N.C.'s Former Golden Boy Now Trying to Stay Out of Prison

John Edwards, the disgraced former candidate for vice-president and one-time golden boy of North Carolina politics, is back in the news. There are reports out that he's trying to cop a plea-bargain deal with the FBI and the IRS to avoid going to jail for misusing campaign funds to buy the silence of his former mistress, Rielle Hunter.

Say it ain't so, John-boy.

When Edwards was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1998, I was delighted. Finally, after decades of having North Carolina associated with the thick-skinned, hell-no politics of the late Jesse Helms, here was someone who I thought represented the state's true political heart. Edwards reminded me -- and apparently a lot of other people -- of the late Terry Sanford, a progressive Southern Democrat who served as North Carolina's governor in the early 1960s and later won a seat in the U.S. Senate and served as president of Duke University.

Edwards seemed to have stepped straight from the streets of Mayberry, the fictional North Carolina town that has been immortalized in "The Andy Griffith Show." In Mayberry, people disagree with each other but their disputes inevitably are resolved by the application of some good old down-home common sense, usually applied by the town's joshing, good-natured, smarter-than-he-looks sheriff, Andy Taylor.

Edwards cultivated an image that made you think he'd grown up as the best friend of Sheriff Taylor's son, Opie. "I believe I can be a champion for regular people," Edwards said back when he was crafting that image. "My own life experience allows me to see things through their eyes. They are the people I grew up with, the people who worked with my father in the mill, the people I fought for as a lawyer."

It sounded so good. When Edwards was elected to the Senate in 1998, it seemed the first step in a political career that could very well take him to the White House. But something changed when Edwards set up shop in Washington, D.C. Or maybe he didn't really change, he just shifted gears to pursue his true ambition of becoming president. He seemed to instantly forget the good old folks in the mill towns back home and set his sights on the White House the moment he arrived in the District of Columbia.

I'll admit I was fooled at first by Edwards's charm and political skills. But in my own defense, I also was among a few people who started having serious doubts about Edwards's sincerity soon after he took office and years before his hypocrisy was brought to light.

Around 2000, an issue surfaced in North Carolina politics that should have been tailor-made for Edwards's populist promise to represent the interests of the "regular people" he grew up with. The U.S. Navy began a ham-handed and ultimately futile effort to force Washington County, North Carolina to accept an unwanted training airfield for carrier-based jet fighters from nearby Norfolk, Virginia.

Since the jets using the training field -- known as an outlying landing field, or OLF -- would not be based in Washington County, there would be no economic benefit to the county for having the airfield. And the constant coming and going of the noisy, low-flying jets would be a serious disruption of residents' daily lives.

Despite protests from local political leaders and the vast majority of Washington County's 12,500 residents, the Navy pushed ahead with its plans.

Washington County is one of the state's poorest counties. Around 52 percent of its population is African-American. The county has little political clout. So the Navy thought it could force the OLF on the county because no one would come to its defense and the political costs to politicians for not opposing the OLF would be minimal.

Long story short, the Navy's plans to build the OLF in Washington County were halted thanks to a determined effort by local residents, the generosity and legal skill of the Charlotte law firm of Kennedy Covington, and the eventual opposition of most of the state's political leaders.

But John Edwards was nowhere to be seen in the fight against the OLF that dragged on for several years. As a self-proclaimed champion of "regular people," he should have been a leader in the opposition to the Navy's plan. But he ducked it. And since the fight against the OLF never really gained attention outside of North Carolina and Virginia, no one called him on his refusal to represent the people he'd promised to defend. The most effective opposition to the OLF came from U.S. Senator Elizabeth Dole, a Republican.

All of this was playing out back home while Edwards was a rising star in the national Democratic Party. The OLF issue was still being hotly contested in 2004, when Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry picked Edwards as his running mate for vice-president. Edwards's personal charm, boyish good looks, and soothing Southern accent seemed to make him the perfect running mate and regional counterbalance for the New England native Kerry.

The Kerry-Edwards ticket lost. Not long after the ticket's defeat in the 2004 election, reports surfaced that Kerry deeply regretted picking Edwards as his running mate. And then in late 2007 the National Enquirer -- a supermarket tabloid scorned by so-called serious political journalists -- nailed Edwards in an affair with Rielle Hunter. And now the guy who could have been Opie's pal and perhaps President of the United States is negotiating with the feds to try to avoid a prison term.

You fooled us, John. Frankly, I hope you go to jail, even if it's only for a few months. In case you've forgotten your small-town North Carolina roots, hypocrisy has never been popular among the "regular folks."

Remembering Jesse

I grew up in North Carolina not far from the hometown of the late Senator Jesse Helms, and I’ve long wondered if I might be distantly related to him. My mother was from Union County, where Helms was from, and her mother was a Helms. I have many cousins there whose last name is Helms. I know that I have many of the small-town values that Helms revered – including the belief that it’s bad manners to speak ill of the dead.

Still, Jesse was never reticent about speaking his mind. So maybe it’s a family trait that I feel compelled to speak my mind about him.

I never understood the tenacious grip that Helms had on North Carolina politics during his 30 years in the Senate. He represented a brand of angry, reactionary Old South conservatism that isn’t—or at least wasn't in those days—usually associated with this state. And yet, while North Carolina chose progressives and moderates, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans for its other elected offices, there was always Jesse, the ultimate unyielding ultra-conservative demagogue, towering over everyone.

Helms affected the lives of North Carolinians before he became a Senator. I have an old friend named Mike who remembers the anguish Jesse caused his family in 1968 when Helms was editorial director of WRAL-TV in Raleigh.

Mike’s father, a Methodist minister, was moving the family from Raleigh to Charlotte. But he was having trouble selling their house. One day he got a call from an African American man who said the real estate broker wouldn’t show him the house. My friend’s father made his own deal to sell to this man.

When word got out that a black family was moving into this previously all-white neighborhood, Helms was apoplectic. He went on the air with a scathing editorial denouncing the minister and accusing him of “blockbusting.”

Jesse even broadcast the address of their home. Cars with license plates from Deep South states showed up at all hours of the day and night and parked on their street. Agents from the State Bureau of Investigation moved in with my friend’s family to protect them until they moved to Charlotte.

Still, there were times when Helms’s unyielding resentment of those who annoyed him was funny, almost charming, in a weird way. When I was working at the Raleigh News and Observer (which Jesse detested) I was told to get in touch with Helms to get a comment about a breaking news story.

The N&O had the phone number of an apartment Helms rented in suburban Washington, D.C. I dialed the number.

“Hello,” I said, “am I speaking with Mr. Helms?”

“Ah, who's calling?” Jesse asked.

“My name's Willie Drye, Mr. Helms, and I'm a reporter for the News and Observer. I'm working on a story about . . ."
Click.

“Mr. Helms? Mr. Helms?”

I dialed the number again. This was in the late 1980s, before the days of universal answering machines, and I let it ring. Finally, after a couple of minutes, someone—I assume it was Jesse—picked up the phone and dropped it back onto the hook.

“Have we done something lately to piss off Jesse Helms?” I asked the editor who'd told me to call the senator.

“What happened?” he asked.

“He hung up on me twice,” I said.

“Oh, don't worry about that. He always hangs up on us. Just say he couldn't be reached for comment.”

For all of Jesse’s peevishness and outright nastiness, however, he did have a well-deserved reputation for helping his constituents. Sometimes he’d help even if he knew they’d never vote for him. He did a huge favor for a friend in Chapel Hill when my friend’s wife was trapped in Poland when martial law was declared there in December 1981.

My friend said he'd tried to contact North Carolina's congressional delegation for help, but they'd all ignored him. I suggested that he contact Helms's office. He did, but after his earlier experiences, he wasn't expecting any response.

But Helms's office gave my friend access to the U.S. diplomatic pouch to Poland, which allowed him to send his wife the documents she needed to leave.

There are lots of people in North Carolina and elsewhere who loved Jesse Helms and the way he forced his will on state and national politics. But I can't say that I was grief-stricken when I heard a few days ago that Jesse died.

Still, one of the things I learned growing up in that small town near Helms's home is that it's just not a good thing to rejoice at anyone's death. One of my favorite works by the 17th-century poet John Donne is “For Whom the Bells Toll”, his meditation on the universality and ultimate tragedy of death.

Donne says that we are all diminished a little when anyone dies, and every death is a reminder that our own time will come sooner or later. And I guess that means that we’re all diminished a little by the passing of Jesse Helms.

So goodbye, Jesse, and may God have mercy on your soul. I know for sure of one kindness you did, and no doubt you did other good things in this life that I'm unaware of. But I’d love to listen in on the conversation when you stand at the Pearly Gates and try to explain some of your other actions to Saint Peter. That would be an interesting conversation.