Sex, scorn and videotape
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.
“In months of talking with [John Edwards], I have come to understand his liaison with this woman, if I have, not as a substitute for me. It was more like his relationship with a former staff member,” she wrote. She described an “obsessed” and “overbearing” young volunteer who “volunteered for everything, making himself indispensable,” taking care of cars and dry cleaning — an unmistakable portrait, people close to her say, of Young.
She and her husband were, she wrote, his victims — guilty only of “being vulnerable to obsequiousness.”
Others close to both the couple and Young see it differently, as a relationship that tapped into the worst of both sides: Young’s boundless attraction to power — and the Edwardses’ ease in using him.
“What we always said about Andrew was that there would always be a place for him as long as John and Elizabeth didn’t want to get their hands dirty and deal with the painters and yard people and get their own groceries,” said a former Edwards aide who was among several who agitated more than once to have Young fired. “It was not a healthy arrangement,” the former aide said.
Read the rest....
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090930/pl_politico/27755/print
Sounds a little weird on the relationship between the two.
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.
“In months of talking with [John Edwards], I have come to understand his liaison with this woman, if I have, not as a substitute for me. It was more like his relationship with a former staff member,” she wrote. She described an “obsessed” and “overbearing” young volunteer who “volunteered for everything, making himself indispensable,” taking care of cars and dry cleaning — an unmistakable portrait, people close to her say, of Young.
She and her husband were, she wrote, his victims — guilty only of “being vulnerable to obsequiousness.”
Others close to both the couple and Young see it differently, as a relationship that tapped into the worst of both sides: Young’s boundless attraction to power — and the Edwardses’ ease in using him.
“What we always said about Andrew was that there would always be a place for him as long as John and Elizabeth didn’t want to get their hands dirty and deal with the painters and yard people and get their own groceries,” said a former Edwards aide who was among several who agitated more than once to have Young fired. “It was not a healthy arrangement,” the former aide said.
Read the rest....
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090930/pl_politico/27755/print
Sounds a little weird on the relationship between the two.
