There’s a brief, poignant profile of Cate Edwards, oldest child of John Edwards, in today’s New York Times. I talked with people this week who were appalled at what they thought was pressure by Edwards on Cate to have her by his side, as a way of garnering sympathy, when he was indicted. But as the article makes clear, their relationship is both loving and complicated (they are a father and daughter, after all). The late Elizabeth Edwards gave Cate a major gift when she said at the end of her life that she did not want Cate or any of their children to shun their father because of his tawdry behavior and deceit.  A friend of Elizabeth’s is quoted as saying Elizabeth told Cate that standing by her father would not mean betraying her mother.

Cate has been though a lifetime of pain in her 29 years – the losses of her brother and mother, the emotional battering that Edward’s infidelity caused.  She has emerged as a strong, admirable young woman. Given her wealth she could have been a socialite or dilettante, but she is working hard at her law career, and in the fall will marry her college sweetheart, a doctor. She could be bitter or self-pitying. But she is quiet and solid, and embraces her role of helping to raise her much younger siblings. I just hope that her whole life hasn’t been one of being the dutiful, responsible one, the emotional sounding board for unhappy parents. If the charges against Edwards are prosecutorial overreach, then he should walk. And if he does, whatever one feels about Edwards, it will be easy to be happy for Cate.

Photograph of Cate and John Edwards by Getty Images.

Tags: cate edwards, Elizabeth Edwards, John Edwards

TMZ published a PDF of Elizabeth Edwards' will on Jan. 6, just a month after the health care reform advocate died from breast cancer. The news there is that Edwards named her daughter, Cate, rather than her estranged husband, John, as the executor, and cut him out of the will entirely. Considering their well-publicized marital woes, this is not a huge shock. Also making headlines this week: The National Enquirer says that John Edwards proposed to his mistress, Rielle Hunter, with whom he had a child while still married to Elizabeth. As the New York Daily News notes, the Enquirer also reported that Edwards and Hunter were engaged last February, which obviously turned out to be false.

After reading Meghan O'Rourke's truly moving, empathetic piece in Slate about how Elizabeth Edwards' illness shaped her behavior over the past few years, I had wished that the Edwards family would have at least a modicum of peace in the months after her death. It's dismaying to see that the quiet lasted just about 30 days.

Tags: Elizabeth Edwards, John Edwards, rielle hunter

I felt bad for Elizabeth Edwards when she caught a lot of flak for appearing by her husband’s side while he ran for president even though she secretly knew about his extramarital affair. And I feel bad for her after reading various obituaries that made the affair and the breakup of their marriage seem like defining points of her very existence, no matter everything else that came before. Now to hear that the crazy moralists, or more accurately moral-less, from Westboro Baptist Church – the same folks who picket outside the funerals of service men and women killed in Afghanistan and Iraq – will be picketing Edwards' funeral this Saturday, makes me sad for her and her family.

It’s bad enough that she endured public judgment while she was alive for what would ordinarily be a private matter for most of us; she shouldn’t be subjected to the judgment of heartless crazies in death. Thankfully some 800 people have volunteered to block out the protesters by forming a human “Wall of Peace” outside the church where the funeral will be held. If the Westboro Baptist protesters can’t find room in their ice-cold hearts to feel a shred of sympathy and respect for Edwards' family, particularly her children, maybe those who oppose their tactics should picket outside Westboro Baptist Church every Sunday.

I can’t help but wonder what Elizabeth Edwards thought about as death approached and she assessed her life. Clearly her life was filled with joy and meaning, and experiences that most of us can only dream about. She had access to influential and important people, a public stage to advocate for causes that were important to her, and for a time, an adoring and sympathetic fan-base. Her books, despite the debates over whether they were intellectually honest or simply self-serving, were thoughtfully written and further humanized her – even if sometimes negatively. Still, I wonder if, in the end, all these benefits were overshadowed by the scandal, the humiliating public betrayal by her husband of 33 years, a stepdaughter born to his (mistress? on-and-off girlfriend? wife-to- be?). Did the regrets overwhelm the triumphs? Did she wish she had invested more in herself and her own dreams and ambitions and not put so much of her intellectual energies into those of her husband?

It’s a rule of journalism that obituaries of famous people not ignore the most newsworthy and controversial aspect of their lives. But too many articles about Edwards' death ignored the full arc of her life. Many didn’t mention her obvious love for her children. They didn’t discuss what it was like for her to be an older, second-time-around mom and the unconventional thinking that prompted her decision. (She has said that the house felt empty and sad after the death of her son Wade and with the knowledge that her daughter Cate would be going off to college soon.) I would have liked to hear from friends and family about the inner fortitude that helped her write two books while battling cancer. Was she the friend who always remembered birthdays? The sibling who shopped for days to find just the right Christmas gift? The kind of daughter who called her parents from the campaign trail just to say hi? We don’t know. Yet every article told us over and over the sordid details of what we already knew. (This headline was particularly grating: “Elizabeth Edwards Dies Amid Marital Misery”)

It’s hard not to feel angry at John Edwards right now, not to make him a proxy for all philandering, egomaniacal husbands who trade in loyal wives who have aged and put on a few pounds for younger, sexier, more adoring women. To do so while your wife is fighting for her life seems unforgivable. If anything, the crazy picketers should be protesting outside his house.  I’m joking, of course. Despite his reprehensible behavior, he deserves the same respect as the rest of her grieving family. Who are we to judge him, anyway? After all, he was reportedly by Elizabeth’s side during these last days. Maybe she forgave him. Maybe she loved him until the very end. In any case, now is not the time to beat up on him. He’ll have plenty of time to beat up on himself. His punishment will be living with what he did.

Hopefully over time she'll be remembered for more than just being married to him.

Photograph of Elizabeth Edwards by Frederick Brown for Getty Images.

Tags: Elizabeth Edwards, funeral, obituaries

View a slide show of photographs of Elizabeth Edwards, 1949-2010.
 
In The Politician, the book by a former John Edwards factotum, Andrew Young describes Edwards’ duplicity, his noxious self-entitlement, and the rot at the heart of what was publicly proclaimed to be the ideal marriage between John and Elizabeth. The sad news that Elizabeth Edwards died today* has made me think one tragedy of the Edwards’ story is that Elizabeth was not the one to become the politician. While John had boyish looks and an oily, phony sheen of charm, it was Elizabeth who really connected with the crowds, Elizabeth who had a passion for policy, Elizabeth who had a cause—health care—she truly believed in.
 
Elizabeth Edwards, 61, met her husband at law school—she was of a transitional generation, one in which women in significant numbers started entering professions once closed to them. The Edwardses raised two children and both launched successful careers. Then their teenage son, Wade, died. She remade her life after that crushing loss. She left the law, had a second set of children, and then joined with John on the quest to make him president of the United States. It all turned sordid when the National Enquirer got onto the story of John impregnating a campaign aide. Elizabeth refused to believe the accounts and helped her husband continue the campaign, but the truth finally came out. Later many ugly truths were revealed about the couple's marriage and Elizabeth’s behind-the-scenes behavior—wrenching private scenes disgruntled aides were only too happy to tell.
 
But there’s no mystery to the outpouring of love and sorrow for the end of her amazing, tumultuous life. The way she faced her terrible illness was a model of forthrightness, of courage.Your heart breaks for her and the children she won’t be able to raise. Elizabeth’s life is a lesson in the dangers of a woman investing everything—her ambition, her intelligence, her dreams—to be fulfilled by a man. I wish long ago Elizabeth had said to her husband, “Guess what, I’m the one who’s going to run for the Senate.”
 

 
*This post was updated at 5:20 pm on Dec. 7, 2010 to account for the news of Elizabeth Edwards' death.

Tags: cancer, death, Elizabeth Edwards, John Edwards

News broke Monday that Elizabeth Edwards' cancer is past the point where treatment would be effective. She is at home in North Carolina with her family, including estranged husband John. I've always been sympathetic to Elizabeth, as she's a smart, admirable woman who has been so unlucky in life: Her oldest son Wade died as a teenager; she's had cancer for the past six years; her husband had a cruel, extremely public affair.

In her memoir, Resilience, she recognizes that her circumstances are unfortunate—"My life, at some level, is tragic," she writes—but the ugly events themselves aren't the saddest part. Though other observers may disagree, Edwards says that before all those bad things happened to her, her "chosen reality" was an "old-fashioned world of private passion and unadorned beauty and a life constructed around things of purity and purpose." You could see some of that purity and purpose in her fight for health care reform. Though she was indeed resilient in her fight against cancer and her dedication to her causes and her family, the most tragic part of the Edwards story is that the old-fashioned world she desired was completely and thoroughly destroyed.

Tags: Elizabeth Edwards, elizabeth edwards cancer

The chyron at the bottom of this morning's Today Show interview with Elizabeth Edwards was "Elizabeth Edwards Breaks Her Silence," which seemed absurd to me, as it seemed like only yesterday that she was an ubiquitous presence on the morning and early-afternoon talk show circuit promoting her memoir Resilience, which came out in May 2009. Only in today's insanely accelerated media cycle could a year away from Matt Lauer be construed as "silence," and the Daily Beast's Rebecca Dana picks up on the hypocrisy of Edwards' media strategy. Our own Hanna Rosin described Edwards' public persona as "passive aggressive," when Resilience first came out, and Dana pithily notes, "Edwards may be the most press-friendly press-hating jilted political spouse in history—a significant achievement in a crowded field. She is unmatched in both the relentlessness and vehemence of her image-rehabilitation campaign."

Indeed, Edwards seems obsessed with rewriting her own legacy—a depressing fool's errand from a woman who has been battling breast cancer for years and is very much aware of her own mortality. She says as much in the new afterword in the paperback version of Resilience (which she is currently out promoting), as well as on her Today Show appearance. "I want to reclaim who I am," she tells Matt Lauer. "I'm not just a cuckolded wife," she adds. In the new afterward to Resilience, she writes, "I wish I could be good enough now that I do not care what fabricated image of Elizabeth is in the spotlight. But I admit: I am not that good."

Now the business of rehabilitating Elizabeth's image has become a family affair, as her daughter Cate is set to write an essay that will appear in the new issue of People magazine out Friday. Cate writes about her mother, "There are the things she taught without words ... [like] how to continue to live your life on your own terms when it somehow becomes savaged by people you never invited into it." Though Cate is a grown woman who keeps her own counsel, it's hard not to read her willingness to write this essay as part of a greater cynical media strategy meant to sell copies of the paperback, rather than as touching tribute to a dying mother. Edwards' appearance on the Today Show is embedded below.

Tags: cate edwards, Elizabeth Edwards, matt lauer, Resilience, Today Show

KJ, I keep trying to connect the bad judgment Rielle Hunter exhibited in this interview with the bad judgment she exhibited in posing, with her child, for a series of photos that look like a creepy, male sex-fantasy from 1984. Pearls? Stuffed animals? Men’s shirt? Belly button? It all sort of puts the “ill” back into MILF doesn’t it?

The interview is almost unbearable in its silliness: “One thing I've learned about relationships and men is that you can never walk across the room for a man.” And: “It's beyond difficult. To allow a man to be a man.” And: “I could have helped save the world, but I had to sleep with him.” Every time Hunter makes a consequential choice—to sleep with Edwards on the day they met,  to become involved with a married man—she blames “the force field” of their love. There’s not a lick of remorse, growth, or responsibility in here. She’s just sort of bobbing along in a New Age current of words from one bad decision to the next. It’s funny that Hunter’s singular obsession with Edwards is that, as she explains, “His public persona just did not match who he is.” She has no such problem. Given 10 pages to finally tell us who she really is, Hunter reveals herself as exactly the same amoral sex-kitten/child captured in these photographs.

Photograph of John Edwards by Michael Williams/Getty Images.

Tags: Elizabeth Edwards, John Edwards, rielle hunter

—Does Rielle Hunter's silence over the last couple of years make her the picture of "quiet dignity"? Tact comes (late) to the arch-mistress? [Newsweek]

—Robin Wells is far more than Paul Krugman's wife, yet she's been consigned, along with Margaret Knox and Sheryl WuDunn, to the ranks of (almost always male) Geniuses' (almost always female) Spouses. [Jezebel, The New Yorker]

—Children conceived through in vitro fertilization and other methods of assisted reproduction have lower birth weights and more "genetic differences" than those cooked up the old-fashioned way, researchers now say. [WSJ]

—The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launches a Web site covering the "Palin Primaries." The goal: to highlight the rift between mainstream Republican candidates and Tea Partiers. Each district's name appears inked on a palm. [Politico]

—Martin Amis is supposedly indignant that Anna Ford called him a narcissist in Sunday's Guardian. It's hard to believe the narcissist finds the public flap all that upsetting. [The Elegant Variation, The Independent, Guardian]

Tags: anna ford, birth weight, dccc, Elizabeth Edwards, headlines, in vitro, infertility treatment, John Edwards, margaret knox, marin amis, palin primaries, paul krugman, rielle hunter, robin wells, sheryl wudunn, tea party, we're talking about

It's pretty silly that the New York Times profile of New York Senate hopeful Harold Ford's wife, Emily, calls the former fashion publicist "normally publicity-shy." First off, she used to be a publicist. Furthermore, there is a second article about Emily Ford published today, this one in the Daily Beast. As the Beast Points out, Harold did a "softball interview" with the New York Post's Cindy Adams in which he could not stop gushing about Emily and the couple's aged chihuahua, Fabby. It seems like Emily doth protest too much, especially since, according to Harold in the Post, "She's my director of research, checks my daily schedule and the people I'm seeing ... Today she's into marketing so she works from home, our condo in the Union Square Flatiron District, and she is totally involved in this decision." Hardly the shrinking violet, that Emily.

But the coverage of Emily Ford is not entirely irrelevant. Both the Times and the Beast discuss the campaign ad that some think helped derail Ford's Senate bid in Tennessee in 2006—the ad showed a white woman seductively calling Ford, who is black, and according to the Times, it "played to racist fears." But the more compelling subtext of the Times profile of Emily Ford is the recent humiliation of political wives Jenny Sanford and Elizabeth Edwards—both of whom are mentioned in the article. Ford had a reputation as a ladies' man before he settled down, dating Georgetown coeds well into his 30s, and now he seems incredibly concerned with proving how happily married he is.

Considering the recent obsession with politicians' wives, the interest in Emily Ford is understandable—but it doesn't make the articles about her any more noteworthy. The most hilariously banal part of the Times profile is the section in which the author tries to convince the reader that fashionista Emily Ford is just like us:

Despite gilded-class assumptions raised by Ms. Ford’s fashion pedigree and her mother’s wealthy third husband, Anson Beard Jr., a former Morgan Stanley senior executive, Ms. Ford quickly points out that she grew up in Naples, Fla., playing paddleball as a teenager and perfecting her tan. “I am not an Upper East Side heiress,” she said emphatically.

What an impressive rise from a hardscrabble background of paddle ball and tanning! Is "I am not an Upper East Side heiress" the new "son of a mill worker"?

Photograph of Harold Ford Jr. by David Goldman/Getty Images.

Tags: Elizabeth Edwards, emily ford, Harold Ford, Jenny Sanford, Jr., politicians' wives

John Edwards abused his loyal aide Andrew Young beyond reason, making him play gopher during his affair with Rielle Hunter and then convincing him to say the baby was his. And still, in his new tell-all book The Politician, Young is apparently harder on Elizabeth than he is on John. Young is filled with “rancor” toward Elizabeth, one early account says. He paints her as “obsessive” and “paranoid,” a micro-manager who fired staff for petty reasons, held grudges, and constantly left furious voice mails on Young’s wife’s cell phone calling Young a liar and cheater and Hunter a "completely crazy, desperate, pathetic woman."

Has ever a woman been tortured to such a degree? There must be something to these accounts, since they all sound the same. But they only make me pity her more. Clearly, she was a woman driven to insanity, our own American Medusa, a beautiful maiden transformed by the abuse of men into a poisonous monster. Listen to this conversation between Young and Edwards in the final days of their waning friendship:

"Elizabeth's taken all my keys."

"Elizabeth's taken all your keys?" I wanted to embarrass him by making him explain.

"Yeah, and she's got me sleeping in the barn. She yells at me all night, and when I sleep she gets in my face and screams."

Some more revelations:

—Edwards said he would never seek a divorce, because he still loved Elizabeth "in certain ways."

—John had a private phone for Rielle called the “Batphone.”

—Edwards buys HairTec Thick & Strong Shampoo by the case.

—Hunter employed her own personal guru named "Bob" who was present at her daughter's birth, and often refused to stay in hotel rooms because they possessed "bad energy."

—She believed Frances Quinn was "some kind of golden child, the reincarnated spirit of a Buddhist monk who was going to help save the world."

—Hunter had no health insurance, one of Edwards’ obsessions.

—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton phoned his wife to say they were sorry about what was happening and to tell her she was in their prayers. Bill Clinton, a veteran of his own sexual disgrace and attempted cover-up, called Edwards and said, in effect, "How'd you get caught?"

Correction, Jan. 28, 2010: This post originally incorrectly called Andrew Young's book The Candidate.

Tags: andrew young, Elizabeth Edwards, John Edwards, the Candidate