Hard right; the rise of Jesse Helms.

Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms 

by Ernest B. Furgurson (Norton, 302 pp., $18.95)

ERNEST B. FURGURSON introduces Jesse Helms as a man whose "greatest impact is yet to be felt.' Furgurson, the Baltimore Sun's Washington bureau chief, says Helms should be taken seriously. That's why he wrote this book. Of course, Helms is already taken seriously by conservatives and North Carolina voters. The only people who don't take Helms seriously are members of the liberal press. Therein lies the difficulty with this biography.

Furgurson says that Helms is probably the second most powerful conservative in the country right now; however, he attributes Helms's power not to his ideology but to a cluster of nonpolitical characteristics. He is meaner; he is cleverer about exploiting his constituents' paranoia; and he is more willing to skirt laws, written and unwritten, regarding campaign operations and political conduct. What makes him "hard right' is not only his political extremism, but his willingness to go to extremes.

Helms baffles the liberals much as Ronald Reagan has done. Liberals gleefully approached the prospect of facing Reagan in the elections of 1976 and 1980. Now they can't wait for him to take a last motorcade down Pennsylvania Avenue. His success--well, that's because he's good on TV . . . Conservatives like Reagan and Helms are, in the liberal view, successful in spite of their politics, not because of them.

The difference between Reagan and Helms is their good-cop, bad-cop roles. Reagan is a natural optimist, buoying the spirits of a nation that knows it had been giving way, through its own political and social passivity, to a leftish ethos during the Sixties and Seventies. Helms is all doom and gloom: He serves as the permanent pressure point, never allowing the political establishment to forget about crucial issues such as Communism and abortion.

Furgurson is contemptuous of the very thing he struggles to regard seriously. He disdains conservatives, conservative ideas, and conservative voters. He calls Phyllis Schlafly "the anti-women's-rights entrepreneur' and refers to the "Reagan "Star Wars' strategic-defense scheme.' Furgurson says the conservative coalition includes "born-again Christians fuming at sex on TV and in movies, diehard segregationists and parents against "forced busing,' anti-abortion crusaders, paranoid anti-Communists, and flag-wavers suspicious of the patriotism of anyone to their left.'

If Furgurson's rhetoric is sometimes overheated, his political analysis is pedestrian. His only compelling chapter concerns Helms's alleged racism, and here the interest is owing not to Furgurson's unremarkable insights, but rather to the fact that Helms himself has elected to make race so important in his career. This chapter is called "Jesse and "Fred,'' because "Fred' is what--according to a former aide-- Helms calls blacks in the safe confines of his inner office.

Is this true? Maybe. The most unattractive thing about Jesse Helms is his unwillingness to get the race monkey off his back. While other successful Southern politicians, like Strom Thurmond, have long abandoned the exploitation of racial tension, Helms has consistently raised the issue in every election he has taken part in since 1950. In 1984 he managed to mention Jesse Jackson's name 24 times in a single fund-raising letter. Stuff like that is fairly mild, but Helms's pattern of emphasis is apparent. In his victory speech on election night 1984, he promised to mend fences with blacks in North Carolina, a promise that he has yet to keep.

Then again, some of what he has said on the various racially charged issues he has concerned himself with is true, but he is never given credit for this. Furgurson loses his investigative zeal in cases where some digging might yield corroboration of a Helms allegation. For instance, when he is writing about Helms's insistence that Communists were involved in the civil-rights movement, Furgurson refuses to admit that Jack O'Dell, an advisor eventually fired by Martin Luther King, is a real, live Communist.

Whatever may be said about Jesse Helms's racial attitudes, the story that throws the most light on his character concerns his adopted son, Charles. The tale is faithfully recorded by Furgurson. Reading the newspaper at Christmas-time in the mid 1960s, Helms and his wife saw an item about a nine-year-old orphan with cerebral palsy who told the reporter all he wanted from Santa Claus was a set of parents. Today, Charles Helms works for a tobacco company in Winston-Salem.

Some conservatives find that Jesse Helms says things that make even them shiver. There's no need to apologize for him, though. His vigilant, vigilante-style monitoring of dubious State Department appointments, for example, is a matter of principle, not grandstanding. Being the "obstinate, obdurate' night watchman doesn't fit into Furgurson's theory that Helms takes positions simply to raise money and perpetuate his Senate career. Stopping bad foreign-service nominees is important, but it's not something voters notice.

Political biographies relate the facts of their subjects' lives as a matter of course. What sets the good ones apart from the bad is that they give some explanation of how their subject has merited public attention. In Helms's case, if you think the reason might just be Helms's two-fisted conservatism, you won't find the evidence here. All Furgurson has done is expand the myopic, condescending liberal consensus to three hundred pages.