On The Right - gun control; Confederate flag in South Carolina; Sen. Jesse Helms addresses U.N. Security Council

A: You make the political point. Exactly. Bringing down the flag is not the responsibility any South Carolina governor wants to take, nor any other governor to counsel him to take, especially not the governor of a state that once fought for the Confederacy. There is one clean solution-

Q: To delay the thing until after the primaries?

A:-That's an incidental benefit. But the call should go out for a plebiscite. Let everybody vote on whether that flag should continue in so prominent a position. Almost certainly it would be voted to come down. Among other things, there are economic boycotts getting into the picture, and the southern tradition is sensitive to material pressures. Jim Crow in eateries in Atlanta ended in part because of the heroism of civil- rights squatters, in major part because of the desire of merchants for supplementary black commerce.

Q: So you are telling me you will not advise Gov. Bush to go any further than he has done on this question?

A: That's a good way of putting it.

Helms in the Lions' Den

NEW YORK, JANUARY 21

IT was a rollicking day at the U.N. on Thursday. Amb. Richard Holbrooke is a superb impresario, polished, resourceful, witty. On a single day, he invites Sen. Jesse Helms to address the U.N. Security Council and also invites, to a small luncheon for Helms, representatives of China, and of Taiwan. The Taiwanese didn't turn up, depriving Mr. Holbrooke of a second history-making diplomatic event-the separated Chinese brethren have not shared a diplomatic table in the 51 years of their coexistence. But he scored with Sen. Helms, who is the first legislator in the history of the United Nations to address the Security Council.

And what an event that was. There are only 15 members of the Security Council, but there were 100 ambassadors crowding the scene to hear what would happen when so prominent a critic of much of the work of the U.N. entered the arena and faced the lions. The diplomats at the U.N. are a tough, proud, and sensitive breed. Their weapons are rhetoric, suasion, and votes. But Sen. Helms was armed with a billion dollars, and the lions behaved as lambs. And this notwithstanding that Sen. Helms did nothing that was out of character. He was just plain Jesse Helms. "I am not a diplomat," he told the illustrious assembly, which included nobody who had any doubt on that matter. "I am an elected official with something of a reputation for saying what I mean."

He addressed immediately the sovereign question before the house, which is the accrued indebtedness of the United States government to the U.N. An embarrassing matter, actually. The U.S. doesn't have the reputation of a deadbeat, and doesn't court it. Mr. Helms, who had sponsored a bill that triggered about a billion dollars' reduction in our debt to the U.N., didn't specifically account for the fiscal delinquency. What he stressed was the continuing need for U.N. reforms-without specifying them-and also the reservations so many Americans have about expansive U.N. activity.