The New York Times has published an excerpt of The Politician, Andrew Young's account of working for John Edwards. Turns out that when Edwards cheats on his dying wife, he does it like a lawyer.

Edwards never spoke in concrete, potentially incriminating sentences about Rielle Hunter, Young writes. Which resulted in depressing and absurd conversations like this:

[H]e always used the lawyer's trick of speaking in code so he could claim "plausible deniability" if it was ever needed. She would say she loved him and spoke so loudly that I could hear her on the phone. He would say only, "Me too." And if she asked him if he missed her, he would say, "That's correct" - pronouncing it "cohhhhhhrect" - but never, "I miss you."

And Janet Maslin's review—"[a] mind-boggling book about the sheer freakiness of Mr. Edwards's hubris"—highlights a "Hitchcockian" moment when Edwards insisted to Young that Hunter hadn't been traveling with them when both men knew that she had:

For instance, after Mr. Young finagled a way to explain Ms. Hunter's presence in Mr. Edwards's hotel room in Florida and get her out of there unnoticed, he says, Mr. Edwards just looked at him blankly and said: "I don't know what you're talking about. Rielle wasn't in Florida." What was this: "Gaslight"? A trip to the Twilight Zone? An exercise in lawyerly deniability, to which Mr. Edwards apparently often resorted? A conversation being secretly recorded? Or something even scarier?

The whole thing has an American Psycho ring to it.