Mary Elizabeth Anania — the woman who would become famous as Elizabeth Edwards — saw it. North Carolina voters saw it. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) saw it.
Potential.
The man born Johnny Reid Edwards had it. Great gobs of potential.
John Edwards could have been a great husband, could have been an enduring statesman, could have been an occupant of the second-highest office in the land, could have been president. So thought the people who believed in him. “The sky was the limit,” says James Andrews, North Carolina AFL-CIO president and an early political supporter.
Instead, on Friday, America witnessed the latest distasteful episode in what has become the long, slow and torturous fall from grace of a political comet whose rise was anything but long and slow. Instead of having the courage to face his federal indictment at the Hiram H. Ward Federal Building in Winston-Salem, N.C., alone, Edwards, 57, stepped to a microphone to plead for mercy with his daughter, Cate, by his side. The man who destroyed his family — the smooth-talking seducer of women, voters and juries — couldn’t resist using his flesh and blood as a prop. Whether Cate, 29, wanted to be there or not, Edwards should have had the sense, the maturity and the dignity not to expose her to such an unseemly glare. But, for a man who once showed such promise, he has shown little of those qualities in the past three years.
Edwards uttered just 59 words. “Sorry” was not among them. He seemed to want listeners to feel “his” pain as much as to comprehend his supposed contrition: “I will regret for the rest of my life the pain and the harm that I have caused others,” he said, furrowing his brow and wearing a dark, solemn suit. It’s hard to conceive of many people anguished over Edwards being condemned to a life of regret.
The charges against him are serious: Edwards is accused of helping funnel “Bunny Money” — wads of cash coaxed from heiress Rachel “Bunny” Mellon — to his mistress in order to cover up his illicit affair, which produced a child while the Democratic politician chased dreams of running the country. Even before the indictment, Edwards’s lawyer, Gregory Craig, a former top adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama, was pleading his case, saying, “John Edwards has done wrong in his life, and he knows it better than anyone — but he did not break the law.”
After pleading not guilty Friday, Edwards parsed it further, adding that he “never, ever thought” he was breaking the law. “I take full responsibility for having done wrong.”
Regardless of the outcome of Edwards’s legal case, it’s clear that what could have been an extraordinary American success story has been irrevocably undone — all that potential left unfulfilled.
Spiral of the Great Man
When the Great Man falls, the temptation is to ascribe Shakespearean qualities to his descent. But Edwards provided little that could have appealed to the Bard. His potential was squandered in the tawdriest of ways: sex, lies and, yes, videotapes.
To borrow a term from the law — the profession that launched Edwards — it can be stipulated that he cheated on his cancer-stricken wife. And lied about it. He fathered a child with his mistress. And he lied about that, too. The possibility that he might have misused campaign funds to further his serial deceits threatens to deepen his self-inflicted wounds. But it also calls into question a political system in which money seems to flow far too easily and with far too little accountability.
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