Elizabeth Edwards: The Other Lawyer At Home

Both parents were devastated, but Elizabeth had the hardest time coping with her grief. She quit work, changed her surname to Edwards (she had kept her maiden name at marriage) and stayed home, finding numbness, if not comfort, in watching the Weather Channel with the sound off. Eventually, she and John plunged themselves into creating memorials to their son, including the Wade Edwards Learning Lab in Raleigh.

Elizabeth has said they decided to try to have more children to bring joy back into their home. It wasn't easy, but through intensive fertility treatments--the details of which she declines to discuss--she got pregnant. Elizabeth was 48 when Emma Claire arrived; she gave birth to John "Jack" Atticus at 50. However, she is by no means eager to be a spokeswoman for those trying to push the limits of reproductive biology. She was lucky, she says: "I don't want women to think, She did it at 50; so can I. It's extremely difficult to have children at a later age."

If her husband becomes Vice President, Elizabeth's first job will still be raising her kids. But she'll venture into issues, especially education. As one Edwards adviser puts it, "She has the smarts of Hillary Clinton and the charm of Tipper Gore." Friends say she would bring a refreshing lack of pretension to her new life. "She never puts on airs," says Washington pal Bonnie LePard. "In fact, sometimes she doesn't even put on shoes." (Elizabeth, LePard explains, once joined a campaign strategy meeting at her home barefoot and dressed in overalls.) Mostly, though, she would continue to be her husband's top adviser, second chair to his lead.

--By James Carney. With reporting by Mitch Frank/Raleigh and Tracy Schmidt/Washington