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Since entering politics, Helms has been dogged by allegations of racism. "This is going to be another race story, isn't it?" he asks, his face flushed. "If it is, don't ever come to this office again." He entreats interviewers to ask black Capitol Hill employees how he treats them and notes that a former press aide was black. But Helms has opposed civil rights legislation, busing, affirmative action, sanctions against South Africa and a federal holiday to honor Martin Luther King. He continues to insist that King associated with Communists and "was a man of tasteless immorality." "I wish he had not been shot," says Helms. "I fervently wish that, because I think he would have been exposed for what he was."
Helms tells a story from his childhood. "About the only licking I remember my father giving me was when he overheard me calling a little black boy with whom I was playing a 'nigger.' He told me, 'It wasn't anything you did that made you white, wasn't anything he did that made him black,' and I was never to use that word again." It was no defense, said Helms, that the boy had called him a "white cracker."
Helms says he is driven by principle, not politics. His stand on abortion and his opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment have made him a target of women's rights groups. But there are women among his most senior staff, and as a television executive in the early 1960s, he was one of the first to put a woman sports reporter on the air, over the objections of his superior.
Eight years ago, Helms hailed Reagan as the champion of conservatism. Now he feels the President has been duped by advisers. In a letter to a friend, Helms wrote, just before the summit meeting in Washington: "So many undesirable -- and dangerous -- things have happened on his ((Reagan's)) watch -- and I am increasingly fearful about the future." Deeply troubled by the prospect of further arms agreements with the Soviets, he is still trying to bury the INF treaty by tacking killer amendments onto it, as he proved last week. His distrust of the Soviets is boundless and personal. He still suspects that Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down in 1983 in part because the Soviets had learned that he was scheduled to be aboard. "Trust them?" he asks. "No way, Jose!"