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Still, Helms yearns to be liked and doesn't seem to grasp the extent to which he has alienated some of his brethren. Not long ago, Ted Kennedy, his $ liberal foe, was slightly injured when a tree fell on his car. "I vow that I didn't have my chain saw out there," Helms jokingly told Kennedy as they got on an elevator together. Kennedy laughed, said Helms. Perhaps, but Kennedy will not talk about Helms. Neither will Claiborne Pell, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Why not? "I have to face him," says Pell. Former Senator George McGovern feels less constrained: "People are afraid of him. He can punish you, and he's willing to do that. He's nothing but trouble."
Sometimes Helms will block an appointment even when he favors the nominee. Earlier this year he threatened to hold up confirmation of Major General William F. Burns to head the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The price: a White House promise to submit reports on Soviet compliance with the ABM treaty -- more ammo against the INF treaty. "You use whatever lever you have," shrugs Helms.
Others have been still less fortunate. For a year, Helms blocked the nomination of Richard N. Viets, a career foreign-service officer and former envoy to Jordan, as Ambassador to Portugal. Helms kept up questions about his personal finances until the nomination was withdrawn and Viets retired. "What we have here is a McCarthy of the '80s," says Viets. "You recognize you're in a cage with a viper." Helms bristles at the comparison with Joe McCarthy. "I think he was on to something," says he, "but he was careless with the facts."
If need be, Helms will take on the entire Senate alone. Last November he voted against the nomination of Frank C. Carlucci as Secretary of Defense. Carlucci squeaked by, 91 to 1. A month later, Helms opposed a major education bill, arguing that the Federal Government should not fund education. The bill passed 97 to 1. "I sometimes find myself wishing there were more people on my side who were willing to speak up," he says.
Few in Congress have been so vilified by the press, and none have been so adept at turning it to political advantage. The darts just seem to pass through him. "I never lost a minute's sleep over criticism, and I never shall," he declares. Senators who oppose him on key issues, he says, simply lack the facts or the political courage. And the uncommitted? "The Lord spoke of those who are neither hot nor cold. He said, 'I spew them out of my mouth,' and I think a lot of folks are crying out to be spewed out."
Though Helms' friends credit him with shrewdness and moxie, they marvel that anyone so -- well, ordinary -- should be where he is. Even Dorothy Helms, the Senator's wife of 46 years, is puzzled: "To me, he's just little Jesse Helms that I married however many years ago. He's a very simple person. He just believes certain things, and he acts on them, and that's it." They met when both were working at the Raleigh News and Observer, she as editor of the society page, he as a sports reporter. They have raised two daughters and a son, whom the Helmses adopted as a 9-year-old orphan with cerebral palsy after reading about him in the newspaper one Christmas Day.