John Edwards
Johnny Reid Edwards is an American lawyer and former politician who represented North Carolina in the United States Senate from 1999 to 2005. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the party's vice presidential nominee under Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. He also was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and 2008.
Edwards defeated the incumbent Republican Lauch Faircloth in North Carolina's 1998 Senate election. Toward the end of his six-year term, he declined to seek re-election, and instead sought the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2004 presidential election. Edwards suspended his campaign shortly after Super Tuesday, and later accepted the Democratic vice presidential nomination. Following Kerry's loss to incumbent president George W. Bush, Edwards began working full-time at the One America Committee, a political action committee he established in 2001, and was appointed director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. He was also a consultant for Fortress Investment Group LLC.
After his 2008 presidential campaign, Edwards was indicted by a federal grand jury on June 3, 2011, on six felony charges of violating multiple federal campaign contribution laws to cover up an extramarital affair to which he eventually admitted. He was found not guilty on one count, and the judge declared a mistrial on the remaining five charges, as the jury was unable to come to an agreement. The Justice Department dropped the remaining charges and did not attempt to retry Edwards. Though he was not convicted of any crime, the revelation that he had engaged in an extramarital affair and fathered a child while his wife, Elizabeth Edwards, was dying of cancer, severely damaged his public image and effectively ended his political career.
Since the death of Kay Hagan on October 28, 2019, Edwards is the only living former Democratic senator from North Carolina.
Early life and education
Edwards was born on June 10, 1953, to Wallace Reid Edwards and Catharine Juanita "Bobbie" Edwards in Seneca, South Carolina. The family moved several times during Edwards's childhood, eventually settling in Robbins, North Carolina, where his father worked as a textile mill floor worker and was eventually promoted to supervisor. His mother had a roadside antique-finishing business and then worked as a letter carrier when his father left his job. The family attended a Baptist church.A football star in high school, Edwards was the first person in his family to attend college. He attended Clemson University for one semester before transferring to North Carolina State University. He graduated from NCSU with high honors with a bachelor's degree in textile technology and a 3.8 GPA in 1974, and later earned his Juris Doctor from the University of North Carolina School of Law with honors.
Legal career
After law school, Edwards clerked for federal judge Franklin Dupree in North Carolina, and in 1978 became an associate at the Nashville law firm of Dearborn & Ewing, doing primarily trial work, defending a Nashville bank and other corporate clients. Lamar Alexander, a Republican and future governor of and U.S. Senator from Tennessee, was among Edwards's co-workers. The Edwards family returned to North Carolina in 1981, settling in the capital of Raleigh, where he joined the firm of Tharrington, Smith & Hargrove.In 1984, Edwards was assigned to a medical malpractice lawsuit that had been perceived to be unwinnable; the firm had accepted it only as a favor to an attorney and state senator who did not want to keep it. Nevertheless, Edwards won a $3.7 million verdict on behalf of his client, who had suffered permanent brain and nerve damage after a doctor prescribed an overdose of the anti-alcoholism drug Antabuse during alcohol aversion therapy. In other cases, Edwards sued the American Red Cross three times, alleging transmission of AIDS through tainted blood products, resulting in a confidential settlement each time, and defended a North Carolina newspaper against a libel charge.
In 1985, Edwards represented a five-year-old child born with cerebral palsy – a child whose mother's doctor did not choose to perform an immediate Caesarean delivery when a fetal monitor showed she was in distress. Edwards won a $6.5 million verdict for his client, but five weeks later, the presiding judge sustained the verdict on liability but overturned the damage award on grounds that it was "excessive" and that it appeared "to have been given under the influence of passion and prejudice", adding that in his opinion "the evidence was insufficient to support the verdict." He offered the plaintiffs $3.25 million, half of the jury's award, but the child's family appealed the case and received $4.25 million in a settlement. Winning this case established the North Carolina precedent of physician and hospital liability for failing to determine whether the patient understood the risks of a particular procedure.
After this trial, Edwards gained national attention as a plaintiff's lawyer. He filed at least twenty similar lawsuits in the years following, and achieved verdicts and settlements of more than $60 million for his clients. Similar lawsuits followed across the country. When asked about an increase in Caesarean deliveries nationwide, perhaps to avoid similar medical malpractice lawsuits, Edwards said, "The question is, would you rather have cases where that happens instead of having cases where you don't intervene and a child either becomes disabled for life or dies in utero?"
In 1993, Edwards began his own firm in Raleigh with a friend, David Kirby. He became known as the top plaintiffs' attorney in North Carolina. The biggest case of his legal career was a 1996 product liability lawsuit against Sta-Rite, the manufacturer of a defective pool drain cover. The case involved Valerie Lakey, a girl who at five years old sustained pool suction-drain injury. She was disemboweled by the suction power of the pool drain pump when she sat on an open pool drain whose protective cover had been removed by other children at the pool, after the swim club had failed to install the cover properly. Despite 12 prior suits with similar claims, Sta-Rite continued to make and sell drain covers lacking warnings. Sta-Rite protested that an additional warning would have made no difference because the pool owners already knew the importance of keeping the cover secured.
In his closing arguments, Edwards spoke to the jury for an hour and a half and made reference to his son, Wade, who had been killed shortly before testimony began. Mark Dayton, editor of North Carolina Lawyers Weekly, would later call it "the most impressive legal performance I have ever seen." The jury awarded the family $25 million, the largest personal injury award in North Carolina history. The company settled for the $25 million while the jury was deliberating additional punitive damages, rather than risk a further award. For their part in this case, Edwards and law partner David Kirby earned the Association of Trial Lawyers of America's national award for public service. The family said that they hired Edwards over other attorneys because he alone had offered to accept a smaller percentage as his fee unless the award was unexpectedly high, while all of the other lawyers they spoke with said they required the full one-third fee. The size of the jury award was unprecedented, and Edwards did receive the standard one-third-plus-expenses fee typical of contingency cases. The family was so impressed with his intelligence and commitment that they volunteered for his Senate campaign the next year.
After Edwards won a large verdict against a trucking company whose worker had been involved in a fatal accident, the North Carolina legislature passed a law prohibiting such awards unless the company had specifically sanctioned the employee's actions.
In December 2003, during his first presidential campaign, Edwards published Four Trials, an autobiographical book focusing on cases from his legal career. According to this book, the success of the Sta-Rite case and his son's death prompted Edwards to leave the legal profession and seek public office.
Edwards, his daughter Cate, and David Kirby started a new law firm in 2013, named Edwards Kirby, with offices in Raleigh and in Washington, D.C.
Political career
Policy positions
Edwards promotes programs to eliminate poverty in the United States, including arguing in favor of creating one million housing vouchers over five years in order to place poor people in middle-class neighborhoods. Edwards has stated, "If we truly believe that we are all equal, then we should live together too." He also supports "College for Everyone" initiatives.Although Edwards initially supported the Iraq War, he later changed his position and in November 2005 wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post in which he said he expressed regret for voting for the Iraq War Resolution and discussed three solutions for success in the conflict. He denounced the "troop surge" in Iraq, was a proponent for withdrawal, and urged Congress to withhold funding for the war without a withdrawal timetable.
On social policy, Edwards supports abortion rights and has a universal healthcare plan that requires all Americans to purchase healthcare insurance, "requires that everybody get preventive care", and requires employers to provide health care insurance or be taxed to fund public health care. He supports a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, is opposed to a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage; and supports the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act.
Edwards endorsed efforts to slow down global warming and was the first presidential candidate to describe his campaign as carbon-neutral.
Senate tenure
Edwards won election to the U.S. Senate in 1998 as a Democrat running against incumbent Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth. Despite originally being the underdog, Edwards beat Faircloth by 51.2% to 47.0% — a margin of some 83,000 votes. He served alongside fellow Republican Senator Jesse Helms until Helms left office in 2003, having chosen to not seek reelection in 2002.During President Bill Clinton's 1999 impeachment trial in the Senate, Edwards was responsible for the deposition of witnesses Monica Lewinsky and fellow Democrat Vernon Jordan, Jr. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Edwards was on Democratic nominee Al Gore's vice presidential nominee short list.
In his time in the Senate, Edwards co-sponsored 203 bills. Among them was Lieberman's 2002 Iraq War Resolution, which he co-sponsored along with 15 other senators, but which did not go to a vote. He voted for replacement resolution in the full Senate to authorize the use of military force against Iraq, which passed by a vote of 77 to 23, On October 10, 2002, he stated that:
On October 10, 2004, Edwards further defended his vote during an appearance on Meet the Press:
Edwards subsequently changed his mind about the war and apologized for that military authorization vote. Edwards also voted in favor of the Patriot Act.
Among other positions, Edwards was generally pro-choice and supported affirmative action and the death penalty. One of his first sponsored bills was the Fragile X Research Breakthrough Act of 1999. He was also the first person to introduce comprehensive anti-spyware legislation with the Spyware Control and Privacy Protection Act. He advocated rolling back the Bush administration's tax cuts and ending mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent offenders. Edwards generally supported expanding legal immigration to the United States while working with Mexico to provide better border security and stop illegal trafficking.
Edwards served on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the U.S. Senate Committee on Judiciary, and was a member of the New Democrat Coalition.
Before the 2004 Senate election, Edwards announced his retirement from the Senate and supported Erskine Bowles, former White House Chief of Staff, as the successor to his seat; Bowles was defeated by Republican Richard Burr in the election.