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Dot Helms had always wanted to adopt a child. In a 1962 newspaper article, Helms spotted a Greensboro orphan, age nine, who had cerebral palsy and wanted parents for Christmas. Helms succumbed. They arranged to meet at the zoo. Charles Helms, now 27, recalls: "I never will forget how tall Daddy was. I could tell right from the start that they were a unit and stuck together. I had never experienced that." Before the adoption became official, Helms gave the boy some baseball equipment. "If you won't keep me," asked Charles, "can I keep the glove and ball?" Charles, whose balance has improved after four operations, is a senior in forestry at North Carolina State. "Mom and Dad," he says, "always stressed that whatever your talents, just do the best and you'll make it." Says his father: "He is a blessing."
In the view of one longtime Helms watcher in Raleigh, the son does not entirely erase the sins of the father "Jesse adopted a handicapped son," says the man. "It cost him a lot of doctor's bills. He'd give the coat off his back to help someone lying in the street, but he's not going to vote for food stamps." Indeed, during his first Senate term, Helms voted against funds for the handicapped.
The first Republican Senator from his state since Jeter Pritchard arrived in Washington in 1895, Helms moved his family into a plain, $46,000 house in suburban Arlington, Va. He assembled a squad of smart, youngish devotees more ruthlessly conservative, if that is possible, than he. After weeks of new-boy floundering, Helms was taken in hand by the late Senator James Allen of Alabama. Allen taught him all the parliamentary angles, and the pupil waded eagerly into the minutiae of procedure.
He learned, principally, how to cause a ruckus. Helms was never seduced by the Senate's clubbiness. It was as if he had crated up his Raleigh TV scripts, driven five hours north, and started pitching those editorials into the Senate hopper. If anyone took notice, it was generally with a snickering glance: Helms the flailing buffoon, a crossbreed of Dickens' Pecksniff and Fred Allen's Claghorn, full of futile cracker righteousness. Yet in Aide John Carbaugh's phrase, Helms "planted the flag": his hopeless proposals sometimes forced Senators to take stands on issues they would have just as soon avoided. He introduced numberless bills to stop abortions, to prohibit sex education, to reinstate capital punishment. All lost, by ratios of 10, 20, 50 to 1. He stalled approval of Nixon sub-Cabinet appointees who were not conservative enough for him. He embarrassed Gerald Ford by insisting that the President meet with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.* This year he delayed (but so far not once prevented) the confirmation of six suspect Reagan bureaucrats. Alone he voted against a bill to counter the 1977 Arab boycott of Israel. He promotes South Africa's racist regime with gusto. After the fall of South Viet Nam, Helms introduced a bill that would make all refugee aid private, and clipped a check for $1,000 to his proposal. Fighting Nelson Rockefeller's confirmation as Vice President in 1974, Helms declared: "He