‘The Politician’ by Andrew Young

Got a chief aide? Don’t abandon him for your mistress. That’s the lesson of “The Politician” by Andrew Young. For all its salacious finger-pointing, Young’s tell-all is really about a bromance gone bad.

“Where he once called several times a day, he now never dialed my number,” he writes. “When I got through to him, he kept the calls brief and guarded what he said.”

“He,” of course, is John Edwards; when his affair with Rielle Hunter -- and Hunter’s pregnancy -- hit the press, he persuaded Young to say the child was his. Then Young, his family and Hunter trundled off to a series of houses until the baby was born.

Young was an important player in Edwards’ 2004 race for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he was a close friend. The Edwards and Young families were on vacation together at Disney World when Edwards learned that Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry had picked him as his vice presidential running mate.

According to Young, Edwards and Hunter -- who produced webisodes for the campaign -- carried on their affair for months before a story appeared in the National Enquirer.

Young details the affair from behind the scenes: He carried a special phone for Edwards to use when talking to Hunter; he was there during a visit she made to North Carolina when Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, was away on a book tour; and he caroused with Edwards, Hunter and others on the road during a night of rowdy drinking.

In 2008, Edwards had given up his second attempt at the Democratic nomination but was angling again to be the running mate. Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer had gotten worse and Hunter had a baby daughter. In one of the more incredible details here, Young claims Edwards asked him to steal a diaper so he could do a DNA test; Young never did.

But as he was packing up a house that Hunter had briefly shared with his family, he found a box of her things, among them “a number of videotapes, including one marked ‘special,’ which had the tape pulled out and seemed intentionally broken. . . . I couldn’t resist. With scissors, a pen, and some scotch tape, I fixed the cassette. . . . As I pressed play, we saw an image of a man -- John Edwards -- and a naked pregnant woman, photographed from the navel down, engaged in a sexual encounter.”

Young is critical of everyone around him but never takes responsibility for his decisions. Edwards’ women get particularly harsh treatment. Hunter is portrayed as a sex-crazed loose cannon. Elizabeth Edwards fares no better; in Young’s telling, she’s a controlling, vindictive harpy who leaves cruel phone messages for those who incur her wrath.

If Edwards did everything Young alleges, he was selfish, deceitful and willing to go to extraordinary lengths to cover up an affair during a race for his party’s presidential nomination. So it’s remarkable that he comes out not seeming all that bad. Not that Young has forgiven him. He had been gathering ammunition for a long time; when he discovered the dirty videotape, he immediately decided he “now possessed something powerful” and locked it up in a safe deposit box.

This does not engender sympathy, and every effort to portray Elizabeth Edwards unkindly reflects back on him. Young feels John Edwards owes him. “The Politician” is payback.

carolyn.kellogg

@latimes.com