John Edwards

John Edwards (born June 10, 1953, Seneca, South Carolina, U.S.) is a U.S. senator, who in 2004 was the vice presidential running mate of John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

He was the son of Wallace Edwards, a textile-mill worker, and Catherine (“Bobbie”) Wade Edwards, a textile worker and later postal worker. He grew up in the mill town of Robbins, North Carolina. The first in his family to attend college, Edwards received a bachelor’s degree in textile management from North Carolina State University in 1974 and a law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1977. That year he also married a fellow law student, Elizabeth Anania. Edwards became a successful attorney, first in Nashville, Tennessee, and then in Raleigh, North Carolina, winning multimillion-dollar verdicts in personal-injury lawsuits. The death of his 16-year-old son, Wade, in an automobile accident in 1996 helped to impel Edwards into public service and philanthropy, and in 1998 he was elected to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina.

As a senator, Edwards cosponsored a patients’ bill of rights and supported education reform. As a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he proposed legislation on strengthening homeland security. Seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, Edwards struck a populist tone, with charismatic stump speeches that evoked his modest upbringing in Robbins. Though Edwards’s presidential bid was unsuccessful, John Kerry, the party’s eventual nominee, chose him as his running mate. The pair was narrowly defeated in the November elections by incumbent President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Edwards subsequently devoted much of his time to antipoverty efforts, becoming director of the newly created Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina in 2005. The following year he announced that he would seek the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008. Edwards’s bid for the presidency got off to an inauspicious start, as he finished second in the Iowa caucus, third in the New Hampshire primary, and third in the South Carolina primary (his native state) in January 2008. In late January he withdrew from the race.

During that campaign the National Enquirer reported that Edwards carried on an extramarital affair with a campaign worker. Edwards first denied the allegation, but in August 2008 he acknowledged the affair. In 2010 he admitted that he was the father of the child born to her in 2008. Edwards and his wife separated in 2010, and Elizabeth died later that year after a highly publicized battle with cancer. After a two-year investigation uncovered evidence that he had received hundreds of thousands of dollars to conceal his extramarital affair, Edwards was indicted in June 2011 by a federal grand jury on charges relating to illegal campaign contributions, and he went on trial in 2012. Edwards was found not guilty on one count, but, because the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the five other charges, the judge declared a mistrial on those counts. The five remaining charges were later dismissed.