I’ve only met Jesse Helms once. I was profiling him for two national magazines during his 1996 Senate race, and for two days I shadowed him around the US Capitol. He looked like a fragile, senescent bear and spoke with a mumble that the average Northerner might have had some trouble deciphering. He was harder than most to track down — but finally, as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee was breaking up, I got my five minutes with the Republican icon.
“This isn’t about Bosnia, senator,” I started.
I asked Helms a question about the “homosexual lobby” — one of my clients was a gay magazine — and listened as he stumbled and evaded and lost his train of thought. He asked me to repeat the question. I have a stutter, and mid-sentence I hit a block.
“I can’t understand you,” the senator told me, then swiveled around and walked away.
It was easy at that moment to dismiss Helms as a doddering lightweight with stooped shoulders and an ineffectual streak of meanness. It was harder to see him for what he really was: a powerful national figure who ruthlessly (and, too often, effectively) pursued an obstructionist right-wing agenda.
During his three decades representing North Carolina in the Senate, Helms befriended human-rights abusers around the world; stalled important treaties and appointments; and launched spirited attacks on civil rights, AIDS funding and legalized abortion. He helped mastermind a brilliant fund-raising machine and had his fingers in everything from black-voter intimidation to a veiled threat against President Clinton’s life. His name was the first thing strangers mentioned, usually with derision, when I told them I lived in North Carolina. Yet he also won all five of his senatorial races, trading in on white racial resentment, Christian conservatism, and an avuncular, countrified style.
Now, just before his 84th birthday, Helms has finally decided to share his story. Early this month, Random House released the former senator’s Here’s Where I Stand: A Memoir. Its 36 chapters offer no introspection, no sense of fallibility — not even the basic elements of good storytelling. But we do get 300 pages of Helms’ own words, or perhaps those of a second-rate ghostwriter. In that sense, Here’s Where I Stand is an important historical document about one of America’s most important 20th-century political figures.
It is also a curious exercise in political whitewash. For a senator whose very strength lay in his combative style, Helms has managed to portray himself as a lover of all humanity, from deceased Democrats Paul Wellstone (“a courageous defender of what he believed”) and Hubert Humphrey (who allegedly told Helms “I love you” on his deathbed) to the entire Jewish people (“who prepared the way for the true Liberator of all mankind, Jesus Christ”). In fact, Helms writes, the Jews were one of two peoples whose histories inspired “the freedom Americans enjoy today.” The others, of course, were the Anglo-Saxons.
Helms spends the first eight chapters of his autobiography outlining his life before the Senate, and they paint a Mayberryish picture of small-town North Carolina during the Jim Crow era. “My boyhood days were golden,” he says: He grew up in Monroe, 25 miles from Charlotte, the son of plain folks who took in hobos in the middle of the night and fed them “Mama’s biscuits” slathered with “generous helpings of fatback.”
His father was a police chief who overlooked moonshine stills, eschewed the word “nigger” and reconciled a local grocer (“Mr. Bob”) with the burglar who had stolen some dried beans the night before. “When the stolen goods were offered to Mr. Bob, he hugged this man who had robbed him,” Helms recounts in one of many aw-shucks tales from his childhood.
So perfect were those days that even the high-school principal, Ray House, borders on sainthood: “If it were possible to assemble all the young people who went to school under him and take a poll, every one of them would say ‘I loved him.'”
Helms spends precisely two paragraphs on his political awakening. He attributes this conversion to his father-in-law, Jacob Coble, who sold shoes wholesale and helped him understand “how the strength of a free-market system is interwoven with the true strength of our democracy.” Helms’ first up-close experience with electoral politics came during the 1950 Democratic primary for the US Senate. The incumbent, Frank Porter Graham, was the ex-president of UNC-Chapel Hill and, in the words of former News & Observer publisher Jonathan Daniels, “the single most important human force for enlightenment in the state.” Challenging Graham was Willis Smith, a retired state legislator whose campaign accused the incumbent of being a race-mixer and communist sympathizer.
“White people, WAKE UP,” said one handbill. “Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wives and daughters in your mills and factories?” Another handbill featured a doctored photograph of Graham’s wife dancing with an African-American man. Radio ads proclaimed, “Do you know that 28 percent of North Carolina’s population is colored?” The crude tactics worked: Smith eked by Graham in the runoff, then went on to win the Senate seat in the general election. Helms later became Smith’s administrative assistant.
For more than a half-century, Helms has remained silent about the Smith campaign, even though he’s been dogged by insinuations that he was behind the inflammatory handbills. In Here’s Where I Stand, he tries to set the record straight. Both candidates were “fine gentlemen,” he writes, and Smith in particular was the “kindest man imaginable.” But Helms insists he had no official role in the 1950 campaign. Working as a radio reporter for Raleigh’s WRAL, “I sat in on some of the staff meetings as an observer,” he writes. He also admits producing some 10-second ads urging Smith to call for a runoff after placing second in the primary. But Helms also wants to make something clear: He was neither a member of the Smith campaign nor the creative genius behind the altered photo of Graham’s wife.
Others remember differently. In the 1986 book Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms, journalist Ernest Ferguson interviews James “Pou” Bailey, a retired judge and close Helms friend who also worked on the Smith bid. Helms was “up to his neck” in the campaign, Bailey said. “I don’t think there was any substantive publicity that he didn’t see and advise on.” Ferguson also interviewed a retired N&O advertising manager, now dead, who claims to have watched Helms wield the scissors that doctored the photo.
Whether Helms is setting the record straight or obfuscating it further is a matter of he-said-she-said. Read deeper into Here’s Where I Stand, though, and the whitewash grows considerably more evident. Two chapters later, Helms describes the job that catapulted him to statewide fame and launched his political career: his 12 years as an on-air editorialist for WRAL-TV. Throughout North Carolina, he tells us, “Everyone would gather around the television after dinner to hear the news and then the editorial … In many cases no one was allowed to speak until the editorial was finished.”
What Helms manages not to tell us is the content of those editorials. He quotes a bland one on federal housing programs and a mournful one about the Kennedy assassination. What he doesn’t say is that the 2,751 editorials were based in some of the most venal bigotry of the times. “Are civil rights only for Negroes?” he asked in 1963. “White women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights. The hundreds of others who had their purses snatched last year by Negro hoodlums may understandably insist that their right to walk the street unmolested was violated.”
In his five-minute editorials, Helms condoned lunch-counter segregation; said civil-rights protesters were “no less an affront to society” than the Ku Klux Klan; and accused civil-rights marchers of participating in “sex orgies of the rawest sort.” He also insisted that four Alabama Klansmen who murdered a Detroit woman in 1965 were responding to “deliberate provocation” by Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson. If Helms feels remorse for inflaming racial tensions in North Carolina during the 1960s, he reveals none of it in the new autobiography.
In fact, he still justifies his opposition to civil-rights laws. “Many good people who supported the principle of progress for everyone could not agree to the destruction of one citizen’s freedom in order to convey questionable ‘rights’ to another,” he writes. “They believed forced social engineering was hazardous to the freedom we all deserve.” By polarizing the races, Helms writes, the civil-rights movement constituted a “new form of bigotry.”
And he defends his 1990 Senate bid against former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, which featured a last-minute TV ad in which a pair of white hands crumpled a rejection letter. “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified,” said a voiceover. “But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?” In the new book, Helms says he was responding to legislation, passed by Congress and vetoed by President George H.W. Bush, that would have increased available remedies for job discrimination. Helms mischaracterizes it as a “quota bill” and now claims race had nothing to do with his objections. “Minority classifications were not limited to race,” he writes.
Of course, Helms also denies that this 11th-hour advertising blitz had anything to do with the fact that Gantt, a charismatic and successful architect, happens to be African American. But Helms also wants us to know that he himself is not a racist. As proof he offers his “friendship” — more like friendly banter — with one of the Capitol’s black elevator operators.
The most disquieting section of Here’s Where I Stand is Helms’ description of his 30 years in Washington. When he arrived, he writes, the Senate was “a sort of gentlemen’s club” of Democrats and moderate Republicans. “They didn’t want to make any waves; I wanted to drain the swamp,” he writes. Then, for the next 200 pages, the former senator gives us a toned-down rendition of how he drained the swamp: Helms Lite.
Take foreign relations. Helms describes his institutional arch nemesis, the State Department, as a bunch of “do-as-we-please bureaucrats” and mentions that his staff developed “alternative resources for information.” This “fact-gathering,” as he calls it, uncovered important information, including an alleged secondhand link between an obscure United Nations agency and the North American Man/Boy Love Association. “Our State Department was not aware” of this connection, he writes. “The department claims they were horribly embarrassed by this episode, as they should have been.”
Was this really the essence of Helms’ foreign relations operation? A few fact-checkers who ferreted out pedophiles with vague quasi-governmental connections? Not exactly. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms ran a “shadow State Department” that sent staffers all over the globe, gathering intelligence from Latin America, southern Africa, Taiwan, South Korea and Western Europe. He built a network of right-wing political and business leaders, along with anti-communist exiles from Cuba and Central America. Conservative organizations at home and abroad funded many of these adventures.
To what end? Demurely, Helms says that he was trying to separate the “good guys” from the “bad guys” and to ferret out communism wherever it lay. (Apparently it lay everywhere: “Communism came over on the Mayflower,” he writes, disparaging the Pilgrims’ efforts to share the wealth in the Plymouth colony.)
So, who were Helms’ “good guys”? This is where Here’s Where I Stand again grows silent. The former senator fails to mention that, particularly during the 80s, he built some rather shady alliances. Among his friends:
• The Mozambican National Resistance, or Renamo, a rebel group sponsored by South Africa’s apartheid government (another Helms ally). According to the Los Angeles Times, Renamo used to storm into villages, slice children in half with machine-gun fire, and hack villagers to death with bayonets and machetes.
• Roberto D’Aubuisson, the rightist politician in El Salvador most closely associated with the death-squad murders of Archbishop Óscar Romero and thousands of peasants.
• Jonas Savimbi, leader of Angola’s UNITA rebels, whose reported torture techniques included burning his enemies at the stake.
• Chile’s military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, whose tactics included throwing his political opponents from airplanes.
• Bolivian president General Luis García Meza, a reported cocaine trafficker who came to power in a coup with the help of former Nazi officer Klaus Barbie. The State Department had condemned Meza for “savage violations of human rights,” and the former president is now in prison for his crimes. Helms nonetheless courted Meza’s friendship, calling the United States’ Latin American policy “misguided.”
In Here’s Where I Stand, Helms prides himself on a foreign-policy agenda based on humanitarianism. “How could — and why should — the American people ‘write off’ the slaughter of countless thousands of innocent people as if it were no more than bad debt?” Helms writes in his book. This is a question the ex-senator must today answer himself. How could he “write off” the brutality of some of his closest allies abroad? His answer: In the hierarchy of evils, communism trumps torture.
“Have we always supported the ‘good guys’? Maybe not,” Helms concedes. “But this much is sure: It was never a mistake to give our support to the person or group who did not embrace Communism rather than the person or faction who did.” Linking communism to “the devaluation of human life,” he concludes, “In no case is the ancient rule that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ truer than when the enemy is Communism.”
Helms devotes an entire chapter of Here’s Where I Stand to what he calls “hot-button issues.” He equates abortion with the Holocaust; decries a school-prayer ban that he claims forbids a child from “pray[ing] for comfort for the family of a fellow student dealing with a tragedy”; and explains why conservative talk-radio hosts are more credible than The Washington Post. “The members of the liberal media have made a god of government and devalued Godly wisdom about human conduct,” he writes.
One of Helms’ hot-button issues is AIDS in Africa. In one of his few self-critical moments, he repeats his 2002 regret that he hasn’t done more to solve the international pandemic. “Perhaps, in my eighties, I may be too mindful of my soon meeting Him,” the Republican writes, “but I know that, like the Samaritan traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, we cannot turn away when we see our fellow man in need.”
And with that, he glosses over the real hot-button AIDS issue of his Senate career: the disease’s spread in the United States.
Here’s an oft-told story that’s nonetheless worth repeating. In 1995, Patsy Clarke, whose late husband was a close friend of Helms, wrote the senator a letter about her gay son’s death from AIDS. She wanted Helms to support additional research funds; more important, she asked him “not to pass judgment” on people with the disease. The senator wrote back two weeks later. “I know that Mark’s death was devastating to you,” he said. “As for homosexuality, the Bible judges it, I do not … As for Mark, I wish he had not played Russian roulette in his sexual activity … I have sympathy for him — and for you. But there is no escaping the reality of what happened.” In the same letter, Helms also blasted “militant homosexuals” for hoisting a giant condom over his house.
Homosexuality was among Helms’ obsessions. On the Senate floor, he called gay sex a “filthy, disgusting practice” and tried to jettison political nominees solely because of their sexualities. He opposed federal hate-crimes legislation because it included sexual orientation. He advocated a quarantine for people with HIV.
Most egregiously, he took the lead in opposing funding for AIDS research and treatment. In 1990, he threatened to filibuster a $600 million bipartisan package to provide funding to cities, hospitals and agencies dealing with the health crisis. Only two other senators voted to allow the filibuster to continue, but Helms’ isolation didn’t stop him from trying again. Five years later, he tried to gut another AIDS spending bill — and when the Senate overruled him 97-3, Helms announced, “There is a great odor rising from the manner in which Congress is falling all over itself to do what the homosexual lobby is almost hysterically demanding.”
Helms’ political shenanigans have spanned a wide spectrum of issues. He worked against emergency relief for farmers. He led the fight to defund controversial art. He proposed deep cuts in the National School Lunch Program. He fought against wilderness protection, particularly in his home state.
How will Jesse Helms be remembered in the future, though? Last summer, I taught at a camp made up largely of North Carolina teenagers. One morning, a guest speaker asked, “Who here knows who Jesse Helms is?” There were more than 100 kids in the room. Not a single hand went up. I realized Helms’ memory will be lost to the next generation.
Sadly, we will never know what Helms was really like — what toxic impulses led him to embrace death-squad leaders but vilify gays, or what scared him so much about full legal equality for African Americans.
This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2005.
