A heartbeat away from the presidency, not

In Randy Cohen's Ethicist blog in The New York Times, he takes on the quandary of Elizabeth Edwards:

Elizabeth Edwards pushed the Edwardses’ troubled marriage back into public view with the release of her new book Resilience and an attendant interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Is she wrong to subject her family to the renewed scrutiny apt to result from publishing and promoting this book?
She errs by her own standards. In December of 2006, when Elizabeth learned about her husband John’s affair, she kept mum about it and continued to work for his presidential campaign in order to protect her children from the tumult she feared would accompany the withdrawal of her support. She reiterated her motive in her book and to Oprah. Surely resurrecting the entire episode will subject her youngest children, now eight and eleven years old, to just the buffeting she purports to disdain.
It might have been better had she delayed publication until her kids were older and sturdier. Historians and biographers, for example, sometimes defer publication until the death of a key figure in their work. And while this option is complicated by Edwards’s health— she is battling cancer that has metastasized to her bones— the world could have waited for her marital insights.
Perhaps Edwards changed her mind— people do— and came to feel that her children can endure any new commotion. She may think that the storm will simply pass high above their heads, that few eight-year-olds watch the network news or read the papers. (These days, fewer and fewer people of any age do either.) But kids their ages are apt to be more aware of the adult world than they would have been two years ago, and to spend more time online where celebrity gossip is all but inescapable. And if she has altered her thinking, she has not acknowledged it, making her current behavior indistinguishable from hypocrisy.
This is not to deny a writer a chance to tell her story even when doing so will singe those close to her. But how is such a writer to reconcile her wish to be heard and their desire for a discreet silence? Here’s one way: you may publish without remorse if you write a work of immortal genius (as I discussed in The Ethicist in 1999). Boswell’s Life of Johnson was denounced on publication for violating many people’s privacy. Boswell’s friend Thomas Percy wrote that Boswell was “studiously excluded from all decent and good company” for exposing people’s “unguarded conversation”. But I would not forego a single one of Boswell’s insights, any moment of the delight he offers us, to smooth Percy’s ruffled feathers. In other words, authors must be judged by literary not ethical criteria. As Oscar Wilde put it: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
Posterity may judge otherwise, but I doubt that Resilience rises to this empyrean splendor. And while I would not deny even a lesser author the right to reflect on her own life, I would deny her an exemption from weighing the consequences of doing so. Maybe the adults in Elizabeth Edwards’s life must simply endure this revived exposure. But like all parents, she has a duty to protect— and certainly not to knowingly harm— her own children. It is she who declared that they should be shielded from the sort of public disclosure she now effects.
There are other circumstances when a writer— Olympian or common clay— might honorably risk collateral damage to her family: to champion an unpopular cause or expose significant harm to the community, for instance. But while it is John Edwards who is the prime transgressor here— bruising his wife, his children, his political supporters— her writing about his affair two years after it began is hardly an example of exposing significant harm to the community.
And what of the marriage she writes about? Had she elected to keep it private, it would be nobody’s business but hers and her family’s. But she voluntarily went public, making it, like Greek drama, an edifying spectacle and legitimate subject for general discussion. And if you ask me— which by publishing, she in effect did— she has not acquitted herself well.
To forgive her wayward spouse was her decision to make, but I don’t believe she could have done so in a week and during a press conference, as she seemed to do back when his affair was first revealed. That’s not reconciliation; it’s campaigning. And even then, standing loyally on the dais, she lacked the serene countenance that bespeaks forgiveness. Rather, as political wives do at such moments— Silda and Hillary and the long disheartening parade— she looked tense and resentful and conflicted. Her expression did not (under the circumstances, could not) comport with her declared determination to soldier on. This was not grappling with marital discord; it was a performance and, as such, a kind of lie, one that abetted, or at least acquiesced in, a broader campaign cover-up.
She should have dumped him out of respect for her own values. When she married John, she asserted the premium she placed on monogamy: “‘I wanted him to be faithful to me,’ she told Oprah, ‘It was enormously important.’” This is not to elevate monogamy to a marital necessity. Each marriage has its own rules; each must please only two people (and not harm anyone else). But in what sense does Edwards revere fidelity if her actions don’t accord with her words?
How much more inspiring— for her kids, for other women, for Oprah— if she had responded more like Veronica Lario, wife of Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. When confronted with his escapades, Lario mocked and derided him and demanded a divorce. “The impudence and shamelessness of power offends the credibility of all [women], damages women in general and especially those who have always struggled to defend their rights,” she said, providing yet another example of the superiority of Italian life. They eat better than we do, dress better and cope better with philandering: look at the plots of all those operas.

Randy Responds
Many readers invoked Elizabeth Edwards’s terminal illness as a motive for her remaining with her husband and publishing her book. Her brave and heartrending struggle commands our respect, but it does not require us to forego participation in the public discussion she herself initiated. And in any case, we cannot know her deepest motives but can respond only to her words and deeds.
She did not assert that her illness explained her actions. A justification she did use, with Matt Lauer on the Today show, was her promise to stay with John Edwards “for better or worse". This is unpersuasive. Marital vows are an injunction to stick with a spouse when he’s laid off by GM (for richer for poorer) or, as she is herself, when he is infirm (in sickness and in health) or when he is stripped of his tiara in a beauty pageant (an unlikely case of for better or worse). There is no duty to remain with someone who harms you. As several readers rightly noted, and I wrote, he was the transgressor, she the injured party. There is no moral obligation to pal around with the burglar who swiped your television set. Nor does any major faith require you to appear on the Today show. (There may be religious obligations regarding Oprah. It’s a mystery.)
I can understand a gravely ill mother wanting to present her children with her feelings about all of this, but Edwards might have been truer to her own declared desire to protect her kids had she simply spoken to them tenderly or written out those thoughts and left that document for her children to read when they got a little older rather than involve them in a media blitz.
As to the general matter of parents writing about their lives in ways that might embarrass their kids, I consulted Sophie Pollitt-Cohen. She’s an older child— she’s 21; she’s mine— and has been affected by the writing of both her parents (albeit parents whose lives are less dramatic and less public than that of the Edwardses). She takes a broader view: “I do not expect you or Mom to refrain from writing about your own lives— within reason. Don’t write a book called Sophie Pollitt-Cohen’s Juicy Secrets— but I do expect you to write with tact and respect. Maybe one reason writers’ children become writers themselves is to get their parents back when they’re too old too hold a pen. That’s my dream.”
A child needs a dream. Alas.