A Gentleman but not a Scholar - 28 January 2000

There is a topic which keeps haunting me like one of those beggars in India who, just when you've successfully bypassed scenes of appalling poverty and are settling to admire a temple, there he is again and even if you've given your mite of conscience money he'll be back again around the next corner and the next.

The topic is the embarrassing, the surely shameful business, of America's being so much in arrears with its annual dues to the United Nations.

Well just the other day the beggar walked right into the house, so to speak, and sat down and gave us a lecture, in the person of a United States senator.

I'm talking, as you've guessed, about Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and his starring appearance in a performance before the Security Council, the like of which has not been seen before in the life of the United Nations.

I pause in shock at the realisation that it's 54 years last June since I sat in a theatre box, as a correspondent, and watched the statesmen and the generals and the other big wigs of 51 nations step up to a flag-bedecked dais and sign the charter of the United Nations - which most people there believed would be, at best, a keeper of the peace, at worst a much better, more thoughtfully-crafted institution than its woeful predecessor, The League of Nations - which it is.

But how does it happen, by what rite or protocol does a United States senator just walk into the United Nations, sit down and lecture its most prestigious body? And what's more warn the delegates of, today, 181 nations that if they - the United Nations - attempt to "impose your presumed authority" on the United States then they all - you all - might have to face: "... eventual United States withdrawal from the organisation."

Let me say at once that that sentence was not the culminating threat of a prepared argument. It might well have been off the cuff. Senator Helms gets ahead of himself often.

There is not a prayer that the United States, under any foreseeable administration, would think of deserting the United Nations.

And as for what the Senator rather condescendingly called its "presumed authority", several members of the council were quick to jump in and point out to him that the United Nations was not an abstract body that existed outside its members, that the United Nations is its members and that the United States is one of them and had sworn and signed on to the authority of the Security Council, especially to take joint action against an aggressor however ineffective that action might have been.

The ambassador from Namibia shared the senator's pride in the sovereignty of his own nation but mentioned that Namibia had stayed loyal to the UN when a previous American administration had called its attempts to become a free nation the work of terrorists. Senator Helms got as good as he gave.

But first I should have said how Senator Helms got to be there to give his scolding lecture.

Well it was the United States' turn to preside over the council - the member nations take it in turn - and it is customary for the presiding nation to invite distinguished visitors - I recall Mrs Gandhi, Yasser Arafat - to come and speak.

Now the point about Senator Helms is that he's not just any senator. He's been in the Senate for 27 years. He is the leading opponent of the United Nations in the American Congress but, most important, he is the chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee - next to the President of the United States, in a position of most direct power in foreign relations of any other American.

No ambassador to any country that the president names can take up his appointment unless he has the blessing of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The founding fathers anticipated a day when a president might, for his own reasons, want to ally the United States with a foreign power. So they wrote into the Constitution the warning that the president shall make treaties only "with the advice and consent of the Senate provided two thirds of the Senate present concur."

So the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee has the power to call or not to call his committee into action. Senator Helms has often shelved some bill that the administration very much wanted to have passed by simply not calling his committee to hold hearings on it.

And the same pique has kept, at this moment, more than a few named ambassadors waiting to take their packed bags to the uninhabited embassy of some foreign country.

And also under Senator Helms's jurisdiction there would come up, routinely, the annual American payment of United Nations dues, which at 25% of the whole UN budget many Americans think is too much.

You may also have noticed I mentioned the Senate's and therefore Senator Helms's strongest hold over the president - the power to confirm or reject a treaty with a foreign country.

Remember Senator Henry Cabot Lodge? A decisive figure in American history. He too was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and it was under his leadership that the Senate, in 1920, rejected the Treaty of Versailles and America's entry into the League of Nations.

Senator Lodge was from an old colonial Boston family, a distinguished historian, a scholar and a gentleman. Senator Helms is no scholar but he is a gentleman, courteous to the point of courtliness to friends and enemies alike.

The day after the Namibian ambassador balled him out before the council there was a social United Nations dinner. Senator Helms greeted the ambassador as if he were his oldest forgotten friend from North Carolina.

Somebody, I think, had a shrewd idea in letting the senator air his prejudices before the council and let other nations remind him he was a fellow member with equal responsibilities to the institution that Franklin Roosevelt - an American president - was most instrumental in founding.

Finally, and briefly - what is a caucus? I do believe if you stopped people in the street, anywhere across America, and put the question one in 10, perhaps one in 100, might give the right answer.

Only two or three states hold them, most others have primary election ballots.

Caucus - it's an Indian word and in the beginning it meant no more than a meeting - not a planned meeting - but "let's call a meeting."

At the presidential nominating conventions you often hear that some state delegation or a group within it is going to call a caucus to protest some issue in the party platform or perhaps to lobby against the party's likeliest choice for president.

The Iowa caucuses are, as they say, something else.

They're really the equivalent of a little nominating convention, in fact some states actually choose their delegates to the national convention in a preliminary state convention. And these caucuses are the closest thing to those state conventions - and notice "caucuses", they come in the plural.

They are meetings called by party activists who will most likely be going, as I say, as delegates to the nominating conventions, so they're not the general public. They are pros.

And on Tuesday they met in somebody's living room here, or a barn at a farm in the country, a schoolroom in a city, and there they would sift around for a while, sipping punch, nibbling on bits of cheese, sausage, whatever, until a chairman called them to quieten down and ask them to divide, as in a parliamentary division.

This side for Mr Keys, who is the black Republican candidate, here for Senator Hatch - who, by the way, has already quit the race - this side for Governor Bush and this for Mr Forbes - they are the two who'd spent small fortunes storming around with buttons and balloons and flags and posters and - most expensive of all - television advertisements.

So the folks divide and the chairman takes a head count. And that's it.

So it's not a ballot, no voting booths and patrolling policemen, no levers to pull, no curtains to guarantee privacy or even privacy. Iowa holds caucuses instead of a presidential primary.

How representative is Iowa of the states? Well it's 30th in population, therefore it has a very small convention delegation. It has fewer blacks and Latinos - just over 1% - than all but three other states. Its main political issue is government subsidies for ethanol - industrial alcohol - for farms.

In other words Iowa is about as unrepresentative of all the states or any one of them as you can find.

Why then the big media hullabaloo? Why the correspondents from Germany and Japan - something like 200 intruding strangers, flashing cameras, pushing microphones, mostly?

Because somebody told them that this was the first of the national presidential primaries. That it would show the way the national wind is blowing. And so editors from Singapore to London said: "Better cover the Iowa caucus." Caucuses, Mr Editor.

In the long ago, in the 1930s to be exact, there was a playwright - very famous, very fashionable with the intelligentsia. He won the Nobel prize for literature. Today he is unremembered and so far as I can read and run, quite out of fashion. His name was Luigi Pirandello.

He wrote a play with a title that exactly sums up, I believe, the proper verdict on the importance of the Iowa caucuses. The title? - 'It is, if you think it is'.

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