When John Edwards
returned to North Carolina in the course of his long quest for the
presidency, Andrew Young always met him at the airport in Edwards’s big
black Chevy Tahoe. Young drove, and Edwards rode shotgun, silently
raising his left hand whenever he wanted a Diet Coke, which Young would
wordlessly supply.
When Edwards and his family arrived home, Young had made sure there was
fresh milk in the fridge, a neatly trimmed lawn and neatly folded dry
cleaning. When he arranged their vacation to Disney World in 2004, he
naturally booked himself a ticket. And when Edwards’s mistress
became pregnant, Young — at the cost of his reputation, his wife’s and
his minister father’s — stepped forward to say the child was his.
Young sometimes described himself as Edwards’s “special assistant” and
dreamed of serving in an Edwards White House. Other aides, with a
combination of disgust — and, perhaps, a bit of envy — referred to him
as Edwards’s “personal servant,” or worse, Edwards’s “butt boy.” The
relationship was so intense, at least on Young’s side, that it
generated friction between him and Elizabeth Edwards. But if Elizabeth
and John Edwards sometimes seemed to feel that Young — at 40 no longer
an eager kid, with three children of his own — had gotten too close,
there was no getting rid of him. He had made himself indispensable.
“John was his idol — his hero — and probably who he considered his best
friend and his mentor,” said Tim Toben, a former John Edwards supporter
and friend of Young’s who now lives next door to Young on the rural
west edge of Chapel Hill. “He thought that he had offered the ultimate
sacrifice and was left on the curb.”
Young has fleetingly emerged from the wreckage of Edwards’s political
career as a character from central casting. First he was the fall guy,
and now he’s the sellout, peddling his story in a tell-all book.
But the real story of Young is about the passions of politics and the
classic political triangle of the candidate, his wife and the sometimes
sycophantic aide. The consuming devotion that politicians command from
a small handful of loyalists is familiar — and not just in presidential
campaigns.
“Almost every politician has people like that around him who will do
almost anything, sometimes to a fault,” said Gary Pearce, a consultant
to Edwards’s 1998 Senate campaign.
Neither Elizabeth nor John Edwards responded to a request — relayed
through a spokeswoman — for a comment on Young. Young also declined to
comment, though he did, through a friend, pass on the names of several
allies for a reporter to call. About a dozen former Edwards aides
described his relationship with the Edwardses to POLITICO, most on the
condition of anonymity to avoid getting dragged into the campaign’s
tawdry aftermath.
Young’s friends describe him simply as a “totally devoted” believer who
was “taken advantage of,” in the words of one former staffer. Those
close to both Young and Edwards describe the staffer’s passion in
intensely emotional terms. Starting soon after Edwards was elected to
the Senate in 1998, staffers began describing Young as intensely
“jealous” of others who were close to the senator.
“He believed that Edwards was the next Kennedy,” said a person who was
close to Young. “It’s not enough to say that he idolized the guy —
there’s something deeper and weirder than that.”
Elizabeth Edwards, in a thinly veiled portrait of Young in “Resilience,” her book on surviving cancer and her husband’s affair, compared him explicitly with Rielle Hunter, her husband’s former mistress.
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