Despite his unabashed fondness for high-stakes gambling, dirty jokes and his reputation as a womanizer, he earned a following among both Catholics and fundamentalists. Raised a Roman Catholic, Edwards preached in the Church of the Nazarene as a teen and didn't drink or smoke. According to his authorized biography, his father’s ancestors were Welsh his mother’s continental French but Edwards always considered himself a Cajun. 7, 1927, to a sharecropper and a midwife in Avoyelles Parish, a region settled by 18th century French exiles from Nova Scotia who came to be known as Cajuns. They shared a populist appeal to the state’s downtrodden, and political fortunes that flowed in part from taxes on oil, but the deal-making Edwards had a cooler demeanor.Įdwards was born on Aug. Silver-haired and gifted with an easy charm, Edwards dominated Louisiana politics in the late 20th century much as Huey P. I’ve rarely seen a wider chasm between the promise for greatness and reality.” “He had everything, and yet squandered it by devoting much of his time to enriching his friends. He could relate to crowds better than almost any politician I ever knew,” Louisiana State University journalism professor Robert Mann said in an email Monday. “He had eloquence, creativity, a razor-sharp mind, executive abilities that many lacked, and leadership skills that many envied. Edwards maintained that the case was built on secretly taped and misinterpreted conversations and the lies of his former cronies, who made deals to avoid prison.īut the conviction and the numerous investigations and allegations were an unavoidable stain on his legacy. The federal case that led to his May 2000 conviction involved taking payoffs from interests seeking riverboat casino licenses during his final term in the 1990s. Infamously, the lifelong Democrat said once said that the only way he could lose to a particularly lackluster Republican was if he were “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.”Ī native of Louisiana’s Acadiana region who swore his 1972 oath of office in French and English, Edwards enjoyed renewed popularity after emerging from prison in 2011 at age 83 with his flamboyant character intact. The "Cajun King” was known for delivering a steady supply of memorable one-liners as well as for his deft political instincts.
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