From PEOPLE Magazine
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Such Peaceful mother-son moments aside, the Edwards home has been, say friends, the scene of enormous pain and upheaval. On Aug. 8 former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, 55, confessed to having an affair with Rielle Hunter, 44, a onetime aide who shot short films for Edwards' Web site in 2006. His admission came after reporters from the National Enquirer cornered him at the Beverly Hilton in California, where Edwards had just met with Hunter on July 21 in the hope, he later stated, that he could "keep this mistake I had made from becoming public." When the Enquirer broke the story—and alleged that Edwards had fathered Hunter's 5 1/2-month-old daughter—a once-stellar political career and a seemingly rock-solid marriage took devastating hits. "I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric," Edwards, who insists he told his wife about the brief affair once it ended in 2006, said in a statement. "I was and am ashamed of my conduct."
Yet questions remain about Edwards' behavior. Is the baby his? He denies it and has offered to take a paternity test; a former Edwards aide has claimed to be the father, and Hunter refuses to submit her daughter to a DNA test. Did Edwards buy Hunter's silence? He insists he has not "agreed to or supported payments of any kind." But the hardest question to answer may be: How could he betray his wife, Elizabeth, 59, who fought off breast cancer in 2004, only to see it return, this time diagnosed as incurable, in 2007? Together they had weathered the death of their son Wade, 16, in a car crash in 1996; had added two more children, Emma Claire, now 10, and young Jack (their oldest daughter Cate, 26, attends Harvard Law School); had "always seemed very loving," says one campaign veteran, through the very toughest of times. "Our family has been through a lot," Elizabeth said in her own statement. "But we have stood with one another through them all.... Now, when the door closes behind [John], he has his family waiting for him."
The full story, however, is not as simple as that. Friends say John admitted the affair in installments—"He told the truth slowly," according to one source close to the couple—and not until they had officially launched their campaign in late December 2006. Elizabeth put on a brave public face and even agreed to campaign for her husband. But "no one should assume that it was easy," says Hargrave McElroy, 56, Elizabeth's best friend and one of the very few in whom Elizabeth confided. "There was anguish—excruciating anguish—for her in dealing with this. She was angry and furious and everything, but at one point she had to make a choice: Do I kick him out, or do we have a 30-year marriage that can be rebuilt?" The fact that she was living with a terminal disease, "the uncertainty of her own mortality," says her brother, a film writer and director, gave urgency to her choice. "She couldn't say, 'Well, maybe we'll work through this for years, or maybe we should separate for two years,'" says McElroy. "[The cancer] forced her to choose whether to move forward."
But stumping for her husband—which, for Elizabeth, "was like returning to normalcy," says McElroy—proved a harder challenge than expected, particularly after tabloid reports about the affair began to surface in 2007. "She was struggling with being out there," says McElroy. "She did strikingly less campaigning than she did" when Edwards was John Kerry's running mate in 2004. Once the scandal broke, Elizabeth, who friends say had a naive belief the affair might not become public, pushed her husband to finally come clean. On Aug. 8 Edwards taped an interview with ABC's Nightline at the couple's guest quarters. Their young children weren't home (Jack went with the nanny to pick up Emma Claire from sleepaway camp), and Elizabeth, who stayed off camera, tried to keep the family's two unruly dogs away from photographers at the front gate. "Part of the burden for Elizabeth had been the lie," says McElroy. "She anticipated the great relief the truth brings."
But that was not to come. Instead, she has been crushed by how thoroughly her husband's image has been tarnished—precisely the fate she wished to avoid by staying in the marriage. Politically, "he's finished; it's too distasteful," says one veteran Democratic strategist. Elizabeth's choice to stick it out with her husband was, to a large degree, guided by the reality that her children will one day no longer have a mother, say those close to her. "That was an extraordinary burden for her," says McElroy, "and that's why it's so painful for her to see the father of her children become a pariah."
Whether or not he ever regains the nation's confidence, John Edwards has, friends say, been working hard to regain the trust of his wife. As Elizabeth's father, Vincent, was dying from heart failure in early 2008, John spent an entire night beside his father-in-law's hospital bed because he sensed the end was near and didn't want him to die alone. "John did that. He was amazing," Elizabeth told PEOPLE this May. "I love him for that." A friend says the couple "are not living separate lives. They are together in that house, as before." As for John's contrition, "It is real. He is in pain."
Yet others aren't nearly as sympathetic. One family friend is outraged by both his behavior and his public apology, in which he mentioned that he cheated on his wife only while her cancer was in remission. "The idea that so long as her cancer is in remission his cheating is somehow not so bad—it's mind-blowing," says someone close to the Edwardses. But a longtime friend of Hunter's, Pigeon O'Brien, 42, a music publicist, claims the affair didn't begin or end when Edwards says. "They broke up a bunch of times, especially when Elizabeth was rediagnosed," she says. "But they got back together."
If this is now John Edwards' job—to repair the damage he has caused—then Elizabeth's goal is to keep her family together. Her condition is stable: Her cancer has neither shrunk nor spread. She still works on health-care issues for a Washington, D.C., liberal think tank, but friends aren't sure when she will return to public speaking; she is no longer, for instance, scheduled to make an appearance at the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
Instead she will focus all her energies on her children. The Edwardses have not, at least so far, sat down with their younger children to discuss the scandal. "The kids are, to a certain extent, oblivious," says Elizabeth's brother, "but children are very wise and know things." In the last few days Elizabeth has continued to do the simple things that bind them as a family: gone shopping for school clothes with Emma Claire, helped daughter Cate find a place to live in D.C. and, of course, sat patiently while Jack reads to her for an hour each day. "Every minute counts," Elizabeth told PEOPLE this May. "It's not just when you're onstage with bright lights on you. It's in your kitchen and carpool and office, all of those places, that the value of your life is measured."
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