Facing Up to Jesse Helms

Talk, Nov, 2001 by Susan E. Tifft

The senator who was voted Most Obnoxious in high school was an early mentor to writer Armistead Maupin and wept profusely during a meeting with U2's Bono. He also spurned Nelson Mandela and gay-baited his congressional colleagues. As SUSAN E. TIFFT learned from his friends and associates, Jesse Helms was never as simple as he seemed.

A DISEASE CALLED PERIPHERAL NEUropathy has deprived Jesse Helms of feeling in his feet, forcing him to navigate the gleaming marble corridors of the Capitol in a motorized scooter. Over the past decade he has battled prostate cancer, undergone coronary bypass surgery, and had two knee replacements. So political seers were hardly surprised when the 79-year-old North Carolinian, citing the "inescapable" toll of time, announced shortly before Labor Day that he would not seek a sixth term in the U.S. Senate.

Age and infirmity finally accomplished what a series of Democratic challengers could not: unseating the nation's most visible and obstreperous totem of the far right. True to form, Helms is not going quietly. The owlish septuagenarian is still railing like an Old Testament prophet against his trademark Satans--Fidel Castro, abortion, affirmative action--while adding a few new ones, such as the International Criminal Court and school districts that deny meeting space to the Boy Scouts because of the group's ban on gays. Next to Ronald Reagan, whom he helped bring to power, Helms is the most important conservative of the past quarter-century. But unlike just about every other politician in Washington, he shuns the city's glad-handing party circuit and refuses to retrofit his far-right positions for the sake of political expediency. His formula for success is simple: He holds fast to a set of bedrock beliefs, and he acts on them, which makes him both the most maddeningly consistent ideologue in American politic s and the most polarizing. To his friends he is a man of unshakable principle. To his critics he is a racist, hate-mongering reactionary whose cracker barrel charm masks a capacity for evil: Jubilation T. Cornpone meets Darth Vader.

Both portraits miss the mark, as I discovered in interviews with more than two dozen of Helms's friends, foes, former staffers, and observers. The real "Senator No" is far more nuanced and baffling than his caricature. How else to explain a politician who, in Washingtonian magazine's most recent survey of congressional staffers, was voted one of the "meanest" men on the Hill, yet also ranked number one in the category "Just Plain Nice"? The Helms who warned Bill Clinton that he should hire a bodyguard before campaigning in North Carolina and threatened to sing "Dixie" to former Illinois senator Carol Moseley-Braun, an African-American, "until she cries" is the same man who adopted a nine-year-old orphan with cerebral palsy and wept when Bono, the lead singer for U2, lobbied him for international debt relief for poor nations. He embraces Bible Belt values and shuns computers. Yet his campaigns pioneered direct mail fund-raising, Willie Horton-style saturation negative advertising, and the use of TV to rally pu blic sentiment--a low-tech/high-tech disconnect that Peter Applebome of the New York Times likened to "a 19th-century message delivered by a Stealth bomber." Even fellow Republicans complain that Helms is incapable of compromise. Yet it was Helms, in his role as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who became the first U.S. legislator ever to address the Security Council of the United Nations--"that dysfunctional institution," he calls the UN--and who earlier this year gave ground in order to allow the release of $582 million in American back UN dues.

Helms was born in 1921 in Monroe, North Carolina, a segregated town of 3,000 where his father served as police and fire chief. He attended Wingate Junior College and Wake Forest College but left without a degree to take a full-time job at the News & Observer, the paper in Raleigh, the state capital; he now considers the paper his archenemy. During the 1950s he served as an assistant to two rightwing senators and as executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association. But the job that in 1972 catapulted him into the position of becoming the state's first Republican senator of the 20th century was writing and producing fire-breathing editorials for WRAL, a Raleigh TV station. Every weekday evening at 6:25 p.m. Helms lambasted Martin Luther King Jr., busing, feminists, longhaired hippies, labor unions, Red China, welfare, taxes, and pornographic literature. His bluntly worded blasts were broadcast on more than 70 North Carolina radio stations and published regularly in more than 200 newspapers across th e country "He was Rush Limbaugh before there was Rush Limbaugh," observes Rob Christensen, a political writer and columnist for the News & Obsewer.

In the Senate Helms has been an equal opportunity contrarian. He opposed President Richard Nixon's choice of Henry Kissinger as secretary of state, and he exasperated the first Bush administration by pushing through the constitutionally questionable Helms Amendment, which forbade the National Endowment for the Arts to fund "obscene" art. From his perch on the Foreign Relations Committee he has blocked or stalled ambassadorial appointments of both parties, in some cases for years. The new president has already gotten a taste of Helms's maverick maneuverings: In recent months the senator has held up the confirmation of top Treasury officials in order to force President Bush to make concessions on textile imports, and Helms has publicly pounded the administration for being too "docile" in its relations with China. Helms may have announced his retirement, but until he actually leaves the Senate no one in national politics can rest easy "I don't think you're going to see Senator Helms just ride off slowly into th e sunset," says Christensen. "He'll go out blazing." TIM KIRKMAN is a filmmaker who grew up in Helms's hometown. His documentary Dear Jesse came out in 1998: While researching the film we found [the senior edition of Helms's 1938 high school newspaper]. His peers had essentially named him Most Obnoxious. I had found a picture of him, and he was this skinny, gangly, bespectacled teenager who was probably hurt by that comment. It's a nightmare being a teenager without having to deal with being called the most obnoxious person in your class.