The Dutiful and the Mind-Boggling

Book Review
By JANET MASLIN

THE POLITICIAN: An Insider’s Account of John Edwards’s Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down
By Andrew Young
301 pages. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. $24.99.

Andrew Young’s hero was an inspiring Southern orator and a paragon of Christian virtue. He was a pillar of his community. Then he was photographed in compromising circumstances, outed as an adulterer and beset by a scandal that destroyed his career. “They caught me, Andrew,” the Rev. Bob Young confessed to his heartbroken teenage son.

The traumatized son later went on to subordinate his life to John Edwards’s political career, becoming one of his most trusted aides. And he allowed his own reputation to be ruined in a vain effort to save Mr. Edwards from embarrassment. How much of that dutiful behavior can be explained by his father’s fall?

“Armchair psychologists will say that when John Edwards came along, I adopted him as a substitute for my father,” Mr. Young writes in “The Politician,” his mind-boggling book about the sheer freakiness of Mr. Edwards’s hubris, ambition and dishonesty. Of course they will. Armchair psychologists don’t have it any easier than this.

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