COVER STORIES
Jesse Helms is the New Right's righteous warrior, and his battle is nigh
The classroom is homely and snug, barely 20 ft. square. In a corner on hangers, squeezed behind a cheap upright piano, hangs a row of blue choir robes. The 25 gentlemen of the Bunn Bible Class (average age about 70), file in smiling, touching each other gently. By 10 a.m. they have eased themselves into folding chairs, as have a cluster of wives and old friends' widows. Class President Adrian Newton grasps his Bible and introduces this Sunday's teacher: speaking on "Repentance and Restoration," the right honorable Senator Jesse Helms.
At 59, Helms is younger and sleeker than the others, and his North Carolina drawl is more circumspect. "The lesson today," he says, "is based on Moses' sermon to the Israelites, where he laid it out for 'em—didn't he, Red? Bear in mind, as I read, America of 1981 ... This land of ours was divinely inspired. Thomas Jefferson and all the rest were not smart enough to come up with this system. They got on their knees and prayed for it. That's what makes our country unique.
"We must not make a God of Government. Liberalism is moving into the churches, and that has invited the tidal wave of secular humanism* engulfing this country and the world ... Now, I am not holier than thou. I am not in a position to judge. But I gotta level with you: we become part of what we condone."
When he is done, Helms lingers by the door, accepting the pats and neighborly murmurs with grave good grace. But it is nearly 11 a.m. Former Deacon Helms nudges his friends into the air-conditioned expanse of Raleigh's Hayes Barton Baptist Church, and on toward the battle to redeem America from godlessness.
Jesse Helms is tall (6 ft. 1 in.) but not lean, heavy (193 Ibs.) but not flabby, except for some droop below the chin. A sparse crop of fine gray hair sweeps back from his forehead, and the rest is snipped short. His black-rimmed glasses give him a slightly spooked, owlish demeanor. Helms walks with a relaxed spring, his bearing loose and eager if not quite vigorous. His appearance is scrupulously uneccentric, clean and blue-suit respectable, more like a civic-minded small-town bank president than a U.S. Senator.
The name and the face are only vaguely familiar outside North Carolina, for in his eight years in the Senate, Helms has been a legislator only nominally. Instead of cutting deals and mastering the techniques of cloakroom conciliation, he has been a right-wing curiosity, proposing hopeless bills, attacking presidential appointments out of ideological pique, making blustery speeches that go largely unremarked.
But now the conservative current is swift, and Helms' time has come. Not long after Congress reconvenes this week, both houses will be pressed to confront, as never before, the so-called social issues, that list of New Right grievances upon which Helms has based his political career.
There is his "human life bill," an anti-abortion measure that would statutorily establish the beginning of human life at conception, and so could make abortion prosecuted as murder. In January, hearings may begin on a Helms proposal to abolish Supreme Court jurisdiction over school prayer cases. Another Helms measure, the one with the best chance of passage,