Senator Jesse Helms

[WORDS MISSING HERE] ... there's no need to get fretful or anxious in the presence of people who disagree with him or for that matter of people who loathe him and as he is well loved, he is also well loathed.

Just to fill in his vital statistics, he was born in 1921 in Monroe in North Carolina, baptised as, naturally, a Baptist, started out as a newspaperman and then, having a mellifluous, good-natured voice, became a broadcaster. He married, has three children, served in the navy during the Second War. He lives in Raleigh, which is the capital of North Carolina, a city which encloses within a 30-mile radius more centres of what are called higher learning than probably any other town in the country apart from the state university and five denominational colleges, all Protestant. It's within commuting distance of the University of North Carolina, of the famous Duke University and a later growth, the Research Triangle, one of the leading centres of industrial research.

But this man's eminence has not been earned through any notable connection with the higher learning. Like John F. Kennedy who once thought of going into teaching or journalism, this man decided that he, too, would rather be where the action is. The action, then, for Senator Jesse A. Helms, who discovered comparatively late in life that he was a born politician, is among the people – the mountain lumber men, the oyster and crab fishermen of the coastal sounds, the furniture makers, the women workers in the textile and chemical factories, the old folks in the retirement homes, the young folk encountered anywhere, in the schools, on the football fields and the shopping centres and the churches of whatever faith. And among the hill farmers and the plains farmers, most of all, the tobacco farmers.

You will appreciate that perhaps the trickiest problem of Senator Helms' political life arises from his implacable stand against abortion – he wants a constitutional amendment to outlaw it – and his implacable devotion to the tobacco industry. The connection? Well, if there's one branch of knowledge in which Mr Helms is absolutely dogmatic, though in his reasonable, quiet way, it is in the knowledge of obstetrics. Learned doctors may argue, as they do, about exactly when an unhatched offspring turns into a human being. The senator knows, not in months, not in weeks – it is in the moment of conception.

A few weeks ago, he stood humming and nodding alongside 30 small children in a school while a little girl recited a prayer of thanksgiving for each one of the delicate parts of the inside of my body. To any pedant who wants to make a medical, ethical issue of childbirth and abortion, Senator Helms could reply, with absolute sincerity, 'A little child shall lead them'.

He is, he declares, dedicated to the sacredness of human life. Whether this concern extends to the cigarette smokers of America is a nice point, which I'm sure has been brought up to him and which I'm equally sure he could answer. The tobacco industry has not yet got around to doing what some whisky people are doing, namely, to advertise their product and, in the same breath, deplore heavy drinking, but if anyone could reconcile an anxiety for human health with the prosperity of the brightleaf tobacco industry, I'm sure Jesse Helms could do it.

Of the hundred counties of North Carolina, 90 of them grow tobacco and the state consequently produced between one-third and one-half of the entire American tobacco crop, the brightleaf flue-cured tobacco that's used in cigarettes and pipe tobacco. For a very long time now, it's been known abroad as Virginia tobacco, though it is, in fact, quite different from the Virginia tobacco that was introduced into Europe.

By the way, one of the ironies of its history is that the original Virginia type, a fast-burning leaf, is grown now mainly in Turkey. When, during the Second War, Mr Churchill begged Britons to switch to Turkish tobacco to save the transatlantic ships' bottom for more precious cargoes like tanks and citrus juice and other staples, the British cigarette smoker was unmoved by the fact that the Turks were being enlisted in the Christian war against Hitler and went on stubbornly craving the Carolina, the brightleaf, what they called Virginia tobacco. And the British smoker had his way.

Now, North Carolina, like all the Southern states, was until a generation ago solidly Democratic, with a big 'D' that is. In fact, throughout the Roosevelt era and the Truman era and on into the middle late Fifties, the South was always known as the Solid South, meaning that the whole region voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in state offices and sent nothing but Democrats to Washington.

Now the chairmanship of the Senate committees in every field rests on seniority, on how long their members have been there, so the Southern senators, for generations, had a monopoly of Senate chairmanships. In the 1950s came the Supreme Court's famous and, in the South, long-resisted ruling on integration – the reversal of 200 years of keeping blacks and whites apart in schools, restaurants, theatres, buses, jobs, lavatories, everything.

One result of the slow but eventual integration of the Negro was that many Southerners began to move away from the party, the Democrats, that most strongly enforced the integration ruling. The Solid South was broken in 1972 by Richard Nixon, the first time a Republican had taken all the Southern states. The first time, indeed, the Republicans had made even an impressive showing in the South.

That revolution is now complete. The South is solid again, but solidly Republican. Ronald Reagan took every Southern state, as he took all the others except one and while many Southern politicians remain Democrats in name and party affiliation in state and local offices, again seniority gives them an edge, lots of them have come to admit that they are no longer Democrats in the sense of being loyal to the Democratic party in the nation.

So, while North Carolina has only three Republicans in the House and nine Democrats, most of those Democrats are conservatives whom the Republicans can call on.

One of them who is not only conservative by nature and political habit, but is as conservative as you can come by any definition is Jesse Helms. Until 1970, he was a registered Democrat. Two years before Nixon's landslide, he declared himself a Republican and that landslide swept him into the Senate. So he's been there for 12 years.

Since a senator has a six-year term, Jesse Helms was up for re-election this time. He was up against the governor of the state, a moderate conservative Democrat, Mr Jim Hunt. It's by now agreed that their campaign cost more money and vented more below-the-belt punches than any campaign national or state that political veterans can remember.

It's all over now, so we shall simply say that from supporters both organised as political action committees and from individuals and small groups, not only in North Carolina, but all over the country, Mr Helms managed to amass over $12 million against the governor's about eight millions. With these fortunes, they attacked each other in the grossest way.

Two hundred television commercials a day, Hunt was pictured as a tax-obsessed Democrat and a dangerous radical, not to mention, which came out in several snide mentions that he might be too friendly with homosexuals and those wild, New York liberals. On his side Governor Hunt did not falter. Senator Helms was made out to be something very near to an American fascist, a buddy of ruthless Central American dictators, a man ready with the bomb to overthrow the evil empire of the Soviet Union.

Well, Senator Helms won handsomely. He was threatened with a heavy registration of black votes this time, but the whites registered all the more heavily and, in the end, Mr Helms didn't need a single black vote. He is today the political leader of the extreme right wing of the Republican party. He resents big government, big labour, the feminists, blacks, pro-abortionists, anybody ready for an accommodation with the Russians. He unblushingly calls himself the champion of a Christian nation, which America has not been for a long time, in fact – and never, in law.

Of course, he's against textiles coming in from China and he warns that the United States had better contribute a little bit of weaponry to the embattled states of Central America if we don't want to see ten, twenty million immigrants pouring into America and lining up at the welfare barrel.

As you might expect, Senator Helms is the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee but he was second in line for the chairman of the most powerful of all Senate committees, the Foreign Relations Committee, whose chairman, Senator Percy of Illinois, was just defeated for re-election. So, if he wants it, Senator Helms can become the man to resist any and all moderate moves from the White House to negotiate in Central America, to come to an arms agreement with the Russians, but Senator Helms has sworn to his constituents that he will not leave the Agriculture Committee and the protection of their tobacco subsidy.

The North Carolinians mean to hold him to his vow. What he could do is to take the chairmanship of foreign relations and stay on an agriculture sub-committee to guard brightleaf tobacco. It's a very difficult, moral problem. At last word, Senator Helms had gone off, according to his press secretary, to think and pray about it.

With his private pipeline to the Almighty, I don't doubt that he'll find a solution which will satisfy his conscience and the tobacco growers and all the other subjects of his Christian nation.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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