Rupert Cornwell: John Edwards – from golden boy to national disgrace

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Once upon a time (less than two years ago, to be exact) John Edwards was a narrowly defeated one-time candidate for the vice-presidency, who along with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was one of the "big three" Democratic contenders for the White House in 2008. Today, he is a pariah, shunned by those he used to count as friends, ruined beyond redemption by the scandal that will not die.

In American public life, the old saw runs, it's not the crime but the cover-up that's fatal. Get the truth out at once, straying politicians and celebrities are invariably advised, and careers may be rescued and reputations saved. In this wretched but oddly compelling saga, however, Edwards was doomed by his own hand on both counts.

On its own, the scandal might well have destroyed him. Not only did Edwards the candidate conduct a secret affair with Rielle Hunter, a minor New York socialite who made short documentary videos for his presidential campaign (so far, so Bill Clinton, one might say). Worse, Edwards was betraying his popular and much-admired wife Elizabeth – a high-powered lawyer who had sacrificed her career for his – who was playing a major part in the campaign both as backstage adviser and public surrogate, even though she had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

The cover-up was more damaging still. "Completely untrue, ridiculous," was Edwards's description of the initial report of the affair in The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid, in mid-October 2007. Soon after, however, Ms Hunter was visibly and most inconveniently pregnant. Edwards therefore persuaded Andrew Young, a close and utterly loyal aide, to declare that he was the father, while the candidate himself continued to deny any suggestion of an affair.

In the meantime, Edwards may have improperly used campaign funds to support his mistress and her child, under the guise of follow-up payments for campaign videos she produced. That matter is currently under investigation by a federal grand jury.

Now that he has been so comprehensively disgraced, it's easy to forget how, in the interval between the Bill Clinton presidency and the advent of Obama, John Edwards was the Democrats' great young hope, a charming and handsome trial lawyer who had launched a meteoric political career by winning a Senate seat in traditionally Republican North Carolina in 1998 when he was just 45 (and looked 25). Many already saw him as a future president. Two years later, Al Gore almost chose him as his running mate, and in 2004 John Kerry did so, after Edwards had run a highly creditable primary campaign.

It was a foregone conclusion that he would try again in 2008 – and it's also easy to forget that on healthcare reform, now the burning issue of the hour, it was Edwards, not Hillary Clinton or Obama, who put forward the first and, by common consent, the best plan for universal health coverage of any candidate.

But Edwards is an object lesson that, in life as in politics, few things are what they seem. Yes, he was glib and glossy, with impossibly perfect hair and an impossibly dazzling smile. But Elizabeth, with her bravery, her grace and her common sense, was surely guarantee that John was for real when he campaigned so passionately against poverty, social injustice and the gulf between the "two Americas", rich and poor.

Even she, however, could be no guarantee against the certain disaster for the Democrats that would have ensued had he won the nomination only for the liaison with Hunter to become public knowledge – as it would have done. Sooner or later, such secrets always come out. Indeed key Edwards staffers, convinced by the start of 2008 that despite the denials the rumours were true, are said to have devised a "Doomsday plan" whereby they would deliberately leak the affair, if ever their man looked to have a serious chance of winning the nomination, in the higher interests of the party.

In fact he never did, even though Edwards finished second, ahead of Hillary Clinton, in the Iowa caucuses that kicked off the primary season. Soon he pulled out of the race and endorsed Obama, in the hope of a senior post in the next administration. But any such prospect vanished in July 2008 when the Enquirer caught Edwards as he visited his mistress and her child in a Los Angeles hotel, and ran a detailed story, complete with photographs. A few days later, Edwards admitted the relationship, but still denied paternity.

And so, more than 12 months on, the revelations continue, each one tackier than the last. A fortnight ago The New York Times reported the inevitable: plans by Andrew Young for a book in which the loyal aide will be loyal no longer. Not only will Young explain how he facilitated the trysts between Hunter and his boss (recounting how Edwards once promised his paramour that, after his wife died, he would marry her at a rooftop ceremony in New York, serenaded by the Grammy Award-winning Dave Matthews Band), he also claims that Edwards had other affairs during the campaign.

Mercifully, the closing chapters of the story may be at hand. Edwards is said to have changed his mind and is ready to admit he is the father of Frances Hunter, who is now 19 months old. Hunter and her daughter are reportedly moving to North Carolina, closer to the child's father. As for Elizabeth, the Enquirer claims in its latest issue that, her patience exhausted by the alleged serial infidelity of her husband, she is about to do what most people reckon she should have done long ago and seek a divorce.

With the sole exception of the Enquirer, there are no winners in this miserable yet transfixing tale. Not Elizabeth Edwards, who must fight her illness without her husband of 32 years; not Rielle Hunter or her daughter; and not John Edwards, who has fallen further, faster and more completely than any American politician since Richard Nixon.