Back during coronavirus shutdowns my office telephone rang – a friend asked: ‘You’re not locked down?’

 ‘I’m here alone.’

 ‘I just read Jesse Helms’ pollster was Arthur Finkelstein.’

I told him about Arthur’s first poll for Jesse, about the first time I heard Jesse make a speech. He asked, ‘Why did Reagan lose to Gerald Ford in 1976?’ I told him how Reagan won the North Carolina primary. He asked: ‘Is it true Jesse trailed by twenty-five points when Jim Hunt ran against him?’

 ‘Yes.’ I described how Hunt pummeled Jesse in the first debate. He laughed.

 ‘You ought to put those stories in a memoir.’

I did. But it took three years. Here’s one story…

 A Warning

January, 1975

In the twilight my car rolled to a stop in Jesse’s driveway; I was twenty-two years old, less than a year out of college – he was fifty-three, 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, he 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, 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, said: “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.

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 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 Jesse became the picture of reverence; when the prayer ended he 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 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, Jackie’s father 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 the last time he’d seen Jackie: He’d pushed Jackie’s wheelchair down to the shore by the lake, knelt beside him watching the wild swans, the dying boy said, “Senator, 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, gray matted hair, and tears streaming down her cheeks – you could have cut the emotion in the room with a knife.

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 to 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.