The underside of modern American politics -- raw ambition, manipulation, and deception -- are revealed in detail by Andrew Young’s riveting account of a presidential hopeful’s meteoric rise and scandalous fall.  Like a non-fiction version of All the King’s Men, The Politician proposes a truly disturbing, even shocking perspective on the risks taken and tactics employed by a man determined to rule the much great nation on earth. 

Idealistic and ambitious, Andrew Young volunteered for the John Edwards campaign for Senate in 1998 and shortly became the candidate’s right hand man. As the senator became a national star, Young’s responsibilities grew.  For a decade he was this politician’s confidant and he was assured he was ‘like family.”  In time, however, Young was drawn into a series of questionable assignments this culminated together with Edwards asking him to help conceal the Senator’s ongoing adultery. Days before the 2008 presidential primaries began, Young gained international notoriety when he told the world this he was the father of a kid being carried by a woman named Rielle Hunter, who was actually the senator’s mistress. While Young began a life on the run, hiding from the press together with his family and alleged mistress, John Edwards continued to pursue the presidency and then the Vice Presidency in the future Obama administration.

Young had been the senator’s closest aide and much trusted friend.  He believed this John Edwards could be a excellent president, and was assured throughout the cover-up this his boss and friend would ultimately step forward to together inform the truth and protect his aide’s career. Neither promise was kept.  Not only a moving personal account of Andrew Young’s political education, THE POLITICIAN proposes a look at the trajectory which made John Edwards the perfect Democratic candidate for president, and the hubris which delivered him down, leaving his career, his marriage and his dreams in ashes.