do about Elizabeth. She is chasing off all sorts of staff and making everybody miserable and making you not able to do your job. ... You all need to figure out what's wrong with your marriage and deal with it." He said, "Andrew, I can't divorce Elizabeth. She's more popular than I am in Iowa and New Hampshire." Not "I love her."
Your relationship with John Edwards was like the frog that boils to death as the water is heated slow.
It was like a drip, drip, drip thing.
He didn't even admit paternity of this child until 10 days before my book came out. Even that, think about how cowardly he handled that. He didn't make the announcement. He paid somebody to do it for him. Then he goes off to Haiti with Sean Penn.
Why take the blame for fathering the child?
We [he and his wife] felt like we were bulletproof, that our relationship was bulletproof. Anybody who did know us knew it was baloney. Within days of me making the statement, any time any national figure got pregnant [my friends] would text me, "Andrew, you did it again."
Mackenzie Carpenter's video program, "Omnivore," is available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.
