Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism - Hardcover

Prologue

Although Jesse had earned a fearsome reputation for his slash-and-burn political tactics, there was also a softer side. Within his political circle, Helms was compassionate and caring; his Senate staffers uniformly remembered him warmly. By the late 1980s, Helms was well known for his personal style and his conscious rejection of the imperiousness of some of his colleagues. In 1998, when the Washingtonian surveyed 1,200 staffers and Capitol Hill employees, Jesse was rated among the nicest senators.1 Garrett Epps, a columnist for the liberal Independent Weekly, published in Durham, interviewed Helms in 1989. He was surprised at what he found. “The Helms I expected,” he recalled, “was a sizzling-hot, angry, defensive ideologue.” The person he found instead was “relaxed, friendly, funny and genuinely curious about ideas and people.”2 Don Nickles, one of Helms’s closest allies in the Senate, later reflected that the common caricatures of Helms as mean and vindictive were “misplaced.” Nickles described him as “probably the nicest person serving in the Senate,” certainly “the most gentlemanly of any of the senators,” and a person who “epitomized the Southern gentleman.” In his dealings with other senators he was “always very pleasant, never disagreeable.” He was also unpretentious, according to Nickles. During Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, Nickles recalled, Helms objected when police stopped traffic so that a bus with senators could pass through.3

Helms’ personal warmth extended beyond senators. The third floor of the Dirksen Office Building, where Jesse’s Senate offices were located, contained two public elevators, which were old and slow, and three private elevators reserved only for senators. Staffers and visitors that snuck on the senators’ elevator were routinely evicted. The public elevator, located just outside of Helms’s office, was often crowded with tourists. If he noticed them waiting, Helms delighted in gathering tourists and taking them on the senators’ elevator, or for a ride on the Senate subway shuttle that ran between Dirksen and the Capitol, even when votes were about to occur and the shuttle was reserved for senators. Sometimes, on the spur of the moment, Helms ushered tourists to the family gallery, on the third floor of the Senate, and provided seats for them to watch the proceedings. The Senate guards were so used to Jesse’s routine with visitors that they often chuckled when they saw him coming with an entourage in tow. He considered himself a sort of unofficial host of Capitol Hill, and he personally felt that it was his duty to ensure that tourists enjoyed their visit.4

Helms was especially kind to children, and he liked nothing better than speaking to visiting schoolchildren. According to his own estimate, between 1973 and the mid-1990s, he visited with some 60,000 children from North Carolina. He sometimes disappeared, and staffers would later discover him with a group of children. To “countless small children who have visited the Capitol with their parents,” wrote a New York Times reporter in 1987, he was “simply the friendly man who let them pretend to drive the Senate subway train.” Once Helms gathered up one little girl, seven-year-old Lindsay Rogers of Denver, asking her: “How would you like to sit in the driver’s seat?” Like many other children, he put Lindsay at the controls of the subway, which ran automatically. In 1987, he received a letter from a college student who remembered similar treatment when his sixth-grade class visited Washington, and the Senator let him “drive” the subway.5 Helms was also known for welcoming visitors into his office, especially visitors from North Carolina, and many of them were escorted to the Senate floor for a personal tour from the Senator. He loved seeing a “sparkle” in their eye, he recalled, when they received this sort of treatment from a United States senator. Once he hosted a student group while the president of Argentina was waiting to see him. When an aide interrupted him, he told her to visit with the Argentine. “What do you think I have you for?” he asked.6

Helms’s office was also known for unusual staff loyalty and dedication, despite low pay: the senator paid some of the lowest salaries on Capitol Hill, and he always made it a point to return money to the Congress. He scrupulously avoided excessive overseas travel himself; his staff traveled at private expense. Very often they made phone calls at their own expense because they realized how carefully he scrutinized the phone bills. But his staff was, nonetheless, fiercely loyal. Partly, staff loyalty came from ideological commitment, partly because of the personal bond they felt with the senator, who was warm and avuncular within his circle. He established warm, personal relationships with staffers. After aide Deborah DeMoss lost her father in 1986, Helms became a sort of surrogate father. When she became engaged to Honduran René Fonseca in 1992, Jesse insisted that he meet him in order to look him over. He spent half of a day, taking Fonseca around Washington. After the visit, the Senator informed DeMoss that he approved of the match. In many other instances, he reached out to staffers, keeping up with their health and the welfare of their families. According to DeMoss, Helms, on a personal level, was a “complete opposite” of his public image.

Helms’s office was known through Washington for its efficiency and responsiveness to constituents. Darryl Nirenberg, who served as Helms’s chief of staff between 1991 and 1995, described Jesse as a superb manager who would have made, Nirenberg thought, an excellent lawyer or small businessman. Jesse often mentored staffers by projecting high standards and expectations, by carefully editing their prose, and by permitting them to pursue initiatives on their own under his supervision. His standards included an impeccable ethical sense, and Helms could never be accused of crossing lines or seeking shortcuts. As a former journalist, Jesse took great pride in effective communication. He was a “fabulous writer,” Nirenberg recalled, and “nobody could write like him.” Helms exhibited an unusual work ethic, and he did not expect others to do things that he was unwilling to do; he personally involved himself in many issues.7

The senator made it a point to instruct staffers that solving constituents’ problems was the office’s primary mission; the first thing new staff were told was the need for responsiveness. He expected phone calls to be answered within an hour and all mail to be answered promptly; and periodically he checked up on things by investigating whether phone calls and mail were answered. Although most Senate offices did not treat mail in this careful fashion, Helms insisted on this level of service, and if problems remained unsolved, said one staffer, “we heard about it.” Mail consumed a large portion of the time of his entire staff; all of them worked on it, and unlike other Senate offices there were no legislative correspondents whose sole duty was the mail. Helms himself personally answered a large bulk of the correspendence, taking a stack of letters home with him at night and returning with typewritten drafts for his assistant to retype. Scott Wilson, who worked as a staffer in the early and mid-1980s, remembered that everyone in the office spent much of their time on mail; everyone had typewriters at their desk. One day Wilson was in the senator’s office and he suggested the need for additional staff support to handle the mail. “Well, son,” Helms...