To the Right, March!: Jesse Helms

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band for hours. At the state tuba championship, Principal House remembers, Helms "got to the middle of his solo and stopped dead." Imagine the shaky small-town beanpole straining in the embrace of that brass contraption. "He looked at the judge and said, 'Judge, I'm scared to death.' The judge said, 'Son, I'm scared too. Go on and finish it.' He got the highest rating. That was a big deal."

Helms worked as a soda jerk at Wilson's drugstore. He delivered the News from Charlotte. He swept floors at the Monroe Enquirer, where sometimes they let him write high school sports. In a 1938 commencement pamphlet that catalogued seniors' prospects, Helms said he liked "journalistic work, the life of a pharmacist." His ambition was "to be a columnist." House told the boy just before graduation: "Now, Jesse, you may not believe this, but you can own your own home, and you can have two cars, and you can do a lot for your city and county and state and country." House mulls his old advice. "Jesse's conservatism," he figures, "came from right here in Monroe from the day he was born."

Helms expanded his radius cautiously. First he spent a summer at Wingate College, minuscule and Baptist, seven miles from home. In the fall of 1939 he enrolled at Wake Forest College, half a state away, and spent a year there, proofreading copy at the Raleigh News & Observer to pay his way. (Today he is one of only eight Senators without a degree. He does hold a pair of honorary doctorates, one from South Carolina's Bob Jones University, the other from Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C.)

Helms was offered a sports reporter's job at the News & Observer, but the irregular hours meant his fling with college was finished. Doro thy Coble, a Raleigh girl with soulful eyes, edited the women's page. Two weeks after Jesse turned 21, they were married.

Helms had tried to enlist in the Army, but his hearing was bad. The Navy was less choosy, and for the duration, Specialist First Class Helms wrote press releases in Elizabeth City, N.C., the farthest he had ever been from home. Just after V-J day, Jane Helms was born, and the family moved in with Dot's widowed father, a traveling salesman made good, who lived in Raleigh's neat, green Hayes Barton neighborhood.

The Raleigh Times hired Helms after the war and he promptly became city editor. After a tiff with the printers, Helms quit. Besides, he recalls, he "had this bug about radio," and went to work for station WCBT in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., as a reporter. But the Helmses returned to Raleigh, where A.J. Fletcher, a snappish, right-wing businessman, operated radio station WRAL out of a three-room office. Helms became the entire news department. He lugged his oversize wire recorder, tuba-like, all over the city, and wrote and broadcast the news himself. (Helms' voice can still glide to radio-announcer depths; his single idiosyncrasy is a lazy s, making "pastor" sound like "pasture.")

In 1950 a "New South" was being trumpeted, as it has been often before and since. Thriving North Carolina, with its prestigious universities, became Exhibit A. Behind that progressive facade, however, a Raleigh politician named Willis Smith was running a bilious, Red-and black-baiting