Elizabeth Edwards Can't Have It Both Ways

After the disastrous book tour launch of her confessional Resilience, Elizabeth Edwards isn't going quietly into the night. Now her misguided publicists are telling the media that Edwards won't grant any interviews with reporters who mention the name of John Edwards' one-time mistress -- Rielle Hunter.

Maybe that tactic works with Angelina Jolie in empty-headed interviews about her latest refugee mission, but Edwards used to understand that professional journalists wouldn't allow her to dictate their questions. She isn't a Hollywood celeb but the wife of a one-time presidential candidate who still owes his followers some answers. Most reporters are refusing to go along.

Edwards can't have it both ways -- insisting that she won't sit back as the passive political wife and disappear, while cashing in on her family's personal crisis. Where were the fawning political handlers who once surrounded this couple, when she agreed to head off to promote this book? And what happened to the old Elizabeth Edwards who wasn't afraid to answer any question hurled at her on the campaign trail?

Watching Elizabeth Edwards in freefall -- pandering to chirpy Oprah and CNN's reptilian Larry King -- has been especially painful for me as a reporter who covered her closely for years. I interviewed Elizabeth Edwards shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and in those days she waxed poetic, quoting Emily Dickenson: "Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul." Edwards added," I've thought about that a lot lately. It's just a part of our nature to hope."

That night as I walked out of the Edwards' Georgetown townhouse with a photographer, Elizabeth was hovering over her two young children making dinner in the kitchen and John stood nearby looking bruised from their crushing defeat in 2004. "It wasn't supposed to end this way," said the photographer, as we stood in the dark rushing to crash out an exclusive cover story for People Magazine.

Flash forward nearly five years and we find Elizabeth making the rounds promoting a shallow book that only briefly touches on her husband's humiliating affair. From the voyeuristic TV interviews exploiting Edwards, viewers might imagine the book is a riveting look inside a troubled marriage. Turns out this is largely a rewrite of her earlier memoir -- Saving Graces -- but this time she mentions her poor mother's fear that her Navy pilot father had an affair at the Willard Hotel -- something that haunted Elizabeth throughout her life. She relives the awful tragedy of losing her oldest son, Wade, a wound that never healed.

Without ever naming the mistress, Hunter (aka the Huntress), Edwards only briefly recounts how the dopey would-be filmmaker told John Edwards "You're hot" as he struggled to find his footing in a second run for the presidency. Like so many others, I wondered why the tireless Elizabeth Edwards -- always ready to break into song on the press bus and travel with her young kids -- suddenly disappeared from the campaign. And there was something far less passionate about John Edwards on the stump -- the light was gone and his moment past.

When Elizabeth should have been addressing the Democratic National Convention last summer, she was in seclusion in North Carolina pounding away at the computer writing the book. She should have been in deep counseling trying to figure out how to reconstruct her own blown-up life. Hubby had taken her down with him, by remaining in the race with that looming affair in the shadows. Maybe she wants to continue punishing John Edwards -- and the rest of the country by default -- for straying.

As NYT columnist Maureen Dowd fumed, "She had put so many quarters in the shiny slot machine of their mutual ambition. It was hard to walk away." With that same headstrong ambition, Elizabeth is still determined to choreograph the ending to her own play. As she writes in Resilience, "We so desperately want a map that lays out in serene pastels the paths our lives are supposed to take that we create them, we gravitate to them, we embrace and internalize them, all to no good end....In my life the map has almost always been wrong."

But what about the kids? Why would Elizabeth Edwards allow her young daughter Emma Claire to wander with Oprah through the new 28,200-square-foot "dream house" -- including a gleaming basketball court for John? Then the happy family posed for photos, with 21-year-old daughter Cate clearly missing. Didn't Elizabeth realize that by raising the subject of her husband's affair again, it would open up another round of questions at a time when federal investigators are probing Edward's campaign records to see if the Huntress got illegal funds?

Buried inside the pages of Edward's thin, 213-page book are some clues. Years ago before she was stricken with cancer, Elizabeth -- ever the control freak, labeling even holiday ornaments -- had come up with a list of women she considered good second wife material for John when she died. As it turned out, Hunter is her polar opposite -- "This woman was different from me in nearly every way," Elizabeth screams. But later she writes that after she confronted him, John promised he "would not make the same choice in the daylight that he made in the dark."

Even as this book makes the rounds, Edwards is writing books for each of her three surviving children to remember mommy when she dies. Everything in its place. She has bought a warehouse full of furniture from High Point to open a furniture store in Chapel Hill to "be independent of him." But the couple still lives together, struggling to rearrange the furniture in their own world.

Still, Elizabeth Edwards is waiting to deliver the final verdict. "Forgiveness, I have been told, is the gift I give to him; trust he has to earn by himself," she writes. "I am not going to suggest that that process is over. It is long from being over. I am still adjusting my sails to the new wind that has blown through my life."

Let's hope the next breeze doesn't lead to another book.

Comments

[maori]

Thank you so much.
I'm actually sick of St. Elizabeth and her, "He's the Bad Person, Not Me" tour.
They nearly cost this country the election, and the next 20 to come.
So when she's ready to write a book on what made her able to do that, I'll be impressed.

Cancer does not provide immunity to criticism, or tough questions, despite how hard she works it.

[Muriel Schnierow]

Living with infidelity and a broken marriage cannot be fully understood until you are there. Was it me? was it just a passing thing?(no it wasnt)is this going towards a divorce?(Yes) and then the toughest part of all, the childrens tears. So you stand up straight and walk through it. and decades later people are still talking about it (they are famous) .And one gets punished all over again-punished if you are silent punished if you write a book. Those who are "sick of St. Elizabeth" actually baffle me. maori you have the right to speak-vows are vows and no oneis forced to take them.

[meko]

Living with parents who insist on broadcasting their pain and the details of their partner's infidelity and their broken marriage may be something that you cannot understand until you are there.

How much do I have to take care of my suffering parent? How much am I responsible for my parent's pain? Is it ok for me to still love both my parents despite their flaws? Why are these people acting so crazy, and am I a bad child for feeling hurt by their lack of attention to me? How do I respond to all of those people who ask about my family's business and make fun of me? When are people going to stop talking about this? How do I sit in the same room with reconciled parents knowing all the things they did to each other? What about me?

The world is not your therapist. Some things are meant to be private. Your actions don't just affect you.

[Jazmo]

We all have to navigate our own lives, no doubt about it. But we don't have to publish books then open ourselves up to public scrutiny to sell them and make a buck. In this day and time, to spend our money on a memoir, the public wants salacious. Enough is known about Edwards' affair that we know Mrs. Edwards is in denial and rewriting history. She opened herself up to this. I've given her alot of credit in the past for her fight against cancer, and she gets alot of leeway for that. If she wants to stick by that man, her choice, her life, her situation, just don't try to ram it down the public's throat.

[bmerc]

Great column right on target. I'm sad about Edward's health but that is not an excuse for compounding one mistake (enabling John's dishonesty) with another, her book. Also, I love the description of Larry King--how true! Beverly

[MadOzbo]

Excellent review.
We cannot save Mrs. Edwards from her past, her personal demons, or her Fate.

The least we can do is not pander to them by buying her book, or watching her do the talk-show circuit. Sad and smarmy as this whole situation is, the rest of us have our own lives, and our own challenges, and our own dramas to deal with. There is nothing about this story that warrants our interest beyond the most purient of interests. It seems sadly exploitative of Elizabeth, except SHE is the one doing it to herself. The book is only for her, as it really doesn't convince, console, or affect any of the rest of us...

[LauraPB]

Well said! I don't see how a book deal and making the rounds on the talk show circuit will help her children move past their pain. But if she is going to explain her side of the story, I'd like to know a whole lot more about why she publicly supported her husband's candidacy when she knew about an affair that would certainly threaten the Democrat's chances of winning the White House. I know she's been through a lot, but I still expected more from her.

[jw]

I have to agree with Ms. Podesta. Self-serving is the first word I think of when I see or hear Ms. Edwards.

[nkadzi]

your review on Elizabeth Edwards is very mean!! leave her to navigate her life, don't we all want to have maps for our lives?

[meko]

Before her book, everyone was leaving Edwards to navigate her life. She opened herself up for discussion when she courted the press.