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Helms never returns home before 8 p.m. After dinner with his wife, he goes back to his reading or telephone calls until midnight. Helms seldom watches television, and he has been to only a couple of movies in the last 20 years; he gets impatient over the lost time. His only relaxation, he says, is to run a mile a day, walk his beagle Patches and spend time with his grandchildren. Helms does not drink but smokes a pack of cigarettes over a couple of days. He carries Lucky Strikes in his shirt pocket and always offers one to visitors, sometimes thanking people when he sees them smoking. He seldom forgets his North Carolina roots.
Raleigh, his home town now, is headquarters of the Congressional Club. He created the club in 1973 to pay off his campaign debts. By the time he ran for a second term in 1978, the club was staffed by 150 people and raised almost $8 million for his re-election and another $8 million in 1980. Its heavy impact is feared by many Democrats. Club mailings and TV ads are hard-hitting, sometimes vicious. The club backed John East for the Senate in North Carolina last fall, for example, and so mangled the record of his opponent, conservative Democratic Senator Robert Morgan, that Morgan looked like a liberal. At the same time, the club's skillfully edited TV ads in favor of East made him look so vigorous that most people in the state were unaware until after the election that the new Senator is a victim of polio and confined to a wheelchair.
The club makes itself felt in races all across the country. Dedicated to the defeat of liberals, it issued tens of thousands of mailings to document the voting records of Democratic Senators on such issues as prayer in schools, abortion and sex education. Some of the letters draw angry fire. When one mailing in Ohio charged that Senator John Glenn's vote on the liberalization of the Hatch Act was intended to turn the Government over to labor unions, Glenn angrily confronted Helms and demanded the messages be stopped. Helms apologized, told Glenn he was unaware that his signature was on them. Robert Morgan in defeat is even more alarmed: "You can't believe how this group scares people, including Senators when they vote."
Morgan's charge is music to Helms' ear, since his aim is to scare liberals. One reason he proposes so many amendments is to force Senators to get on the record. Viguerie argues that this is what the New Right is all about. "These liberals aren't used to having their voting records spotlighted," says Viguerie. "We've finally learned not to rely on the media, which has a liberal bias anyway. So we bypass them by mail and TV and go directly to the voters. Democrats don't like that, and they're crying." Viguerie predicts the Democratic screams are going to got louder. "Jesse has an army out there," he says. "and he talks to them almost weekly by mail. We're years ahead of the Democrats in the technology." So powerful is Helms' club back home that the North Carolina Republican Party has become a weak appendage.