What's on Jesse's Mind?

At first Bill Clinton knew exactly what he wanted to do after learning that North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms had told a Raleigh newspaper that the President "better have a bodyguard" if he ever visited his state. "I'm ready to go to North Carolina right now," an angry Clinton informed White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, who brought him the news last Tuesday. The deep strike in enemy territory was quickly dismissed as impulsive. "We can't just react every time Jesse Helms decides to push his crazy buttons," said a senior official.

Instead White House aides glimpsed an opportunity. Helms' blast -- the second reckless salvo from the archconservative Republican in four days -- offered Clinton a chance to point out how extremist Republicans can be. His public reaction was carefully studied: calling Helms' comments "unwise and inappropriate," the President suggested that Republicans might want to examine whether Helms was fit to serve as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "That's a decision for them to make," said Clinton, "not for me."

Certainly, nowhere is the prospect of Republican control of the Hill as disagreeable to Clinton as on Foreign Relations. For the past seven years, the panel has been a quiet congressional backwater, politely posing few problems for Clinton or his predecessor, George Bush. But control of the panel moves from the courtly, bland and ineffectual Democrat Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island to the reactionary Helms, who promises to let few Administration positions go unquestioned. Helms has always been a bomb thrower, unafraid of blowing up reputations abroad and at home. He likened Haitian leader Jean- Bertrand Aristide to Adolf Hitler. He still refers to the world's most populous country as "Red" China. He stuck up for the architects of apartheid over the black majority in South Africa and once accused Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz of "playing footsie with the communists." Last year, after debating Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, the first black woman in the Senate, about the virtues of the Confederate flag, he said, "I'm going to sing Dixie to her until she cries." When Clinton nominated Roberta Achtenberg, a gay-rights activist, to a post at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms said, "She's not your garden-variety lesbian. She's a militant-activist-mean lesbian."

Now, as chairman of the prestigious committee, Helms will be in a position to make his strongly conservative -- and sometimes highly quixotic -- foreign policy views matter. Two weeks ago, he sent Clinton a letter threatening to give the Administration's foreign policy a rough ride for the next two years unless the President deferred the vote on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to the new session of Congress. A Senate aide likened the tactic to "kidnapping a child and sending a ransom note even though you plan to kill the kid anyway."