"[In Monroe] you walked into any store, you knew practically everyone in it. You knew that they knew you and your family just as well. No matter what you did, good or bad, it got out right quick."

"I always thought of him as almost stand offish," said Henry West of his Monroe classmate Jesse Helms. "Maybe it was because he was busy. But he didn’t get in with the boys and mix it up.  He was always doing something with his family or about his family or about his work on the papers."

"The editorial style of Jesse Helms delighted a good portion of our audience and infuriated another part.  But he had a delivery, and when he said it, you knew he meant it.  And all of his followers were applauding, and all of the dissenters were saying, 'Hmm, hmm, hmm.  Why do they let that man on the air?'"

Ray Wilkinson was a local broadcasting legend, humorist and Farm Broadcasting Hall of Famer. His hard work earned him numerous national awards, including a 1965 Oscar in Agriculture. From the 1960s until his 1972 U.S. Senate election, Jesse Helms joined Wilkinson as a regular editorial commentator on WRAL's news.

“People have feelings about racial issues and we exploited those feelings in the campaigns very ruthlessly to our benefit."

Wrenn served as director of Senator Jesse Helms’s political action committee, The Congressional Club (later The National Conservative Club), from 1975 to 1996. He directed political campaigns in North Carolina for Ronald Reagan in the 1976 Republican presidential primary, John East for U.S. Senate in 1980, Lauch Faircloth for U.S. Senate in 1992, Tom Fetzer for mayor of Raleigh in 1993, and Richard Vinroot for governor in the 2000.

Republicans Leading Democrats in Negative Advertising:

"The conservatives and the Republicans as a whole, in the use of negative advertising on television, were a generation ahead of the Democrats in the early '80s. And they didn’t do that; we did. They had some sort of moral argument about that they shouldn’t."

End of the Congressional Club:

"We lived in a very narrow world. We lived in an intensely political, ideological world and we saw everything through that lens. You cannot imagine how intensely we saw things through that lens, and stepping back from that and getting out of that world, for me, was a good thing."

Meeting with Bono:

"His involvement with Bono for all I know could be 100 percent sincere personal relationship, but it also to me had the appearance of looking like a little bit of political brass polishing and a way to sort of smooth up and polish the image and to leave it maybe with a little more glint on it than it would have had otherwise."