Jesse Helms: champion of liberty (RIP)

By Wes Vernon

This week's column started out as an attempt to sum up Jesse Helms' pivotal place in history and all that he has done for America. Soon came the realization of a task so daunting that one hardly knows what to leave in and what to leave out — assuming the column is not meant to morph into a book. So herewith, some highlights of how he stood up for this nation.

Uncompromising anti-Communist

We can start with Helms' days in the early fifties as administrative assistant to Democrat Senator Willis Smith — a highly respected former president of the American Bar Association. Helms had Willis's ear during the latter's membership on the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee when that bipartisan panel unanimously found that Owen Lattimore — then a target of Senator Joseph McCarthy — had been "from sometime beginning in the 1930s a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy."

Loved by anti-Communists worldwide

The Miami Herald, with a large readership in the anti-Castro Cuban American community in that city, ran a lead story on the senator's July 4 death by noting his co-authorship of the Helms-Burton Act. Among other things, that wide-ranging measure outlined the conditions for ending the U.S. embargo against Cuba — chief among them being that neither Fidel nor Raul Castro would be in power.

Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.)-a native of Havana who with her family arrived on U.S. shores to escape Castro's prison state — said, "Senator Helms understood the terrifying nature of dictatorships and was helpful in the cause of freedom for oppressed people everywhere."

No fan of Hollywood politics

Unsurprisingly, Senator Helms's staunch anti-communism earned him the enmity of the Hollywood left, as exemplified by the likes of Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Paul Newman, Marlo Thomas, and Phil Donohue, who put up money to defeat him at the polls. P.S. He won anyway.

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman

Jesse Helms always knew the difference between crafting foreign policy that, on one hand, involves us with other nations in matters of mutual principle and sovereignty and — on the other hand — bogs us down in entangling alliances against which George Washington warned us.

His opposition was instrumental in keeping the U.S. signature off the treaty of the International Criminal Court (ICC), an audacious plan that could haul American citizens (including those in uniform) before an unaccountable tribunal that would deny them their rights as guaranteed under the Constitution. Helms' leadership led to the Senate rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which lacked meaningful ways to detect cheating — and which could have led the U.S. to disarm while allowing America-haters an arms buildup to destroy us.

He was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the current deployment of our anti-missile defense, or Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). And the North Carolina senator followed through by leading the charge that foiled President Clinton's attempt to weaken that program just prior to leaving the White House.

These are significant accomplishments for a chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Most who have occupied that post in my lifetime were either committed internationalists before they arrived, or were quickly co-opted by the diplomatic "one-world" establishment after arriving there. Not Senator Helms. He took over that chairmanship in a spirit of good will to other nations, while always mindful of his first responsibility to use America's best interests as a yardstick. The professionals at the State Department and elsewhere who tried to work around Chairman Helms quickly realized nothing got past him.

Freedom over diplomacy

Jesse Helms put individual freedom before the walking-on-eggs business of diplomatic superpower niceties.

During the Cold War, a Ukrainian sailor made a dash for freedom by jumping from a Soviet ship into the Mississippi River. The Soviets — after catching the man and bringing him back on board — insisted he had fallen off the boat and was not trying to escape. Helms tried to subpoena him to testify before the Senate Agriculture Committee which he then chaired. But the Soviet ship left in time to avoid that.

This was one of the few — but significant — times when Helms was at loggerheads with his close friend Ronald Reagan, who was then preparing for his first summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The senator believed the injustice of sending a freedom-lover back to retribution of the slave state trumped any problems concerning the summit. Reagan on this occasion backed the State Department brass.

Years later — largely because Helms refused to let the issue die — the sailor, Miroslav Medvid was released from a Soviet hospital for the criminally insane where he had been at the tender mercies of the KGB. He and Helms had an emotional meeting as witnessed by the senator's staff aide Marc Thiessen.

The ultimate confrontation

The striped pants boys at the State Department were scandalized upon learning that Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms was about to become the first legislator of any nation to address the United Nations. The nerve of that primitive to speak to the sophisticates at the citadel of worldly wisdom!

How it went

As expected, not every diplomat at the U.N. Security Council agreed with the Helms speech, but in the end, he departed the "Tower of Babel" on the East River with their respect.

The speech began with an acknowledgement of some disagreement but stressed that "It is not my intent to offend you and I hope I will not. It is my intent to extend to you my hand of friendship and convey the hope that in days to come, and in retrospect we can join in a mutual respect that will enable us to work together in an atmosphere of friendship and hope...."

Laying the cards on the table

Without insulting his audience, Senator Helms was speaking from the heart of America which — as polls have shown for several years now — has registered skepticism and disapproval of the United Nations. He cited "thousands of letters [he'd received] from Americans all across the country."

— They hear "comments here in New York calling the United States 'deadbeat,'" notwithstanding that the UN lives and breathes on the hard-earned money of the American taxpayers (over $10 billion in 1999 alone).

— "They read reports of raucous cheering of the UN delegates in Rome" of the defeat of U.S. efforts to protect Americans from the International Criminal Court.

— They learn that "despite all the human rights abuses taking place in dictatorships around the globe, a UN special 'rapporteur' decided his most pressing task was to investigate human rights violations in the U.S. — and found our human rights record wanting."

Overwhelming support for UN reform

Helms noted that the Senate had passed (98-1) the Helms-Biden law mandating "a new [U.S.] relationship with the United Nations," with reforms such as creation of the new independent UN Inspector General and the adoption of "consensus budgeting practices" for more transparency.

As the largest contributors to the UN treasury, the senator reiterated, Americans have a right and we have "a responsibility to insist on specific reforms in exchange for their investment."

Drawing the line

Senator Helms mentioned that Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., one of his much earlier predecessors as Senate Foreign Relations chairman, had asked for fourteen conditions to the treaty providing for America's membership in the League of Nations right after World War 1. Among these were that the United States would remain the sole judge of its internal affairs; that the League would not restrict the rights of U.S. citizens; and that the U.S. would retain the authority for the deployment of U.S forces throughout the League.

President Woodrow Wilson, a super self-righteous fool of a president if ever there was one — my words, not Helms' — refused to compromise, and so the Senate — in a great moment of towering wisdom — rejected Wilson's Versailles Treaty.

Just so we are clear

Helms added these points to his UN audience:

— "It is a fanciful notion that free peoples need to seek the approval of an international body (some of whose members are totalitarian dictatorships) to lend support to nations struggling to break the chains of tyranny and claim their inalienable God-given rights."

— The American people "look with alarm at the UN claims to a monopoly on international moral legitimacy. They see this as a threat to the God-given freedoms of the American people, a claim of political authority over America and its elected leaders without their consent."

— The senator quoted Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who opined that power must be dispersed because "if I do not like what my [county] does, I can move to another [county].... If I do not like what my state does, I can move to another state. And if I do not like what Washington does, I have few alternatives in a world of jealous nations." In Helms words, "as the UN seeks to impose its utopian vision of 'international law on Americans...where do we go when we don't like the laws of the world?"

And finally:

A UN that seeks to impose its authority on Americans without their consent "begs for confrontation and, I want to be candid, eventual withdrawal." (Italics added)

A very key aide to one of Senator Helms' colleagues once told me the North Carolinian was probably the one and only conservative in the Senate who has not been swayed into giving ground on principle.

Since then, some others of high principle have come aboard. But they are all too few. It is perhaps ironic that this patriot would pass away on the Fourth of July — as did Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1826 and James Monroe in 1831.

© Wes Vernon