WASHINGTON — I have been reading an advance copy of memoirs
written by Jesse Helms, the retired North Carolina senator who
braved the liberals’ indignation to create the politics that now
prevails on Capitol Hill and in the White House, namely, modern
American conservatism. Helms did not do this alone, and arguably he
was only a member of the first-string team whose quarterback was
Ronald Reagan. Yet Helms was very important, particularly on the
social values issues that average Americans now deem so compelling.
His memoir, Here’s Where I Stand (Random House), is a very
good refresher course on how America moved from the dreary, futile
governance of Jimmy Carter to the present vigor of a proud, can-do
America.
Helms writes in straightforward prose from a foundation of
beliefs that are solidly conservative. He tells a good story. In
reading Here’s Where I Stand I have not been able to slay
the fear that when this book comes out on August 30 the dominant
liberal culture, the Kultursmog, is going to rain down on
him. It will malign his motives and values and belittle his
achievements. What will be left is another grotesque image of the
conservative public figure: a bigoted, small-minded, not very
intelligent, provincial. And so Jesse Helms will be interred in the
liberals’ burial ground along with Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon,
and all the other political leaders they have opposed. Across the
street is the liberal museum of leadership. Franklin Roosevelt is
there with all his famous successors, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter,
Bill Clinton, and various of Helms’s colleagues from the Senate:
Teddy Kennedy or his sidekick Christopher Dodd — the blood runs
thin. Strangely Lyndon Johnson is hardly visible.
The Kultursmog has been writing American history for us
for decades. Review it for yourself. It contains no admirable or
impressive conservatives. Yet here we are in 2005 with much of the
country governed by conservatives and conservative values. No
wonder the liberals are so perplexed and angry. They are a strange
band of rastaquoueres living in what for them is a strange
land. Nonetheless they still have the capacity, owing to their hold
on the culture’s centers of influence, to belittle those whom they
do not like, and to present them as grotesqueries. Watch the
liberals go to work over the next few weeks on President George W.
Bush’s perfectly sensible Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts. This
week one of their leading polluters, NARAL Pro-Choice America, is
airing fraudulent television advertisements presenting Roberts,
when he was deputy solicitor general during the presidency of
George H. W. Bush, as a supporter of “violent fringe groups and a
convicted clinic bomber.” Well, as memoirist Helms says of so many
of the deceits he had to deal with, horsefeathers.
In Here’s Where I Stand Helms chronicles reminiscences
of scores of friends, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Reagan, and
his great friend Lady Thatcher. At the end of the senator’s long
career a frail but spirited Lady Thatcher came to the dedication of
his Helms Center in rural North Carolina. She stayed for the entire
three-day ceremony. She knew she was with friends. Helms also
remembers those with whom he has disagreed. That would be every
liberal Democrat from the past thirty years. Unfortunately he is
too much the gentleman to pass on a bad word about any of them.
Even Boy Clinton gets a polite send off.
There are two topics on which Helms is particularly worth
reading, race relations and the United Nations. On race relations
he manfully comes out and makes the case for states’ rights and the
integration that he seems to think could have been worked out in
the last quarter of the 20th century without heavy-handed federal
involvement. I am not sure his optimism is warranted. The denial of
constitutional freedoms had been suffered by blacks for a long
time. A jolt of federal power did the trick. The extension of
federal power into areas not recognized by generations of Americans
(and not always salutary) now seems to be receding. Blacks have
their rights, and with the exception of affirmative action’s
enduring use the constitutional balance seems to be remerging. I
accept Helms’s insistence that he favored equal rights. I just
doubt his approach would have worked.
On the United Nations he has my vote every time. Wherever he
mentions that arrogant corrupt organization he is on the money. At
the very end of his memoir he reprints his very compelling speech
to the United Nations as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. There he notified the assembled crooks and agents of
tyranny that American sovereignty cannot be usurped. It is
dependent of the “consent of the American people.” He reminds them
of the dreadful job they have done as peacekeepers and conflict
managers. And he urges an end to corruption.
Bearing in mind that this past week saw the first conviction of
a UN oil-for-food crook in what is the largest fraud case in world
history, I think we can conclude that old Senator Helms’ memoir
makes for timely reading. Pre-order now on Amazon.
