Former aide reveals in new book that Edwards thought about leaving wife

Associated Press

The day before former North Carolina Senator John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced their legal separation, The Wall Street Journal reported that a former aide revealed in a new tell-all book that the two-time presidential candidate had thought about leaving his wife but also cited his love for her as a reason to keep details of an affair hidden.

Andrew Young’s book, “The Politician,” was only just released Saturday, but the Journal said it had purchased an advance copy.

On its Web site, the newspaper reported Young saying Edwards asked him to go into hiding with Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter in part because of his wife’s health, writing: “ ... that if I helped him, I would make Mrs. Edwards’s dying days a bit easier. ‘I know you’re mad at her, Andrew, but I love her. I can’t let her die knowing this.’”

Elizabeth Edwards has an incurable form of cancer that returned in 2007.

Her husband acknowledged for the first time last week that he fathered a child with Hunter.

Young provides an unflattering portrait of the former North Carolina senator, talking about his obsession with campaign donations, his fixation with his hair, his disapproval of “fat rednecks” at state fairs and the lengths he went to hide the affair. Young has said in excerpts of an ABC News interview that Edwards asked him to find a doctor to fake a paternity test and to steal a diaper from the baby to secretly do a DNA test.

Young also describes the discovery of a videotape showing Edwards and a naked Hunter.

“It was like watching a traffic pileup occur in slow motion — it was repelling but also transfixing,” he writes, according to the Journal.