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Van Helmsing

By David Weigel on 3.31.08 @ 12:07AM

Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism
by William Link
(St. Martin's Press, 656 pages, $39.95)

Early last year when his presidential bid was gearing up, one of Barack Obama's classmates from Harvard Law handed the New York Times a photo of the young superstar from a 1990 election-watching party. Obama is wearing jeans and a blue shirt opened down to the last button, as if he's en route to a phone booth and a battle with Lex Luthor. The buttons are undone so that Obama can reveal a T-shirt: "Harvey Gantt for U.S. Senate."

Why Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte who was running for a Senate seat in North Carolina? Why not, say, John Kerry, who was winning his second term that night in Massachusetts? It wasn't just that Harvey Gantt was black. It was that he was running against Jesse Helms.

That year Helms had attacked Gantt for benefiting from racial preferences, for supporting racial quotas, and for being close to Jesse Jackson. Gantt fought back with millions of dollars in campaign funds, raised on swings to California and New York from liberals much like Obama. The result was the same as every time Helms faced a challenge from the left. Helms won.

There was nothing unusual about Obama's 1990 sartorial choice. To be a liberal in the ages of Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton was to oppose Jesse Helms. In Righteous Warrior, his authoritative, occasionally textbook-ish biography of the senator, William A. Link provides a generous helping of their insults: Helms was "the Senate's most persistent yahoo," "Senator Know-Nothing," an undisputed homophobe and a vaudeville bigot.

School busing, the Martin Luther King holiday, AIDS research, gay rights, arts funding, foreign aid -- name a liberal cause and Helms was there trying to block it. How many senators had Loudon Wainwright III songs ("Jesse Don't Like It") written about them for NPR?

THE IRONY HERE -- and Link is only the umpteenth writer to realize this -- is that the more Helms stoked that anger, the more he won. Every dollar from an eastern seaboard or San Francisco liberal was matched by support from Helms's base.

On the night of his 1990 re-election, Helms watched Dan Rather announce his victory and crowed about it when he took the stage. There was "no joy in Mudville tonight," he said. "If the liberal politicians think I've been a thorn in their side in the past, they haven't seen anything yet."

Link portrays Helms as central to "the rise of modern conservatism." This is true, as anyone who worked on Ronald Reagan's primary campaign in 1976 could tell you. Reagan's career would have ended if Helms hadn't fired up his political machine.

But Reagan's conservatism was a reaction to the threat of Great Society statism and foreign policy weakness. Helms came to conservatism as a reaction against the liberal elite -- academics, East Coast intellectuals, Freedom Riders, and anyone else who dared to meddle with the Southern family's way of life. "Nobody thought it was terrible," Helms once said of segregation. "Not even the blacks." Who were social scientists and sanctimonious politicians to say any different?

Helms entered politics explicitly to battle these people. In 1950, months before his 29th birthday, the young journalist and political mover worked on his first statewide campaign: a primary battle between two Democrats for one of the state's Senate seats. (The Democratic primary was the election, for all intents and purposes, until the mid-1960s.) A conservative senator died and was replaced by Frank Graham, the president of the University of North Carolina, a liberal who favored a slow, gradual end to segregation.

"In Frank Graham," Link writes, "the opponents of New Deal liberalism had found a target that embodied their fears about labor relations and race; these joined with their anxieties about Communist subversion in the administration of Harry S Truman."

Helms liked Graham, but he signed on with conservative Raleigh lawyer Willis Smith and battered the incumbent with two messages. One was economic freedom: Smith railed against "all unnecessary encroachments of big government upon the lives of the people." The other was race.

Although his contemporaries quibble over how much influence Helms had on the campaign, Smith's ads included a fake endorsement from a "Colored Committee for Dr. Frank Graham" and a forged photo of Graham's wife dancing with a black man. Smith won, and Mr. Helms went to Washington with him.

ALMOST EVERYTHING HELMS needed to know about public opinion he gleaned from the Smith campaign. He saw that voters didn't like to be bossed around by perceived "elites," and that the appeal of a man like Graham could be swamped if voters were offered a man who felt like they did about race, about Communism, about the federal government. "I would like to call the roll, somehow," he told a friend, "[and determine if there were] enough people who understand state sovereignty to have some political effect."

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Foreign Policy, Barack Obama, Television, Law, NATO, Communism, Conservatism