In 1975, Carter Wrenn was 22. One day in January, he picked up U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms and drove him to a school east of Raleigh where Helms gave an emotional speech. After telling a story about an 8-year-old who died of leukemia, Wrenn noticed the impact the story had on a woman sitting near him:
“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.”
Helms used the boy as a prop, Wrenn writes in his new book, "The Trail of the Serpent: Stories From The Smoke-Filled Rooms of Politics."
“I really had them with me tonight,” Wrenn remembers Helms told him on their way back to the car.
Wrenn went on to become a critical figure in conservative politics in North Carolina. He helped Ronald Reagan win the North Carolina Republican presidential primary in 1976, and worked with Jesse Helms for 20 years.
Helms’ legacy is tied to his fight against racial desegregation. To give one example, when in a close race against former Charlotte Mayor Harvey B. Gantt, Helms ran what is now known as the “White Hands” ad. It showed the hands of a white job-seeker crumpling up a rejection slip as the narrator said “They had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is.” Wrenn, who was working on Helms’ campaign at the time, says he regrets running the ad.
A new book from Wrenn gives an inside perspective into decades of conservative politics in North Carolina. We sit down with him to discuss his long career as a political strategist and complicated relationship with Sen. Helms.
GUEST:
Carter Wrenn, conservative political strategist and author of "The Trail of the Serpent: Stories From The Smoke-Filled Rooms of Politics"
