Elizabeth Edwards: How I Survived John’s Affair

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.

John told me of his indiscretion on Dec. 30, 2006, after returning from a tour to announce that he was running for President. My family had come for Christmas, and the plan was that he would announce in a series of cities and return to Chapel Hill for a final rally with his hometown supporters and his family. Before the announcement tour, he had asked my brother to come with him to film it, since Jay taught film at the graduate film school at NYU, but when Jay found out another videographer was coming whether he came or not, Jay said no. Now the announcement tour was over and we were sitting in our family room, John telling us about the response in the various cities. John pulled Jay aside and asked him again to film the campaign. The female videographer who had been on the announcement tour was not going to travel with him again. John did not tell him why. The next morning he told me why, or told me a version of why. He had made a terrible decision and had been with the woman. After I cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up.

And the next day John and I spoke. He wasn’t coy, but it turned out he wasn’t forthright either. A single night and since then remorse, was what he said. There were other opportunities, he admitted, but on only one night had he violated his vows to me. So much has happened that it is sometimes hard for me to gather my feelings from that moment. I felt that the ground underneath me had been pulled away. I wanted him to drop out of the race, protect our family from this woman, from his act. It would only raise questions, he said. He had just gotten in the race; the most pointed questions would come if he dropped out days after he had gotten in the race. And I knew that was right, but I was afraid of her. And now he knows I was right to be afraid, that once he had made this dreadful mistake, he should not have run. But just then he was doing, I believe, what I was trying to do: hold on to our lives despite this awful error in judgment.

My husband, I suppose like every person in this position, had assumed that I would never find out, that the life he had built and cherished would not be put at risk by an indiscretion. I spoke one time later to a media executive who said it was unlikely I knew everything. He was in a position to say that because he had stood once where my husband had stood. But, again I assume like most in this position, my husband did not want to risk the life he had built even after it was discovered, so he told me as little as he thought he could, as little as he must, with the hope that I would not leave him. I am certain he wished what he said were all true. I am sure, after all these months, he wishes that it had not even been one night, that when she said “You are so hot,” he had turned and run. And I believe that he doesn’t really understand why he did not.

And I suppose like most wives–or husbands–in my position, I wanted to believe his involvement with this woman had been as little as possible. A single night, another opportunity, but that was it, and he had wanted away from her. I hung on to whatever I could. I was, in nearly every sense, Tecmessa or the wife of any soldier or warrior who comes back from a campaign changed: I wanted my old life back with the man I knew and loved. I looked at his face and heard his voice, and it seemed possible, didn’t it, that nothing had really changed. The man I married couldn’t have done this. No matter how much I wanted it to be otherwise, like those women, I had to accept that the man who had come home to me was different and that our story would be different because of that. But knowing that and letting go of my expectations were two quite different things.

I spent months learning to live with a single incidence of infidelity. And I would like to say that a single incidence is easy to overcome, but it is not. I am who I am. I am imperfect in a million ways, but I always thought I was the kind of woman, the kind of wife to whom a husband would be faithful. I had asked for fidelity, begged for it, really, when we married. I never need flowers or jewelry; I don’t care about vacations or a nice car. But I need you to be faithful. Leave me, if you must, but be faithful to me if you are with me.

It wasn’t a premonition. I was talking about my own history. At 13 I had read my mother’s journals, found them buried beneath a mattress in a guest room. I discovered that my mother believed my father had been unfaithful to her when I was a baby. I will say clearly that I do not know if that is true. I only know what she suspected. She was serially pregnant in the late 1940s and early 1950s: My brother was born 13 months after I was; my sister was born 12 months later. And my mother believed, rightly or wrongly, that my father had found other companionship while she was buried in babies. She even thought she knew where–the Willard Hotel in Washington–the place I had my senior prom, which must have been a bitter pill for her, although I had a suitably terrible time because, unbeknownst to her, I knew what that hotel meant to her.

There was never a satisfactory place to settle, so she lived all those decades still loving him, but with something deep inside her that would always be restless, even after he died. “The trust was supposed to be deep. The smiles were supposed to last forever.” Don’t ever put me in that position, I begged John when we were newlyweds. Leave me, if you must, but do not be unfaithful.

The possibility of my father’s infidelity ate at Mother, I knew, but she stayed there, stayed with him and loved him, and after his stroke when he was nearly 70, she cared for him for nearly two decades with a selflessness that is almost unimaginable. Was that what I was supposed to do? And I was the one who would need the care. Although we did not know yet at the beginning of 2007 that the cancer had metastasized, we did know since 2005 that the cancer had spread at least to my lymph nodes, that there was some possibility of metastasis. I was the one who would need the selfless partner.

If it had been possible to view it all from some altitude, it might have seemed so easy to see how we came together and pushed each other away … for days, for weeks, for months. But I had no altitude at all. It was quite the opposite. I was too low to have any perspective at all. All I wanted was my life back. I didn’t like this new life story; I wanted my old one. I wanted to turn back time so we could avoid the wind, avoid the woman, avoid the pain. Open a drawer and find my life again. But I would open a drawer and find my new reality instead. Everything I tried to do to allow me to go to some safe place turned out to be filled with the same pain. I would look at a happy family picture and break down. I tried to write and could not. Even now it is hard to put it into words.

When I die, my place in the lives of others will be filled by other people. I know this. It is true for all of us. Someone else will have your job; someone else will mow your lawn; someone else will kiss the cheeks of those you love. One of the reasons that I spend time labeling baskets and organizing Christmas ornaments is that I have tried to create a world for my family that will last longer than the years I now have left. I am so in love with my family, so protective, that–odd as it may sound–long before I was sick, I would tell John whom he should marry should I suddenly die. And now I was dying and he had chosen to spend time with someone so completely unlike me. It almost goes without saying, for I would never have, could not have, stood on a sidewalk in the hopes that some clumsy come-on line might work on a married man. But it wasn’t just that; this woman was different from me in nearly every way.

At this moment I saw my death not simply as a transition for my family but as my complete erasure from my family’s life and a complete erasure of the life I hoped they would have. I was afraid of what John might do when cancer finally wins, but he has been as assuring as I could have hoped. I am now at ease that John would not make the same choice in the daylight that he made in the dark, but for some time that thought dogged me, kept me awake at night, stoked my anger and my pain.

I doubt there is a person to whom this has happened who did not, for some time, beat themselves with self-doubt and self-loathing. What did I do? How had I failed as a wife? Self-doubt wasn’t that long a journey for me, frankly. The reason I was compulsive about learning whatever I needed to know on the campaign trail was that I was certain I would be humiliated if I was caught not knowing what everyone else in the room knew. So I learned four times the facts I would ever need, and I kept staff up nights finding answers to the questions I feared I might be asked. All the work to avoid being embarrassed was wasted; I now felt thoroughly and publicly humiliated.

How to write on a few pages what that time was like? Morning, afternoon, evening, sleepless night. Morning, afternoon, evening, sleepless night. Morning, afternoon, evening, sleepless night. I put on my earphones and dreamed. “Hard to see the light now. Just don’t let it go. Things will work out right now. Ask me how I know.” I thought I could fix it; I think John thought he could, too. But we were not living in our house, working on fixing it. We were separated. He was on the campaign trail. At first I could not, would not go. What would I say? I had said, in the months before, how this man had been my rock, and he had been, but I couldn’t say that now. When I finally did campaign, I was pointed, so pointed I thought someone might suspect: We elect a vision and a person capable of making that vision become reality. I could say that easily. It was, in fact, easier than I thought it would be. I could do this, and in doing it, I could feel as if I were standing closer to the core of who he was and is than when I let his indiscretion capture my thoughts. I was with him in a sense. And in a sense, of course, I was not.

It turned out that a single time was not all it was. More than a year later, I learned that he had allowed [the woman] into our lives and had not, even when he knew better, made her leave us alone. I tried to get him to explain, but he did not know himself why he had allowed it to happen. In months of talking with him, I have come to understand his liaison with this woman, if I have, not as a substitute for me. Those with any fame or notoriety or power attract people for good reasons and bad. Some want to contribute and some want to take something away for themselves. They flatter and entreat, and it is engaging, even addictive. They look at our lives, which from the outside in particular are pictures of joy and plenty, and they want it for themselves.

That leaves, unfortunately, the long process of rebuilding trust. He violated a trust and then he lied. And even when he told the truth, he left most of the truth out. My mother’s mother used to say that the intent to deceive is the same as a lie. We have spent much too long in that purgatory, so long it feels like hell. If he lied for a year and told another lie for another year, does that mean it takes two years to re-earn trust? It is not as easy or formulaic.

Just as I don’t want cancer to take over my life, I don’t want this indiscretion, however long in duration, to take over my life either. But I need to deal with both; I need to find peace with both. It is hard for John, I can see, because it is something about which he is ashamed. But his willingness to open up is a statement that he trusts me, too. For quite a long time, I used whatever he admitted in the next argument, and he was hesitant to say anything. That is, gratefully, behind us. There is still a great deal of sorting through to do–the lies went on for some time. And we both understand that there are no guarantees, but the road ahead looks clear enough, although from here it looks long. It helps that there are rest stops–building Legos with Jack, reading with Emma Claire, planning Cate’s new house, hanging pictures of 30 years of memories–that remind us why we are together.

Forgiveness, I have been told, is the gift I give to him; trust he has to earn by himself. 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. Nothing will be quite as I want it, but sometimes we eat the toast that is burned on one side anyway, don’t we?