The wife of John Edwards, Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate, Mrs. Edwards, born Elizabeth Anania, grew up in a sophisticated middle-class family. Her father, a Navy pilot, was of Italian descent; her mother was from a Mississippi family with deep roots in the South.

Unlike her husband, whose rags-to-riches story is well known, The eldest of three children, she spent part of her childhood in Japan, where her father was stationed. She met Mr. Edwards in law school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. On the surface, the pair could not have seemed more different. She was talkative and "sort of Bohemian, the smart kind in the library working on the literary review," and also very pretty. "Everybody had a crush on her." He seemed like "a very decent Southern boy."

When John Edwards in June of 2003, spoke of the Italian roots of his wife, Elizabeth Anania, it drew approving nods in the heavily Italian-American community of South Des Moines, Iowa. The DemStore Monthly http://www.demstoremonthly.com/200306.html

In 1992, John and Elizabeth Edwards established the Vincent J. Anania Lacrosse Scholarship in honor of Elizabeth's father, a former lacrosse player and Assistant Coach at UNC-Chapel Hill.  John Edwards: Elizabeth Edwards http://www.johnedwards2004.com/elizabeth.asp

Although the surname of Anania is present in 220 commune in Italy, the name is
represented around Palermo, and Barcellona, Sicily; Cantanaro, Calabria; and  Naples, Rome, Milan and Turin.

Elizabeth Anania seems to be a rather remarkable woman. Steely yet charming.
Brilliant yet Self Deprecating. And More.

Below is:
New York Times: "A Thorough Blend of Other Political Wives"
The Charlotte Observer:"Work Ethic Grew in Mill Town"- Elizabeth Anania's Influence
The Charlotte Observer: "Edward's Mate Charms, Disarms"

The New York Times
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
July 8, 2004

WASHINGTON, July 7 - America got a fresh glimpse of Elizabeth Edwards on Wednesday and witnessed a thoroughly modern political wife.

She appeared steady and solid in taupe pantsuit and sensible heels. When her husband, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, made his debut as a vice-presidential candidate on national television, it was Mrs. Edwards who held together the family tableau, maintaining a firm grasp on the hand of their 6-year-old daughter, Emma Claire, to prevent her from twirling about and wrecking the photo opportunity.

"That is the real Elizabeth," said Tricia Arnett, one of Mrs. Edwards's good friends. "Her most important job in the world is mother, and she's probably the most unpretentious person I know. I think you saw that coming through today."

But at 55, Mrs. Edwards is much more than the mother of John Edwards's children. Smart, blunt, hilariously funny, she is a professional woman in her own right and also her husband's most trusted political adviser - Nancy Reagan and Hillary Rodham Clinton rolled into one.

Like Mrs. Clinton, Mrs. Edwards has been a successful lawyer; she practiced bankruptcy law until 1996, when the Edwardses' son, Wade, died in a car accident at age 16.

And like Mrs. Reagan, she is fiercely protective of her husband's image, so much so that when Mr. Edwards's media consultant, David Axelrod, did not live up to her exacting expectations during the senator's bid for the Democratic nomination, a new image-maker was brought in to advise him. Mrs. Edwards correctly understood that her husband's sunny optimism was his greatest political asset, Mr. Axelrod said, and she was determined that voters see it.

"She was very involved in the process and that she had a very strong proprietary sense of how John Edwards was going to be presented," he said. "There's no doubt that she and I had our moments, but I came away from it with great respect for her."

On Wednesday, in the first public appearance of her husband's campaign for the vice presidency, Mrs. Edwards kept her remarks brief and to the point. She and Mr. Edwards and their three children, Cate, 22, Emma Claire, and Jack, 4, had spent the night at a farm outside Pittsburgh that belongs to Mr. Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. "Any endeavor that starts in an environment like this has got to have the wind at its back," Mrs. Edwards said, as the two families stood side by side in the lush green rolling hills. "I feel completely confident about this race."

Confidence and calm are traits Mrs. Edwards exudes. Awaiting Mr. Kerry's vice-presidential pick, she showed not a trace of anxiety, said her brother, Jay Anania, a filmmaker in Manhattan. "I told her I was constantly baffled and annoyed by her Zen-like attitude.''On the campaign trail, she lends a kind of gravitas to her husband; Mr. Edwards's advisers say voters give him credit for choosing a partner who seems so down to earth and to have coped so well with the death of a child. And women who have had trouble conceiving are well aware that Mrs. Edwards, who began having children again in her late 40's, underwent fertility treatment.

"I did a television program this morning," Mr. Axelrod said, "and the make-up artist commented on that and said, 'You know, it's great to see his wife out there. You know, she's a little bit heavy, she's not from Central Casting, she seems like a real person.' "

People who know Mrs. Edwards say she is as she appears - a woman who volunteered in the Parent-Teacher Association when Wade and Cate were young, who kept up friendships through a monthly "lunch bunch" in North Carolina. Last week, to celebrate her 55th birthday, she went out to dinner with friends and discussed what clothes she might wear if her husband was picked to run for vice president. Like women across America, she is trying out the South Beach diet.

"Elizabeth is very self-effacing," said Steve Jarding, a former adviser to Mr. Edwards. "I don't think John has the massive ego that a lot of politicians have. But if he did, Elizabeth would absolutely slice it up. It's not her personality to allow it."

Unlike her husband, whose rags-to-riches story is well known, Mrs. Edwards, born Elizabeth Anania, grew up in a sophisticated middle-class family. Her father, a Navy pilot, was of Italian descent; her mother was from a Mississippi family with deep roots in the South. The eldest of three children, she spent part of her childhood in Japan, where her father was stationed. She met Mr. Edwards in law school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. On the surface, the pair could not have seemed more different, said Mr. Anania. She was talkative and "sort of Bohemian, the smart kind in the library working on the literary review," and also very pretty. "Everybody had a crush on her." He seemed like "a very decent Southern boy."

But, Mr. Anania said, "It was just so apparent that she felt a comfort with him."

As her husband became a successful trial lawyer in North Carolina, Mrs. Edwards practiced law, eventually cutting back her hours to part-time. But when Wade died, she withdrew from work entirely. She found a way out through Internet support groups and charitable work. Together with her husband, she helped establish a foundation in honor of Wade, and a computer learning center, the Wade Edwards Learning Lab, for youngsters in Raleigh.

"She's a real project person," said Ellan Maynard, a good friend, "and that was a way she could put her energy to good use and a way to keep her from staying up all night without walking the floors. It wasn't a cure. It was a mechanism to help her get through the day."

When Mrs. Edwards decided to have children again, friends were skeptical; they worried what it would be like for her, trotting kids off to school at age 55 alongside women 20 and 30 years her junior. Mr. Axelrod, the media consultant, recalled a discussion with her: "She said, 'The music had gone out of our lives. We were all grieving, including Cate.We knew we needed to bring more children into our house.' "

As to how she will juggle the demands of motherhood and the campaign trail, friends acknowledge it will be difficult. The family rule, Ms. Maynard said, is that one parent is home at all times. But on Wednesday, that rule was broken, and probably not for the last time. After a campaign appearance in Cleveland, Elizabeth Edwards kissed Jack and Emma Claire goodbye, packing them off with a nanny while she continued on the campaign trail for a few more days at her husband's side.

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > The North Carolina Senator's
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/08/politics/
campaign/08wife.html?pagewanted=print&position=

The Charlotte Observer
Anna Griffen, Staff Writer
Monday, August 18, 2003

..Influence of Elizabeth Anania on John Edwards

...Friends and classmates say it would be difficult to overstate Elizabeth Anania's impact on John Edwards, both now and then. When they met, Edwards lacked polish, not potential. Anania helped him see the possibilities.

She was a Navy brat who spent much of her childhood overseas, four years older than Edwards and more worldly than just about anyone he had ever met. She kept the shelves of her off-campus apartment stuffed with novels, biographies and history books, not just law texts. She could chat just as easily about Henry James, her favorite American author, as she could Dean Smith's latest recruiting class, classmates said.

"All I remember about John back then was that he was the guy Elizabeth was dating," said professor Ken Broun. "But Elizabeth she was brilliant."

>From their first meeting in a basement snack bar, she had been nearly as taken with Edwards as he with her. He ended their first date, dancing at the Holiday Inn, with a quick kiss on the forehead rather than on the lips.

Though their memories of that first night out have faded over time - she swears Edwards wore a bow tie; he can't remember making such a fashion statement - they seemed a dream couple to classmates. Both had the beauty to be mistaken for bimbos and the brains to make Law Review and graduate with honors.

Plus, they were in love. On July 30, 1977, the Saturday after the bar exam, classmates gathered in a small Baptist church outside Chapel Hill.

Edwards slipped an $11 band on Anania's finger to seal the deal. She gave him a $22 ring, but kept her maiden name.

They spent one night honeymooning in Williamsburg, Va., then headed in separate directions: Anania took a federal clerkship in Norfolk. Edwards won one in Raleigh.

He and David Kirby, a law school friend, drove to Virginia almost every weekend to visit the women in their lives.

On the way, they talked about sports, the law, their families and their dreams.

Edwards was a newlywed, and a new lawyer. His wildest hopes went no further than four or five years into the future, and included nothing more than kids, a nice house, maybe a place at the beach.

"He didn't have any sort of grand plan," Kirby said. "He wanted normal things, wonderfully normal things."

Then something happened that propelled Edwards from small-town boy to legal wunderkind, and ultimately to this campaign for the White House:

He stepped inside a courtroom.

Work Ethic Grew In Mill Town
http://observ.oltronics.net/lifeinprint/politics.html

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA. - At the decidedly unglamorous hour of 7:15 a.m., the equally unglamorous wife of presidential candidate John Edwards strolls into Pete & George's Steakhouse to polite yet dull-eyed stares.

Elizabeth Edwards looks the part of would-be first lady in her dignified black pantsuit, pearl necklace and heavy makeup despite the early hour. The former Raleigh lawyer reaches automatically for hands and recites her litany: "Hi, I'm Elizabeth Edwards. My husband, John, is running for president. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Edwards. My husband, John, is running for president.

"But these are hard-core Democrats, not easily impressed and well aware that her husband's rival, John Kerry, has all but clinched the nomination. Most keep shoveling home fries and grits as Edwards starts talking. One elderly woman whips out her compact and begins reapplying her lipstick.

After a few moments, though, the forks stop moving. The lipstick gets stashed.

This is not what they expected.

For one thing, Edwards lacks pretension. She scratches her head furiously at an itch. She pauses for an indelicate, early morning cough. She rushes through her remarks so fast that a Navy pilot in the crowd later wonders, "Is it possible she broke some kind of land-speed record?"

Yet in the end, Edwards wins a rousing ovation. She may be unpolished, but she's also sharp. She charms them with her nervousness, disarms them with jokes about her husband's good looks, dazzles with answers about predatory lending and No Child Left Behind.

"She didn't duck anything. She answered everything," Mario Granger, a Howard Dean supporter, gushes to his wife. "She'd be a different kind of first lady."

That could be said for any of the Democratic spouses. Dr. Judith Steinberg, Howard Dean's wife, rarely campaigns. Teresa Heinz Kerry has her own fortune and opinions. Kathy Jordan Sharpton sang backup for James Brown.

Of the group, Edwards, 54, is the best at playing the dutiful mate, matching the soft-spoken, seldom-seen Laura Bush adoring gaze for adoring gaze.

But as first lady, Edwards would be more Hillary Rodham Clinton than Barbara Bush. She is her husband's chief adviser and alter ego, his confidant and protector, his campaign's mother bear.

Job is to be a window

Not so many months ago, Edwards was a political novice who whispered her remarks and kept her eyes glued to her prepared text.While her husband made millions wooing juries as a personal-injury lawyer, she practiced in the more staid, private world of bankruptcy law. She argued cases in front of appellate judges, detail-minded sorts who don't go for showmanship.

Pregnant with their third child, Edwards was largely absent from her husband's 1998 Senate run, in which he defeated a sitting senator. So this race has been an electoral trial-by-fire for Edwards, serving as full-time political spouse at house parties and campaign rallies.

"My job is to be a window onto John," she said. "You want people to like you, not because of you but so they think, `Hey, he married someone likeable.' If I talk too much about myself, I'm not doing my job."

Still, her own life story is intriguing.

Her father, Vincent Anania, was a Naval aviator, and she spent much of her childhood overseas. (She bought those pearls she's wearing as a teenager in Japan.)

After graduating from UNC Chapel Hill and starting work on a Ph.D. in American literature -- the planned theme of her dissertation was "the sense of continent in the American and Australian" -- she enrolled at Chapel Hill's law school in the fall 1974.

That's where she met her future husband.

To Johnny Edwards and his friends, all country boys, Elizabeth Anania was exotic and urbane, a poised young woman as comfortable discussing UNC Coach Dean Smith's new recruiting class as her favorite author, Henry James. Classmates considered her the smartest kid in the room, from her ability to solve the Sunday New York Times crossword sequentially to her eagerness to challenge professors.

During their first year, a criminal law instructor spent two months analyzing one case. As the days stretched into weeks, students began looking at each other nervously, wondering and then fearing that the professor was going to teach nothing else, but then test them on everything in their texts.

Finally, the future Mrs. Edwards met the professor's question with her own. When, she asked, are you moving on to something else?

"We'd all been getting hyper about it and complaining to ourselves, but she was the only one who had the guts to stand up and say something," classmate Ron Garber said last year. "That's the quintessential Elizabeth story."

In her married life, friends from Raleigh describe Edwards as the woman who did everything better than they could, a successful lawyer who managed to attend every PTA meeting and soccer game.

Her home became the neighborhood gathering spot. Her kids' Halloween costumes took months to plan: When her son and his friends wanted to trick-or-treat as a golf course, she grew real grass on cardboard.

"She enjoyed the law, but she didn't let it define her," friend Bonnie Weyher said last year. "Her first priority was always her family, keeping the kids happy, keeping John happy. She was content to let him be the name."

Not looking for sympathy

In 1996, the Edwards' oldest child, 16-year-old Wade, was driving to the family beach house when a gust of wind shoved him off the road. His truck flipped, rolled several times and came to rest upside down and aflame.

Wade's death spurred his father's abrupt leap into politics. It led his mother to quit her job, take her husband's last name and start a vigorous hormone regimen in hopes of conceiving again. She had Emma Claire at age 48, Jack at 50. (Their other daughter, Cate, is a senior at Princeton.)

"There are times when we think about Wade, a sort of, `Gosh, he would have enjoyed this,' and you just want to go like this," she kisses her index and ring fingers and raises them heavenward. "But the truth is, it would be just as hard if John wasn't running for president. Part of the reality of losing a child is that you never know when it's going to hit you."

Edwards rarely mentions her dead son on the stump. In Virginia Beach, a woman asked how her husband feels about the nation's rising credit card debt. She responded with an anecdote about the lengths some companies will go to for new customers: Wade died eight years ago, and the family has since moved several times. Yet he still gets credit card applications in the mail.

"In a situation like that, it would feel wrong not to mention him, to censor myself," she said. "At the same time, I don't want to go out there looking for sympathy."

Edwards' candor is unusual in the high-risk world of presidential politics, and in her husband's campaign. The candidate himself is studiously on-message, delivering the same answers to the same questions day after day and steering away from personal reflection.Yet his wife readily admits that she dyes her hair to hide the gray, and chats openly about her weight struggles. Her stories about campaign life are invariably silly and self-effacing.

The hairbrush crisis

There was the morning she got a hairbrush stuck in her hair while preparing to leave her Iowa hotel room for an appearance on the "Today" show. She called her husband's chief of staff, Miles Lackey, who proceeded to try to yank the brush out with a fork from the previous evening's room service.Then there was the day she was eating a tangerine en route to a rally, and juice dribbled on her blouse. Dabbing at the mess made it worse.

As Edwards and the rest of the campaign caravan pulled into the event parking lot, she grew frantic. This was rural Iowa, a land of cows and fields, not shopping malls.

Finally, Edwards spotted a Salvation Army thrift store. She ran inside and emerged wearing a $2.99 sweater set.

Guardian of husband's image

She guards her husband's image more than her own, having decreed long ago that there would be no dancing, funny hats and or wacky photo ops in his future.

She is an active player in the campaign's daily strategy sessions, frequently reining in advisers if they ramble and offering her own suggestions. (A die-hard Carolina basketball fan, she's the one who suggested they seek support from former Oklahoma Sooners coach Barry Switzer, recognizing the influence of a legendary coach.)

She has developed a thicker skin and gentler tongue -- one staff member from Edwards' 1998 campaign described her as "seldom seen but always, always heard" -- but still leaps at perceived slights toward her spouse.

For example: She considers talk of John Edwards as vice presidential material a backhanded compliment. "Some other campaign started this as a way to convince voters that it was OK not to vote for John," she said. "It is a way to diminish him."

While she is a policy wonk -- an admitted C-Span groupie who began the slow climb out of mourning by watching the Weather Channel nonstop -- she opens almost every speech with an aside aimed at letting the crowd know that she knows she's not what they expected.

"My husband looks 35," she tells the breakfast crowd at Pete & George's. "And there's nobody in the world who hates that more than I do."

Such comments, reminders that John Edwards is a 50-year-old man still faithfully married to his law-school sweetheart, aren't happenstance.

"You want people to get a sense that we are regular people, and a self-deprecating joke can do that. He's easy fodder for it, and I am too," she said. "I know the questions, so let's just make it my punch line."

90 seconds of privacy

Edwards talks to her husband several times a day by cell phone. They see each other a few times a week, usually in the company of staff and strangers.

"We were in Kansas City for a rally, and someone backstage said, `Let's give you some time by yourselves.' Ninety seconds later, they were back," she said. "That, right there, is our life right now."

When she campaigns separately from her husband, she usually flies coach and travels alone. She doesn't like having campaign staff fluttering around her. Along with the pantsuit and pearls, a John Edwards button is the only sign that this woman could be carrying her own bag into the White House someday.

"I'm 54 years old. I don't want someone taking care of me. I wind up feeling like I should be taking care of them," she said. "I can't get over being a mom. I've sort of made the campaign adjust to me instead of the other way around."

Charlotte Observer | 02/16/2004 | Edwards' mate charms, disarms
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/
news/7964006.htm%E2%80%9D