At last Carter Wrenn, the well-known conservative consultant, has written his book about his life in politics: “The Trail of the Serpent: From the Smoke-Filled Rooms of Politics.”

D.G. Martin

Wrenn first worked for Tom Ellis, a conservative North Carolina lawyer and early supporter of Jesse Helms.
Wrenn writes, “The year I turned twenty-two, in 1974, not meaning to, I landed in politics; a year later Ronald Reagan ran for president and a man I barely knew — Tom Ellis, Reagan’s North Carolina Chairman — told me, ‘Build the campaign.’ Politics is a vicious world. Proud, certain they hold power in their men in campaigns tell themselves, “I’m winning this election.”
“But as Gary Pearce, a Democrat I battled for years, told me after our hair turned gray: ‘When you’re in a campaign you’re really like a frog on a log floating down a river watching the banks roll by telling yourself, ‘I’ve really got this log rolling’ — but it’s not you, it’s the river.’”
Wrenn’s first assignment was driving Helms to a campaign supper at a Christian school.
Arriving at the school, “Jesse 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 Southerncourtliness, half-bowing to the ladies, he fawned over the children, stood joking with the men.”
More than four decades later, Wrenn can still hear and experience the speech Helms gave that night.
“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 Ted 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 Jesse 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. He’d been the only senator who voted against making Rock-y-fella vice president because his conscience wouldn’t let him vote for a man who’d stolen another man’s wife.
“The last time Jesse 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 — Jesse’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, Jesse 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.”
Wrenn remembers, “I looked at Jesse stunned, staring into a world I never knew existed. The moment he finished his speech Jesse 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.”
Wrenn tells how Helms used his power hold on his supporters to develop a fundraising organization that transformed North Carolina and American politics.
In later chapters that will be the subject of a future column, Wrenn tells more about how Helms, as an actor and politician, gained and used real power.

D.G. Martin, a retired lawyer, served as UNC-System’s vice president for public affairs and hosted PBS-NC’s “North Carolina Bookwatch.”