North Carolina's unbending Senator goes his own way
For years he was regarded as a solitary pip-squeak voice on the far right, a lonely ideologue from a Southern backwater. Today he can intimidate the Secretary of State, thwarting Alexander Haig's key sub-Cabinet appointments. When he notifies the White House that he wants to tell Ronald Reagan in person about certain gripes, the President cheerfully agrees to hear him out—even if the message includes a few instructions on how the President should behave as a true Reaganite.
It is an impressive show of personal clout. But Jesse Helms, the senior Senator from North Carolina, has become a dominating force in the Government, partly because of his own fierce skills of coercion and partly because the public's mood has shifted his way. Next to Reagan himself, Helms is the most influential conservative around. While he does not speak for all conservatives—some consider him too radical on certain issues—he has an army of supporters stretched across the country who eagerly send him millions of dollars to save the Republic. His political base is not the Republican Party but an organization he created back home in North Carolina. The Congressional Club is equipped with all the modern technology needed for polling, fund raising and dispatching blizzards of mail for whatever causes Helms desires.
In Congress, Helms leans all over his own Republican leadership. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, on which Helms serves, is Senator Charles Percy; a man with a terminal case of political meekness, Percy is no match for the baiting Helms. Majority Leader Howard Baker receives only a trifle more deference. When Baker returned from the White House recently to declare that social issues would henceforth be secondary in importance to the President's economic package, Helms brushed off the marching orders. "I'm not changing my agenda," he said last week, as a Senate committee began hearings on a bill, co-sponsored by Helms, that would effectively make abortions illegal.
Helms this year became chairman of the Steering Committee, a powerful group of 25 conservative Senators who meet weekly to plan how they will work their will. As chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Helms will play a key role in the passage of this year's farm bill, and he remains stubbornly set to cut way back on food stamps. The Administration has already bowed to the chairman: Chief Budget Cutter David Stockman carefully exempted subsidies for growing tobacco, one of North Carolina's biggest exports, from any reduction at all.