The Natural

By MICHAEL DUFFY

The best tale about John Edwards is neither tall nor ancient, but it serves as an ideal allegory for his life. In the summer of 1995, the hotshot Raleigh, N.C., trial attorney wrapped up his legal work for the week and strolled into a local sporting-goods store to do some shopping. Edwards explained that he was planning to climb 19,340-ft. Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in a few days with his son Wade, then 15, and he needed some good, strong hiking boots. Horrified by the customer's naive, if not dangerous, lack of preparation, the sales staff urged him to, at the very least, break in the stiff boots during the flight over the Atlantic. Edwards did not confide another problem, for which there is no known equipment solution: he's afraid of heights.

On the morning that he, Wade and two others were to summit, Edwards woke up at 16,000 ft. with altitude sickness; he had literally gone too far too fast. He urged the others to go on up without him. But descending from the top a few hours later, they ran into Edwards forcing himself up the trail alone. Swallowing his discomfort, he wanted to go all the way. And in the end, of course, he made it.

Climbing Kilimanjaro cold is more or less what Edwards has done this year, turning a long-shot bid for the White House into a spot on the Democratic ticket. Win or lose this fall, Edwards in many ways has already won: he has beaten the odds and, at 51, will almost certainly take his place as a leading figure in the Democratic Party for years to come. His out-of-nowhere performance this year would not surprise those who have known him since he scraped his way out of Robbins, N.C., the mill town he talks about at every stop and in every speech. That's because shooting the moon has long been Edwards' strongest game. He has for years been willing to ignore local conventions, bet the farm on a hunch and streak past his stunned, sometimes resentful rivals as he collected an armful of glittering prizes. It is a career arc that, in national politics at least, might be shocking were it not so much like that of another Southern pol who jumped at mid-life into high-stakes politics and found himself in the White House seven years later.

But George W. Bush inherited a global brand name that gave him a running start. The smiley kid from up-country Carolina has come further faster than anyone since Richard Nixon moved from a seat in Congress to the vice presidency in six short years. So how did Edwards do it?

What propels Edwards, friends say, is a burning desire to level the playing field. Growing up in a Carolina mill town, where he saw how his father Wallace and other textile workers were subjected to the daily indignities of life as the working poor, left him "with a real sense that some things need to be set right," says adviser Bruce Reed. His considerable ambition is neatly hidden behind loads of charm, but he also packs a happy self-confidence that other men routinely call staggering. "He has no butterflies," says Reed, laughing a bit. "It's amazing what you can accomplish when you are not self-conscious about it."

"People always underestimate my son," says his mother Bobbie, and it's easy to see why. Johnny Reid Edwards was born in Seneca, S.C., a rural corner of the state where Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina collide. Edwards' parents were millworkers who had to take out a $50 loan to pay the hospital bill. Bobbie sewed kids' swimsuits for a living; Wallace labored as a $35-a-week textile worker from the day after he graduated from high school. But they were moving up. The Edwardses' ancestors had lived in up-country Carolina and Georgia for several generations and, like many striving in that region, had made the jump from poor sharecroppers to less poor cotton-mill workers. The family story even includes a classic cornpone beginning: Bobbie and Wallace met at a square dance. Wallace asked Bobbie for her phone number--"and we went from there," she told TIME last week. They were married in 1952. John arrived in 1953; siblings Kathy and Blake came later.

The Edwards family moved a lot during the 1950s as Wallace chased better-paying jobs. It was a game of diminishing returns because the textile companies gave the best jobs to college graduates. Wallace had to swallow his pride when he was asked to teach the shiny management recruits how a mill really functioned. "They would start them off paying them more than they were paying me, and I had to train them," he recalled last week. "You can imagine how I felt." John remembers waking up one morning to find his father sitting in the living room surrounded by pencils and paper and watching dreary math-instruction programs on TV, trying to catch up.

Still, Edwards' youth seems in all ways normal and in some ways prophetic. He was friendly--more like his outgoing mom than like his dad, recalls John Frye, Wallace's friend and the father of Edwards' best boyhood chum. Growing up chiefly in Robbins, N.C., Edwards played hoops in his backyard and contended with neighborhood bullies by following his dad's advice: Don't wait for trouble; punch the other guy hard in the nose first. Addicted to Perry Mason and The Fugitive on TV, Edwards wrote an essay in Grade 6 called "Why I Want to Be a Lawyer." ("I would like to protect innocent people from blind justice" is how he naively put it.) Only an average student, Edwards lettered in four high school sports and had a reputation as a devastating hitter on the football field. He rarely let any limitation stand in his way: he once joined the tennis team to chase the prettiest girl in the school.

If Vietnam and Watergate left marks on Edwards, who is the first major-party candidate on the big ticket to have entered college in the 1970s, they cannot be seen. Instead, the most visible scars are economic. Edwards can recall how his father marched his family out of restaurants where the menu items were too expensive. When Edwards arrived at nearby Clemson University in 1971, he was thinking not about politics but about becoming a football star, and he managed to snare a walk-on spot on the squad. But he failed to win a scholarship and transferred to the more affordable North Carolina State a semester later, working odd jobs to pay his tuition bills, graduating in three years to save money and pragmatically choosing to major in textile studies. That was just a safety net. When he graduated in 1974, he had his eye on a law degree and entered the University of North Carolina that fall.

It was there, in Chapel Hill, that he spotted--and finally met--his future wife, Elizabeth Anania, the daughter of a Navy pilot, who grew up partly in Japan. Dazzled by her brains and beauty, Edwards waited a semester before asking her out. Their first date was at a Holiday Inn where the music was so loud, they couldn't talk. She was unimpressed with her suitor until Edwards bent over and sweetly kissed her good night on the forehead. The two were married 2 1/2 years later, the day after they took the bar exam. Arriving at a hotel in Virginia Beach, Va., a day later, Edwards was $2 short of the $22 room fee. Her parents had to drive over with the difference.

To this day, despite his enormous success as a lawyer, there are reminders of those penny-pinching times. Edwards combines fine suits with cheap digital watches, a champagne income with a taste for Wendy's and Applebee's.

The partners at the law firm Tharrington, Smith & Hargrove in Raleigh realized that they might have something special in Edwards when the 31-year-old attorney won a $3.7 million judgment in a medical-malpractice case in 1984. Edwards had stunned the local bar by forgoing a $20,000 settlement offer and going to trial instead. That sort of thing simply wasn't done, but then again, Edwards was doing a lot of things that had never been done before. After three years of civil litigation in Nashville, Tenn., he passed up a more lucrative offer from a Raleigh corporate firm for a job at a smaller partnership. But if he was brash, he certainly wasn't lazy. Before trial in cases of medical malpractice, he simply outhustled the lawyers for the insurance companies, mastering case details, learning obscure medical procedures and rounding up expert witnesses.

But his special talent was with the jury, his down-home voice loud and firm at times and buttery and confiding at others. In every state, there are a few lawyers known to possess a golden tongue who can explain things in simple but emotional terms. By age 40, Edwards had found that this talent was his best tool for leveling the playing field.

With a friend from law school, Edwards opened his own firm in 1993, and he could now afford to be choosy. He turned down 50 to 100 cases for every one he accepted. The mere hint that Edwards might be a client's lawyer was enough to produce a generous settlement offer. But given a choice between settling or not, Edwards usually leaned toward going to trial, so supremely confident was he in his ability to read a jury. By 1996 Edwards was rich and one of the best-regarded lawyers in the U.S. He had exceeded every expectation anyone had ever had for him, and then some.

And then the lights went out.

On April 4, 1996, the Edwardses' son Wade was driving his Jeep south on I-40 to the family beach house for spring break. His parents were to join him a few hours later. Wade was their pride and joy, an old soul who was close to his father and had won a top spot in a Voice of America essay contest, the son who helped the father up the mountain. But somewhere near Warsaw, N.C., that day, a gust of wind caught Wade's black Grand Cherokee and spun it out of control. After several swerves, the car flipped over and skidded across the pavement. Wade and his friend Tyler Highsmith were wearing seat belts and had not been drinking. Tyler was able to free himself from the wreckage and walk away. But the roof collapsed on Wade, killing him instantly. A friend drove Edwards to the hospital, where he hugged his son goodbye.

For the next six months and probably longer, John and Elizabeth disappeared. Neither went to work. Friends went by daily to feed them and then put them back to bed. He was bad, and she was worse. He went for long jogs; she lost herself in the Weather Channel. Edwards began attending Bible fellowship classes. Over time, the couple pulled themselves together by focusing on how to best remember their son. They settled on a long stone bench for a picnic area at Wade's high school--designed to suggest a comet with its short but bright life. They plowed hundreds of thousands of dollars into a building across the street to provide after-school assistance to any student who needed it.

A year later, Edwards was running for office. Though he had done little or no political work before and his voting history was spotty (his excuse: he was often too busy with legal cases to vote), Edwards insists he had long been intrigued by the idea of public service. In fact, Wade had told friends his father was considering a run. Edwards' public explanation for his mid-life pivot is that it was merely an extension of his lifelong mission as the Equalizer. "If you can't help enough people being a lawyer, consider being a lawmaker" is how he thought of the plan, according to his 2003 autobiography, Four Trials.

As always, Edwards aimed high. When he told his mom he was running for the Senate, she asked, "The state senate?" No, said Edwards, the one in Washington. In 1998 Edwards challenged G.O.P. incumbent Lauch Faircloth, then 70, who did his best to portray Edwards as an ambulance chaser. Edwards was prepared for that and worse, according to pollster Harrison Hickman in an interview with the New York Times. When Hickman warned the novice candidate about the ugly nature of politics, Edwards replied, "I appreciate your saying all that to me. But I have to tell you, if you have ever had to climb up on the examining table in the medical examiner's office and tell your son goodbye, there's nothing they can do that's worse."

The first-time candidate vowed to improve public education and the environment and win a patients' bill of rights. He swore off political-action-committee money and donated $6 million to his own campaign. Edwards told consultants he would fire--and then sue--them if they used Wade's death during the campaign. Though he does not talk about him on the stump, Edwards wears his son's Outward Bound pin on his lapel. Edwards won a resounding victory in the primary and survived Faircloth's attacks in the fall, winning 51% of the vote.

True to form, "Edwards hit the Senate like he was running the 100-yd. dash," says Senator John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat. As soon as Edwards arrived, in January 1999, the courtroom virtuoso was tapped by Tom Daschle to defend Bill Clinton in the impeachment proceedings. Edwards dazzled members of both parties with his no-notes defense of the President during the trial. He took a seat on the sleepy Banking Committee, which matters in North Carolina, but switched a year later to the more visible Commerce Committee. By the summer of 2000, Edwards had scooted to the top of Al Gore's short list for a running mate and dropped off only at the end. When Bush won, Edwards was invited to take over the coveted Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee--coveted because its chairman gets to meet every fund raiser in the nation. But Edwards declined, a sure sign that he was going to run for President.

Edwards' legislative record is thin. To earn some foreign-policy credentials, he sought and won a seat on the Intelligence Committee in 2001. He met with Democratic wise men and in the summer of 2001 called terrorism the gravest threat facing the nation, though hardly anyone heard him. He helped move a retooled patients' bill of rights through the Senate in 2002--a gift from his friend Ted Kennedy, who authored the original bill--only to see it die in conference committee. And he narrowly failed to round up enough votes in 2003 to block the Bush Administration from easing air-pollution rules for factories and power plants. He changed committees again in 2003, jumping to Judiciary, the home of hot-button issues dear to liberals. His striving didn't always wear well, however. Republicans snickered about Edwards' ambition. Montana's Conrad Burns was known sometimes to sing a friendly "Hello, Mr. President" whenever Edwards stepped into a Senators-only elevator. Democrats quietly gritted their teeth. As John Kerry once put it, "And you think I'm ambitious?"

And so once more Edwards burned his boats and went for broke. In the fall of 2003, faced with a choice of running for re-election in North Carolina or trying for President, he opted for the latter, an utter long shot. Edwards raised a lot of money, mostly from other trial lawyers, and made very few mistakes, but at every critical juncture he was overshadowed by his more erratic rivals: first, when retired General Wesley Clark jumped into the race the same day Edwards announced his candidacy, and later when he came roaring out of Iowa in second place on the night Howard Dean let loose with his famous scream. Edwards was drowned out each time. Sensitive about his scant experience, he published a 60-page booklet full of plans and proposals, far more detailed than those of any other Democrat. He could be withering in his critique of the Bush team, but he carefully clung to the high ground when discussing his rivals, keeping the door to the vice-presidential nomination open.

But his chief contribution to the race was the Speech: a distillation of what he saw as the nation's condition, which he called "the two Americas"--one, for the wealthy, privileged and connected, where there are good jobs and affordable health care and good schools, and another for everyone else. "Today under George W. Bush, there are two Americas: one America that does the work, another that reaps the reward. One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks. One America--middle-class America--whose needs Washington has long forgotten, another America whose every wish is Washington's command." It was a great speech for a Democratic audience, but it couldn't lift him to the nomination.

At least not at the top of the ticket.

--With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr. and Karen Tumulty/Washington and Mitch Frank/Robbins

With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr. and Karen Tumulty/Washington and Mitch Frank/Robbins