Nice Bio of John R. Edwards

Edwards' Presidential Bid a Reflection of Rise from Working Class Childhood

By Scott Shepard

John Edwards is really Richard Kimble of "The Fugitive." Or more accurately, he's the lawyer who could have saved the wrongly accused Kimble from having to roam America year after year in search of justice.

The TV show, which aired on ABC from 1963 to 1967, caused a "building fury" in young Johnny Edwards week after week because "no one ever bothered to take Dr. Kimble's side and make things right for him, or even try," Edwards would recall decades later.

Of course, Johnny Reid Edwards also recalls being equally fanatical about "Perry Mason." But television's longest-running lawyer series offered comfort at the end of each episode as Mason, played by Raymond Burr, extracted a dramatic witness stand confession from the real killer.

Without "The Fugitive," Edwards might never have embarked on this, his second campaign for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States. Because at the age of 11, at the height of the TV show's popularity, Johnny Edwards chose the profession that would eventually lead him into politics.

In a grade-school essay titled "Why I Want to be a Lawyer," Johnny wrote, "Probably the most important reason I want to be a defense attorney is that I would like to protect innocent people from blind justice the best I can."
Edwards might have followed his father, Wallace, into the mills of North Carolina: The bachelor of arts degree he earned from North Carolina State University in 1973 is in textile technology, and he is the first in his family ever to attend college. He started school at Clemson University in South Carolina, the "missed dream" of his high-school-educated father, and hoped to earn a football scholarship.

But Edwards transferred to more affordable North Carolina State before the school year was over, having run out of money and into the reality of big-time college football: 6-foot, 170-pound receivers need not apply, even if they are speedy and agile.

In college, he opposed the Vietnam War and, in 1972, though registered as an independent, voted for Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, despite his father's conservative Republicanism. Edwards registered for the military draft but was not ordered to military service. And sometime in the mid-1970s, he changed his voter registration to Democrat.

New name, new life

In 1974, Edwards entered the University of North Carolina Law School in Chapel Hill, where he became known as "John," though his birth certificate reads "Johnny." Three years later -- and 10 years after the last episode of "The Fugitive" -- he left with a law degree and a fiancee, Mary Elizabeth Anania, the daughter of a Navy pilot who was widely regarded as one of the smartest members of the class of 1977.

They were married July 30, 1977, the Saturday after they both took the North Carolina bar exam. She still wears the $11 wedding ring he placed on her finger, he the $22 ring she placed on his. Their one-night honeymoon in Williamsburg, Va., was a gift from Elizabeth's parents. They continue to celebrate their wedding anniversary just as they did on their first: with dinner at Wendy's.

Over the next two decades, Edwards grew rich beyond his greatest expectations, accruing more than $45 million in judgments or settlements during his career as a personal injury lawyer in Raleigh. Somewhat superstitious, he sometimes wore special suits for closing arguments in trials -- a real-life version of the skilled, crusading attorney representing regular folks in times of tragedy and loss in some of John Grisham's novels.

Not bad for the "son of a mill worker," which he has so often noted in his quests for the presidency that now he jokes about it. "I'm sure that by now you may have heard something about me being the son of a mill worker," he frequently quips these days.

He says his itinerant and working-class childhood in the roughneck mill villages of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia -- with football, basketball, baseball and the plight of Richard Kimble as his main concerns -- and the summer jobs sweeping the floors of the mills, painting railroad crossing signs and laying carpet gave him "a sense of the dignity of hard work and the struggle of good men and women."

Edwards is Southern. He likes NASCAR, bluegrass music and North Carolina beach vacations, and his favorite meal is fried chicken, mashed potatoes, scratch biscuits and his mother's pecan pie and chocolate cake.

Wealthy populist

Edwards' persona for the 2008 campaign -- that of a champion for the working class -- doesn't fit with his lifestyle, some people have noted.

Indeed, critics have made much of the fact that Edwards has received pricey haircuts, has consulted for a Wall Street hedge fund that caters to the super-rich and lives in a big house -- a very big house, some 28,000 square feet.
Edwards has apologized for the haircuts, but not his lifestyle. He has frequently said that "nothing was handed to me" and that he worked hard to get where he is.

The "two Americas" campaign stump speech Edwards has been giving in one form or another since 2004 weaves the story of his up-from-the-bootstraps personal rise and his Grisham-like legal career with a call to heal the rifts that divide the nation, the establishment of "one America that works for all of us."

Personal challenges

But having lived on both sides of the economic divide in America is less consequential to the politics of John Edwards than the most defining events of his life:

The death of his son, 16-year-old Lucius Wade Edwards, in 1996, when the Jeep Cherokee he was driving flipped over in the wind.

The diagnosis of breast cancer Elizabeth received in the final days of the 2004 presidential campaign and the defeat of the Kerry-Edwards ticket.

The news in March that Elizabeth's cancer had returned in an incurable form.

Edwards still finds it difficult to speak at length about Wade. His most extensive account of the tragedy is found not in his speeches or interviews but in his 2004 autobiography, "Four Trials." It includes an account of how the two of them, the year before Wade's death, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, in part to help Edwards conquer his fear of heights. With coaxing from Wade, Edwards made it to the summit, nearly 20,000 feet.

Edwards and his wife have set up a number of scholarships and charities, most notably the Wade Edwards Foundation.

After Wade's death, Edwards sought new challenges and, at the urging of then-Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, ran for the U.S. Senate, defeating Republican incumbent Lauch Faircloth. He spent $6 million of his own money in a campaign that pitted him against the powerful political organization of North Carolina's other senator at the time, the legendary Jesse Helms.

Also after Wade's death, the couple decided they wanted more children in addition to daughter Cate, now 25, a graduate of Princeton and a student at Harvard Law School. Elizabeth underwent hormone shots and, at 48, gave birth to daughter Emma Claire in 1998 and, at 50, in 2000, to son John "Jack" Atticus -- not after the lawyer hero of "To Kill A Mockingbird," but after the Roman intellectual, a nickname a Latin teacher gave Wade.

"Our house was fairly joyless. ... And we said, 'Well, kids give us happiness,' Elizabeth Edwards explained in 2004 during her husband's first bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Elizabeth's illness threatened to end Edwards' campaign in March when it was discovered that her cancer had returned.

But the couple made the decision, he says, that "we were not going to go quietly go away" but would "continue to fight for what we believe in."

From The Campaign To Change America