By Cliff Bellamy

cbellamy@heraldsun.com; 419-6744

CHAPEL HILL -- Elizabeth Edwards on Wednesday remembered U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who died Tuesday of cancer, as "an extraordinarily compassionate man."

Edwards also said that she hopes Kennedy's death will provide some renewed vigor for health care reform, which Kennedy championed during his long career in the U.S. Senate.

Edwards -- wife of former senator, vice presidential and presidential candidate John Edwards -- made her comments during a wide-ranging session with reporters at Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill to announce the N.C. Literary Festival, to be held Sept. 10-13 at UNC. Edwards will be at the festival Sept. 12 to discuss her book, "Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities."

"This was an extraordinarily compassionate man," she said of Kennedy. "You'd see him help [Senator] Jesse Helms down the steps when he was having health problems." She praised his support in recent years, along with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas, of a renewal of a cancer research bill -- which Kennedy championed before he knew he had cancer, Edwards said. She wants Kennedy's death "to provide renewed vigor for those fighting for health care reform."

Edwards herself is battling cancer, and said she hopes to live long enough to see a breakthrough in its treatment. "The answer is out there somewhere," she said. During a pause in the conference, Edwards joked that she was "readjusting my hair .. or somebody else's hair." She said she had an appointment with a doctor later in the day, adding that "things are going well."

She dodged questions about her husband's affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, and when a reporter briefly brought up the possibility of her husband being the father of Hunter's child, she did not comment.

In "Resilience," published earlier this year, Edwards writes about her feelings when her husband told her of the affair in late December 2006. "So much has happened that it is sometimes hard for me to gather my feelings from that moment," she writes in the book. "I felt that the ground underneath me had been pulled away." They pushed on with the campaign for the presidency, she writes, because of a conviction that "this new awful reality would not control our story."

Edwards recalls other moments of loss in "Resilience" -- like the deaths of her father and son Wade, who, at 16, was killed when his car was hit by a strong wind and blown off the road. He tried to get the car back on the road, but the car flipped. In her book she also praises others who exhibit strong qualities of resilience, like her father, who in 1990 had a stroke and was diagnosed as being brain dead, but lived until 2008. Another important character is Toshiko, a Hiroshima survivor who taught Edwards and her sister Japanese dance when her father, a naval aviator, was stationed there. "If she bore resentment, or hatred," Edwards writes, "she found a way to bury it, to not let it define the rest of her life."