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Elizabeth Edwards, Still Pitching

2 years ago

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Editor in Chief

No. Bloody. Way. Elizabeth Edwards thinks of the coiffed one as a victim?

According to the excerpt of her new book, Resilience, in this week's Time, she does -- and sees her husband's whatever-she-was as an aggressor who "targeted'' and stalked him. In the piece, which runs under the headline "How I Survived John's Affair,'' she says this:

"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.''

Fancy hotel, fancy woman, waiting in the dark for hours. And like any predator, guessing that it didn't matter what she said.

Elizabeth describes her husband, on the other hand, as "old-fashioned,'' and filled with remorse for what he at first said had been a one-time lapse with a woman he never wanted to see again.

He did keep seeing her, though: "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.''

Allowed into our lives...had not made her leave us alone...allowed it to happen. Quite a passive dude, for someone who wanted to run the world.

I can't think of anyone in contemporary American political life – no, not even Obama – more widely admired than Elizabeth Edwards. And for a political spouse – you know, like this one and this one and this one – that kind of across-the-board response is unheard of.

Only, remember how Edwards used to say that his presidential campaign wasn't about him? (Yes, they all say that.) Well, it wasn't about her, either.

In this book excerpt, she says she bought his argument that he had to stay in the '08 presidential race, even after confessing to the affair, because to drop out so soon after announcing would have raised questions. "I was afraid of her,'' Elizabeth explains – afraid that her husband's mistress, who goes unnamed throughout the book, might go public. Only, refusing to acknowledge or call things by their name doesn't make them go away.

After her cancer came back, of course he could have exited the race without raising any questions. At the time, everyone who knew them said that, if anything, Elizabeth was even more convinced than John that he had to stay in the thing. And there's no denying that she played chicken with the country's future, too.

Yes, Rielle Hunter is going to have a lot to explain to her now one-year-old daughter. The girl's paternity may be unclear, but once grown, her own "My Daddy Denied Me'' memoir seems inevitable. Still, (almost) no one is the one-dimensional bad guy Hunter has been made out to be. Nor is even charming, smart, Elizabeth Edwards – so empathetic she could serve on the Supreme Court – one-dimensionally selfless.

Her marriage was commoditized, all right, but first and foremost by Elizabeth herself. This afternoon on Oprah, we'll watch her at it still; it's what she does.

Filed Under: Woman Up

Tagged: elizabeth edwards, ElizabethEdwards, john edwards, JohnEdwards, resilience, rielle hunter, RielleHunter

More articles from Melinda Henneberger »

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