Goodbye, Senator Know-nothing

Jesse Helms trashed the U.N. and drove our allies nuts. And the Bush team will keep his go-it-alone ideology alive even after he leaves office.

By Ian Williams

Aug. 23, 2001 | Future historians may find it difficult to believe that for much of the momentous last decade, American foreign policy was held hostage by a churlish septuagenarian bigot whose view of the world made Rush Limbaugh's seem suavely cosmopolitan. Books have been written about the role of the individual in history, and North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms will doubtless go down in future tomes as the lone destroyer of one of the most promising diplomatic eras of the 20th century. And his retirement, announced in a North Carolina television appearance Wednesday night, can't undo his impact on the world.

Even before he became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms used and abused his power as ranking Republican on the committee to turn American diplomacy into an oxymoron, making the world's only superpower the object of sniggers, incredulous exasperation and dogged opposition among its allies as well as enemies.

Helms was widely reviled by liberals for his atavistic views on race, affirmative action and gay rights. "If the homosexuals would stop doing what they are doing, an end would be put to all future cases of AIDS," he once said memorably. An ardent segregationist, in 1996 he played the race card in his last race with Harvey Gantt, an African-American, with a nationally attacked television ad featuring a white worker ostensibly rejected for a job because of his race.

But his lasting legacy is in the area of foreign relations. Helms did not have the excuse of constituent pressure for this crusade. A North Carolina reporter who followed Helms on the campaign trail in 1996 told me he could not remember a single appearance at which either the candidate or the voters had raised a foreign policy issue. In a sense, this lack of constituent interest explains his success.

Just before he died, ex-Sen. J. William Fulbright, D-Ark., explained to me that the reason he lost his Senate seat was that his opponent had "outed" him to the voters of Arkansas as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, as irrelevant and suspicious to down-home voters as the Politburo. "You don't think Claiborne Pell goes around telling Rhode Island that he's got the job now, do you?" Fulbright chuckled. Indeed, when Helms ran in 1984, he promised North Carolina voters that he would not take the Foreign Relations chairmanship but would stick to Agriculture -- a much more potent interest for his state. Nobody appeared to notice when he broke his word.

It is of course quite possible to have profoundly reactionary principles and a wide knowledge of the world. Henry Kissinger's name comes immediately to mind. What made Helms a bigot, as opposed to a mere reactionary, was his know-nothing outlook on the rest of the world. While he held nations hostage to his small-minded views, he understood little about them, having only personally visited Mexico. But Americans tolerated his ignorance. In most other countries, if the equivalent officeholder had, as Helms did, introduced Benazir Bhutto, prime minister of Pakistan, on the Senate floor as premier of India, and boasted that he had had a 90 minute chat with her about Indian affairs, then he would have been laughed out of office. In Washington, those who care about such things were thankful he got the right subcontinent.

More disturbing, they groveled in the face of his notorious vindictiveness. Helms could and did hold up or veto ambassadorial appointments, and used the threat to get his way. In the course of his vendettas, crucial ambassadorships across the world were left unfilled, and capable diplomats left the State Department.

But his principles were ultimately fairly flexible, subject to political expedience. One could respect a thoroughgoing, principled bigotry, but he was as unctuously flexible as all those so-called liberals who fawned over him and pandered to his whims -- notably President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

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