Or maybe the question is when did his views become so fashionable?
Helms was a “unilateralist” back when George W. Bush was still hitting the bars in his 20s. Forget grousing European allies, sometimes the conservative former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee was an army of one, standing alone against the entire D.C. political establishment and sometimes even the world.
In recent years, Helms is most famous for personally holding up the U.S. payment of back dues to the United Nations for 17 months, until they agreed on reforms; for personally scuttling the nomination of popular former GOP governor William Weld to be ambassador to Mexico (Helms thought he was too soft on drugs), and for his uncompromising alliance–some would say leadership–of America’s once marginalized religious right. And for … well you get the picture.
Such recent exploits, however, are only the end of the list. Jesse Helms learned early on to stand alone against the political tides, and things have only gotten easier. When he entered the Senate 30 years ago, most of his fellow lawmakers found Helms’s unilateralism and aggressive, uncompromising views far to their right. Back in 1972, most believed that America, like Europe, was evolving toward a social democratic, secularist and internationalist agenda.
Today, instead, it’s clear that many of the controversial foreign-policy views Helms espoused are probably here to stay. In fact, the man that American liberals and Europeans have often loved to hate is leaving Washington at a time when his approach to foreign policy is arguably more in vogue than at any time in recent history. The moderate Senate Helms entered 30 years ago has veered sharply in his direction in recent years. Many of Helms’s disciples, meanwhile, are better positioned than ever before to carry on his legacy. Over the years, he nurtured the minds of scores of congressional staffers. Many of them now work in the Bush administration. “It’s far from the end of an era,” says Marc Thiessen, a former Helms spokesman who now serves as chief speechwriter for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “Senator Helms gave us combat training and now all of us have set off into the world. The team of Helms alumni is now going to be influencing foreign policy for years to come.”
Among the Helms staffers serving in the Bush administration: Roger Noriega, U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States; Dan Fisk, deputy assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs; Ian Brzezinski, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Europe and NATO; Steve Biegun, staff secretary for the National Security Council; Marshall Billingsley, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for negotiations policy, and Michael A. Westphal, the senior civilian appointee in the Department of Defense with responsibility for sub-Saharan Africa strategy. There are many others. In fact, so many of Helms’s disciples now serve in the Department of Defense that Rumsfeld recently hosted a lunch for them and invited the senator.
So what exactly did Jesse Helms stand for? Ask him, and he’ll give you a simple answer. “I worried about doing what was right,” Helms told NEWSWEEK. Ask him if there’s a “Helms doctrine,” and his face goes blank. Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, compares Helms to Arthur Vandenberg and Henry Cabot Lodge–as a “broker between a skeptical public opinion and an insistent internationalist elite.” Some might argue with the “broker” part as Helms wasn’t always willing to compromise." And certainly much of the public despised what he stood for.
But it’s nonetheless true that his ideology reflects a certain segment of America that is little understood overseas and has consistently confounded America’s allies for what they see as stubborn self-righteousness. In recent years, this constituency, anchored in the Bible Belt of the Deep South and in some parts of the Midwest and Sunbelt, has seen its power grow dramatically.
They share an ideology that Mead argues has it roots all the way back when Andrew Jackson was fighting against Northeastern elites in the 19th century and whipping French butt down in New Orleans. It’s driven less by the intellectual arguments for do-gooding and multilateral cooperation of Bill Clinton’s terms–or even the senior George Bush’s–and more by emotion, patriotism and instinct. At its core it is deeply nationalistic and anti-intellectual–and this might in part explain why Helms was so hard to argue with. “If he was going down a road and I or anyone else told him ‘you can’t do it that way,’ it was almost a guarantee he would,” recalls one former aide who now works in the Bush administration. “He has only two directions on his moral compass.
There are no gray areas. “I have occasionally been referred to as ‘Senator No’,” Helms has often written. “I am proud of the title.”
Indeed, Helm believed the United States was the chosen country in a battle between good and evil, a view with distinctly biblical undertones. And it explains much about Helms’s thinking. Helms believes in protecting U.S. sovereignty above all else–why dilute the authority of the United States? Out of this belief stems Helms’s disdain for international agreements like the ABM treaty, the U.N. Criminal Court or the Kyoto Protocol. He would prefer to live undisturbed, yet when challenged, strike back with raw brute force.
It’s a philosophy that offends both European allies and internationalist Americans concerned with problems outside our borders. But some see echoes of his positions in the Bush administration. Bush’s “axis of evil” outlook squares nicely with Helms’s view that the United States has a special role in the world–just as President Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire” is also congruent with Helms’s good-vs.-evil paradigm. The hawkish views toward terrorism recall his uncompromising views during the cold war–views shared by Reagan–such as his opposition to detente, the Panama Canal treaty and Noriega and his support for the Nicaraguan contras. The Bush administration’s recent decision to move forward with a missile-defense system would not likely have been possible if Senator Helms had not led the charge to scrap the ABM treaty–taking on the Clinton White House and many outside of U.S. borders. “Senator Helms can’t take credit for creating these positions in foreign policy. What Senator Helms can lay credit for is keeping it alive for a very long time. He was the keeper of the flame,” Says Daniel Pletka, a former aide who is now vice president of the American Enterprise Institute. “Being right is more important than politics. Those qualities are the mark of man.”
“One area where you can see Senator Helms’s character in the administration is [that] they’re not afraid to take a stand and stick with it,” says Patricia McNerney, his staff director on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. “You don’t worry about carping. That was the Helms approach, you figure out the policy, take a stand and you bring the others to you.”
Exactly who will step up to take his place remains to be seen. Clearly, however, Jesse Helms no longer stands alone.
