Jill Lawrence of USA Today has written exactly the kind of candidate profile that the Washington Post 's David Von Drehle encouraged at the recent Poynter politics seminar.
Lawrence profiles John Edwards by exploring the impact of the death of his 16 year-old son, Wade, in a car accident seven years ago. I wonder if my encounter with the story might mirror that of many readers: I was paging through the paper (Thursday Nov. 20 edition) in search of something else but stopped at the Edwards headline and read the whole piece.
Shouldn't we be doing more of these targeted profiles, on state and local as well as national candidates?
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Update at 12:45 p.m. Friday: For an earlier (and more detailed) targeted profile on the same subject, see the remarkable piece by Rob Christensen of the Raleigh News & Observer, pasted below. (Just click on Continue Reading beneath this item.)
Raleigh News & Observer
September 12 2003
By Rob Christensen
John and Elizabeth Edwards were rich beyond all expectations, counted a wide circle of friends and enjoyed a close-knit family.
Then on April 4, 1996, their world unraveled in the few seconds it took for their son's Jeep Cherokee to overturn on Interstate 40.
Wade Edwards, 16, was killed. It was at once a tragedy for the family and a life-changing moment for John and Elizabeth. They decided, in their late 40s, to have more children. They turned to religion. And John Edwards would launch a new career in politics, a radical turn for a man who often didn't vote.
Standing outside in the parking lot of Duplin General Hospital where he went to recover his son's body, Edwards, through his tears, vowed to make something of Wade's death.
"He turned to me -- he was totally in shock -- and said, 'I just can't let his death go without something good coming out of it. I couldn't take it otherwise,' " said David Kirby, Edwards' friend and law partner.
Edwards' response to Wade's death provides at least part of the explanation for an unlikely career in politics and provides clues to how he responds under duress -- something Americans like to know about potential presidents.
At first, he and Elizabeth withdrew from nearly everything that had been in their lives prior to April 1996. Everything except their family.
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Balancing demands
Elizabeth Edwards could have had a high-powered law career like her husband, but she did what many mothers do: She balanced her career with the demands of rearing two children, Wade, born in 1979, and Cate, born in 1982.
She still practiced law -- as a bankruptcy lawyer for the firm of Merriman, Nicholls & Crampton -- worked in the state Attorney General's Office and was an instructor at the University of North Carolina law school. During big trials, Edwards often talked to her by phone, asking her to critique the day's events.
She was also a suburban soccer mom, hauling coolers of soft drinks to her children's soccer games. One Halloween, she dressed Wade and eight other children as a nine-hole golf course, growing grass on sandwich boards they carried over their shoulders.
Despite long hours at his law practice, Edwards coached several of his children's soccer and basketball teams. The family had season tickets to UNC-Chapel Hill basketball games. Wade worked part time as a runner in his father's office.
Father and son climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in 1995. When they neared the top, Edwards developed altitude sickness and Wade helped his father get dressed and climb to the summit. Edwards, already slim from jogging, lost 20 pounds that week.
In early 1996, Wade was one of 10 national finalists in a patriotic essay contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Voice of America. The essay described the experience of accompanying his father to the voting booth. The essay earned the Edwardses a trip to the White House, where they met first lady Hillary Clinton.
Several weeks later, Wade, 16, was heading to meet his parents for Easter break at the family beach home on Figure Eight Island near Wilmington. He was accompanied by three friends from Broughton High School traveling in two vehicles. Along I-40 in Duplin County, Wade's 1995 Jeep Cherokee drifted to the left onto the median, according to the accident report. He swung right and overcorrected. The vehicle flipped and landed on its roof.
Nearby motorists helped the passenger out of the Jeep and extinguished a small engine fire. But Wade Edwards' lifeless body was pinned in the vehicle.
Afterward, the Highway Patrol said Wade was traveling about 70 mph in a 65-mph zone. There was no indication of alcohol. He was wearing a seat belt.
"A thousand things could have caused it -- talking to friends, adjusting the radio," said Trooper T.A. Sinclair, who investigated the accident.
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Help from friends
In the weeks that followed, friends took turns trying to console John and Elizabeth, bringing food or just keeping them company in their home.
Elizabeth Edwards' grief, in particular, was overwhelming, friends say. She surrounded herself with memories of Wade, asking friends to share their photographs and videos of her son. For at least two years, Wade's bedroom remained untouched; a capped, half-finished bottle of Gatorade sat on a table next to his bed.
"It was tough," Kirby said. "You are just surrounded by your grief. You just can't appreciate the pain parents feel until it's happened to you. It's a pain that is so deep and so strong that it becomes a physical pain where you are almost nonfunctional. They just struggled with it on a daily basis."
The family's home had been a gathering place for Wade's friends. The Edwardses continued to have his friends over for group dinners every Tuesday night for months, the most recent one this past spring.
They also became immersed in setting up a scholastic learning lab in Wade's honor.
The couple commissioned a sculpture on Wade's grave at Oakwood Cemetery, an angel cradling a young man in her arms. Elizabeth Edwards was a regular visitor, reading from the Bible or "Sages and Dreamers: Portraits and Legends from the Jewish Traditions" by Elie Wiesel, tending the flowers, sometimes lying down on the green grass of her son's resting place.
"I read out loud; I know he can't hear me, but I do," Elizabeth Edwards said at the time. "I go to the learning lab; there's the fiction contest. So in a sense, I feel like we continue to parent him. The way that we cope, the way I cope, is to do those things that make it seem he's still a part of my life, even though he physically can't be."
John Edwards told colleagues at the firm he needed to take time off from his law practice to spend time with his family. They didn't know whether he would return.
Edwards had long been a dedicated runner, finishing five marathons -- his best time, 3 1/2 hours. It was his chief means of release, and it gave him stamina to put in long hours at work.
In the weeks after Wade's death, Edwards' friends took turns getting him to run again. Each afternoon, they met him behind the Division of Motor Vehicles office on Blue Ridge Road and headed down the paths of Umstead State Park for five to seven miles.
"It was like Forrest Gump," said Raleigh lawyer Robert Zaytoun, referring to the fictional movie character. "We just started running. It was therapy for John. All you heard was the sound of feet on the gravel road. It was kind of eerie, but it was just a deep retreat for him. You never know what you can do with grief like that."
After several weeks, Edwards began opening up and talking with his friends about his grief, the possibility of entering politics and his renewed spirituality.
Edwards had been reared as a Baptist, but he had attended services irregularly as an adult. At the time of Wade's death, neither he nor his wife belonged to a congregation.
But Wade's death reconnected them with their spirituality. They joined Edenton Street United Methodist Church, the downtown church Wade had attended. Edwards became active, serving on the church's administrative board and attending Sunday school.
At the invitation of Joe Knott, a conservative Republican lawyer and law school classmate, Edwards and David Kirby started attending Bible study fellowship classes every Monday night at St. Mark's United Methodist Church. Even during his Senate campaign, he attended the Monday night sessions when he was in town.
Until the presidential race, Edwards was co-chairman of the Senate prayer breakfast.
"As you would expect when Wade died, something like that happening in a family as close as ours means you do a lot of thinking and self-analysis, and my faith came soaring back," Edwards said. "My relationship with the Lord and its importance to me became clear."
The Edwardses sought to remember Wade in very tangible ways. On the grounds of Broughton High School, they erected a 150,000-pound, 120-foot-long cement sculpture of a comet that includes 70 handprints from Wade's high school classmates and excerpts from Wade's writing. The Edwardses also started a writing contest in Wade's name and endowed a
chair at the University of North Carolina law school.
The Edwardses threw themselves into the Wade Edwards Learning Lab during the summer of 1996, buying the building -- now valued for tax purposes at $563,067 -- purchasing the computers and furnishings, and setting up the nonprofit foundation. Typically, 50 to 70 children jam into the center after school to work on computers and receive extra help with their schoolwork. The Edwardses opened a second lab in Goldsboro.
Nearly every day until the Edwardses went to Washington, Elizabeth Edwards worked at the learning lab, often at the front desk. The senator often mentions the learning labs during campaign appearances, but he doesn't mention Wade and declines to answer questions about his son's death.
The Rev. Roger Elliott, pastor of Edenton Street Methodist, often counsels grieving families. He says the Edwardses' period of grieving was not unusually intense.
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'Life is short'
"Some people going through this kind of thing can withdraw and turn bitter," Elliott said. "On the other side of that, there are people who learn a great deal from that -- learn that life is short and ought to be used for something worthwhile. It's not just to be thrown away or taken for granted. I think in John and Elizabeth's case, they understood that life is short. There ought to be some quality to it. It ought to be used wisely, and I think they are trying to do that."
During this period, the Edwardses decided to have more children.
Elizabeth Edwards, who took hormone shots, had Emma Claire at age 48 in 1998 and John Atticus at 50. Atticus was Wade's Latin name in high school.
"We asked ourselves, 'How in the world are we ever going to get joy back into our lives again?' " she said. "It became clear the answer was children."
After a five-month hiatus, Edwards returned to his law practice in September 1996. Edwards said his son's death gave him a better understanding of what families go through when they face tragedies.
"I did what I have always done in my life, which is to take difficult circumstances and try to turn them into good," Edwards said. "Which is why shortly after Wade died, we immediately went to work on the idea of the learning lab and trying to find a place to put it, figuring out how to put the concept together, figuring out how to order computers, how to do the construction. That was a full-time job."
Politics was his next outlet.
For most of Edwards' life, politics seemed unimportant to him. Not only did he not attend political functions, but in the five years before running for the Senate, he did not vote almost half the time, according to election records. He cited the pressures of his law practice as a reason for not voting.
But Edwards had dropped hints throughout his life that he might want to run for governor or for senator. Elizabeth Edwards recalls his mentioning having political ambitions in law school, although Edwards says he has no such recollection. But as Edwards became more successful in the 1990s, he started telling friends that he might want to run for office.
In an interview in 1994, Edwards spoke publicly about a potential career in politics. Recently, he recalled a conversation with his son.
"I remember vividly Wade standing in my kitchen," Edwards said. "He was reaching for a Coke, and turning to me and saying: 'So, Dad, are you going to run or not?' "
Exactly when Edwards decided to switch careers from the law to politics isn't clear. But within four months after he returned to his law practice, he was interviewing political consultants.
After Wade's death, he finished two major cases, winning $25 million in a Cary swimming pool case in January 1997 and $23 million in a Charlotte malpractice suit that September.
Friends say that being a plaintiffs' attorney -- where he was constantly involved in other families' tragedies -- was difficult for Edwards while dealing with his own. Every morning before trial in the swimming pool case, he would visit Wade's grave and pray.
Kirby said he thinks that Edwards probably would have run for office after both his children were in college but that Wade's death moved up the timetable. Edwards says it's impossible to know.
Elizabeth Edwards says she thought at first that Wade's death would make it less likely that her husband would run for office. But that changed, and quickly.
"The one thing a child's death does is wipe the slate clean for you," she said. "It was something Wade wanted him to do."
Edwards has walked a fine line involving his son. While friends say it is clear that there is a connection between his son's death and his candidacy, he has been sensitive about not wanting to be perceived as exploiting it for political purposes.
While interviewing consultants for the Senate race, Edwards said Wade's death was off limits.
"He pretty much told every consultant -- he interviewed five or six -- that if you so much as write one word about my son or in any way use him for political purposes, you will be fired at that moment, and, to the extent that I can, I will sue you," Kirby said.
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A fresh face
When he found his favored consultants, they quickly recognized a rare talent.
"One of the holy grails of politics is the fresh face -- Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," said Gary Pearce, a Raleigh political consultant, referring to the Frank Capra movie. "I remember thinking, 'I think I really found it.' "
After considering running for governor, Edwards decided to challenge Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth in 1998 -- because of the timing and because Faircloth looked vulnerable.
In the Democratic primary, Edwards easily defeated D.G. Martin, a Yale-educated lawyer and former Green Beret who was vice president of the University of North Carolina. Martin was favored by much of the party establishment, but he had little money.
Putting $3 million of his own cash into the primary, Edwards outspent Martin 4-to-1. Edwards' large bankroll and winning manner convinced the AFL-CIO, the teachers and many leaders in the African-American community to support him. He defeated Martin by a 51-to-28-percent margin, with the rest of the vote split among other candidates.
Edwards did not have an easy task in the fall. Not only was he trying to unseat a well-financed incumbent, but Republicans had won seven of the previous nine Senate races in North Carolina.
Edwards' race had a populist flavor. He campaigned against Washington lobbyists, against the big insurance companies and for a patients' bill of rights. He declined to take money from political action committees.
The comparisons between Edwards, the handsome, youthful lawyer, and Faircloth, a folksy 70-year-old agribusinessman, played in Edwards' favor. Not only would Faircloth not debate Edwards, but until the end of the campaign, he took pains not to be photographed with him.
Edwards was able to match Faircloth financially. Although he initially told supporters he would put in $3 million of his own money, he ended up giving his campaign $6 million.
Even as Edwards was running for the Senate, there were those who thought North Carolina was not just sending someone to Washington to fill a Senate seat. Roger Smith, a former law partner, remembers a late-night conversation with Edwards at a Democratic gathering at Asheville's Grove Park Inn more than a month before the election. Smith's version of the chat:
"Roger, you know we are going to win this election," Edwards said.
"I'm glad to see you are confident about it," Smith replied.
"No, no," Edwards said. "You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that I've got a positive attitude about this. What I am telling you is a fact. I'm going to be elected to the U.S. Senate."
"Well, John, anything you did would not surprise me," Smith said. "You could probably go just as far as you want to go."
"We're going to find out," Edwards said.
Smith: "I left that meeting thinking: 'This man is going to be president of the United States.' "
A few days before he defeated Faircloth by a 51-to-47-percent margin, Edwards attended a Democratic rally in the back yard of a southwest Raleigh home.
After working the crowd, Edwards agreed to take a few questions from reporters. The British Broadcasting Corp. correspondent had an unusual question:
What do you make of the talk that you might run for president?
Edwards laughed it off. He said he was worried only about getting elected to the Senate.
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Washington correspondent John Wagner contributed to this report.
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