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Finally, I said I didn’t feel well and maybe we should go home. I don’t recall her exact words, but they were something like “You don’t ask me to get all dressed up like this on short notice and then just go home. Suck it up, buddy.”
    Since I needed to waste more time, I suggested we go to a McDonald’s, where I could get a Sprite to settle my stomach (which to a nurse was ridiculous). When the soft drink didn’t work—“I really feel bad; I think we should go home”—Cheri gave up on me and agreed to call it a night. She fumed on the ride home, though, and when we got to the house she got out of the car without saying a word. She was stomping mad, and I had to hustle to catch up with her at the front door. When I opened it she could smell our dinner cooking, hear the music, and see rose petals on the floor and a table set.
    That night we had a candlelight feast that included the juiciest steak I ever had, topped with a concoction of crab and lobster. Cheri’s dessert—a chocolate torte—came with whipped cream, raspberry drizzle, and her engagement ring. When I got down on my knees, my stomach didn’t hurt, but it was filled with butterflies as I said, “You are the woman of my dreams, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?” She said yes. After dinner, we called our family and friends and gave them the news. (Her father wasn’t surprised. I had asked for his permission.) We soon set September 11 as the date for our wedding.
     
    O
n the day Cheri and I were engaged, the United States Senate acquitted President Clinton in his impeachment trial, ending thirteen months of crisis over his sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky and his stupid, lying attempt to escape the truth. Senator Edwards played a role in the investigation, helping to preside over depositions of Lewinsky and Clinton’s friend Vernon Jordan. He also made his first speech to the full Senate during the closed-door impeachment trial, which was one of those rare moments when all one hundred members actually occupied the chamber. A lot of staff time and effort was put into preparing Edwards’s remarks, but when the timecame he put away the text and spoke, as he said, “from the heart.” (He later authorized the release of a transcript of his remarks.)
    In considering the charge, Edwards said, “I think this president has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen.” But he did not agree with those who thought Clinton acted with a criminal’s intent to avoid prosecution. Instead, he saw a politician’s instincts at work: “I suspect the first thing he thought about is, ‘I’m going to protect myself politically.’ He was worried about his family finding out. He was worried about the rest of the staff finding out. He was worried about the press finding out.”
    Urging the Senate to focus on the question of whether the evidence against Clinton exceeded the standard of “reasonable doubt,” Edwards said he had poured long hours into studying the case, often staying up till three in the morning. In the end, although he suspected Clinton might be guilty of “a lot that has not been proven,” he couldn’t join those who thought the president had committed perjury or obstructed justice.
    Considering John Edwards’s gift for courtroom drama, I’m certain he held the Senate’s attention with his explanation for his votes against the charges. But once I read the speech and thought about the clubby culture of the Senate, I realized that he probably won them over at the end, when he talked about how he had come to admire, respect, and even love his colleagues.
    “An extraordinary thing has happened to me in the last thirty days,” he told the one hundred senators. “I have watched you struggle, every one of you. I have watched you come