To the Right, March!: Jesse Helms

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U.S. Senate primary campaign against Frank Graham, a widely admired former University of North Carolina president. The slimy tactics, agrees Helms' friend Judge James ("Pou") Bailey, "got clean out of hand." The election is still a sour blotch for North Carolinians; white supremacy had not been an issue since the turn of the century. Helms was a Smith partisan. Graham won the primary, but without a majority, so Smith was entitled to a runoff. He was in no mood for it. "I went on the radio," Helms says, "telling folks that supporters ought to go out to his house and encourage him." Several hundred did, and Smith won the second election. Helms disclaims any part in the deceits and hysterical racist broadsides undertaken on Smith's behalf. "The liberals are trying to get me," Helms says. "I had nothing to do with the campaign." Affirms Bailey—almost: "I don't think Jesse wrote a damn thing for that campaign."

Helms must have done something to please Smith, for a year later the young radio newsman left Raleigh and WRAL for Washington to work on Smith's staff. After a year as an administrative aide, he was detached to help with Georgia Senator Richard Russell's doomed segregationist presidential campaign. A year later, Smith died, and having worked at five jobs in five years, Helms decided to go back home and make a normal life in North Carolina: build a house (a red brick quasi-colonial next door to his father-in-law), join the Rotary Club (chapter president), gab with the Masons (32nd degree, the second highest rank), and devote evenings to making popcorn with Dot and his daughters.

Helms spent the next seven years in a happy humdrum, working as executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association. The job paid well, and it also introduced him to the state's corporate Establishment, which found Helms a right-thinking young apprentice. (A curious pattern: small-town boyhood, radio sports reporter, business p.r. man. Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms.)

Helms has never lost an election. The first victory was in 1957, when he ran for Raleigh city council and became its most conservative voice. "On occasion," a newspaper said, Helms "dressed down the mayor and other council members he was at odds with." Stridency became an early political habit.

Midway through his second two-year term, he returned to A.J. Fletcher's WRAL. "The old man," says Bailey, "thought the sun rose and set right behind Jesse's left ear." WRAL, that hymn-and-hog-price 250-watter, was now Capitol Broadcasting, an empire embracing the radio outlet, Raleigh's first TV station and a hookup of about 70 rural stations called the Tobacco Radio Network. Fletcher piled three executive titles on Helms and let him do the station's editorials.

Helms reveled in that part of the job. He had never suffered an instant of doubt about right and wrong. He saw the muck of degeneracy, subversion and secular humanism befouling his cherished America. In 1960 the first of Helms' five-minute Viewpoints appeared on the 6 o'clock news. The commentaries, more than 2,700 in all, were broadcast twice every weekday until he first ran for the Senate a dozen years later.

Even today, Helms' eyebrows seem perpetually raised, riding a good