NEWSWEEK COVER: 'The Sunshine Boys?'

		NEWSWEEK The July 19 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday July 12) examines "The Sunshine Boys?" and whether the Kerry/Edwards ticket and the politics of optimism will prevail in November. Newsweek interviews Kerry, Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth. Also in another exclusive, Newsweek unmasks the victims in the infamous Abu Ghraib photos and discovers that many were common criminals and not terrorists. Plus small victories in the fight against AIDS and rock band, "The Hives," breaks out. (PRNewsFoto)[LH] NEW YORK, NY USA

Kerry Almost Selected Florida Sen. Graham as Running Mate New Ad to Get Heavy Play This Week: Edwards Touts Kerry's Leadership by Citing Testimony of His Vietnam Crew NEW YORK, July 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Concluding four months of deeply secret deliberations, Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. John Kerry came close to picking 67-year-old Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, ranking Democrat and former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Newsweek reports. Another finalist, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who lacked any national experience, deduced that he wasn't The One when Kerry spent their bus trip in Iowa together watching the Tour de France, report Chief Political Correspondent Howard Fineman and Washington Correspondent Richard Wolffe. In fact, on that trip Kerry was scribbling an announcement speech -- for Sen. John Edwards. (Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20040711/NYSU007 ) The July 19 cover story (on newsstands Monday, July 12), "The Sunshine Boys?" analyzes Kerry's bet on Edwards and whether the politics of optimism will work for the duo in November. "People are desperate to feel optimistic again," Sen. John Edwards tells Newsweek in an interview. "I know what they need. I know what they want...They want someone who will lift them up again, in a real way, not rhetoric." Edwards can "elevate John's game," Kerry stepson Chris Heinz says. And Newsweek has learned, that rapidly deploying Edwards' sales skills, the Kerry campaign cut a new spot -- it will get heavy play this week -- in which the North Carolinian touts his running mate's leadership by citing the testimony of Kerry's Vietnam Swift-Boat crews. "Edwards is a terrific advocate," said Kerry's adviser Tad Devine. "Now he's our advocate." From a young age, Edwards was determined to be successful, report Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas, General Editor Susannah Meadows and Miami Bureau Chief Arian Campo-Flores. "I knew he was a good-looking boy, but he didn't go around like he thought it. He didn't try to be a star. He was a little more normal," his mother, Bobbie, tells Newsweek. "He was just an ordinary kid." His parents could see his determination. "I think he learned early on that if he was determined enough and worked hard enough, he could accomplish anything," said Bobbie. Raised as a God-fearing Baptist, Edwards was taught by his parents to respect others. This was not an idle exhortation. When his friend and football teammate Bobby Caviness lost his parents while he was still in high school, John and his family had Caviness, who is black, over to the house every game day to make sure he had a good meal. "That was unheard of, for a black person to be eating dinner that often at a white person's house in the late '60s and early '70s," says Caviness. In homeroom, Edwards would ask Caviness if he'd done his homework. Edwards would look it over, Caviness warmly recalled, and tell him, "You might take another look at No. 7." "The only way you were successful is you went to college," Wallace Edwards, John's father, tells Newsweek. "He saw me passed up for a lot of promotions. I trained a lot of college guys. They were getting paid more than I was, and I trained them." The summer between high school and college, Edwards worked at the mill swabbing out the looms. "It was a nasty job," his father recalls. "The guys, the mechanics who worked on them, a lot of them chewed tobacco and spit it into the machines. Tobacco on the floor, in the machines. He didn't say, 'I don't want to do this for the rest of my life' -- he said, 'I'm not going to'." As a young boy, watching "Perry Mason" and "The Fugitive" on TV, Edwards dreamed of becoming a lawyer, Newsweek reports. "Probably the most important reason I want to be a defense attorney is that I would like to protect innocent people from blind justice the best I can," he wrote in a school essay when he was 11 years old. Over the years, Edwards's courtroom opponents came to regard him with ungrudging awe. "He didn't have any weaknesses," said James Cooney, who faced Edwards in about a dozen cases. "He was never underhanded. If I was in a trial with John Edwards and I ever had to pull a knife out of my back, it was only because he shoved it through my chest." In cross- examinations, Edward's "style was gentle," said Cooney. "He never yelled at a witness. He didn't try to physically dominate a witness -- when he got done, when the witnesses stood up, all their clothes fell off." Edwards made the jump from law to politics not long after his 16-year old son, Wade, died when his car was blown off a highway as he drove to the family beach house one day in 1996. A few months before he died, Wade had penned an essay called "Fancy Clothes and Overalls," about the importance of voting as a measure of equality. "Wade used to ask him, 'When are you going to run?'" says Gary Pearce, a Democratic consultant who advised Edwards's 1998 U.S. Senate campaign. "Well," Edwards told Pearce, "this is my answer to Wade." Edwards had shown little interest in politics, failing to vote in several elections. But he poured $6 million of his own money and all his honey-coated ferocity into driving out the GOP incumbent, Sen. Lauch Faircloth, in a Republican- dominated state. In politics, as in just about everything else, Edwards has "no fear of losing," says Pearce. "He's been through the worst thing that any human being can go through in life." Steve Jarding, who ran Edwards's PAC until 2002, says: "I remember Elizabeth saying, 'When you lose a son, there's nothing else they can throw at you'." And Contributing Editor Melinda Henneberger takes a closer look at Elizabeth Edwards. She describes for Newsweek the day her husband was chosen as Kerry's running mate: "I had a hair appointment, and the hair guy was so nice to come and do my hair at my house, so while I have color on I run upstairs and throw underwear in a bag." Elizabeth Edwards often speaks of "parenting Wade's memory" by trying to make a difference in the world, as he would have wanted. And Teresa Heinz Kerry, who lost her first husband in a plane crash says, "I understand that because I do the same thing with Jack's memory...Having the two babies is another affirmation, and I admire that, too. If I had a 'Farmer in the Dell' life I would have liked to have tried to have a baby with John" Kerry, whom she married at 55, she says. "But at some point, the shop is closed!" (Read Newsweek's news releases at http://www.Newsweek.MSNBC.com. Click "Pressroom.")