Ideologue with Influence

By Robert Ajemian

North Carolina's unbending Senator goes his own way

For years he was regarded as a solitary pip-squeak voice on the far right, a lonely ideologue from a Southern backwater. Today he can intimidate the Secretary of State, thwarting Alexander Haig's key sub-Cabinet appointments. When he notifies the White House that he wants to tell Ronald Reagan in person about certain gripes, the President cheerfully agrees to hear him out--even if the message includes a few instructions on how the President should behave as a true Reaganite.

It is an impressive show of personal clout. But Jesse Helms, the senior Senator from North Carolina, has become a dominating force in the Government, partly because of his own fierce skills of coercion and partly because the public's mood has shifted his way. Next to Reagan himself, Helms is the most influential conservative around. While he does not speak for all conservatives--some consider him too radical on certain issues--he has an army of supporters stretched across the country who eagerly send him millions of dollars to save the Republic. His political base is not the Republican Party but an organization he created back home in North Carolina. The Congressional Club is equipped with all the modern technology needed for polling, fund raising and dispatching blizzards of mail for whatever causes Helms desires.

In Congress, Helms leans all over his own Republican leadership. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, on which Helms serves, is Senator Charles Percy; a man with a terminal case of political meekness, Percy is no match for the baiting Helms. Majority Leader Howard Baker receives only a trifle more deference. When Baker returned from the White House recently to declare that social issues would henceforth be secondary in importance to the President's economic package, Helms brushed off the marching orders. "I'm not changing my agenda," he said last week, as a Senate committee began hearings on a bill, co-sponsored by Helms, that would effectively make abortions illegal.

Helms this year became chairman of the Steering Committee, a powerful group of 25 conservative Senators who meet weekly to plan how they will work their will. As chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Helms will play a key role in the passage of this year's farm bill, and he remains stubbornly set to cut way back on food stamps. The Administration has already bowed to the chairman: Chief Budget Cutter David Stockman carefully exempted subsidies for growing tobacco, one of North Carolina's biggest exports, from any reduction at all.

The most spectacular example of Helms' clout has been the way he has held up confirmation of no fewer than seven of Haig's top assistants at the State Department. Helms has nothing against Haig himself and helped Reagan when the Secretary's own nomination seemed in trouble. The President was being warned that Haig could not be confirmed by the Senate. Worried, Reagan asked that Helms be called at home on a Saturday morning and put to work. Helms immediately called Richard Nixon to ask if Haig's Watergate involvement would be a problem. This inquiry produced a cataract of facts and anecdotes, as if Nixon had been waiting for the call, and Helms was reassured. He spent the next two days calling Senators, checking their views, urging Haig's confirmation. When he reached 51 votes, Helms called the President to tell him that enough support was there. Reagan was gratified.

But later, when Haig announced his choices of Assistant Secretaries-- men like Lawrence Eagleburger, who had worked for the conservatives' particular hate object, Henry Kissinger--Helms was furious, since Haig had assured him that he would pick hard-line conservatives. At one Senate hearing, Helms showed his distaste for another nominee, Chester Crocker, whom Haig wants for African affairs. Helms considers Crocker too partial to the frontline black states on South Africa's borders, too vague about the role of the Cubans in Angola. Leaning into the microphone, fixing his owlish eyes on the witness, Helms slipped into his country-boy sarcasm: "Dr. Crocker," he said slowly, "I'm sure your dog runs out and wags his tail when you come home, but I want to know where you stand."

The President's senior aides have uncomfortably followed Helms' maneuvers, and last week they invited him to the a White House to try to work out a solution. Armed with a long memo, Helms warned that the backgrounds and views of men like John Holdridge, whom Haig wants as Assistant Secretary for East Asian Affairs, and Thomas Enders, who is up for Inter-American Affairs, made it impossible for them to carry out Reagan's declared policies. Helms insisted on briefing the President himself, and the staff agreed to set up a meeting. Pledged Helms: "If the President looks at the records of these men, and still wants them, I won't block anybody." But he repeated his opposition. Said Helms: "I'll question them all hard. And I'll probably vote against them."

Helms hopes that Reagan will reject at least some Haig choices. A more probable outcome to this week's hearings is that the President will install as deputies to Haig's men some of the Senator's own candidates like Arizona State University History Professor Lewis Tambs, who is Helms' proposed replacement for Enders.

Strictly speaking, Helms is not so much a conservative as a right-wing radical, out to reshape the world in his image. No politician today is more unbending in his zeal. He will never compromise, and that is why admiring conservatives say that they will walk out of windows for him. His dogma is that the have-nots must bootstrap it virtually on their own. In essence he shuts out a whole segment of the population, blacks and other minorities. Helms does not have a single black on his staff.

Conservatives generally are a lot more tough-minded than their counterparts on the left. Unlike the liberals who silently fumed at Jimmy Carter, Helms and his allies are always on the attack, even against their leader in the White House. Says Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail wizard who has raised large sums of money for Helms: "Never again will conservatives lay down for a Republican President, like they did for Nixon and Ford."

Striking at Reagan, of course, is a touchy matter since conservatives, including Helms, are personally so fond of him. The President has already shown a willingness to compromise with the moderates, however, and the intransigent Helms will tolerate little of that. His constituents are complaining, he says, and Helms agrees with them. Says he: "The people who fought and bled and died for Reagan have not been listened to. He's got to remember who took him to the dance."

For all his growing strength, Helms is not a charismatic man. People are stirred far less by his presence than by the fundamentalist message he preaches. He is moralistic, railing about good and evil, often simplistic and polarizing. His soft voice is a kind of disguise for the words he speaks. He has a mean streak and can be cruel to his opponents, taking public note, for example, of Senator Ted Kennedy's swimming skills.

Raised in the small (pop. 11,584) North Carolina town of Monroe, where his father was both police and fire chief, Helms retains his country style. His frequent response to an inquiry about how he is doing is "Well enough to take some chicken broth." He stands at 6 ft. 2 in., with a gangly frame that is slightly stoop-shouldered. He walks like a sailor, which he once was, elbows extended and his legs spread as he lopes along. He has a small mouth that gives him a puckish look, even though, at 59, his hair is thinning and his chin has doubled. His round brown eyes and arched eyebrows tend to make him look perpetually surprised. But Helms knows exactly how to behave. "I'm a lousy politician," he says, in his best humble-pie manner, "and a terrible speaker."

Helms also knows his people. For years he was a TV political commentator in Raleigh, and his bristling, anti-Government editorials gained him a wide audience. Back home in North Carolina last week, speaking to the Chamber of Commerce, Helms moved easily through the crowd, always deferential, always courtly, touching in his folksy way on the mess the country is in. He listened to the familiar urgings to keep up the good fight. A thin film of sweat covered his face, a reminder of Helms' intensity; he is not a gregarious, double-handshake politician who thrusts himself at crowds.

Helms lives modestly, almost reclusively. He and his wife Dot rarely entertain or go out. Helms instead pours his energy into his work. He wakes up around 6 a.m. and spends several hours reading reports and answering mail, sending off about 75 letters a day. He is attentive to friend as well as foe and is known for helping North Carolina constituents who have opposed him bitterly.

Helms never returns home before 8 p.m. After dinner with his wife, he goes back to his reading or telephone calls until midnight. Helms seldom watches television, and he has been to only a couple of movies in the last 20 years; he gets impatient over the lost time. His only relaxation, he says, is to run a mile a day, walk his beagle Patches and spend time with his grandchildren. Helms does not drink but smokes a pack of cigarettes over a couple of days. He carries Lucky Strikes in his shirt pocket and always offers one to visitors, sometimes thanking people when he sees them smoking. He seldom forgets his North Carolina roots.

Raleigh, his home town now, is headquarters of the Congressional Club. He created the club in 1973 to pay off his campaign debts. By the time he ran for a second term in 1978, the club was staffed by 150 people and raised almost $8 million for his re-election and another $8 million in 1980. Its heavy impact is feared by many Democrats. Club mailings and TV ads are hard-hitting, sometimes vicious. The club backed John East for the Senate in North Carolina last fall, for example, and so mangled the record of his opponent, conservative Democratic Senator Robert Morgan, that Morgan looked like a liberal. At the same time, the club's skillfully edited TV ads in favor of East made him look so vigorous that most people in the state were unaware until after the election that the new Senator is a victim of polio and confined to a wheelchair.

The club makes itself felt in races all across the country. Dedicated to the defeat of liberals, it issued tens of thousands of mailings to document the voting records of Democratic Senators on such issues as prayer in schools, abortion and sex education. Some of the letters draw angry fire. When one mailing in Ohio charged that Senator John Glenn's vote on the liberalization of the Hatch Act was intended to turn the Government over to labor unions, Glenn angrily confronted Helms and demanded the messages be stopped. Helms apologized, told Glenn he was unaware that his signature was on them. Robert Morgan in defeat is even more alarmed: "You can't believe how this group scares people, including Senators when they vote."

Morgan's charge is music to Helms' ear, since his aim is to scare liberals. One reason he proposes so many amendments is to force Senators to get on the record. Viguerie argues that this is what the New Right is all about. "These liberals aren't used to having their voting records spotlighted," says Viguerie. "We've finally learned not to rely on the media, which has a liberal bias anyway. So we bypass them by mail and TV and go directly to the voters. Democrats don't like that, and they're crying." Viguerie predicts the Democratic screams are going to got louder. "Jesse has an army out there," he says. "and he talks to them almost weekly by mail. We're years ahead of the Democrats in the technology." So powerful is Helms' club back home that the North Carolina Republican Party has become a weak appendage.

Restraint comes hard for Jesse Helms. "I'm so used to throwing grenades," he told some of his Senate staffers one day, "that I don't know how to hang on to them." It was a revealing comment. for Jesse Helms surely will not hold back. He has built his career on drawing the line, charging forward, preaching the ruthless application of conservative dogma. That is how he got to be the head of Jesse's army. And that is how he finally got invited to the dance.

-- By Robert Ajemian/Washington

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