"People also used to say, 'Oh, I met Khrushchev, and he was nice!' " Frank continues. "There's no correlation whatsoever between someone's public policy stance and their personality. None. Few people get elected to office unless they're prepared to be nice to other people. Grumpy people rarely win elections . . . "

I stare at him. Frank is one of my favorite members of Congress, but he is exceptionally grumpy. His staff has learned to ignore it, but he can still make the occasional rookie reporter cry.

"Okay, I'm an exception," says Frank. "Thank you for pointing that out. It saves me a lot of time." He stabs out his cigar. "But the fact is, people rarely get far in public life without having the ability to make other people like them. There's nothing inconsistent with being charming and a racist bigot. Particularly in the South."

"Helms's contradictions are not hard at all to reconcile," agrees Mel Watt, a black Democratic congressman from Charlotte, North Carolina. "People who are patronizing and unsympathetic in their public postures but friendly on a personal level -- historically, that's almost the stereotype of the older southern gentleman."

Before running for Congress, Watt managed the first Senate campaign of Harvey Gantt, who challenged Helms both in 1990 and 1996. During the race, Helms aired one of the most shameless television ads he'd ever run: a pair of white hands crumpling an employment-rejection notice while a narrator intoned, "You needed that job, and you were the best-qualified, but they gave it to a minority."

Harvey Gantt, by the way, is black.

"He chose to resurrect a bill that even Strom Thurmond had abandoned!" says Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley-Braun, who was the first African-American woman elected to the Senate. She's referring to the failed measure Helms sponsored in 1993 to renew a design patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy that just happened to use the Confederate flag as its emblem. "What I've seen," the former senator grimly declares, "is someone who has no understanding or appreciation for the humanity of people who disagree with him."

In Helms's office, I ask whether he'd revise any of the civil-rights positions he had as an editorialist, when he excoriated black activists for being uppity and defended luncheonette owners who refused to serve.

"I still think forced integration was a mistake," he says. "As a government action, I think it was detrimental to whites and blacks. And left alone, it'd have come along -- if you look at the football teams in North Carolina, I tell you, there's scarcely any room for a white boy on 'em!"

He's utterly silent for a moment.

"I came along at a different time, an earlier time, far earlier than you," he finally says. "And I remember very distinctly one of my little friends, when I was 4 or 5, was a little colored boy. And he got mad at me -- I think we were playing jack rocks -- and he called me a white cracker."

He pauses, looks at me intently. "And I called him a you-know-what," he continues. "And it just happened that my father was passin' by, and he heard me do that. He came and took me by the hand and said, 'I'm not gonna paddle you, but don't ever let me hear you use that word again.' And I never used that word again.

"I wish somebody would go among the, uh, colored people, as we called 'em, who work in the Senate, and ask what they think of Dot Helms," he concludes. "And what they think of me. Many people here who work in the Senate, they are my buddies. I do the high-five with 'em. No kiddin'. They stick out those hands and . . . " He swats the air, demonstrating.