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Van Helmsing

By David Weigel on 3.31.08 @ 12:07AM

(Page 2 of 2)

When Smith died in 1953, Helms returned to North Carolina and wrote a column for an investment newspaper that blistered Raleigh and stuffy local editorial boards as much as it blistered Washington. He moved onto television in 1958, making the same points, and earning more explosive success.

Helms's TV commentaries still seem oddly familiar today, and not just because Helms laid the groundwork for his Senate crusades against honoring Martin Luther King ("a communist agitator") and condemning homosexuality (Bayard Rustin, co-organizer of the March on Washington, was a "sex pervert"). Helms's tenor and focus were the mold for future rightwing populists like Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs.

Helms railed against the University of North Carolina for allowing liberal agitators to speak on campus, and he exhorted his listeners to support a speaker ban in the state legislature. It passed. Helms turned a teaching assistant who assigned students a slightly salacious poem into a minor Ward Churchill figure.

When the Charlotte Observer or the Raleigh News and Observer attacked Helms, he informed his fans that these newspapers had contempt for their values. "These long hairs keep talking about a revolution," Helms said privately in 1970. "One of these days they may get one -- but not the kind they expect."

Obviously, Helms was right. This was what infuriated the left about Helms: Such a reactionary could only succeed because... well, could the reaction against their ideas possibly be so strong? It could. But this chemistry worked against Helms, too. His politics were completely reactive. As much power as he accrued in the Senate, even his base knew that they were electing a saboteur, not a senator.

In 1984, when Helms defeated Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt in a Homerian epic of a Senate race, Helms's pollsters asked one last question, just for fun. If Helms ran for governor, would he have beaten Hunt? Helms lost the fictional race by double digits.

THIS DIDN'T SEEM to bother Helms. He realized his role in the buildup of the conservative movement, and again and again in this narrative he is shoved aside by the people he helped elect.

After getting Ronald Reagan to the threshold of the GOP nomination 1976, Helms watched bitterly as Reagan selected moderate Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker as a running mate in a craven grab for delegates. Helms fought the Martin Luther King holiday in the Senate confident (and correct) that most conservatives didn't want it, but Link quotes a rival senator's aid on why the party abandoned him: they "wanted something to do for black recognition, and this [was] a relatively easy one." The man who the new conservative majority identified with the most was, most often, a fall guy.

Helms did have major successes on the sort of hot-wire social legislation that no other senator would touch. No one wanted to debate the National Endowment for the Arts, for example, but once Helms introduced an amendment prohibiting it from funding obscene art, few senators dared vote against it.

But the rest of his victories were short-lived. Helms terrified the foreign policy establishment when in 1986 he won the party's ranking slot on the Foreign Relations committee. He defeated a more moderate Republican for the job, and he walked out of the party's vote smiling at the press corps. "I'm sorry to disappoint you folks," he said to reporters. "I hate to ruin your day, but you lost."

From 1995 to 2001, when he led the committee, he put fear in the bones of internationalists, killed the nominations of people who favored Third World birth control, and delighted the right. But the man he defeated for the job, Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, came back to run the committee after Helms retired. That's the same Lugar who co-sponsored arms control legislation with Barack Obama, and whom Obama says might have a place in his cabinet.

Flick on talk radio and you'll hear Helms's legacy. Flick on C-Span and you'll wonder if the man had any impact at all.

Letter to the Editor

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