The Trail of the Political Serpent

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Editor’s note: Wrenn was a leading player in Helms’s political operation for 20 years, and also ran the successful campaigns of U.S. Sens. John East and Lauch Faircloth. These lightly edited excerpts are from The Trail of the Serpent: Stories From The Smoke-Filled Rooms of Politics, and are published with permission from Republic Book Publishers. 

January 1975

In the twilight, my car rolled to a stop in Jesse Helms’s driveway; I was 22 years old, less than a year out of college—he was 53, starting his third year in the Senate.

Loping out of his small brick house, clutching a speech in one hand, his coat slung over his shoulder in the other, Helms was over six feet tall, stoop-shouldered, with a long face and round cheeks; his mouth was a jagged gash above a receding chin but his eyes were huge, not pop-eyed, but wide, brown owl eyes too big for the rest of his face.

Climbing into the car he growled, “You’re late,” reached into his back pocket, laid a worn brown wallet thick as his fist on the dash in front of him, straightened the enameled U.S. Senate seals on his cufflinks; putting the car in reverse, I thought, “Scratch the surface and beneath those cufflinks you’ll find a redneck,” and drove east to a small Christian school.

When we passed the television station—where he’d worked before he was elected to the Senate—he stared at the blinking red lights on the tower. “Do you know Mr. Fletcher who owns the station?”

I shook my head.

He grunted. “He’s sick but he’s still one tough old son-of-a-bitch. He just disinherited his son. He’s not leaving him one red cent.”

I asked why, glanced down at the green lights of the dashboard, listening to his answer—he paused, I said: “So he disinherited his son because the two of them don’t see eye-to-eye on civil rights?”

“Does that trouble you?”

It seemed heartless. “What’s he dying of?”

“Old age and grief, he can’t take his money with him.”

I drove through the twilight to a small town east of Raleigh, stopped at a lone stoplight, rolled past a cornfield, turned into a dirt driveway; in a copse of trees beside a small weathered school, a reception committee was lined up on the edge of the parking lot.

Helms ambled out of the car—a covey of old women wearing faded gingham dresses, faces wrinkled by the sun, bosoms heaving, hovered around him; becoming the soul of Southern courtliness, half-bowing to the ladies, he fawned over the children, stood joking with the men.

A short stout man clutched him by the arm leading him into a gymnasium, past rows of tables covered with worn red and white paper tablecloths to his seat at the dais; a rail-thin minister with wisps of white hair tottered to the podium; bowing his head, Helms became the picture of reverence, when the prayer ended sang out—“Amen”—sat down, lifted a fork, ate with the grim determination of a man who remembered what it was like to grow up poor, miss a meal.

I still remember the speech he gave that night more than four decades later.

Rising, walking to the podium, he tapped the microphone, puffed his cheeks, frowned, shuffled papers, stared up at the ceiling, pursed his lips, made a popping sound with his mouth, told a joke about Ted Kennedy then got down to raw bare-knuckled politics talking about the night Kennedy drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, about staring at Kennedy’s red face across the Senate, saying Kennedy didn’t get his rosy cheeks lying on the beach and, if he did, it was because the bottle lying on the sand beside him wasn’t suntan lotion.

Mispronouncing Nelson Rockefeller’s name, Helms said he had no beef with “Rock-y-fella” personally. He said Rock-y-fella’s problem was his womanizing; he said he knew a lot of people didn’t care about that kind of thing anymore but he was old fashioned. 

The last time Helms said Rockefeller’s name his eyebrows popped upwards into the center of his forehead, looking like an enraged owl.

His voice changed, becoming lower, richer, throbbing with emotion, talking about religion, telling a story about an eight-year-old boy, Jackie, dying of leukemia, who every morning at sunrise rolled his wheelchair down to the lake by his home to watch the wild swans rise into the sky—Helms’s voice broke. You could have heard a pin drop.

Heaving a long sigh he told how one morning just after dawn his phone rang, and a friend said, “Senator, I thought you’d want to know Jackie passed on this morning.”

Stopping, leaning down, hand shaking, Helms fumbled with the water pitcher, poured himself a glass of water, drank, calmed himself, told how just before he died sitting by the lake at dawn in his wheelchair watching the wild swans rise into the sky the dying boy said, “Someday, I’m going to fly high in the sky like those swans.”

The woman sitting across the table from me had a broad wrinkled face, matted gray hair, and tears streaming down her cheeks—you could have cut the emotion in the room with a knife.

I looked at Helms stunned, staring into a world I never knew existed.

The moment he finished his speech, Helms made a beeline for the exit; striding through the shadows across the parking lot in the darkness he chuckled softly, nodded toward the gymnasium behind him.

“I really had them with me tonight.”

The tears running down a woman’s cheeks were real, the world I stared into was real—but the man on the stage was an actor. I should have seen it as a warning … but didn’t.

A Brutal Fight

(Editor’s note: Helms was reelected in 1978 but faced his toughest campaign in 1984, when Gov. Jim Hunt opposed him in what was then the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history. Wrenn called Helms’ Raleigh-based political organization “the Circus.”)

Eyes watery, face flushed, coughing into a handkerchief, Helms sank into a chair beside Tom Ellis, the Raleigh lawyer who was his closest adviser, in the Circus conference room. Helms wheezed, stared across the table at Arthur Finkelstein, his pollster. “Get on with it … I don’t have much time.”

Finkelstein took the first poll in Helms’s third campaign before Thanksgiving two years before the election. He pursed his lips. “I’ve only seen this once before.”

Read two numbers.

Ellis scratched his chin. “You’re telling me more voters dislike Jesse than like him.”

Finkelstein laughed. “Dislike is too nice a word.”

“Tell me how to change that?”

“You can’t.”

Finkelstein said after 12 years watching Helms in the Senate, voters’ loathing was chiseled in stone.

Earl Ashe, a former WRAL-TV producer, frowned. “You mean they don’t like where Jesse stands on issues?”

“It’s not that,” Finklestein said. He read a question—“What do you like least about Jesse Helms?” Read the answers: “Mean, arrogant, haughty, holier-than-thou …” Finkelstein said Helms was like Elmer Gantry—it wasn’t what he believed, it was who he was voters loathed.

Ellis cut his eyes, glanced sideways at Helms. “Alright. Tell me how we win.”

Finkelstein raised both hands in the air in front of him, palms open, said there were three kinds of elections. 

“First, there’s the election where you like both candidates.” Finkelstein waved both open palms, lifted one, dropped the other to the table. “You vote for the candidate you like best.” He lifted both palms in front of him again. “Two, you like one candidate, dislike the other.” He closed one palm into a fist. “That one’s easy. You vote for the candidate you like.

“Three, and this is the election you hardly ever see, you dislike both candidates”—he closed both palms into fists—“and vote for the one you dislike least. That’s the only election Jesse wins.”

No governor had ever been elected more than once until Jim Hunt. He was elected lieutenant governor when he was thirty-five in 1972. Hunt built a political machine, ran for governor in 1976, won, amended the state constitution so he could run again.

Finkelstein said even Republicans liked Hunt.

Helms lit a filterless cigarette.

Ellis knocked ashes out of the bowl of his pipe into the ashtray. “Get to the ballot question.”

Helms trailed Jim Hunt by 25 points.

Ellis sat back shocked.

“Well, we’ve got a year to find a way to make Hunt more unpopular than Jesse.”

The most brutal campaign I was ever in started.

Helms’s Secret Weapon

Bob Harris attended Raleigh’s St. Timothy’s High School at Ellis’s church; muscles withered from muscular dystrophy, needing a body brace to hold him up in a wheelchair, he graduated from North Carolina State University in three years.

During John East’s 1980 campaign, walking into a room full of ladies opening envelopes, pulling out checks, I watched a wide-eyed boy in a wheelchair lift two rail-thin arms, hands quivering, struggling to hold a thin metal letter opener.

The next morning Lil Murray rolled Harris into my office. I said: “I need someone to do research.”

Chin resting on the edge of his body brace, neck muscles too frail to lift his head, he cut his eyes staring back at me. “How much does it pay?”

The tears running down a woman’s cheeks were real, the world I stared into was real—but the man on the stage was an actor. I should have seen it as a warning … but didn’t.

Carter Wrenn

Every morning a researcher dropped packets of cut-out newspaper articles on Harris’s desk; he scrawled wavery notes across the top, sent them to Ellis and me.

After John East won, Harris’s disease came out of remission. Unable to breathe, raced to a hospital in the middle of the night in an ambulance, red lights flashing, a week later he came home hollow-cheeked, no longer able to sit in a wheelchair, even with a body brace.

Lying in bed with a round hole—a tracheotomy—at the bottom of his neck, when his exhausted lungs left him struggling for air his mother, Elena, bending down, turned on the ventilator on the floor by his bed. He used a voice box to speak.

When he’d call, I’d hear the box crackle, couldn’t understand a word he said—but, rail-thin, Elena, leaning forward at the waist toward the phone, seamlessly translated his words; no longer able to hold a pen, he dictated memos Elena wrote down in short-hand, typed, and faxed to Ellis and me.

Lying in bed a 24-year-old cripple, eyes locked on Hunt, he read every newspaper article, speech, word Hunt spoke.

‘Where Do You Stand, Jim?’

Jim Hunt called himself a “progressive,” but more than anything else he was pragmatic; he’d sing one song to liberals, another to moderates, a third to conservatives, singing each so adroitly each group nodded.

Hunt struck, running a radio ad nailing Helms to the wall for voting for the tobacco tax and against Social Security.

Setting a cassette player on the table in my office, pushing a button, Ashe played Hunt’s radio ad. Scratching his chin, shaking his head, Ellis sighed. “We got to answer that one.”

Harris growled over the speaker phone. “I faxed you a radio script.”

His ad repeated the same line five times—Helms saying, “I’m Jesse Helms. I oppose the Panama Canal giveaway. Where do you stand, Jim?” But each time, Harris put a different issue in the second line.

Ellis grunted and said, “Put ‘Hunt’s a liberal’ at the end.” Finkelstein frowned.

Finkelstein lifted a pencil, marked the script, split it into five ads, handed it to me.

“Do 10-second TV ads—we’ll reach more people.”

Ashe scratched his chin. “You can’t add ‘Hunt’s a liberal’ to the end of a 10-second ad.”

Harris growled, “Leave it out.”

We made five old-fashioned “crawl” ads, played them at a press conference; reporters watched white words crawl across a black screen, just heard Helms’s voice, never saw his face. Laughed. Said nobody ran old ads like that anymore—we’d just made cheap ads to get free newspaper stories.

We spent $100,000 airing ads for three weeks. Finkelstein walked back into my office, dropped a poll on the desk, looked from me to Ellis. “It’s time you two learned something new: You’ve run the same old conservative versus liberal ads for years—that’s who you are.” Finkelstein’s eyes locked on Ellis. “But this campaign’s not about liberal versus conservative. It’s about Jim Hunt’s character.”

Only one line in those ads worked: Where do you stand, Jim?

We’d spent $4 million telling people Hunt was a liberal, hardly a soul believed it; we spent $100,000 asking a five-word question—Where do you stand, Jim?—and Helms shot up eight points, trailed Hunt by 12.

The White Hands Ad

(Editor’s note: Helms beat Hunt, 52 percent to 48 percent. In 1990, Helms was challenged by Harvey Gantt, the first Black mayor of Charlotte.)

Gantt blasted Helms for voting against Sen. Ted Kennedy’s civil rights bill which called for racial quotas. Every TV studio in Raleigh was full—Ashe, Ellis, and I flew to Washington, sat in a hotel room with Alex Castellanos, wrote a script, drove to a studio the next morning. At noon I flew home to film an ad with Gov. Jim Martin. Ashe and Castellanos finished the quotas ad: A pair of white hands crumpled a job rejection letter into a ball, the announcer said, “You needed that job. And you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is.”

Ashe and Castellanos went to work on a second ad about Gantt using a racial quota to get his hands on the Federal Communications Commission license for a new Charlotte TV station, then selling the piece of paper to a broadcasting corporation, pocketing a million dollars.

The “White Hands” ad aired. Three nights later, John McLaughlin polled. No one cared about quotas. The ad flopped. We switched to the ad about Gantt pocketing a million dollars—greed worked. But howling newspapers turned the “White Hands” ad into an urban legend, said a racist ad was why Helms won. Fifteen years later, facing Helms, a dark-haired reporter asked if he’d played the race card.

Helms shook his head, said, no, the ad was about quotas.

The reporter drove to my office. Turned on his camera. “You played the race card when you ran that ad—didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

He blinked, surprised. “You disagree with Jesse? That’s not what he told me.”

“Yes.”

“Would you run that ad again?”

The Tuskegee Airmen Visit

The year I turned 50, I bought an office condominium in an empty two-story building near my home. The week after I moved in a young Black lady walked through the door, smiled nervously. “You looking for someone to clean this place?”

Three days later a Black man wearing a baseball cap climbed out of a red Cadillac, ambled down the empty hallway, standing in my library, stared at shelves of books, held out his hand. “I’m Leonard Hunter.”

A retired Air Force sergeant, Hunter didn’t need to work—he drove to my office two nights a week to help a friend’s daughter build her cleaning business. A born storyteller, laying his cap on the table in front of him, he’d sit telling stories about fighting at Da Nang in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, flying in planes bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail at night, going to Raleigh’s Black high school in the 1950s. One night, cap on the table he cocked an eyebrow.

“A friend told me you made that ‘White Hands’ ad.”

I hesitated. “I did … with Earl and Alex Castellanos.” Hunter stroked his chin. “You used race to whip Harvey Gantt?”

“People say that … but the ad was about quotas.” I told him about Gantt attacking Helms for voting against Kennedy’s bill.

The next day Hunter led three tall, white-haired Black men into the library, sat down, pointed. “These men were Tuskegee airmen. When they joined the Army they weren’t allowed to vote but they loved their country so they fought for it anyway. That’s what I call patriotism.”

I saw the “White Hands” ad—and the “Brooke flier,” a 1976 pamphlet that said President Gerald Ford was considering a Black senator to be his running mate —as bare-knuckled politics. Both were true, both were about issues, both helped win elections. I saw nothing wrong with either until I saw them through Hunter’s—and the Tuskegee airmen’s—eyes.

The sound of Hunter’s wounded voice echoing in my ears, I answered the reporter’s question.

“No. I wouldn’t do that again.”

An Icy Silence

Sue Myrick, sinking during her 1992 U.S. Senate GOP primary, losing to Lauch Faircloth, cornered Helms, chastising him, laying the blame on him as her ship capsized—in Helms’s eyes, Ellis had landed him in another mess. 

Sitting in front of his typewriter, pecking keys, he wrote to Myrick, told her he didn’t support Faircloth. Myrick gave his letter to the press. Scowling, Ellis rolled his eyes, stopped speaking to Helms. Icy silence descended.

A year later I boarded a train to Virginia with my wife, Page, riding to her brother’s wedding; back at my office the phone rang, soft-spoken, never raising her voice, 64-year-old Paula Kay answered—Helms snarled I’d signed his name to a fundraising letter he’d never seen.

Soft, polite but firm, she stopped him. “Senator, you must be wrong.”

Helms went on a tirade, bullied her. Face ashen, she barely spoke another word.

The train stopped. I called the office, listened to her shaken voice. Dialed Helms. “What kind of man bullies a lady that way? You need to apologize.”

Livid, he sputtered, couldn’t get out a complete sentence, slammed down the phone. Listening to the humming line I thought, Enough. I sent him the fundraising letter he said he’d never seen with his initials scrawled across the top in blue ink where he’d approved it—Helms and I only spoke one more time, years later.

“You disagree with Jesse? That’s not what he told me.”

Bullying a woman was a symptom, but the roots of Helms’s illness ran deeper: A bone disease left him wobbly-legged at 70 years old; prostate cancer landed him in a hospital for radiation; a heart defect landed him in an operating room—a doctor inserted a pig valve in his heart.

Years before, Helms had asked Ellis to get George Hale, the rector of St. Timothy’s Church, to hire his daughter, Jane, as principal at the church school. George hired her. Time passed. George stepped down as rector but stayed on as head of the school—a petty war broke out between Jane and George. Turned bitter. George ordered the school board to fire Jane; Jane’s partisans struck back to fire George.

Father Jay James, the Episcopal minister who’d replaced George as rector, removed the old school board. The day the new board met, I voted to remove both Jane and George but pay them through the end of the school year.

I got a letter from Helms cutting all ties with the Circus.

Today, when someone asks, “Tell me what kind of man Jesse was,” the first thing I remember is the photograph in his high school yearbook of Helms in his drum major uniform, a high, furry hat atop his head, waving a baton, strutting down Main Street in his hometown in front of the marching band. The same strutting drum major, craving attention and applause, landed Helms on television doing editorials, landed him in the Senate.

Long before Jane lost her job, Ellis and I were bone-weary of the drum major. And Helms, staring into a shadowy future with a pig valve in his heart, saw the applause he mistook for respect no longer hinged on walking into the Senate—it hinged on how he was remembered as a senator. 

Journalist Rob Christensen once described the Circus as “Jesse’s rusty knife”; wanting to be remembered as a statesman, Helms cast aside the rusty knife—but not before flashing his own knife, telling a reporter I’d gotten rich pilfering money from the Circus.

The accountant who did my taxes gave my financial statements to the press, stopped Helms dead in his tracks.

The drum major, at a small college near his hometown, set up the Jesse Helms Center—with a replica of his Senate office inside—to be a shrine to his memory, then made one last demand: He wanted a list of Circus donors to raise money for his center. I sent him the list on an inch-thick computer disk.

After the parting, pondering mysteries, I wondered if the Circus would survive. It didn’t. But my fear was wrong. I didn’t see it 30 years ago but, as webs spread, the Lord had given me a gift.

When it was dawn at the Circus we inherited the flowers of Eden but the trail of the serpent was over them all. No man has the power to save himself. Only God can save him. Condemned by a pope, outlawed by an emperor, in a plague-riven world, by faith alone Martin Luther sowed the seeds of a spiritual rebirth, light graced lost souls in a fallen world.

Bow your head, pray for an angel—only faith can save us.

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Carter Wrenn blogs about politics with his friend and former campaign opponent Gary Pearce at talkingaboutpolitics.com.