In July, 2001, then-U.S. Senator John Edwards delivered the opening speech at the Association of Trial Lawyers of America's annual convention in Montreal.
As the honour suggested, he was not only a rising star in American politics, but a legend in the legal fraternity – a personal injury lawyer who had taken cases with hugely problematic odds and won mega-dollar settlements for clients.
In 1993, for example, Mr. Edwards was retained by the North Carolina family of young Valerie Lakey, who'd lost most of her intestines to the suction power of an uncovered wading-pool drain. He sued the manufacturer, Sta-Rite Industries, for negligence, and refused settlement offers, even as they climbed from an initial $100,000 (U.S.) to $17.5-million. Found guilty at trial, the company was forced to pay $25-million, the largest verdict in state history.
The Montreal speech was almost a love-in. When he left the podium, cries of 'Edwards for president' echoed through the room.
Mr. Edwards clearly heard them. He ran twice for the Oval Office, becoming John Kerry's Democratic vice-presidential running mate in 2004. He tried again four years later. But no one was going to beat Barack Obama in 2008, least of all a candidate like Mr. Edwards, who had by then developed an unfortunate tendency for reckless self-destruction.
Mr. Edwards has now taken on another seemingly lost legal cause – his own.
On Friday, after a two-year federal investigation, a grand jury in Raleigh, N.C., indicted him on six counts of fraud and conspiracy.
The U.S. Justice Department alleges that during the 2008 presidential race, Mr. Edwards misused some $925,000 in donations to hide his extramarital affair with Rielle Hunter, a former campaign aide. Had their relationship and her subsequent pregnancy become known, the indictment claims, it would have badly blurred a principal focus of the Edwards candidacy – his image as a loyal and loving family man, dedicated to his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth.
The indictment went forward after lawyers for Mr. Edwards refused to accept the terms of an out-of-court settlement that would have seen the 57-year-old politician plead guilty to a felony charge. Such a plea bargain would likely have led to his professional disbarment.
No stranger to the art of courtroom framing, Mr. Edwards is gambling that he can persuade a jury that, while his moral and ethical lapses may have been legion, he did nothing illegal.
"There's no question that I've done wrong," he said Friday in Winston-Salem, N.C., "and I take full responsibility for having done wrong. And I will regret for the rest of my life the pain and the harm that I've caused others. But I did not break the law, and I never, ever thought I was breaking the law."
If convicted, however, he faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each of the six counts.
Once the great hope of the Democratic Party's left wing, Mr. Edwards carefully positioned himself as the defender of the little guy, marginalized Americans mercilessly trampled by the forces of corporate power. He campaigned effectively, inveighing against the scourge of poverty and the threat of global warming, while promoting universal health care.
He was smart, youthful, charming, fast on his feet and telegenic. He had authentic blue-collar roots (as the son of a textile worker), played high-school football, and had married his college sweetheart. If regional unknowns like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton could attain the country's highest office, perhaps so could he.
He was undone by his own hubris – the smug conviction that power and money could mask personal peccadilloes, that he could made a credible run for the presidency while hiding a mistress and an out-of-wedlock daughter. Fifty years ago, he might have been able to get away with it. Not in modern-day America. He could have been a poster boy for the question: What was he thinking?
His greatest problem now, of course, will be his own credibility, or lack thereof. Facing press inquiries about his relationship with Ms. Hunter – even while his wife was fighting her losing battle with breast cancer – he repeatedly lied. When he did at last acknowledge his infidelity, he claimed that the affair had ended before she became pregnant, and denied having fathered her child. Instead, even as he was allegedly tapping wealthy political patrons to cover Ms. Hunter's travel, housing and medical costs, he was pressing his aide, Andrew Young, to falsely claim paternity. Mr. Young complied, though later renounced the claim in a tell-all book.
It wasn't until January of 2010 that Mr. Edwards finally told the bitter truth. His ailing wife promptly announced her intention to divorce him, but died before she could file.
To the long, ignominious list of promising American politicians hoisted on their own petards, their careers effectively ruined by sexual scandal – Gary Hart, Henry Cisneros, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, Jesse Jackson Jr., Gary Condit – John Edwards has added his tarnished name.