Feature

Oldest Living Confederate Senator Tells All

The following afternoon, the senator invites me into his personal office for a brief second interview. I'm delighted, because I still have other questions to ask: about George W., about W.'s father, about the U.N. and Madeleine Albright and the Foreign Relations Committee and Saddam and Osama. Yet I find myself distracted by a large photograph on the wall above his couch. I try not to look at it. And yet . . .

"Look at you! The lady's lookin' at me and Bono!"

It's the strangest shot: Bono, making a V-sign in his wraparound shades, and the senator, grinning like a jackal in his suit.

"I'd never heard of Bono," he says. "So I said, 'Well, why is he comin' here?' It turns out that he is a deeply religious fellow. A family man. And a very charming individual."

He looks back at the photograph, then at me. "Now, I don't understand his music. All I know is loud. But he invited Dot and me to one of his concerts, and to use his -- what do you call it?"

"Skybox," says Jimmy Broughton, his chief of staff.

"Yes! Skybox. They had 27,000 people, I think. Sold out." He starts drawing an invisible diagram in the air. "The suite had a glass window on this side. And it had refreshments and so forth. Thick glass so the noise wouldn't bother you. And then, if you wanted, you could go outside.

"So my grandchildren and I and Dot, we sat outside, and it was . . . earsplitting! And there was my friend Bono down there, dancin' around a heart-shaped thing, yellin' and carryin' on! He'd wave his hand, and a whole sea of people would do the same thing, just like seaweed blowin' in the wind!"

He smiles that big Ichabod Crane grin of his. "They were havin' a screamin' willy!"

Lazy taxonomists usually lump strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms into the same generation of carbon-dated electoral relics, but almost nineteen years separates the two Carolinians, and time has been much kinder to Strom than to Jesse. As recently as the mid-nineties, when Strom was almost in his mid-nineties, he was still walking around the Senate unaided, adhering to a rigorous regime of sit-ups and prunes and swimming furious laps at the gym. ("He takes up a lot of lane," his trainer once observed.) It is only today, just a few days shy of his 100th birthday, that Strom, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, is finally somewhere else, lost in a mist of recidivist contentment, smiling gauzily every now and then at pretty ladies and the people he knows.

Helms, on the other hand, has been in fragile health for some time, and the press has been whispering for years about his imminent demise. Between 1991 and 1998, he was treated for prostate cancer and had two kneecaps replaced, plus a heart valve. Back in December 2000, the senator's spokesman on the Foreign Relations Committee got so fed up with press inquiries that he sent out a blast-fax: To our friends in the media -- Senator Helms is not sick. He is not in the hospital. He is not on life support. He does not have terminal prostate cancer. He does not have pancreatic cancer. He is absolutely fine and will (God willing) be around to torment you for a long time to come. Relax and accept it.

But apparently, Helms wasn't absolutely fine. Eight months later, he announced his retirement, citing his health. Seven months ago, he had another heart valve replaced, and he continues to suffer from a peripheral neuropathy that wreaks havoc with his strength, balance, and nerve endings.

Moseley-Braun sees a connection between Helms's recent interest in AIDS and his aging. "I think that whenever someone is facing their maker," she says, "they try to straighten up and fly right."

What's strange, though, is that Helms's dearest friends say the exact same thing.

"I think what you've seen is a stripping-away or a peeling-away of the shell, and it's really shining the light on the true Jesse Helms," says Senator Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican who happens to have been a heart surgeon in his previous life. "Amidst this fading energy, I've seen this AIDS issue take off to the sky."

During Senate breaks, Frist frequently does medical mission work in Africa. Three years ago, he asked permission to do a global-health bill out of the Foreign Relations Committee, of which Helms was the chairman, telling the senator that AIDS was destroying sub-Saharan Africa.

"And Jesse said, 'You gotta be kidding me,' " recalls Frist. " 'There are 10 million orphans from parents who've died of AIDS in Africa?' And I said, 'Yes. It's the same little virus that, over the years, you haven't been too sympathetic to.' So we wrote a global-health bill. And it passed."

Franklin Graham, Billy's son and the chairman of Samaritan's Purse, an international Christian relief organization based in North Carolina, was also instrumental in persuading Helms. "I told him that we have to be consistent as Christians," he says. "We can't be for saving the unborn and then turn our backs on children dying of AIDS."

Back in his office, I ask Helms if his interest in Third World–debt relief and AIDS means his priorities have, in fact, changed.

"Not one iota."

Didn't he mention being "ashamed"?

"Well, I did say it, and I am ashamed," he says. "But we're not going to stop the spread of AIDS if we don't all get busy workin' in every possible way. We got to make morality in America popular again."

He looks at me defiantly. "Because a lot of people who have AIDS and other diseases," he says, "delight, I am told, in spreadin' 'em. Which is awful, if you think about it."

Today, it is hard not to think about Helms in terms of his ideological opposite, the late Paul Wellstone, who also was a principled populist and the lonely senator on the slim side of 99-1 votes. Before he died, I happened to ask Wellstone what he made of his North Carolina colleague. I confessed to being charmed by him -- in spite of the homophobia, in spite of the appalling record on civil rights, in spite of the utter monstrousness of his public rhetoric.

Wellstone was sympathetic. Shortly after he got elected in 1990 (but before he got to Congress), he told the Chicago Tribune that he "despised" Helms. "I still don't understand what I would consider his real . . . harshness, to tell you the truth," he told me. "But I'll tell you: We once went on a plane together coming back from Rabin's service, and we had a lot of time to talk. I remember saying, 'We didn't start out on such good footing.' But then he talked about his children and grandchildren, and I talked about our children. And since then, we've come to really appreciate each other. Whenever he's been in the hospital, I've always called him and wished him and Dot well . . . So it's been nice. And surprising. But you know, I'm glad. I would rather it be this way."

He stepped into the elevator to go vote. "I guess the key distinction," he said, "is between a person and a person's viewpoint." The doors closed.

It was then I realized: Helms inspires Democrats to do just what he says his own daddy preached.

Love the sinner.

Hate the sin.

And pray that one day, our way wins.