For Edwards, a relationship that never quite fit

“The fight has just begun,” Mr. Edwards said. “We will keep marching toward that one America, and we’re not going to stop until we get there.”

Kerry aides heard that as his first bid for 2008.

A year later, Mr. Edwards wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post that began, “I was wrong.” It laid out his case against the war in Iraq.

An interviewer asked Mr. Kerry about it. “I said that before Senator Edwards wrote that,” he replied.

Mr. Kerry felt blindsided both by Mr. Edwards’s apparent determination to run for the presidency again and by his efforts to distance himself from the mistakes of the campaign immediately after the election. In interviews and on his farewell tour of North Carolina, Mr. Edwards said he had wanted to fight harder on the Swift boat attacks. He had wanted to campaign more in the South. And, with so much credit being given to “values voters,” he said that he had wanted to talk more about faith.

Mr. Edwards told Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that he had wanted to “go after Bush.” “Terry, they wouldn’t let me,” he said, according to Mr. McAuliffe’s book, “What a Party!”

Mr. Kerry declined to comment for this article. A spokesman said he had no interest in relitigating the 2004 race. But he told Mr. McAuliffe that he could not get Mr. Edwards to fight. Kerry aides said, and Mr. Shrum wrote in a memoir, that Mr. Edwards had promised Mr. Kerry that he would not challenge him in a run for the 2008 presidency. Mr. Edwards demurred about any agreement; he told one interviewer in early 2005 that he was focused on seeing his wife through her cancer and would decide “the right thing to do based on what’s going on with my own family.”

Mr. Edwards’s new stance on the war won him new support within his increasingly antiwar party. He knew that people might say his reversal was politically expedient (and Kerry loyalists said just that). But he characterizes it as a matter of conscience.

“The most important thing that had changed was time to reflect on what I’d done,” he said. “I had to live with what I’d done, and I couldn’t live with it if I didn’t tell the truth.”

While Mr. Kerry, too, had emerged as a leading voice against the war after the election, his comments at a campaign event just before the 2006 midterm elections — what he called “a botched joke” about Iraq — raised old doubts about his agility in a campaign. In January, when Mrs. Clinton, Barack Obama and Mr. Edwards already dominated the talk about 2008, Mr. Kerry announced he would not run.

The former running mates have spoken little since that day in Faneuil Hall. In March, Mr. Kerry telephoned the Edwardses after Mr. Edwards announced that his wife’s cancer had returned and was incurable, and that he was still running for president. A spokesman for Mr. Kerry said they had had a nice conversation. A spokesman for Mr. Edwards, however, said Mr. Kerry had spoken only with Elizabeth.

Picking the president: The candidates Click to visit that candidate's MSNBC page or click the XML symbol for an RSS feed. John McCain                Barack Obama

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