Elizabeth Edwards
On May 3, former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards acknowledged that a federal investigation had been opened into whether his campaign improperly gave money to a woman with whom Edwards had an extramarital affair. Edwards has denied any wrongdoing by his campaign. In an exclusive excerpt from her new book, Resilience, Edwards' wife Elizabeth describes her reaction to learning of the affair in late 2006.
In 2006, I was busy. I wrote a book and built a house; rather, I actually wrote the book and I watched the house being built. I cared for two youngsters and measured for draperies. I sat with my husband as he planned to run again for the Democratic nomination for President, and I got treatments for a breast cancer that was in remission and periodic scans to make sure it was. My daughter Cate and I went to Massachusetts to find a place for her to live in Cambridge when she started that fall at the law school at Harvard. I gave speeches and promoted my book, and I helped move my elderly parents from Florida to Chapel Hill, N.C., where I lived, when the assisted-living center in which they lived told them they would have to go. I was busy. Too busy, it turns out, to notice that my life had left its orbit. My husband had an affair.
This is my story, and my story is filled with pain and anger, with great erasures of my history and new outlines for my future, but it is not filled with the clatter you seek. The story from my side is quite a different story from the one of grocery-store papers, a story played out too many times but rarely as publicly as my own.
John was gone a lot in 2003 and 2004 running for office, and although I saw him all the time in 2005 when I was getting treatment for breast cancer, I knew I would see him less in 2006. I even participated in his being gone. I thought he should do a spring-break trip for college students in New Orleans to help with the Hurricane Katrina cleanup. His antipoverty work would take him across the country, and I knew that. When he told me that the political action committee was going to have behind-the-scenes videos made of some of these efforts, it didn't seem like that bad an idea, and it certainly didn't occur to me to ask about who was making them. It didn't occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work, he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line "You are so hot" and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.
I said as much in a speech I gave that April in Boston. What, one questioner asked after the speech, was the secret of a good marriage? I told her the truth: I don't know. We don't do date nights; we don't take long romantic vacations together. We care about the same things, but I think the real secret is to marry the right man. I thought I had.