What's on Jesse's Mind?

By Michael Duffy/Washington

At first Bill Clinton knew exactly what he wanted to do after learning that North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms had told a Raleigh newspaper that the President "better have a bodyguard" if he ever visited his state. "I'm ready to go to North Carolina right now," an angry Clinton informed White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, who brought him the news last Tuesday. The deep strike in enemy territory was quickly dismissed as impulsive. "We can't just react every time Jesse Helms decides to push his crazy buttons," said a senior official.

Instead White House aides glimpsed an opportunity. Helms' blast -- the second reckless salvo from the archconservative Republican in four days -- offered Clinton a chance to point out how extremist Republicans can be. His public reaction was carefully studied: calling Helms' comments "unwise and inappropriate," the President suggested that Republicans might want to examine whether Helms was fit to serve as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "That's a decision for them to make," said Clinton, "not for me."

Certainly, nowhere is the prospect of Republican control of the Hill as disagreeable to Clinton as on Foreign Relations. For the past seven years, the panel has been a quiet congressional backwater, politely posing few problems for Clinton or his predecessor, George Bush. But control of the panel moves from the courtly, bland and ineffectual Democrat Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island to the reactionary Helms, who promises to let few Administration positions go unquestioned. Helms has always been a bomb thrower, unafraid of blowing up reputations abroad and at home. He likened Haitian leader Jean- Bertrand Aristide to Adolf Hitler. He still refers to the world's most populous country as "Red" China. He stuck up for the architects of apartheid over the black majority in South Africa and once accused Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz of "playing footsie with the communists." Last year, after debating Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, the first black woman in the Senate, about the virtues of the Confederate flag, he said, "I'm going to sing Dixie to her until she cries." When Clinton nominated Roberta Achtenberg, a gay-rights activist, to a post at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms said, "She's not your garden-variety lesbian. She's a militant-activist-mean lesbian."

Now, as chairman of the prestigious committee, Helms will be in a position to make his strongly conservative -- and sometimes highly quixotic -- foreign policy views matter. Two weeks ago, he sent Clinton a letter threatening to give the Administration's foreign policy a rough ride for the next two years unless the President deferred the vote on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to the new session of Congress. A Senate aide likened the tactic to "kidnapping a child and sending a ransom note even though you plan to kill the kid anyway."

But it is important to distinguish Helms' ferocious bark from his bite. The Senator has said, for example, that he favors a "surgical" operation to decapitate Fidel Castro, but he doesn't have the power to make something like that happen. His rough agenda as chief of the foreign policy panel, while conservative, is not wholly outside the mainstream. His doubts about Clinton's controversial pact with North Korea to curb its nuclear program in exchange for new light-water reactors financed by Japan and South Korea are shared by other Republicans. He will look into drug trafficking and human-rights violations in Burma, joined by Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry. He wants to withhold foreign aid from Colombia if Bogota shows favor to the Cali drug cartel, a position Kerry also embraces. He will probably call for close - scrutiny of arms sales by the Russians and the Chinese, a practice advocated by many.

Other priorities are more peculiar to Helms. According to a staff memorandum obtained last week by TIME, Helms has chosen some personal priorities: to examine whether to fold the Foreign Service into the civil service; to reconsider Washington's relations with the U.N.; to do away with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; and to investigate whether foreign aid could be replaced by the Overseas Private Investment Corp., a federal agency that helps U.S. capitalists make investments in developing nations. Helms can also be counted on to ride several other hobbyhorses: his hatred for all communist regimes, including China and Cuba; his passion to see Americans compensated by governments that expropriated their property; his conviction that the Mideast peace process has cost Americans too much.

Helms' distaste for foreign aid is longstanding, as he bluntly told a news conference in Raleigh the day after the election: "The foreign aid program has spent an estimated $2 trillion of the American taxpayer's money, much of it going down foreign ratholes to countries that constantly oppose us in the U.N." But he has limited room to maneuver. Total U.S. largesse abroad in 1994 comes to $12.3 billion. Half of that is military aid, a backdoor subsidy for U.S. weaponsmakers that he is unlikely to gut. Actual developmental aid, the kind conservatives love to hate, comes to only $6.5 billion, down 20% from 1993. The incoming chairman has promised to make no cuts to Israel, the biggest recipient, with $1.2 billion. The Administration has already decided to close 23 Agency for International Development missions. Either way, foreign aid authorization bills rarely matter: Congress has not managed to pass one in nine years. The money is actually doled out by the Appropriations Committee.

While the prospect of nonstop hearings promises to make life miserable at the State Department, senior Clinton officials are not visibly troubled by Helms yet. In a pep talk to his top aides, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott pointed out that Presidents retain huge advantages in managing foreign affairs because they can do so much without congressional approval. He added that November exit polls showed foreign policy does not much concern voters at the moment; voters seem to want more continuity with the past in foreign policy, not less.

Helms' potential for troublemaking is also limited by the fact that he does not enjoy strong support from his party colleagues on the committee. His fire- breathing rhetoric makes it hard for him to round up moderate votes. Richard Lugar of Indiana, who chaired the panel during the early 1980s, when Helms opted for control of the Agriculture Committee, is a thoughtful internationalist who often teams up with Kansas' Nancy Kassebaum to form the balance of power on the committee. She is close to her Kansas colleague Bob Dole, who cannot become an isolationist while he harbors presidential ambitions. As a result, while Helms might be able to score debating points against the Clinton team, he will be hard pressed to change the President's policy very much.

Notwithstanding his sharp tongue, Helms has slowed down in recent years. Fighting prostate cancer, back problems and a hernia, he had a quadruple bypass in June 1992. The Senator's once feared foreign policy team is widely considered the most moderate he has had in a decade. In 1992 he installed as staff director of Foreign Relations retired Navy Admiral James ("Bud") Nance, a former fighter pilot. Nance let go many of the more free-wheeling and controversial aides. "He fired half of us, and the other half ran for cover," says a staff member who was forced out. "Now he can't get legislation through."

In his long career as a foreign policy gadfly, Helms has tended to lose more than he wins. "He will pitch a fit and make a stink about a lot of things," says a former Republican staff member on the committee. "But on the big things, he rarely prevails." Where he is likely to affect policy is at the margins, on treaties that must be approved -- there are few on the docket -- and appointments. State Department officials believe Helms will manage to kill George Bush's cherished Chemical Weapons Convention banning the production of such arms because the Senator believes the Russians are still cheating. He is likely to make it tougher for the U.S. to deploy troops to the Golan Heights as part of an Israeli-Syrian peace deal, though the Senate will probably approve the idea over his objections.

His obstructionist approach to nominations is nothing new; for years he has placed "holds" on ambassadorial choices he disliked, angering Republicans and Democrats alike. Even before he was chairman, he held close to a veto over any diplomatic nominations, keeping some in limbo for months, even years. At other times Helms prefers just to make trouble. When Clinton forwarded to the Senate last year Geraldine Ferraro's nomination to be Ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Huamn Rights, Helms sent the State Department as part of the process more than 100 questions that he wanted answered in 24 hours. Sample: "How many countries in the world have official languages?"

Before a Rose Garden ceremony last Wednesday marking the accord on the GATT treaty, Clinton had a chance to press Dole to block Helms' ascension to committee chairman. But the President, a top official said, did not bring it up; he knows Helms is not going be unseated. Besides, an unbridled Helms, whose every word and deed will make the evening news, may actually prove a plus for the Administration. Says a senior official: "It's going to be a problem for our foreign policy, but I think it's going to be a serious political problem for the Republicans." If your name is Bill Clinton, it could be good to have Jesse Helms to kick around.

With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister, Elaine Shannon and Mark Thompson/Washington