Here's Where I Stand
A Memoir
by Jesse Helms
Random House, 317 pp., $25.95
IN HISTORICAL TERMS IT WAS not too long ago, a half-century or less, that old-line Southern Democrats, with their seniority and solidarity in Congress and maverick governors like George Wallace, were a significant force in American politics. Jesse Helms went to Washington the first time (1950-53) as a staffer for one of those, Senator Willis Smith. Helms's autobiography covers that, as well as his small-town Depression-era origins, his career as a broadcast executive and editorialist that made him a candidate for the U.S. Senate as a newly minted Republican, and his 30 years in the Senate (1972-2002), including his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Jesse Helms is a unique, and probably unrepeatable, phenomenon. He was five times elected U.S. senator from a state that is larger than is commonly recognized, despite a well-deserved reputation for refusing to play by many of the normal rules of politics, and a professional and political background different from most senators. He won five statewide elections against opponents with potfuls of out-of-state money and the opposition of every daily newspaper in the state. After and before each election, the press announced that his victory had been a fluke and could not be repeated.
This autobiography displays many of the characteristics that one likes to think belong to the man himself. It is candid (in an extroverted sense), humorous, charitable to opponents, and firm in avowing the continued correctness of positions taken. You can see here the feisty but good-humored, above-board, and likable personality that was at least partly responsible for his political success and that went a long way, as he became better known in Washington, toward softening the hostile impression of "Senator No."
Despite a reputation for intransigence, Helms as senator clearly understood the difference between compromising on the possible and abandoning principle. There is no pomposity, self-absorption, or convenient obfuscation in his recollections. He tells on himself the story of one of his assistants, visiting in the bowels of the State Department, seeing a framed picture of the senator in a place of honor. Expressing some surprise at this, Helms's man was told that the portrait was a reminder that "the enemy is always watching."
Future students of later 20th-century politics will have, in this work, a useful and different perspective to consider about a good many things of importance. While Helms does not deal in gossip and personalities, his recollections do give interesting glimpses of the presidents and other greats and near-greats on the national scene during his time. To give a few hints only: Nixon did, indeed, lie to a friendly freshman senator about Watergate. From retirement, Sam Ervin telephoned his successor almost daily with advice. There are many more such nuggets. Helms's experience as a reporter and editorialist, I daresay, makes him a livelier and nuts-and-bolts storyteller than most politicians.
Helms clearly regards his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as the most important aspect of his career. He believes he was instrumental not only in thwarting many bad appointments and projects, but in reversing a virtual monopoly on foreign policy by the State Department bureaucracy, and returning decisive control to the president and Congress. He has not retreated in the least from the stand that it was right to support bad governments when they were barriers against the far greater evil of Communist expansion. At any rate, Helms's account of how he navigated the Senate and dealt with the State Department will be of continued interest to those who study such things in the future.
I said that Helms's autobiography is candid--at an extroverted level. Yet there is a deep contradiction. In his comments on recent times, Helms has never met a Republican president or Republican policy that he does not like. He avows satisfaction at the triumph of conservative forces in American politics. At the same time he admits failure in the causes that brought him to prominence: abortion, school prayer, busing, affirmative action, arts funding. To close out his career as a complete party man is a strange, though probably inevitable, climax to the national career of one who rose to notice and power as a lonely die-hard for principle.
The chairman of the Republican National Committee was reported recently as apologizing for his party's "southern strategy," though doubtless he does not intend to give back the 7 out of 10 national elections that the strategy helped to win. Jesse Helms's career was part and parcel of the forces that made that strategy successful. His five-minute television editorials after the news, which went out across vast rural, conservative regions of North Carolina on the Tobacco Network, were an eloquent expression of the white South's response to the ferment of the civil rights era. I know. I was there. I heard them. You would never know that from the autobiography of the senator who now thinks federal appropriations to fight AIDS in Africa is a high priority.
The important story in Helms's career is one he never acknowledges and, perhaps, does not even recognize. It is the taming and mainstreaming of southern politics by co-option into the Republican party.
Clyde N. Wilson is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The John C. Calhoun Papers.