He leans in confidentially: "If you promise not to regard me as holier-than-thou, I'm gonna tell you a secret."

I nod.

"I've got a little office that's down on the first floor of the Capitol" -- a private, stately little space, one of the real old-fashioned Senate perks extended to the body's senior members -- "and I've gone down there many a time and said, 'Lord, I don't know how to handle this. Please, if you will, help me.' And every time, His hand would go on my shoulder and say, 'Get out there and try again.' And I . . . I still lost, but my faith in the Lord has grown immeasurably since I've been here. Because I know who's in charge. He is." Helms rolls his watery eyes toward Heaven and points up.

---

Faith is central to understanding Jesse Helms. He is a devout Baptist from a state of devout Baptists, and while the things he does in the Lord's name may give a lot of us the chills, it's this sense of devotion that informs much of his rhetoric and deeds. It explains why he's an ardent pro-lifer; it explains why he's a mean-activist-militant heterosexual. (At a campaign rally in 1990, he lamented: "Think about it. Homosexuals and lesbians, disgusting people marching in our streets, demanding all sorts of things, including the right to marry each other. How do you like them apples?") It probably also explains why, many Christmases ago, Helms adopted a child with cerebral palsy after reading a newspaper story about unadoptable children, and why, years later, he served as director of United Cerebral Palsy North Carolina.

Helms also has one of the few real marriages in the Senate. Everyone in that floor Jessepalooza mentioned Dot Helms. Sixty years later, and even in a scooter, he still opens doors for her.

It's a sense of Christian duty, too, that friends say accounts for Helms's recent embrace of two unlikely causes: AIDS funding in Africa and Third World–debt relief. In what has now become a shiny pearl of Senate folklore, the senator openly wept two years ago when Bono, the lead singer of U2, used the biblical principle of Jubilee to persuade the Committee on Foreign Relations to forgive the world's poorest nations their loans. And this past February, at an AIDS conference thrown by an international Christian relief organization, Helms stunned everyone by confessing how "ashamed" he was not to have done more to fight the world's AIDS pandemic, especially in Africa. His Senate swan song became a $500 million appropriations bill to USAID for HIV-positive pregnant women.

"I have come to a conclusion that the positions Jesse Helms took really weren't political positions," says Warren Rudman, the retired New Hampshire Republican and one of the Senate's last great moderates. "They were things he truly believed in."

It also often surprises people that in person, Helms is almost the exact opposite of the dragon the media and his foes make him out to be. He joshes with Senate pages, herds tourists into SENATORS ONLY elevators to spare them long waits, and greets most of the Capitol Hill employees by name. (Unlike, say, Barbara Mikulski, the liberal Maryland senator, who might routinely vote in their interests but whose stare could freeze a bottle of vodka.) In The Washingtonian's biennial, bipartisan survey of top Capitol Hill staff, Helms was voted the nicest member of Congress -- this is out of 535 people, mind you -- in both 2000 and 2002.

How do you like them apples?

"It's the reverse of the proverb: He's the velvet hand in the iron glove," says Danielle Pletka, who worked for the Foreign Relations Committee for ten years. "Often to the immense frustration of his staff. Because you'd want him to be the man people think he is: a superhawk, a tough guy. Instead, he's genuinely, relentlessly nice."

"He has been extremely cordial and kind to me personally," admits Hillary Clinton, who once accused Helms on national television of being the steward of a vast right-wing conspiracy. "He was the first of my colleagues to stop me and ask me how my mother was doing after she had surgery for colon cancer." She abruptly stops walking -- a risk if you're Hillary, because the press and tourists will crowd. "I mean, we still disagree on practically evvverything," she says. "But . . . uh . . . well. I think both of us have been surprised at how cordial a relationship we've developed."

"You could approach him about any issue," adds Russ Feingold, the liberal senator from Wisconsin. "You'd be foolish to approach him about some, but I was surprised to discover that he's rather easy to work with." He, too, pauses. "As long as you're not rude to him."

---

"Arrrrghhhh! that is the most ridiculous, hackneyed point," says Barney Frank, one of three openly gay members in the House, as he sits in the gilded Speaker's Lobby and munches irritably on a cigar. "People were nice to their slaves!"

In the same biennial Washingtonian survey that rated Helms the nicest member of Congress, Frank was deemed Brainiest and Funniest for the past ten years.