The Pain of Elizabeth Edwards

The Atlantic ^ | september 2009 | Christopher Hitchens

[kingattax]

Potential readers should not be deterred by the vaguely Hallmarkish cover—and subtitle—of this book, both of which may be blamed on the publisher. I’m assuming that Broadway Books has a packaging-and-editing style all its own, because on page 88 it makes Elizabeth Edwards tell us something that “Edmund Wilson, the incomparable twentieth-century literary critic, said.” Perhaps someone at the firm felt that this would explain just exactly who Wilson was to a reader who didn’t know, but the effect is to be condescending and to diminish the impact of reading a senator’s wife who is well able to cite Edmund Wilson in her own right.

Elsewhere Mrs. Edwards gets her own way, quoting with familiarity and aptness from Sophocles and Millay and making astute comparisons between the novelistic characterizations of John Updike and of Henry James. (Her husband’s “campaign biography” book, Four Trials, was co-written with him by my friend John Auchard, editor of the somehow perfectly titled Portable Henry James and an academic colleague of Elizabeth’s; few such workaday volumes can boast this sort of step-parentage.)

One of the more noticeable features of John Edwards’s little book was the sense it conveyed that the candidate understood perfectly well that he had married the smartest student in his law-school class. And nobody who saw them together could fail to notice that he was always—and understandably—somewhat in awe of her.

(Perhaps here is the moment for me to say that I used to see a good deal of them both in Washington, beginning with my writing a profile of him in 2002, and that we have been on friendly social terms in each other’s houses. I think I may refer to her as “Elizabeth” rather than “Mrs. Edwards” from now on.)

[popdonnelly]

If it’s any consolation, I think John Edwards is a pain, too.

[Big Ol L]

Exactly. Elizabeth knew exactly what she was doing when she refused to do the right thing and leave her cheating husband. She is every bit as addicted to power as he is, and the lure of being the First Lady and everything that goes along with it outweighed any sense of personal pride or dignity she may have had left after marrying him in the first place.

I will not buy or even read her book. I have no sympathy for her, and I think her getting cancer again is a receipt from God for not doing the right thing and leaving her husband. Elizabeth Edwards is scum, her husband is scum, and their children need to be taken away before the parents pass their poisonous lessons on to them.

[Gapplega]

The Edwards are white trash with a big bank account, nothing more, nothing less. Good riddance. Just like Teddy. Hopefully, the taxpayers in NC won’t have to pay for a state funeral after she dies from her future brain mets.