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From work, Helms drives a 1984 Oldsmobile -- he favors used cars -- to his modest home in Arlington, Va., which is furnished in what he calls "ancient fill-in." He slips on his gray Nike running shoes and what Dorothy calls "some old disreputable-looking pants and shirt" and watches the evening news. Often he tunes in Dan Rather, though he urged conservatives a couple of years ago to buy up CBS, which he sees as a citadel of liberalism. His favorite program is Highway to Heaven, about an angel come to earth. "Very inspirational," says Helms, "and you don't see people falling in and out of bed to make a point."
Except when Helms is doting on his six grandchildren, he rarely relaxes. He types as many as 50 letters a week to friends and constituents, pecking with two fingers on an old Royal manual. To a woman fretting over her mother's ill health, Helms wrote that his own mother had believed in the curative powers of baked apples. In another letter he wrote of the gay-rights movement: "I view it as something of a nightmare that the Sodomites are so brazen . . . These obnoxious, repulsive people are anything but 'gay.' "
Helms' heroes are Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill and the late Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina. His values are rooted in North Carolina's Piedmont. Monroe, whose population was 3,000 when Helms was growing up there, was profoundly conservative. Schools were segregated, and once a year flowers were placed on the graves of the Confederate war dead. Yet most townsfolk assumed that the devil was a Republican, which made it all the more shocking when Helms became the state's first G.O.P. Senator of this century.
Helms' father, known respectfully as "Mr. Jesse," was police chief and stood a full head above 6 ft. One Christmas he gave his son a plaque engraved with the words SON, THE LORD DOESN'T REQUIRE YOU TO WIN. HE JUST EXPECTS YOU TO TRY. The plaque hangs beside Helms' Senate desk, emboldening him in his sometimes lonely crusades. High School Principal Ray House preached another homily that had a profound influence on young Jesse: "With hard work, nothing is impossible."
Helms, one of only six Senators who do not have a college degree, dropped out of Wake Forest to become a reporter, then program director of a Raleigh radio station. Years later, his unabashedly conservative editorials for a Raleigh television station won him a statewide following and future political base. He first came to Washington in the early 1950s as a staffer to North Carolina's Senator Willis Smith, but the advice he remembers best came from Georgia's Senator Richard B. Russell: "Jesse," he told him, "a Senator who does not know the rules can be cut to ribbons by a Senator who does."
When Helms ran for the Senate in 1972, he showed both his political savvy and his genius for raising money, pioneering direct-mail solicitations and founding a fund-raising apparatus that became one of the most formidable in the nation. In his 1984 bid for a third term, Helms spent $18 million on the most expensive Senate campaign ever, yet he defeated former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt by a scant 3%.