One more historical record in refuting the Big Lie that Republican Party “Traditional Conservatives,” represented as the “New Right” (again), are in any way representative of an actual foreign policy of “Realism and Restraint.” As can be seen in the example of those two Traditional Conservatives, epitomized by John P. East heralded as a Traditional Conservative here, who with Jesse Helms, was most opposed to President Reagan for not being “hard-line” enough in military affairs! Following in the “tradition” of the “Conservative Movement Founders,” the troika of Kendall, Burnham, and Buckley, initially self-identified as the “New Right” as well, was this second “New Right” (they love re-labeling themselves as “New,” but it’s still always the equivalent of “New Coke”).
I spent four days going through files at the Reagan Library Archives a couple weeks ago, coming across how opposed "Traditional Conservatives” as represented by East/Helms were to any “backsliding” by Reagan on Arms Control, SDI, etc. Recently I explained my “overbroad brush” of criticism of “Conservatives” as due to their own “amalgamation” of “Conservatism” as one monolithic ideology, with Kendall (and like-minded Yoram Hazony) as their main political theorist of Trumpism, in misrepresenting “Conservatives” as the “U.S. Peace Party,” as the Quincy Institute’s “New Right foreign policy experts” (as distinguished from their “better-half, their "non-right wing side” of QI) did here:
"An evening of patriotism and conviviality honoring the work of longtime patriot and tireless defender of America and her founding principles—a 1996 Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow and our 2024 honoree, Mark Levin. Also featuring Mollie Hemingway, journalist, author, political commentator, and 2014 Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow, as the Master of Ceremonies.”
Who says there’s no connection with the Straussians of Claremont/Hillsdale, and The American Conservative and QI’s right-wing side? If you attend, Saurabh Sharma as representing the National Conservative’s Edmund Burke Society will probably be there as well, as an essential element of the “New Right,” as could have been seen here: "Opening Remarks on the future of American Foreign Policy from Saurabh Sharma, President of American Moment, and Emile Doak, Executive Director of The American Conservative, at the "Up From Chaos: Conserving American Security" Conference in Washington D.C.
With Trump’s “New Right” having swept the primaries, except for D.C., Jesse Helms, John P. East, Strom Thurmond, Straussians Willmoore Kendall and Harry Jaffa, as the principal "New Right” ideological antecedents of Trumpism (and DeSantism), are no doubt crowing in triumph from their perches in Hell, with the world going up in flames as they had worked so hard for in their lifetimes.
With this being one example that would be waged against even Reagan by the “UltraConservatives” described herein:
"Helms - tall, stoop-shouldered, owlish behind his horn-rimmed glasses -spoke for 40 minutes against the nomination, concluding: ''Mr. Weinberger is not ... prepared to make the clean break with the very policies ... which have managed our military and international decline.''
"Weinberger was confirmed that day by a 97-2 vote, with only Helms and his new Senate protege, John East, also from North Carolina, in opposition. The dissenting vote was Jesse Helms's Inauguration Day signal that he would oppose the new President he had helped elect on any deviation from the pure gospel of conservativism that has been the Helms hallmark since he first entered the Senate eight years ago."
John East has been heralded here as an exemplar of “Traditional Conservatives.” Who with Helms and Thurmond, were the “deadenders” standing for segregation, as explained elsewhere. Which is why I specifically identified myself when I became more of a “National Security Conservative" in the mid-1980, as a “NeoConservative” for my personal purposes as I couldn’t stand with the left-over Segregationists of East, Helms, and Thurmond. Though I didn’t realize at the time how the “Traditional Conservative political theorists” really did desire a fascist-like state, with censorship, ultra-militarism, etc., as Kendall called for. As do the NeoConservatives as well, sharing roots as they do, which wasn’t shared with us “useful idiots” as they pronounced themselves for “Freedom.” But of the “Conservative kind” as well, which took a deeper political theory analysis of Willmoore Kendall and George Carey to see how deep-seated was their hostility to the U.S. Constitution’s Bill Of Rights, and particularly of the First Amendment, and how in favor of censorship they were! As their political theory writings openly declared! And as Trump and DeSantis imposed in their support of Israeli Fascism, following self-described “libertarian” Charles Koch’s anti-BDS lead. Following in the tradition of Jesse Helms:
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OPENER Peter Ross Range is a freelance writer based in Washington. By Peter Ross Range carcely three hours after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office at his Inauguration, Jesse A. Helms, the conservative Republican from North Carolina, took the floor of the Senate to oppose confirmation of Caspar Weinberger as the new President's Secretary of Defense.
Helms - tall, stoop-shouldered, owlish behind his horn-rimmed glasses -spoke for 40 minutes against the nomination, concluding: ''Mr. Weinberger is not ... prepared to make the clean break with the very policies ... which have managed our military and international decline.''
Weinberger was confirmed that day by a 97-2 vote, with only Helms and his new Senate protege, John East, also from North Carolina, in opposition. The dissenting vote was Jesse Helms's Inauguration Day signal that he would oppose the new President he had helped elect on any deviation from the pure gospel of conservativism that has been the Helms hallmark since he first entered the Senate eight years ago. If Helms's views had not changed in those eight years, many other things had. When he came to Washington eight years ago, the lanky legislator was regarded as a political Quixote tilting at the windmills of change. He thundered apocalyptic imprecations against everything from Big Government to the alien forces he felt were threatening America with moral decay, economic doom and military disaster. Even his supporters on the conservative right called him, whimsically, ''our Horatius at the bridge.'' Helms compared him-self to the well-meaning Dutch boy who plugged the dike with his thumb. ''There have been a lot of holes to plug,'' said Helms at the end of the 96th Congress in December.
Now, in the opening days of the 97th Congress, all that has changed. Helms possesses the asset most honored in Washington: clout. The Republicans' majority status in the Senate handed him the powerful post of chairman of the Agriculture Committee, from which position he plans an all-out assault on the $11 billion food-stamp program. Both his views and his new power have served to annoint him as the spiritual leader of the new bloc of ultraconservatives in Congress who are convinced that their day is only beginning to dawn.
''Conservatives used to believe their job was to lose as slowly as possible,'' says Howard Phillips, another Helms protege and founder of the Conservative Caucus. ''I don't just want to slow the train down; I want to put it on another track.''
The conservative rerouting of the political railroad has been in planning for at least five years. Says Phillips, ''We knew if we followed (the plan), we would be able to take over one house of Congress by 1980 ... but'' - and this shows how doctrinaire the New Right is - ''we don't have the White House yet.'' Ronald Reagan is not conservative enough.
The G.O.P. sweep in November elected l6 new Republican senators, giving the party a majority in one branch of Congress for the first time since 1955. Yet it is clear that a right-wing hard core of some 15 senators, led by Helms and Senator James McClure of Idaho, will resist any modification of principle. They are bound by broad agreement on the so-called ''profamily issues'' - antiabortion, antiequal-rights amendment, antibusing, proprayer in the schools - and a free-market conservatism on economic issues. They favor limited Government spending on social programs but more for defense. They share a hawkish view of the world that favors a more assertive resistance to Soviet expansion and accepts limited human-rights abuses in the interest of supporting staunch military allies.
At least five of the freshman Republican senators are natural recruits to the Helms-McClure faction; many others, such as Alfonse D'Amato of New York and Dan Quayle of Indiana, are much closer to Helms than to such Republican liberals as Charles Percy of Illinois or Charles Mathias of Maryland. They will often join the right wing in issue-oriented coalitions, also supported by such incumbent Republicans as Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John Tower of Texas, who have now assumed powerful committee chairmanships. On many votes, the Helms faction can also count on sympathetic Southern Democrats, who have always felt more comfortable voting with Republicans on military and social issues than with the liberal leadership of their own party. Thus, the hard-core of ideo-logical conservatives around Helms and McClure are the energizing nub of a powerful coalition that can attempt to dominate domestic issues and fashion foreign policy.
Paradoxically, this new alignment leaves President Reagan - the darling of the conservatives for almost two decades - in the unusual position of possibly facing a more damaging challenge to his leadership from the Republican right wing than anything the Democratic liberals can muster at this time. Thus, while only Helms and his North Carolina colleague would cast votes against an important Reagan appointment on the new Administration's first day in office, the potential for defiance from the right might dog President Reagan's efforts, and those of the G.O.P., to expand on the November victory and build a new political consensus in the nation. The most interesting battles on the national political stage in the coming year may be between a moderating Republican President and the true-believ-ers on his right. It will surely test the mediating skills of Tennessee's Howard Baker, the new Senate majority leader, and G.O.P. whip Ted Stevens of Alaska to keep the Republicans' sixvote Senate majority in working order.
Helms's senatorial colleagues admit that part of his power lies in his freewheeling attitude toward mainstream Republicanism. ''Sometimes it's an asset that he is somewhat independent of the party,'' says Senator McClure.
This independence is partly explained by the unorthodox course of the l980 Republican campaign. The Republican National Committee worked brilliantly at times to orchestrate party politics from the grass roots up. At the same time, largely distinct from party efforts, a shadow campaign was being waged nationally and locally by conservative groups. They were organized into an effective alliance by television evangelists pushing moral issues, such as right-tolife and prayer in the classroom, and by the men who have constructed an extrapolitical network of computerized mailing lists to galvanize conservative support nationally and lo-cally. By integrating these forces, a new conservative coalition emerged that overcame historic regional differences, linking Washington-haters in the Southern Bible Belt with the Middle Western Farm Belt and the Sagebrush Rebellion of the West.
They received political guidance through the medium of a postman or a preacher instead of a precinct captain. It worked like a well-oiled machine, but not as a political machine with traditional party loyalties. This represented a historic upheaval in American politics.
''There were two things that hit us,'' Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York said after the election. ''First was money, money, money, money. ... Then there was ... organization and technology. ... We are so far behind that we ... are in danger of becoming the permanent minority party.''
Because of the New Right's relative independence of party - its hard-line conservatives form a minority within the majority in the Senate - it can even bypass (Continued on Page 64) Barry Goldwater as an old-school elder statesman. This maverick style is what permits the new conservatives to take such extreme positions, declaring holy wars rather than working within the known rules of political pragmatism. A case in point is their attitude toward the Family Protection Act, introduced last year by Republican Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada. The bill condemned homosexuals, prohibited information on contraception for unwed minors, attacked ''sex intermingling in sports and other school activities,'' removed Federal laws concerning wife-and-child abuse and generally reinstated ''the traditional role of women in society.'' Paul Weyrich, director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, one of the right's most extreme yet best-organized Washington-based direct-mail groups, called Laxalt's measure ''the most significant battle of the age-old conflict between good and evil, between the forces of God and forces against God.''
Ira Glasser, national director of the American Civil Liberties Union, labels ''the swift and sudden rise of the new evangelical groups ... a grave threat to traditional civil liberties.'' Former Senator George McGovern, defeated by New Right fund-raising and propaganda expertise, wrote before the election, ''Their zealotry, self-righteousness and vindictiveness ... connote something radically different from the authentic conservatism of, say, Robert Taft or Senator Goldwater.''
While Barry Goldwater often votes with the New Right, he, too, regards some of its religiously committed leaders with suspicion. Like less dogmatic conservatives, and indeed most other Republicans, Goldwater agrees with many New Right goals: less social spending and heavier defense budgets, less Government interference with business and more industrial freedom from environmental restrictions, less school busing and fewer racial quotas in jobs and education. Yet the aging Republican leader rejects the intransigence of the New Right. ''If they disagree with you one bit, you're a no-good S.O.B.'' After the election, Goldwater asked acerbically: ''Who the hell is the New Right anyway? Who is Paul Weyrich? He's not a leader of the Republican Party.''
Neither, for that matter, is Jesse Helms - in his heart. ''Helms and guys like Thurmond and East, they are old Dixiecrats,'' points out one Western conservative. ''He descends from the William Jennings Bryan wing of the Democratic Party,'' says a Goldwaterite with ties to the Reagan-Bush ticket in 1980. ''On some things, he's not even a conservative. How can a conservative even imagine passing laws on your private life - like abortion and prayer!''
Today ideological labels can be as misleading as party affiliation in identifying loyalties. The conservative tide, running swift and strong, comprises several splayed forces, all of whose power centers have some claim to sharing in Reagan's triumph. There is the old Republican establishment, tied to the G.O.P.'s traditional financial constituencies and shibboleths. Then there is the Old Right, strongly anti-Communist and states' rights oriented, and the neo-conservative wing, which prides itself on its intellectual leadership, and which has attracted prominent Democrats like Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Henry (Scoop) Jackson of Washington.
As majority leader, Howard Baker, a moderate, faces a difficult task balancing the factions now taking shape in the new Senate. The heady, unaccustomed power of majority control has sharpened differences between the hard-core Republican conservatives -11 Westerners, four Southerners and one New Englander -and the more moderate elements. Some 15 other Republicans are firmly conservative, but less doctrinaire than the far right. They include the Armed Services Committee chairman, John Tower, Virginia's John Warner, New Mexico's Pete Domenici and Florida's freshman Senator Paula Hawkins, who opposes the equal-rights amendment.
The small Republican liberal wing includes the new Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Charles Percy, Oregon's dovish Mark Hatfield and the outspoken Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, who vehemently opposed Alexander Haig's appointment as Secretary of State.
This leaves an unimposing middle ground of perhaps a dozen Senators for Baker and Stevens to count on as a moderate base in any floor fight. This group includes Robert Packwood of Oregon, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, John Chafee of Rhode Island and such newcomers as Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire. Since Jesse Helms met Ronald Reagan in the early 1970's, he has ardently supported the Californian's Presidential aspirations. Helms and his political sidekick Thomas F. Ellis, a North Carolina attorney, helped revive Mr. Reagan's flagging 1976 bid for the nomination by orchestrating his upset primary victory in their home state over Gerald Ford. In 1980, Helms campaigned in 22 states for Mr. Reagan and other G.O.P. candidates, and his unique political machine, the Congressional Club of North Carolina, raised an astonishing $4 million nationwide for the Republican standard-bearer.
In person, Helms is a courtly charmer with the Southern gift of hyperbolic gab. He calls the President's wife ''Miss Nancy'' and tells the homeliest page in a Senate elevator that she is the finest beauty in the land. He drags total strangers onto the reserved seats in the Senate subway and invites liberal reporters to lunch in the Senate dining room. Helms has impeccable moral credentials - the Rev. Jerry Falwell says, ''If I knew Senator Helms would take care of my family, I could die happy.'' Although he controls a total of about 50 jobs on his personal staffs in Washington and Raleigh, neither office has a black employee, despite North Carolina's 22 percent black population. Yet Helms's staff is known for giving excellent and impartial constituent services.
''Jesse is sui generis,'' explains Democratic Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, who opposes most of Helms's positions. ''I hate to compare anybody to my predecessor, Joe McCarthy, but, in a sense, Jesse is like McCarthy. He is a force unto himself.''
With the new expansion of the Senate's right wing, Helms is now a good deal more than the one-man show he has been since coming to the Senate in 1972. Helms and McClure, also elected in 1972, are the senior members of the Senate's New Right. They were joined in 1974 by Paul Laxalt, former Governor of Nevada, who was Ronald Reagan's campaign chairman; today he is considered President Reagan's point man on Capitol Hill, where his influence rivals that of the majority leader, Howard Baker.
Jake Garn, a conservative Mormon and former Mayor of Salt Lake City, was also elected in 1974, to be joined two years later by Orrin Hatch, a youthful, mirthless Mormon lawyer from Utah, new to politics. The Wyoming rancher Malcolm Wallop, a polo-playing millionaire, and Harrison Schmitt, New Mexico's astronaut-geologist, were elected in 1976, too, forming a small coterie of conservative Westerners, whom McClure and Nebraska's Carl Curtis organized into a conservative strategy group called the Senate Steering Committee, which meets over lunch every Wednesday, usually in a Senate dining room. Because it refuses to release a membership list, Democratic Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia once bitterly labeled the committee a ''shadowy'' and ''mysterious'' body.
The ultraconservatives gained more senatorial ground in 1978. William Armstrong, a radio-station executive, was elected from Colorado; an Iowa businessman, Roger Jepsen, and a New Hampshire airline pilot, Gordon Humphrey, became the first Senators who won seats with the backing of the newly organized, highly doctrinaire political-action committees. But 1980 was the breakthrough year.
Aided by a Reagan bandwagon and a right-wing ''hit list,'' funded by such organizations as the National Conservative Political Action Commit(known as ''Nickpack'') and Helms's Congressional Club, five New Right conservatives were added to the Senate: John East is a college professor from eastern North Carolina, whose election campaign was managed out of the Congressional Club's offices. East is so conservative that Helms likes to joke that ''I'm now the liberal Senator from North Carolina.'' Senate observers expect East, who never held political public office before, to function almost as Helms's political clone.
Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, also ran at Helms's urging. Helms spoke several times in Alabama and the Congressional Club sent campaign funds. Denton had clearly established his conservative credentials when he founded the antiadultery, antipornography Crusade for Decency. Denton today is strategically placed on the Judiciary Committee, now chaired by Strom Thurmond. Thurmond named Denton chairman of the newly created Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, the linear descendant of the Internal Security Subcommittee Joseph McCarthy used for his Communist-hunting hearings in the 1950's. Denton vows he is not reviving the spirit of McCarthyism, but he is buttressed on the right side of the committee bench by John East and Orrin Hatch. Steven Symms's victory over the liberal Frank Church in Idaho was one of the most bitter battles of the 1980 elections. Even Jesse Helms described the tactics used to bolster Symms's campaign as ''cuttin' and slashin'.'' During four terms as a Congressman, Symms earned 100 percent ratings from several conservative lobbying groups and 10 percent from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. Symms was Helms's House counterpart in introducing the bill for an antiabortion amendment. Charles E. Grassley ousted the liberal John Culver in Iowa in another vitriolic campaign that was heavily supported by the National Conservative Political Action Committee. A farmer from the most conservative part of the state, Grassley had spent six years in the House compiling by far the most conservative record in the Iowa delegation. Following in the footsteps of his predecessor, H.R. Gross, for 26 years the leading curmudgeon in the lower house, Grassley manifested a conservatism that even led him to such diehard symbolic stands as voting against a Congressional pay raise. Don Nickles, a prosperous small-town Oklahoma businessman, stepped into the vacancy created by the retirement of Henry Bellmon to become, at 32, the youngest member of the Senate. Nickles is a classic New Right creation. He attended the conservative ''candidates' school'' run every six weeks in Washington by Paul Weyrich's Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. Seizing upon the profamily issues of abortion, busing and prayer in the schools, Nickles had Moral Majority support in a campaign that seemed to oppose almost everything. During the primary campaign, The Tulsa World wrote: ''It is difficult to tell whether Don Nickles is running against ... his Republican opponent, Democratic President Jimmy Carter, the Federal Government or the alphabet. 'I'm against the D.O.E., H.E.W., H.U.D., E.P.A. and OSHA,' Nickles tells audiences.''
What distinguishes the New Right from the Old Right besides age is the tendency of the younger conservatives to work as a group, drawing on their new network of right-wing lobbies. They have introduced a new cohesion into conservative politics.
The New Right's strength was first evident on the day Senate Republicans chose their new leadership before Christmas. Moderates Baker and Stevens were re-elected to the top leadership positions as expected. Then came the vote for the third-ranking position, chairman of the Republican Conference, which functions as the party's coordinating machine. The mainstream candidate was H. John Heinz 3d, a wealthy Pennsylvanian, regarded as a moderate by most but as a flaming liberal by party enemies on the right. The Steering Committee, the New Right's high command in the Senate, put forward McClure and mobilized sufficient support from other factions to defeat Heinz, 33-20. This gave the right wing, only a few years ago an intramural debating society countable on one hand, a solid foothold in the Senate leadership.
With the retirement of Carl Curtis in 1978, McClure had become the Steering Committee's chairman and Helms its vice chairman. After McClure became conference chairman in December, Helms took over the Steering Committee. Although both are in their 50's, they are a decade or so older than most other committee members. The group as a whole is marked by boundless activism and determination to get things done, and its members intend nothing less than to take over the Senate, the House and the White House.
''The New Right - and to an extent we're like Communists in this - feels victory is inevitable,'' says Paul Weyrich. In 1975, shortly after the 1974 midterm elections, Jesse Helms formulated a plan in a speech to the American Conservative Union Convention. First, he drew lessons from post-Watergate Republican losses and 1974's abysmal 38 percent voter turnout. He targeted the nonvoting 62 percent of the electorate as a kind of silent majority - he called them ''the conservative majority'' - who had only to be politicized to put the country into the hands of the right people.
He had flirted with the idea of founding a third party, but finally opted for operating as a conservative movement affiliated with the Republican Party. In his 1975 speech, Helms prescribed organizing the waiting conservative masses district by district and inviting in groups ''not presently part of the political process,'' a harbinger of such phenomena as the Moral Majority. As Howard Phillips puts it: ''Since Washington tends to maximize the power of the liberals, we had to move the battleground. ... We were shifting from the politics of celebrities to the politics of issues.'' In short, let the hopelessly liberal media focus on the nation's capital while the conservatives mobilize voters in the heartland. THIRD JUMP
Another development of the mid-1970's was the emergence of political-action groups dedicated to replacing liberals with conservatives. The Conservative Caucus, for instance, was born in a memorandum written to Jesse Helms by a political aide, South Carolinian John Carbaugh. Howard Phillips, then working in Helms's office, became its director.
At about the same time, two disillusioned young political organizers, John T. (Terry) Dolan and Charles Black, approached Helms with a concept for a national conservative campaign-financing organization. Helms sent a confidential memo to key people on the right and Nickpack was born. In 1980, Nickpack was the organizing force that helped defeat four liberal Democratic Senators: Birch Bayh, John Culver, Frank Church and George McGovern. It was a moment of supreme victory for the Quixote of the Carolina Piedmont. Fighting the archenemy of liberalism has been the crusade waged by Jesse Helms for all of his political life. The son of a fire-andpolice chief with a third-grade education, Helms was raised in tiny Monroe, N.C., 23 miles southeast of Charlotte. His first serious political experience came during the notorious 1950 Senate election, generally regarded as the dirtiest in North Carolina history. Helms, a young radio newsman, did publicity for the conservative lawyer, Willis Smith, who ran against Dr. Frank Porter Graham, president of the liberal University of North Carolina.
In a four-week Democratic run-off campaign, still remembered in the state for its hate literature and racist tone, Graham was portrayed as a Communist sympathizer and an integrationist. One flier, signed by a ''Know the Truth Committee,'' exhorted: ''WHITE PEOPLE WAKE UP!'' It conjured scenes of ''Negroes working beside you, your wife and daughters in your mills and factories.'' It announced, ''Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.'' The leaflet endorsed Willis Smith: ''He will uphold the traditions of the South.''
The virulent campaign included newspaper ads playing to Southern paranoia (''The South Under Attack'') and radio spots stirring racial fears (''Do you know that 28 percent of North Carolina's population is colored?''). ''The mob mood that was built up in the final days of the campaign was not unlike that preceding a lynching,'' wrote the political scientist Samuel Lubell in ''The Future of American Politics.''
Graham lost by 18,000 votes, with at least 18 counties that had previously supported him reversing their vote. The election brought Helms together with another smart young conservative, Tom Ellis, a Raleigh attorney, who today runs the Congressional Club and acts as Helms's political alter ego.
Helms served as a Senate aide to Smith until the Senator died in office in 1953. After several years as director of the North Carolina Bankers Association in Raleigh and a term on the City Council, Helms bought a part interest in a conservative Raleigh television station, becoming its first on-camera editorialist. His fiveminute commentaries were called ''The Voice of Free Enterprise in Raleigh-Durham.'' During the civil-rights era (Helms called it the ''civil-rights uproar''), Helms made a reputation for himself by opposing everything the civil-rights movement stood for, leading what The Charlotte Observer called ''the rear-guard action against racial equality.''
Helms's 2,700 editorials over the next 12 years made him a hero with conservatives in the villages and farming communities. Helms's invective against ''restless Negroes'' and college students who indulged in ''riotous weekends at beaches in Florida ... where orgies and mayhem are highly advertised'' was also carried over the 70 stations of the Tobacco Radio Network and reprinted in more than 50 small-town newspapers.
At a time when many Southern whites were outraged by the sight of young blacks blocking streets in demonstrations and sitting in at lunch counters, Helms encouraged resistance to change. Recurring themes in his editorials were the pending apocalypse and the ''immorality'' of blacks. While the Southern white constabulary was routinely mistreating and sometimes condoning the killing of blacks, he contributed to further inflaming racial feelings by accusing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. of ''holding himself above the law.'' ''Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are facts of life which must be faced,'' he said.
Editorials also appeared under Helms's byline in The Citizen, the magazine of the Citizens Councils of America, based in Jackson, Miss., which called Helms ''our favorite media master.'' The November 1967 issue of The Citizen carried a Helms commentary which attacked the civil-rights movement and outbreaks of racial street violence by asking, ''Is survival possible when civilization reverts to the law of the jungle? ... The question grows more ominous by the day. The hour approaches when we must decide whether we will be ruled by sanity or ruined by savagery.''
Race, however, was not Helms's sole preoccupation. As the ''voice of free enterprise,'' he inveighed against labor unions, Social Security, Medicare, the Rural Electrification Authority, the League of Women Voters, the 18-year-old vote, Nixon's China opening, Kissinger's detente with Moscow, the United Nations and farm subsidies. Although opposed to more than he favored, Helms once wrote in support of private schools, so that ''political sociologists ... would forever be unable to dictate terms and procedures for the people of America regarding their schools.''
None of this seemed to hurt Helms when he became a Republican convert in 1970 after 28 years as a Democrat, and forsook the airwaves for politics in 1972. ''I saw it,'' he says, ''as a chance to carry the free-enterprise message across the state.'' Helms won with 54 percent of the vote, possibly the first on-camera personality to ride television into the Senate.
Besides benefiting from Richard Nixon's extraordinary 1972 coattails, Helms successfully linked his opponent, Congressman Nick Galifianakis, the son of Greek immigrants, with the unpopular Democratic Presidential nominee by erecting several huge billboards that read, ''McGovernGalifianakis,'' the two names run together as one. His slogan: ''Jesse Helms: He's one of us.'' During his first term as Senator, Helms concentrated on the emotional issues of school desegregation (''forced busing''), abortion, prayer in the schools (''voluntary prayer'') and excessive Government spending. He made a career of losing on principle -almost any 99-1 Senate vote since 1972 has Helms casting that sole dissenting vote. The Raleigh News and Observer named him ''Senator No.''
Helms modeled himself on the late Alabama Senator James Allen by becoming a master of parliamentary procedure and one of the Senate's most skillful obstructionists. He spent more than 100 hours ''in the chair'' (presiding over the Senate is considered an onerous chore by most senators) during each of his first two years, becoming the first Republican to win two Golden Gavel awards.
Helms's 1978 re-election campaign was launched in 1976 by his close political associate Thomas Ellis, who ran the North Carolina Congressional Club. Founded after Helms's 1972 campaign as a fundraising device to pay off campaign debts, the club has since shed ''North Carolina'' from its name and become an impressive national political propaganda operation built around direct-mail computerization, which enables conservatives to get their message to the voters minus the critical filter of the mass media. It also generates enormous amounts of money - $7 million for Helms's 1978 re-election race, the largest sum ever spent for a Senate election, most of it from outside North Carolina. Concentrating on television commercials, Helms outspent his weak Democratic opponent by 30 to 1 and won with 56 percent of the vote. Even today, the Congressional Club is operating at a high pitch, perhaps in preparation for the 1984 reelection campaign, when Helms is expected to face tough opposition from popular Democratic Governor James Hunt.
In 1980, the Club enlisted John East, a conservative college professor who had never held political office; he scored an upset victory in the Senate race over the Democratic incumbent, Robert Morgan. East's campaign concentrated on television commercials which dwelt relentlessly on such supposed Morgan sins as the ''Panama Canal giveaway'' and the Senator's position on the Occupational Health and Safety Act -stances which Morgan claimed on the floor of the Senate were gross distortions of his record. The East campaign, which took some pains to avoid showing that he was in a wheelchair, constantly featured an eight-year-old photograph of his opponent, Morgan, with liberal Senators George McGovern and Edward M. Kennedy. It suggested by association that Morgan, considered by many the most conservative Democrat Senator, was, in fact, a liberal. East was elected by a squeaker margin of 6,700 votes. Helms's role in the Senate serves a number of political purposes. ''If Helms stakes an ultraconservative position,'' remarks one conservative Senator's aide, ''that draws the whole spectrum to the right. Helms is like a kind of insurance. You might have a burglar alarm that goes off too often. But at least it works when you need it.''
Even Helms's ideological ally James McClure admits that, ''There are times when, whether it's (liberal) Howard Metzenbaum or Jesse Helms, you wish they weren't out there playing their own game. But you have to have the radicals of the left and the right so you'll know where the center is.''
So one of Helms's obvious roles in the New Right is to set what the columnist George Will calls ''the outer limit of conservative activism.'' Helms's hand is also felt on foreign-policy issues, especially in Latin America and Africa.
It is in the third world that Helms sees creeping Communism presenting the gravest peril to American survival. He unleashes his well-traveled aides, James Lucier, John Carbaugh and Richard McCormack, as watchdogs of international conservatism wherever he feels Western interests are threatened. This has meant lending support to the white-minority regimes in South Africa, Namibia (South-West Africa) and in Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe. Helms calls them ''the only footholds we had left in Africa against Communism.'' Does he see Zimbabwe as merely a pawn in the East-West game? ''Right,'' he replies. Latin America, too? ''Right.'' Any hope today for Zimbabwe? ''We just talked Rhodesia into the garbage dump. That country's gone.'' Helms created an international incident in 1979 when he sent Carbaugh and Lucier to London to monitor the talks that led to the transfer of power from Ian Smith's regime to the black leader Robert Mugabe. Helms's aides were accused of disrupting the negotiations by trying to give support to Smith and his black surrogate, Bishop Abel Muzorewa. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance stormed to Capitol Hill to lodge a protest with Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (''the only time I've ever seen Cy Vance truly angry,'' said one person present). Vance claimed that the British had officially complained of interference by Lucier and Carbaugh, which perhaps was an overstatement. Helms, though, was prepared: ''I called Maggie Thatcher. She didn't know anything about it.''
''Jesse's got his own foreign policy,'' is how Wisconsin's William Proxmire sums it up. Though Helms had virtually never been abroad before joining the Senate in 1972, and has never traveled with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since joining it two years ago, he is now in a position to make his anti-Communist foreign-policy views felt. In the new Congress, he has been named chairman of the Subcommittee for Hemispheric Affairs because, he says, ''If we don't start getting things straight with our own hemisphere, starting with Canada, Mexico and all the way south, our own stability is in jeopardy.''
Helms occasionally travels abroad at the expense of one of the four ''educational,'' tax-free institutes his aides have founded in Washington. Most of these trips have been to conservative countries like Taiwan or to those with right-wing military dictatorships, such as Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. During such visits, Helms operates independently of the American Embassy ''except for a courtesy call on the way out of town.'' He collects data in support of the right-wing cause or to discredit such deposed - or assassinated - socialists as Salvador Allende of Chile. ''He was a moral bum,'' says Helms. ''He ruined the country, its economy. He kept a mistress out at a country place.''
Helms is known for having his own pipelines, independent of other members of the Foreign Relations Committee, to hawkish dissenters at the Defense Department and the C.I.A. who keep him abreast of creeping moderation in the national-security establishment. ''Sometimes the committee would meet in executive session for a topsecret briefing,'' remembers one person present, ''and you could tell Helms already knew the stuff. It was embarrassing.''
No matter what the issue, one is almost certain to find the hand of the far right's Horatius stirring things up. ''He's the Ted Kennedy of the right,'' says one detractor, who nonetheless admires his political skill. ''He gets into everything.'' If the 1980 election was Jesse Helms's personal moment of triumph after years as a senatorial lone wolf, and if the New Right generally saw it as a turning point, 1981 has already had its disappointments. The unswerving Helms-McClure faction was outraged when Ronald Reagan appointed a Cabinet that only partially fulfilled conservative hopes. David Stockman at the Office of Management and Budget, John Edwards as dismantler of the Department of Energy, James Watt as an Interior Secretary who regards many environmentalists as ''obstructionists,'' General Haig at State and the Democratic neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick at the United Nations -these were their kind of people. But managerial wizard Weinberger at Defense, former Wall Street broker Donald Regan at Treasury, especially Terrel Bell at Education, where he was making noises about maybe not abolishing the department - these were disappointments.
The conservatives have ways (beyond opposing appointees) to hold Ronald Reagan's feet to the fire. For example, Helms constantly invokes Mr. Reagan's name to hold him to issues the new President may now want to avoid. On the day Helms reintroduced his bill for a constitutional amendment banning abortion, he told a cheering rightto-life assemblage, ''If I know Ronald Reagan, he's not backing down. And, for what it's worth, neither is Jesse Helms.''
Mr. Reagan, who showed himself through his appointments to be a more pragmatic compromiser than some conservatives had expected, may not see it this way. ''There isn't going to be an abortion amendment, and Helms knows it,'' explains one activist in the Reagan-Bush campaign. ''You'd see lawlessness in this country to make Prohibition look like a picnic.''
Sensing their slippage, Helms's forces fought back. Again there was talk of running him for Vice President in 1984, a reminder to George Bush to eschew the politics of his Eastern Establishment past. This Vice-Presidential threat is the same tactic used to force Bush's endorsement of the hard-line 1980 party platform, which Helms and his allies wrote, and about which Helms says he got ''99 percent of what I wanted.''
The New Right's anxiety in the formative days of the Reagan Administration may ultimately be justified by events over the coming months as the White House lines up priorities and attempts to chart a course for the nation. If the records of Helms and other New Rightists are a guide, they will not be content with political symbolism. They insist on basic changes on the critical domestic and foreign-policy issues that have carried them to the Senate.
They are convinced that the political tide is still surging to the right, and they are prepared and encouraged to use the 1982 and 1984 elections to test their principles against the voices of moderation and compromise. Jesse Helms, as always, has no doubts about it.
