By Thanksgiving, I knew I didn’t fit in Washington-I was not cut out for that kind of politics-and needed to find a way to return to North Carolina. This is not to say there weren’t some extraordinary moments for me during my Washington duty. Cheri and I got to use the senator’s tickets to see a symphony at the Kennedy Center, and he insisted I use Elizabeth’s ticket to sit in the visitors’ gallery at President Bush’s first State of the Union address following the 9/11 attack. (She was worried about a terrorist attack, and as parents the Edwardses always avoided being in the same place when they had any fear of a dangerous incident.) But the occasional symphony or special event cannot restore balance to your life. We were determined to reclaim our life in North Carolina, so we sold the place at the Watergate, and to save money I moved out of McLean and into a tiny basement apartment in the city. (It had just one little window, and that was in the bathroom.) I didn’t tell anyone at work that I was fixing to leave, but I started planning and looking for the right moment to give my notice. In the meantime, I marveled at the cutthroat competition for advancement that dominates life on Capitol Hill.

I Koma watched from afar as a staffer named Miles Lackey maneuvered to replace chief of staff Jeff Lane. Miles made his key move at the end of the year, when he accompanied the senator on a trip abroad that included Afghanistan, where U.S. forces had just ousted the Taliban rulers who had given safe haven to al-​Qaeda. Soon after their return, Lane was out and Lackey was in. At around the same time, another staffer left after a conflict with Elizabeth over the Christmas card list, which had been expanded to include many political figures in Iowa and New Hampshire. Another colleague had so many stress-​related outbursts that he was required to get anger management counseling.

My unhappiness must have been pretty obvious, because eventually John Edwards noticed. I was driving him out to Dulles International Airport (National was still closed because of 9/11 security concerns), and he suddenly just said, “You don’t like it up here, do you, Andrew.”

“No, Senator, I really don’t.”

“You want to go back to North Carolina?”

“Yeah.”

In the spring of 2002, I was one of the few people in the world who knew that Raleigh, North Carolina, was certain to become an important hub for national politics. Presidential candidates usually set up their headquarters in their home area-Jimmy Carter in Plains, Al Gore in Nashville, Bill Clinton in Little Rock -and for John Edwards this meant that a national organization would be run from the capital of the Tar Heel State. As the campaign’s first employee in Raleigh, I was positioned to play an important role that would depend on the skills and contacts I had developed in the state as well as the education I had received on Capitol Hill.

God couldn’t have arranged life better for me. After months of separation and unhappiness, Cheri, Brody, and I were together again. Our lakeside house was finally finished and ready for our second child, who was expected near the end of summer. I figured that now I would be able to spend more time with my wife and child-like a real father-because the senator would be traveling around the country as a president Nial hopeful.

By the time I got back to North Carolina in March, Senator Edwards had already visited six states, including repeated trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, where he announced that his goal was to “make the American dream stronger than it ever has been.” It was a vague theme, but it was enough for a handful of Democrats in New Hampshire, who told the national press corps that they were impressed with him. Behind the scenes, Steve Jarding and Mudcat Saunders were raising money and winning friends for the senator in unusual ways. In one of their schemes, our political action committee loaned computers to Democrats running for state offices in places like Iowa, who agreed to give them back to us at the end of the year. The arrangement helped them with the expense of campaigning, and built goodwill. When we got the machines back, they came loaded with information-e-​mail lists, telephone lists, addresses-that we thought would be invaluable to us.

Supported by the money collected by Jarding and Saunders, the senator traveled from state to state, refining his pitch. At eight different Jefferson-​Jackson Day dinners (banquets held to give candidates a forum), he railed against “Washington insiders” and “rich fat cats” like the disgraced executives at the bankrupt Enron Corporation, who had become symbols of the greed enabled by Washington. This kind of talk was red meat for Democrats in the hinterlands, and they ate it up.

Although I saw less of the senator during this period, he came home often enough for me to notice that he was changing. A year before, he had seemed bored and disappointed by life in the Senate. Now, with the presidency as a goal, he was focused and alert. Sure, he complained about fatigue and run-​ins with people who made him uncomfortable (he still struggled to feel at ease rubbing elbows with some poor and working-​class folks), but I had never seen him more energized and excited. The way he talked, I could tell that he was mastering the issues and getting to know Iowa and New Hampshire better than he knew North Carolina.

Veterans of presidential campaigns say that the early days are the easiest, and this was true for Edwards, who raced into the lead in the competition for donors and national party backers. In both New Hampshire and Iowa, he won over key political figures with his charm and audiences with his Robbins-​to-​ Washington story. “I believe I can be the champion for regular people,” he said in his standard stump speech. “My own life experience allows me to see things through their eyes. They are the people I grew up with, the people who worked with my father in the mill, the people I fought for as a lawyer.”

As she accompanied him on campaign trips, Mrs. Edwards turned out to be popular, too. Unlike other political wives, she wasn’t pretentious or cautious, and she openly tried to make sure the country’s sexiest politician didn’t get too full of himself. At one press event, she even asked the local reporters, “Have you met anyone up here who knows who he is?” In another encounter with the press, she let a writer see her stash her cell phone in her bra as she rushed out the door of her house. People, especially women voters, loved this stuff. She knew it, he knew it, and they played it to the hilt.

The national press loved it, too. U.S. News & World Report put Senator Edwards on its cover at the end of April and made Mrs. Edwards a big part of their story on the presidential hopefuls. A week later, The New Yorker made the senator the subject of a glowing profile that suggested he might be the next Bill Clinton. Writer Nicholas Lemann described Mrs. Edwards as “vibrant” and “fiercely ambitious for and protective of her husband.”

In protecting the senator, Mrs. Edwards didn’t shield him from her own criticism, which she offered every time she saw him perform at a rally or conduct an interview. She was the one person he trusted to give him honest feedback, which meant that when he bumbled through an appearance on Meet the Press in the spring of 2002, she agreed with the critics who said he looked unprepared for host Tim Russert’s questions and sounded evasive in his responses. In fact, it was the worst TV performance of his career, such an awful and embarrassing display of political sidestepping that he would remember it for years with a combination of shame and anger.

Fortunately, he didn’t stumble very often, and he was a quick study. Months later, he went back on national television-this time it was Face the Nation-and scored points with pointed attacks of Bush administration policies that had squandered a huge federal surplus in order to lavish tax cuts on the rich.