The Ascendancy of Jesse Helms

Republican senator Gordon Smith, a golfing buddy of William Weld, gently lobbied Sen. Jesse Helms on behalf of Weld’s nomination to be U.S. ambassador to Mexico. So did GOP senator John Ashcroft of Missouri. Two moderate Republican senators, Olympia Snowe of Maine and John Chafee of Rhode Island, sent Helms a letter endorsing Weld. The Massachusetts governor himself demanded that Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, step aside and let his nomination proceed. Thirty-six other governors echoed Weld. Meanwhile, the Weld camp recruited conservatives to whisper kind words about Weld in Helms’s ear. One who did, a North Carolina banker, insisted Weld had been an effective U.S. attorney in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, when the State Department asked Helms to meet privately with the nominee, the senator declined. “Why should I subject myself to that?” he said. If Weld drops by anyway, Helms added, he’ll point the now-former governor and his press claque down the hall, where they can gather for a press conference. And Helms will retreat to his office, shut the door, and chuckle.

The hullabaloo in Washington over his unflinching opposition to Weld has scarcely fazed Helms. He won’t respond to Weld’s public fulminations. The Foreign Relations Committee’s spokesman, Marc Thiessen, handles that, time and again citing Weld’s support for “medical marijuana” and weak record in prosecuting drug cases as Helms’s grounds for refusing even to convene a confirmation hearing. “I’m staying out of it,” Helms told me. “The media, they want a feud. And they are for Weld. But it’ll serve no useful purpose to let them have one. I don’t let these stakeouts by TV stations from Boston bother me. I just walk right by.” Not always. When he encountered a press stakeout after a committee session on July 30, Helms engaged in some brief repartee with a Boston reporter who asked about Weld’s status. “Did you take any Latin in school?” Helms inquired. Yes, the reporter said. “Res ipsa loquitur,” Helms shot back, and walked on. The phrase means: “The thing speaks for itself.”

Next to Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms is the most important conservative of the last 25 years, and episodes like this help reveal that Helms is the most inner-directed person in Washington. He has his own set of priorities, and he doesn’t waver. He has a style all his own, too. He’s invariably straightforward (invoking a Latin idiom was an aberration). He never softpedals or dilutes his conservatism, even in private. On Weld, the easy course would be to let the nomination sail through, which it would absent Helms’s objection. But Helms doesn’t shy from tough, unpopular stands. Indeed, his relentless, unswerving application of conservative principles to practically every issue is precisely what has made him a major player in Washington and national politics. Helms follows a simple formula: Implacability equals strength. It works. He can’t be buffaloed — or ignored. Even acting alone, Helms has enormous sway, as Weld has had to learn.

No conservative, save Reagan, comes close to matching Helms’s influence on American politics and policy in the quarter-century since he won a Senate seat in North Carolina. Barry Goldwater flamed out after 1964, though he lingered in the Senate until 1987. Newt Gingrich single-handedly grabbed control of the House of Representatives for Republicans, but he hasn’t done much with it. Richard Nixon, conservative at heart, got the two big issues wrong by embracing big government and detente. Strom Thurmond has been reliably conservative for a half-century, but not a leader. Jack Kemp altered conservative economic thinking — nothing more. But Helms has led on everything from promoting human rights in China to opposing gay rights at home. And, at 75, he’s still out front.

Now the world is finally beating a path to Helms’s door. In 1976, Helms rammed a “morality in foreign policy” plank through the Republican national convention that all but officially ended the Kissinger era in American foreign policy. Earlier, Helms had created an international incident over then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s decision to bar exiled Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn from visiting President Ford. Yet last fall, Kissinger flew to Greensboro, N.C., to raise money for Helms’s reelection. It was his second appearance to aid Helms. Another ex-secretary of state and Kissingerite, Larry Eagleburger, spoke at a Helms rally in Fayetteville. After the election, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivered a speech at the Helms Center in Wingate, flying home with a carry-out order of barbecue Helms had bought for her. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on Foreign Relations, is working closely with Helms to restore the committee’s power and prestige. The point here is that Helms has gained strange, new respect not as many conservatives have — by moving left. Helms has earned it the hard way — by not moving at all.

I have two tests for measuring Helms’s impact: the Trent Lott test and the George Bailey test. Let’s start with Lott. He and Helms, in their twenties, gained Capitol Hill experience by working for conservative southern Democrats. They were elected to Congress the same year, 1972. The question is, Who has done more, Lott or Helms? Lott advanced through the leadership ranks to become House Republican whip before jumping to the Senate in 1988. He was elected majority leader last year. What has he accomplished? Lott was a capable leader of House Republicans when they were in the minority, and he brokered the deal last year that led to welfare reform, a minimum-wage hike, and the Kennedy-Kassebaum health-care bill. This year, he played a prominent role in negotiating the budget deal with President Clinton. That is about the sum of his major achievements.

The Helms list is so much longer that Helms, who regards boastfulness as a mortal sin, is too self-conscious to recite it. In fact, when I asked him to name his top 10 accomplishments, he declined to name even one. (His aides are less reticent.) But in politics alone, Helms has made history. He’s an event- making politician, not merely one who’s served in eventful times. He helped make direct mail not only a key fund-raising tool for conservatives but also an alternative medium for the Right. From it came the New Right, the bulging faction of social conservatives without which Reagan wouldn’t have won the White House in 1980. Of course, if not for Helms, Reagan wouldn’t have been politically viable in 1980 in the first place. Four years earlier, Helms and his sidekick Tom Ellis engineered an astonishing upset victory for Reagan in the North Carolina primary that resurrected his candidacy. Had Reagan lost in North Carolina — and his handlers were already negotiating to get him out of the race — his presidential bid would have died early and ignominiously in 1976, and his prospects in 1980 would have been uncertain at best.

Helms has also been a magnetic force on ideology and policy, pulling the entire national debate to the right. Positions he noisily took in Washington two decades ago, almost alone, are now part of mainstream conservatism. Among them: the balanced-budget amendment, a flat tax, school prayer, curbs on food stamps, legislation banning abortion. In the 1980s, Helms pressured the Reagan administration to intensify anti-Communist activism in Central America, Asia, and Africa and to reject arms-control concessions. And on issues where others turned squeamish, he spoke out. Helms confronted the homosexual lobby in Washington on gay rights, AIDS research, and government sanction of the homosexual way of life. He has paid a price for this. His speeches are picketed by gay activists (he had to slip in the back door of an Atlanta hotel for a fund-raiser last year), and a 15-foot condom was put over his house in Arlington, Va.

Amazingly enough, Helms is an able and resourceful executive who uses his staff to maximize his influence. He delegates rather than micromanages. Most pols, Lott especially, are chronic micromanagers. Given a long leash by Helms, his staffers “have clout beyond what other congressional aides have,” says conservative strategist Jeffrey Bell. Thus, in the 1970s, John Carbaugh and James Lucier acted with such audacity in foreign affairs that Helms was accused of operating his own State Department. In the 1980s, Deborah De Moss exerted a powerful influence on Latin American policy. Now, Ellen Bork is becoming a force in foreign-policy debates. Thiessen, the committee spokesman, has found he’s free to bludgeon foes. In a TV appearance, Thiessen told Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy he should apologize to the American people for siding with Cuba in the shootdown of two Cuban-American planes. Afterwards, Thiessen feared he’d gone too far and jeopardized his job. Should have been tougher with Axworthy, Helms told him. Once empowered, Helms aides remain close to him after they leave his staff. He has a network of talented lawyers, lobbyists, and consultants ready to assist him at a moment’s notice: Carbaugh, Charles Black, Marc Rotterman, Alex Castellanos, Darryl Nirenberg, Steven Phillips, David Keene.

For what it’s worth, Helms also has another gift that most politicians lack: He spots new talent around the world. When Margaret Thatcher was a minor British MP in 1974, Helms hosted her in Washington. He gave her office space and arranged appointments for her. In 1989, he met with Boris Yeltsin, whom President Bush and his aides dismissed as a loutish rival to their favorite Russian, Mikhail Gorbachev. Helms was impressed and began to talk up Yeltsin in Washington. In 1989, he learned of Harry Wu, the exiled Chinese dissident, and invited Wu to testify on Capitol Hill. They became warm friends, and Wu has since emerged as an international human-rights hero. During Clinton’s first term, Helms admired the gritty performance of U.N. ambassador Albright. After the 1996 election, he urged Erskine Bowles, the White House chief of staff, to prod President Clinton to name her secretary of state. Clinton did, prompting Helms to order his staff never to criticize Albright. Most surprising was Helms’s discovery of John Ashcroft, now a rising star in the Senate. Helms traveled to Missouri in 1974 to campaign for Ashcroft for state auditor, sight unseen. He had heard only that Ashcroft was a conservative.

Now for the George Bailey test — after the Jimmy Stewart character in It’s a Wonderful Life who was shown what the world would have been like if he’d never lived. Let’s narrow the test from a lifetime to the past 12 months. What wouldn’t have happened in Washington if Helms had stayed in Raleigh, N.C., as a WRAL-TV commentator?

There would be no pending reorganization of the State Department, in which two agencies will be abolished. There would be no United Nations reform. Richard Lugar of Indiana would be Senate Foreign Relations chairman in place of Helms, and he has minimal enthusiasm for revamping State, folding the U.S. Information Agency and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency into it, and emasculating the Agency for International Development. Lugar tried to strip U. N. reforms from legislation appropriating back U.N. dues. He lost 75-23 on the Senate floor.

What’s surprising to many is that Helms, neither a detail man nor a lover of process, delved into such cold fare and did it deftly. His reputation as strictly an outside player, harrumphing on behalf of one lost cause after another, may be the received wisdom in Washington about Helms, but it’s wrong. Helms calibrates his maneuvering according to how much power he has, and in this case, as Foreign Relations chairman, he has a great deal. He started with an idea. “I became convinced early on that the foreign-policy apparatus was not operated for the American people, but so the striped-pants boys could stick out a pinkie, have a cocktail, and sound profound somewhere around the world,” he told me. “When I got to the Senate, I found I was exactly right.”

Having watched Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s reorganization plan go belly-up in 1995″They kicked him in the pants and told him to go home like a good little boy” — Helms laid the groundwork for passage of his own version. He personally briefed Clinton, who appeared to be amenable. When the bill reached Clinton’s desk, however, he vetoed it. Helms persisted. He contacted Clinton again and pledged a bipartisan approach. More important, he lined up Christopher’s successor, Albright. She produced her own plan, which was so much to Helms’s liking that he quickly agreed to sponsor it.

Slipping reform of the bloated U.N. bureaucracy through the Washington gantlet took more cleverness yet. First, Helms refused Clinton’s request to pay up U.N. dues unless reform requirements were attached. Then, the day Kofi Annan was elected the new U.N. secretary general in January, Helms summoned Annan to Washington. He told Annan the United States would pay its arrears only if the United Nations accepted benchmarks for reform. Annan disliked the idea, but wasn’t violently opposed. Helms proposed specific benchmarks, shrewdly basing them on State Department documents, Albright speeches, and goals Annan himself had declared for the organization. In the end, both houses passed the reforms, and the administration accepted them. Soon Annan announced his own set of reforms.

I have gone into detail about these admittedly unsexy accomplishments both because they’re significant and because, as usual, Helms has gotten no credit. There are many other examples of Helms’s impressive work product. Would the House have voted to kill the National Endowment for the Arts on July 10 if Helms hadn’t first zinged the agency in 1989 for funding obscene art and roasted it regularly since then? Not a chance. Also, Helms called for a work requirement for food-stamp recipients as long ago as 1974; last fall, Congress finally passed one. Helms has also perfected the tactic of winning while losing. He failed to block ratification of the flawed Chemical Weapons Convention, but he won 28 of 33 concessions he’d sought. What’s more, Clinton grudgingly agreed to submit NATO expansion and ABM treaty revisions to the Senate for approval. Without Helms, Trent Lott might have won a handful of concessions, but nothing like these.

In one important sense, Jesse Helms is the easiest boss in Congress. With Helms, the text never changes. “He never pulls the rug out from under you,” says Thiessen. “He’s the most consistent politician in America.” Bob Dole says of Helms: “You know where he is. You don’t have to look under the table.”

Helms once claimed he hadn’t changed his mind in 30 years, but he has at least once. In the early 1980s, Helms opposed foreign aid to Israel and was skeptical of then-Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. This became an issue in his 1984 reelection campaign as pro-Israel campaign contributions poured in to his Democratic opponent, Jim Hunt. After the election, Helms warmed to Begin, notably after Irving Kristol characterized Begin (to Helms) as “the Jesse Helms of Israel.” In 1985, Helms visited Israel for the first time. He concluded Israel is America’s “only real ally in that part of the world.” Mubarak? “He’s friendly. But do you think he’s going to take on his Arab friends? Give me a break.”

The dirty little secret in Washington is supposed to be that Helms isn’t mean-spirited after all, but is a kindly, courtly gentleman who loves kids. This is no secret at all. Everyone knows it, but few say so publicly. Helms is unfailingly nice to staffers. Paul Weyrich, who now runs National Empowerment Television, heard from Helms on Christmas Eve 1974. Weyrich was a low-level staffer for another senator, and Helms called to say Weyrich’s work was appreciated. Several years ago, Helms spotted NEA chair Jane Alexander touring the Capitol around 3 p.m. with family members. “Miss Alexander, do you think your family would like some ice cream?” Helms asked her. (“It was the only thing I could think of,” he says now.) Helms and the Alexander crew trekked off to the Senate dining room. Afterwards, he and Alexander “got along fine for a while until she recognized I was not going to bend on NEA. She’s a nice lady.”

What makes Helms especially formidable are two additional traits. He has a rare knack for shutting out the buzz in Washington (the only other politician who could do this was Reagan). “He genuinely doesn’t care what liberals and the media think about him,” says Bell. This is a source of power, a way of avoiding distraction. Helms coolly ignores the gossip, the chatter, the social scene. He grants few interviews and never appears on Sunday TV talk shows. “Tell them I’m in church with Mrs. Helms,” he advises aides. He’s a Baptist who takes his Christian faith with utmost seriousness, and it allows him a detached perspective on Washington. A few months ago, GOP senator Paul Coverdell came to Helms with a policy problem involving Mexico. Helms gave his blessing to Coverdell’s solution and then confided: “And remember, Paul, no one will remember a thing about this a week from now.”

Helms hates embassy parties. “They invite us for 8:00, people come at 9:00, they have a cocktail hour and then sit down for dinner at 10:00, the speeches begin at 11:00, and you get home at 12:15,” he says. “I just don’t go to them. ” Senators who do, Helms says, doze in the Marble Room off the Senate floor the next day. Nor does Helms make a beeline to the White House when summoned. In April, Clinton invited a handful of senators to a private foreign-policy discussion at Blair House. Helms declined, using the excuse that his granddaughter was in town. She was, but the fact is he just wasn’t interested in going.

While sensitive to criticism, Helms is never bowled over by it. He reads the Washington Times and the Washington Post at home before driving to work. Like Reagan, he reads Human Events, the conservative weekly. His administrative assistant, Jimmy Broughton, gives him packets with news magazines, opinion magazines, and articles from other newspapers, but Helms doesn’t read much of the stuff. He does like columnists Robert Novak, Wesley Pruden, and James Glassman. He loathes the New York Times. He has told aides: “I don’t care what the New York Times says, and nobody I care about cares what the New York Times says, and nobody in North Carolina cares what the New York Times says.” But he manages to read the Times columns of William Safire. “I enjoy Safire,” he says. “Everybody should.” And he read a Times editorial on July 29 trashing him as “imperious” and ” parochial” and endorsing Weld. Typical, he said.

When Helms does submit to an interview, he’s breathtakingly candid. In 1995, I asked Helms on CNN if he thought Clinton was up to the job of being commander in chief. Helms said no, a flat, honest answer that other politicians would have been afraid to give. Later, he joked to a North Carolina reporter that Clinton should get a bodyguard before coming to North Carolina. (Washington reporters tried to make a major story out of this by suggesting it was a threat to Clinton’s physical safety.)

Helms is undiplomatically frank about his dismay with Europeans. Last February, U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson insisted the United States should pay its U.N. dues because the money was owed Europeans for Bosnian peacekeeping. Helms exploded, poking Richardson in the chest. “Let me tell you something about the Europeans,” he said. “Because of the British flirtation with appeasement, 300,000 American boys are in graves in Europe. Don’t tell me what we owe the Europeans.”

And when the new British foreign minister, Robin Cook, breezed into Helms’s office on his first trip to Washington after the election of a Labour government in Britain last May, that meeting didn’t go well either. Cook groused about the Helms-Burton Act, which tightened the embargo on Cuba and made British and other foreign companies liable in American courts for exploiting nationalized U.S. property. “We saved your bacon two times in this century,” Helms replied. “And when we need something, you don’t give us a thing.” Senator, you don’t understand, Cook said. “Yes, I do understand,” Helms insisted.

That exchange was just the beginning. Helms, in his thick rural accent, suggested the British were appeasing Fidel Castro. He brought up Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who sought in vain to accommodate Hitler. (Aides of Helms have heard his Chamberlain spiel so often, some can repeat it verbatim.) Cook and his entourage fumed over that jab. Then Cook complained Britain had deployed troops in Bosnia for an extended period when the United States didn’t. “Congratulations!” Helms shot back acidly; he had opposed the eventual dispatch of American soldiers to Bosnia in any case. Helms couldn’t resist expressing his undying admiration for former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, whose Conservative party the Labourites had just ousted. After 20 minutes, Helms had had enough of his visitors. He stood up. ” Nice of you to come,” he told Cook, ushering him to the door.

Several weeks later, Ian Smith, the leader of white-ruled independent Rhodesia in the 1970s, dropped by Helms’s office on Capitol Hill. Helms and Smith are old friends, and the meeting went swimmingly: Smith got 30 minutes with the senator.

Helms’s most striking trait? “When you get right down to it, he’s got a ton of guts,” says Carter Wrenn, a former political adviser who split with Helms in 1994 in a fund-raising dispute. “He’s not intimidated by the process,” says Coverdell. “He won’t let the system push him around.” On matters he considers important, he’ll tie up the Senate for days. Helms infuriated senators in 1982 by filibustering against a gas-tax hike as the Christmas recess was supposed to begin. Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming refused to shake his hand after that debate. Helms is always ready to attack liberal icons, even if it rubs racial sensitivities. In 1983, he strongly opposed the creation of Martin Luther King Day, a holiday many conservatives, including Reagan, had endorsed. Helms says he didn’t take into account the unpleasantness his opposition might generate, and shouldn’t have.

“I’ve got to sleep with myself,” he says. “If I get to that point in my thinking, I ought to leave the Senate.” Still, as a favor to then-senator Mack Mattingly of Georgia, he agreed to help raise money for the King Center in Atlanta in 1985. In a letter to Coretta Scott King, Helms said he had only one condition. She would have to release all King’s old files. (Helms thought they might reveal links to Communists.) He never heard back from her.

Helms’s gutsiest decision has been to confront the homosexual movement. Few Republicans have joined him. “The whole sexual lobby has worked on the Congress,” says Helms. “They’ve succeeded in having senators scared to death of them.” Helms isn’t. He’s tried unsuccessfully to stop medical research funds from going disproportionately to the search for an AIDS cure. In 1994, he added a chapter on homosexuals to his only book, a thin paperback, When Free Men Shall Stand, first published in 1976. The chapter title: “How about Sodom and Gomorrah anyhow?” It tells the story of a U.S. Agriculture Department official transferred after criticizing, in a television interview, the presence of gay officials at the department. Helms held up all the department’s legislation and nominations until the official’s job was restored. “The Bible is unmistakably instructive about the sin of sodomy,” Helms writes. “I confess I regard it as an abomination.”

After 25 years, Helms is still a misunderstood man in Washington. For him, politics is never a game. He doesn’t swap favors. A week before the vote in May on the Chemical Weapons Treaty, the State Department went along with Helms on reorganization. A bargaining chip, the media declared. If it was, it was a bargaining chip that didn’t affect Helms’s vote. In June, when Helms declared his opposition to Weld, the governor’s first response was to run to the press and organize a lobbying drive. Those were the wrong tactics. “If you want to get Jesse’s attention, you knock on his door,” says Bob Dole. ” You don’t put it in the paper.” But it’s too late for that now.

The rise of Helms, for all his success, comes with a price tag for Republicans. He is a polarizer, a provocateur, hated by the Left and disliked by centrists. He enrages feminists and gays with his stands against abortion and gay rights. Helms is so unpopular with blacks that he doesn’t bother surveying them in his campaign polls. GOP moderates fear Helms creates exactly the wrong image for the party: too right-wing, angry, intolerant. Their idea of a nice conservative is Reagan — genial, open-minded, not excessively rightwing.

In truth, Reagan was every bit the conviction politician Helms is. He agreed with Helms on nearly everything, including the social issues. Their differences were solely matters of style. Reagan, as candidate and president, was conservatism with a happy face. Helms is conservatism with a stiffened spine. Reagan’s success as a conservative leader, however, wouldn’t have happened without Helms’s bracing him. The Republican party needs another duo like that. What’s missing, obviously, is a new Reagan. Helms is still here, operating at full tilt.

By Fred Barnes; Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD