JESSE HELMS: Scourge of the Senate

An entire wall of Jesse Helms’ Capitol Hill office is covered with political cartoons, most of them lampooning him as a rogue and obstructionist. The senior Senator from North Carolina takes impish delight in each and every one of them. “The uglier they are the quicker he puts them up,” says an aide. Among Helms’ favorites is one depicting a fellow Senator praying, “And would you kindly ask Jesse Helms to please shut up?”

Can the Jesse Helms who rises to greet a visitor, full of cracker-barrel charm and as well mannered as an overly polite schoolboy, really be the notorious “Senator No,” scourge of the Senate? Poor, misunderstood Jesse Helms. A bulky 6 ft. 2 in., he has a jowly, owlish face; his sparse white hair is slicked back, and his eyebrows, frozen like question marks above his eyes, seem to ask, “Who me, cause a fuss?” A sometime Sunday-school teacher, he is fond of saying, “Well, bless your heart,” his voice a velvet bass carried by a Carolina drawl. But in an instant, a glint appears in his eye as he hatches yet another plan to tie the Senate in knots. Meet the other Jesse Helms, the wily parliamentary terrorist who has blocked civil rights legislation, held ambassadorships hostage and undermined treaties.

“I’m no charlatan,” says Helms, 66. No, he’s a true believer. As patron saint of the not-so-New Right, he is protector of the unborn, champion of prayer in the classroom and pure hell on Communists. “A guy of guts and fire,” Republican Senator Alan Simpson calls him. But conservatives too know how prickly he can be. Ask Ronald Reagan. Negotiating arms deals with the Kremlin is one thing; getting them past Helms is something else. Helms is not just committed to causes, he is consumed by them. Consider his fight to ban abortion. “Sure I’m obsessed with it,” he says, “and I’m absolutely certain I’m right, and nobody’s going to change my mind.”

The Senate is a clubby place that takes pains to protect the minority from the majority. Helms has taken full advantage of that magnanimity, giving some to wonder, What is to protect the majority from Helms? His arsenal is primitive but effective: adding on dilatory amendments, filibustering, running hapless nominees through his congressional paddling machine. Some call it “porcupine power.” As the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, he stands at a crucial thoroughfare. Again and again, he has turned the path of legislation and confirmation into his private turnpike — pay Jesse’s toll or wait forever. Last week he was at it again. In an effort to stall the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces agreement, he even questioned Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s authority to sign the treaty.

When the question of obstructionism is raised, Helms seems wounded. He plays by the book, he says. “I’m accused of holding up nominations and frustrating the will of the Senate. When you look at the record, it’s not so.” Then that glint flashes again, and he admits, “The reputation is quite valuable, because it has a certain amount of effect. They know I’m capable of it.” That they do. Senate colleagues will attest that Helms has SPECIAL HANDLING stamped all over him, and some grumble that he has poured sand into the Senate’s engine all too often.

Still, Helms yearns to be liked and doesn’t seem to grasp the extent to which he has alienated some of his brethren. Not long ago, Ted Kennedy, his $ liberal foe, was slightly injured when a tree fell on his car. “I vow that I didn’t have my chain saw out there,” Helms jokingly told Kennedy as they got on an elevator together. Kennedy laughed, said Helms. Perhaps, but Kennedy will not talk about Helms. Neither will Claiborne Pell, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Why not? “I have to face him,” says Pell. Former Senator George McGovern feels less constrained: “People are afraid of him. He can punish you, and he’s willing to do that. He’s nothing but trouble.”

Sometimes Helms will block an appointment even when he favors the nominee. Earlier this year he threatened to hold up confirmation of Major General William F. Burns to head the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The price: a White House promise to submit reports on Soviet compliance with the ABM treaty — more ammo against the INF treaty. “You use whatever lever you have,” shrugs Helms.

Others have been still less fortunate. For a year, Helms blocked the nomination of Richard N. Viets, a career foreign-service officer and former envoy to Jordan, as Ambassador to Portugal. Helms kept up questions about his personal finances until the nomination was withdrawn and Viets retired. “What we have here is a McCarthy of the ’80s,” says Viets. “You recognize you’re in a cage with a viper.” Helms bristles at the comparison with Joe McCarthy. “I think he was on to something,” says he, “but he was careless with the facts.”

If need be, Helms will take on the entire Senate alone. Last November he voted against the nomination of Frank C. Carlucci as Secretary of Defense. Carlucci squeaked by, 91 to 1. A month later, Helms opposed a major education bill, arguing that the Federal Government should not fund education. The bill passed 97 to 1. “I sometimes find myself wishing there were more people on my side who were willing to speak up,” he says.

Few in Congress have been so vilified by the press, and none have been so adept at turning it to political advantage. The darts just seem to pass through him. “I never lost a minute’s sleep over criticism, and I never shall,” he declares. Senators who oppose him on key issues, he says, simply lack the facts or the political courage. And the uncommitted? “The Lord spoke of those who are neither hot nor cold. He said, ‘I spew them out of my mouth,’ and I think a lot of folks are crying out to be spewed out.”

Though Helms’ friends credit him with shrewdness and moxie, they marvel that anyone so — well, ordinary — should be where he is. Even Dorothy Helms, the Senator’s wife of 46 years, is puzzled: “To me, he’s just little Jesse Helms that I married however many years ago. He’s a very simple person. He just believes certain things, and he acts on them, and that’s it.” They met when both were working at the Raleigh News and Observer, she as editor of the society page, he as a sports reporter. They have raised two daughters and a son, whom the Helmses adopted as a 9-year-old orphan with cerebral palsy after reading about him in the newspaper one Christmas Day.

From work, Helms drives a 1984 Oldsmobile — he favors used cars — to his modest home in Arlington, Va., which is furnished in what he calls “ancient fill-in.” He slips on his gray Nike running shoes and what Dorothy calls “some old disreputable-looking pants and shirt” and watches the evening news. Often he tunes in Dan Rather, though he urged conservatives a couple of years ago to buy up CBS, which he sees as a citadel of liberalism. His favorite program is Highway to Heaven, about an angel come to earth. “Very inspirational,” says Helms, “and you don’t see people falling in and out of bed to make a point.”

Except when Helms is doting on his six grandchildren, he rarely relaxes. He types as many as 50 letters a week to friends and constituents, pecking with two fingers on an old Royal manual. To a woman fretting over her mother’s ill health, Helms wrote that his own mother had believed in the curative powers of baked apples. In another letter he wrote of the gay-rights movement: “I view it as something of a nightmare that the Sodomites are so brazen . . . These obnoxious, repulsive people are anything but ‘gay.’ “

Helms’ heroes are Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill and the late Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina. His values are rooted in North Carolina’s Piedmont. Monroe, whose population was 3,000 when Helms was growing up there, was profoundly conservative. Schools were segregated, and once a year flowers were placed on the graves of the Confederate war dead. Yet most townsfolk assumed that the devil was a Republican, which made it all the more shocking when Helms became the state’s first G.O.P. Senator of this century.

Helms’ father, known respectfully as “Mr. Jesse,” was police chief and stood a full head above 6 ft. One Christmas he gave his son a plaque engraved with the words SON, THE LORD DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU TO WIN. HE JUST EXPECTS YOU TO TRY. The plaque hangs beside Helms’ Senate desk, emboldening him in his sometimes lonely crusades. High School Principal Ray House preached another homily that had a profound influence on young Jesse: “With hard work, nothing is impossible.”

Helms, one of only six Senators who do not have a college degree, dropped out of Wake Forest to become a reporter, then program director of a Raleigh radio station. Years later, his unabashedly conservative editorials for a Raleigh television station won him a statewide following and future political base. He first came to Washington in the early 1950s as a staffer to North Carolina’s Senator Willis Smith, but the advice he remembers best came from Georgia’s Senator Richard B. Russell: “Jesse,” he told him, “a Senator who does not know the rules can be cut to ribbons by a Senator who does.”

When Helms ran for the Senate in 1972, he showed both his political savvy and his genius for raising money, pioneering direct-mail solicitations and founding a fund-raising apparatus that became one of the most formidable in the nation. In his 1984 bid for a third term, Helms spent $18 million on the most expensive Senate campaign ever, yet he defeated former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt by a scant 3%.

Since entering politics, Helms has been dogged by allegations of racism. “This is going to be another race story, isn’t it?” he asks, his face flushed. “If it is, don’t ever come to this office again.” He entreats interviewers to ask black Capitol Hill employees how he treats them and notes that a former press aide was black. But Helms has opposed civil rights legislation, busing, affirmative action, sanctions against South Africa and a federal holiday to honor Martin Luther King. He continues to insist that King associated with Communists and “was a man of tasteless immorality.” “I wish he had not been shot,” says Helms. “I fervently wish that, because I think he would have been exposed for what he was.”

Helms tells a story from his childhood. “About the only licking I remember my father giving me was when he overheard me calling a little black boy with whom I was playing a ‘nigger.’ He told me, ‘It wasn’t anything you did that made you white, wasn’t anything he did that made him black,’ and I was never to use that word again.” It was no defense, said Helms, that the boy had called him a “white cracker.”

Helms says he is driven by principle, not politics. His stand on abortion and his opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment have made him a target of women’s rights groups. But there are women among his most senior staff, and as a television executive in the early 1960s, he was one of the first to put a woman sports reporter on the air, over the objections of his superior.

Eight years ago, Helms hailed Reagan as the champion of conservatism. Now he feels the President has been duped by advisers. In a letter to a friend, Helms wrote, just before the summit meeting in Washington: “So many undesirable — and dangerous — things have happened on his ((Reagan’s)) watch — and I am increasingly fearful about the future.” Deeply troubled by the prospect of further arms agreements with the Soviets, he is still trying to bury the INF treaty by tacking killer amendments onto it, as he proved last week. His distrust of the Soviets is boundless and personal. He still suspects that Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down in 1983 in part because the Soviets had learned that he was scheduled to be aboard. “Trust them?” he asks. “No way, Jose!”