The Road Warrior

Edwards was also a driven student who was obsessed with making top grades. He resolved to keep college costs down by taking summer school and graduating in three years. Everyone knew what Edwards had in mind for his future: he was going to law school. He was accepted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In class, he fell for Elizabeth Anania, a smart, outspoken student four years his senior. "She was just a ball of fire in the classroom," recalls Patrick Oglesby, who was editor of the law review. Elizabeth was known as a fierce classroom debater. "If she's right, she's not going to back down," says Oglesby. If Edwards was smitten with her, Elizabeth might not have been quite as impressed with him, at least at first. She got better grades and made law review, while he didn't. It was "a blow to him," she tells NEWSWEEK. "He had some uncertainty about whether he could match up." But, she says, by the time they graduated, he ranked higher in the class.

Edwards has said that, even as a kid, he dreamed of being a lawyer. He watched every episode of "Perry Mason" and "The Fugitive." When he was 11, he penned an essay titled "Why I Want to Be a Lawyer," in which he wrote, "I would like to protect innocent people." Edwards tells crowds he got into the law for just that reason: to help the little guy against moneyed interests. But friends at NC State remember it differently. He talked about being an "attorney representing businesses," says Bill Garner, a boyhood friend and college roommate. "He wasn't focused at that point … on the liability side. He was more focused on being a corporate attorney." Edwards says he did, in fact, stumble into those kinds of cases. "It was really more of a happenstance than anything else," he says. He went to work for a firm "looking to start a civil trial practice … I happened to get a case or two, really through luck, worked very hard on them, was successful, and it sort of snowballed."

It didn't take long for Edwards to earn a reputation as a fearsome courtroom operator. He favored heartbreaking cases in which clients had been injured by unsympathetic corporations—cases that had the potential for enormous payouts. In one case, his client was a 5-year-old girl who had been disemboweled by a faulty swimming-pool drain. The jury awarded her $25 million. He was renowned for his tireless preparation. He worked back-to-back all-nighters, reviewing every document and page of testimony himself. "It's very difficult to keep up with him," says a former associate, Andy Penry. "He doesn't eat or sleep … You cannot outwork him." In marathon prep sessions, Edwards would plot out the trial in advance, anticipating witnesses and questions, spotting holes in his case and his opponent's. Penry says that when Edwards would hit a sticking point, "he would call in his secret weapon: Elizabeth."

He was also a natural courtroom showman, calm and confident with an instinct for connecting with juries. Edwards didn't try to dazzle jurors; he wanted to win their trust. He was always smiling, pleasant and calm, even when cross-examining reluctant witnesses. "He ingratiated himself with jurors to an extent greater than I have seen in any other lawyer," says Dewey Wells, a former defense attorney who faced Edwards at trial.

The work paid off. In 1990, at 37, Edwards was admitted to the Inner Circle of Advocates, a club of lawyers who had tried at least 50 personal-injury cases and won at least one million-dollar verdict. Three years later, he opened his own firm with old friend David Kirby. Edwards specialized in suing doctors on behalf of babies born with cerebral palsy. In all, as a lawyer, he won more than $150 million in jury awards and settlements.

By 1996, Edwards had made it big. He had a lucrative career, a loving wife and two kids, 14-year-old Cate and 16-year-old Wade. But in April of that year, Wade died when a windstorm overturned his Jeep on the highway. The family was devastated. Edwards stopped practicing law for six months.

At the time of Wade's death, Edwards had already begun thinking about quitting law for a career in politics. It was something he'd talked about with his son many times. Wade would joke with him, asking him when he was going to run. A few months before his death, Wade had entered an essay on voting in a Voice of America contest. He won; Bill and Hillary Clinton shook his hand at the White House. In an interview with the Raleigh News & Observer, Kirby recalled a conversation the day he went to the hospital with Edwards to identify Wade's body: "He turned to me—he was totally in shock—and said, 'I just can't let his death go without some good coming out of it. I couldn't take it otherwise'."