Authors: Hedrick Smith
Metzenbaum got indirect confirmation from Timothy Wirth, a Colorado Democrat who won a Senate seat in 1986 after serving six terms in the House. In just one month, Wirth told me, he concluded that Senate procedures encourage the negative power game. “In the House, you learn how to get something done by putting together a coalition, counting votes and getting legislation passed,” Wirth said. “But in the Senate, people’s power arises from their ability to say no, their power to block anything. The people who are really good at legislating are good at knowing how to threaten the use of negative power.”
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Helms and Jackson: Mirror Images
In the broader political arena, the confrontational politics of Jesse Helms were paralleled in some ways by those of Jesse Jackson in the 1984 presidential campaign. For Helms and Jackson have worked as highly symbolic politicians who gain power and leverage by mobilizing a minority within their own party, and keeping it stirred up, often to the exasperation of their party leaders. Their philosophies are radically different, but their tactics have been similar in leading mass movements: Jackson, the blacks; and Helms, the hard right. Just as Helms angered other Senate Republicans with his attack on the Martin Luther King holiday, Jackson gave heartburn to Democratic party leaders in 1984 by pitching his campaign at black voters and black pride, causing a backlash among white voters that later hurt Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, especially in the South. In the 1988 campaign, Jackson played a more traditional style of politics, trying to broaden his appeal. But in 1984, Jackson, like Helms, played an antimainstream strategy.
When party leaders have tried to placate or negotiate with Helms or Jackson, it has rarely worked. For the porcupine power game depends on being the odd man out, not on building coalitions. In that game, the battle is usually more important than the victory because the battle keeps the movement alive and aroused. Helms and Jackson typically battle for their share of the spoils, using their popular leverage against their own party leaders. In that game, power stems from dramatizing the Cause, forcing new showdowns, stirring again and again the emotional dynamic of their movement, and in Helms’s case, in touching those predictably sensitive nerves that trigger a new flow of financial contributions. In confrontational politics, there is little incentive to compromise. For compromising with the power structure dilutes the force of the symbolic leader’s appeal to his most ardent partisans.
In another sense, Jesse Helms has become the 1980’s political cult figure of the right, to replace Senator Edward Kennedy, the 1970’s cult figure of the left. Kennedy had great influence with other congressional Democrats. His legislative staff network reached into many committees, touching many issues. With the Kennedy family cachet, he could help other Democrats, and they clustered around him. When Kennedy moved on an issue, others moved with him, especially as he challenged Jimmy Carter in 1979 and 1980. The failure of Kennedy’s bid for the presidential nomination, and the defeat of several liberal Democratic
senators in 1980, caused the Kennedy movement to ebb.
In almost mirror image, Helms has been to Reagan as Kennedy was to Carter, except that Helms was smart enough not to tackle Reagan directly. But Helms has been the keeper of the ideological flame, riding partisan shotgun as the “genuine conservative,” just as Kennedy had cast himself as the “genuine Democrat” against Carter’s watered-down version. Each tried to hold his president’s feet to the fire, to bring the president back to the true gospel. The role is well-known in American politics; other presidents have had purists on their flanks: Dwight Eisenhower had Senator Robert A. Taft; Franklin Roosevelt had Henry Wallace. If Ted Kennedy thought Carter was too tightfisted to be a true Democrat, then Helms and company clamored that Rasputins in the White House were poisoning Reagan’s pure conservatism. “Let Reagan be Reagan!” they chanted.
Helms’s political apparatus is far more structured and extensive than was Kennedy’s, and it has given extra muscle to Helms’s obstructionist politics. In the Senate, Helms made himself the moving force of the Steering Committee, an informal, secretive band of fifteen to twenty conservative Republicans who lunch weekly on Tuesdays. Their committee has no official standing but it has gained clout by its members’ working together, hiring an effective staff, and using filibusters and their senatorial rights to “hold” legislation and appointments. In the Reagan years, Helms’s hard core became known as the 4-H Club: Helms, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, and Chic Hecht of Nevada. Other steering committee regulars were Steve Symms and Jim McClure of Idaho, Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, Jake Garn of Utah, and until they left the Senate in 1986, Jeremiah Denton of Alabama and John East of North Carolina.
An equally potent element of the Helms apparatus is the network of sharply partisan conservative congressional staffers, known as the Madison Group. They are orchestrated by a pudgy, boyish-looking, and politically ingenious attorney from South Carolina named John Carbaugh. Staffers such as Michael Pillsbury, David Sullivan, Margot Carlisle, Quentin Crommelin, Angelo Cordevilla, Debbie DeMoss, and Jim Lucier have often pushed Steering Committee senators to take action. Some of these staff aides joined the Reagan administration, formed a network inside government, and fed information—often classified—to those still on Senate staffs. By publicizing what they saw as Soviet violations of arms treaties, the Madison Group activists put pressure on Secretary of State Shultz and President Reagan to take a
tougher line toward Moscow. Through cleverly coordinated moves inside and outside the administration, they maneuvered the government into covertly shipping Stinger antitank weapons to Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader.
The core of Helms’s North Carolina apparatus is the Congressional Club, widely regarded as the second most potent fund-raising apparatus in the country after the Republican Party. Using commercial companies it spawned, the Congressional Club pulls in millions for Helms-endorsed candidates and causes. Its peak effort produced the most expensive campaign in Senate history, Helms’s $16.4 million reelection campaign in 1984, a fund-raising feat that caused Howard Baker to call Helms “the Nelson Rockefeller of political fund-raising.”
In Washington, Helms is the godfather of a large network of right-wing organizations. He inspired the National Conservative Political Action Committee, a multimillion-dollar PAC which targets liberal and some moderate politicians nationwide with blistering negative advertising campaigns. He was a guiding spirit for the Conservative Caucus and Young Americans for Freedom and a founding father of the Council on National Policy, the secretive right-wing answer to the eastern establishment’s Council on Foreign Relations. He has his own bevy of think tanks, The Institute of American Relations (1AR), the Center for a Free Society, the Institute on Money and Inflation, and the American Family Institute, as well as a couple of tax-exempt lobbying groups, the IAR Foreign Affairs Council and the Congressional Club Foundation.
This political machinery has given Helms the ability to mobilize support to put pressure on others in government, much as mass lobbies do. “Jesse Helms would never have done as well with his issues without being able to trigger mail writing and phone calls,” observed Chris Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut. “If Jesse hasn’t convinced you, there’s the thought of all those people he can activate.”
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Others contend that the tail of the Helms apparatus has been wagging the dog and that Helms sometimes has to stir up filibusters and make big publicity plays, like the Martin Luther King episode, to raise funds in order to keep his huge apparatus well financed. When Helms, Don Nickles, and James East forced the Senate to stay in session nearly to Christmas Eve 1982 by filibustering a bill imposing a gasoline tax to finance highway improvements, they infuriated other senators. The normally mild-mannered Republican Whip Alan Simpson denounced them for an “obdurate and obnoxious performance.” The bill passed,
with Helms ridiculed by his colleagues as “Senator Grinch.” No matter; Helms’s gambit played well with his home crowd and produced a new flow of dollars for his network.
Howard Baker, an aide told me, ventured privately to his staff that Helms had “become a prisoner of the monster apparatus he created,” because he constantly needed new issues to keep the donations flowing into the Congressional Club and his foundations. “The question is: Does Jesse Helms run the Congressional Club or does the Congressional Club run him?” one Baker lieutenant said to me. “They thrive on unresolved issues or issues where they can make a big fuss even when they cannot win.”
A key objective of Helms’s porcupine politics has been to press and harass the Reagan administration into a more aggressively anti-Communist foreign policy, especially to promote guerrilla wars against Marxist regimes in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Angola. At a roast in Helms’s honor for his sixty-fourth birthday in 1985, Senator Dole called Helms “the Rambo of the Geritol set,” playing on the gun-toting, anti-Soviet heroism of the movie
Rambo
. The roast fell on the very night that President Reagan was returning triumphantly from his 1985 summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—a meeting that the right-wing crowd had adamantly opposed. At the Helms dinner, their mood was conveyed in the toastmaster’s quip that as door prizes, Helms would pass out copies of “George Shultz’s Summit Cook-book: Forty Ways to Eat Crow.”
Sometimes, Helms has tried to run his own independent foreign policy, accusing Shultz of being duped by an appeasement-minded Foreign Service and suggesting that even Casey’s CIA suffered from “pro-Soviet bias” on arms issues.
When Helms was chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee in 1985, he sought a personal showdown with the Russians over the case of Miroslav Medved, a Soviet seaman who tried to defect from a Soviet freighter unloading grain near New Orleans. After Medved was examined by American doctors and told them he had changed his mind and now wanted to go home, the White House was prepared to close the incident. But Helms was far from satisfied. He charged Medved was being held against his will. Helms issued a subpoena for Medved and sent a personal emissary, David Sullivan, to serve the subpoena and order Medved to appear in Washington. The Soviet freighter captain refused to let Sullivan on board.
The whole Helms gambit was extraordinary: an Agricultural Committee chairman usurping the normal functions of the State Department
or the attorney general. A few weeks later, Secretary Shultz, in a burst of frustration, exploded at a Helms aide during a reception that his senator was a “constitutional ignoramus,” implying that Helms did not know what he was doing.
In fact, Helms usually knows precisely what he is after. He just plays a very different game from most senators. Their game is pushing programs, passing legislation, making compromises. Helms’s game is the opposite: stalling action or provoking filibusters by making proposals sure to infuriate liberals such as Lowell Weicker of Connecticut and generally gumming up the works.
“Any time they wanted to put a stick in the spokes, Helms would throw in an abortion amendment or a prayer-in-schools amendment, and Lowell Weicker would stand up and solemnly declare he was going to filibuster the rest of his life on this issue,” Howard Baker told me one morning. “To tell you the truth, Jesse Helms is a much-maligned politician from a senatorial standpoint because, more than most, if you had to do something for the sake of the Senate or the country or the party, and you went to Jesse, you could cut a deal.… Sometimes it took months. Sometimes I had to let it languish there for months, as in some State Department appointments.”
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Helms’s favorite weapon against Shultz and the State Department has been the legislative “hold,” a senatorial courtesy which allows a single senator to delay action on some presidential appointment if he has personal objections. Most senators use the “hold” sparingly, generally when they have not had a chance to meet the nominee or attend a confirmation hearing and want more time. Helms uses it constantly.
In 1981, Helms pressed for a “housecleaning in the Asia bureau” of the State Department and put a five-month hold on a former associate of Henry Kissinger’s to force replacement of two other officials. The Kissinger network is a special Helms target; Helms hated Kissinger’s promotion of détente with Moscow. In 1982, Helms put such a long hold on two senior Reagan appointees to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency that their names were eventually withdrawn. In June 1985, Helms put a hold on twenty-nine ambassadorial and high-level appointments by Shultz to try to force six of his own favorites into ambassadorial spots. From July to November, he held up the appointment of a new ambassador to China. Winston Lord, another former Kissinger aide and former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Helms did not relent until the administration paid his price: pledging not to funnel economic aid to China through the United Nations for a birth-control program that included forced abortions.
Helms and Metzenbaum know that these tactics so anger their colleagues that they face retaliation whenever they want something. They are both usually careful not to offer much that can be held hostage by others. Indeed, Helms’s guerrilla strategy left him ill suited as Agriculture Committee chairman for the vital task of lining up votes in both parties to pass farm legislation. He had to lean on Bob Dole, an expert craftsman of compromises and coalition-builder.
“Howard and Jesse are the skilled of the skilled, and both of them carry very few identifiable legislative bills,” remarked Alan Simpson, the Republican whip. “I can tell you that other senators go hunting with passion for the bills that Helms or Metzenbaum want. They say, ‘Well, Howard held me up,’ or ‘It came to the end and he stopped me,’ or ‘Jesse held me up. What have they got? What do they want? I want to go find it. I want to trash it. I want to filibuster it.’ And there’s not much there. It’s just a few vapor trails going through the sky.”
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