John Dickerson needs to read my husband's book, Four Trials. In it, he will read the stories of four families uprooted by tragedy or accident who leaned, in their worst moments, on John Edwards. He was but a young man when he represented a former salesman, E.G. Sawyer, who, because a doctor prescribed an excessive amount of a pharmaceutical, was confined to a sliver of life in squalor. Without John's strength, intelligence and voice, he would have died that same way. Dickerson would not have to have read Four Trials to know the story of Valerie, whom John represented after a pump connected to a kiddie pool drain with a faulty cover sucked most of her intestines from her little body. And there are hundreds of E.G.s and Valeries over a twenty year career, hundreds of stories too hard to hear and certainly too hard to tell. But John heard them, and told them, and lived beside these families until their lives were righted. He is doing a broader version of the same work today. His Road to One America tour was high-lighting what he has seen as he has worked on poverty issues: people in need: in need of housing and health care and jobs, surely, and in need of dignity and respect, and in need of a voice. He, again, is their voice. Yes, he has faced death and disease in our family, but the measure of his strength is the fights he has -- for his entire adult life -- voluntarily taken on, not just those that fate would not permit him to avoid.

Cross-posted at http://blog.johnedwards.com/