What's on Jesse's Mind?

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Helms' potential for troublemaking is also limited by the fact that he does not enjoy strong support from his party colleagues on the committee. His fire- breathing rhetoric makes it hard for him to round up moderate votes. Richard Lugar of Indiana, who chaired the panel during the early 1980s, when Helms opted for control of the Agriculture Committee, is a thoughtful internationalist who often teams up with Kansas' Nancy Kassebaum to form the balance of power on the committee. She is close to her Kansas colleague Bob Dole, who cannot become an isolationist while he harbors presidential ambitions. As a result, while Helms might be able to score debating points against the Clinton team, he will be hard pressed to change the President's policy very much.

Notwithstanding his sharp tongue, Helms has slowed down in recent years. Fighting prostate cancer, back problems and a hernia, he had a quadruple bypass in June 1992. The Senator's once feared foreign policy team is widely considered the most moderate he has had in a decade. In 1992 he installed as staff director of Foreign Relations retired Navy Admiral James ("Bud") Nance, a former fighter pilot. Nance let go many of the more free-wheeling and controversial aides. "He fired half of us, and the other half ran for cover," says a staff member who was forced out. "Now he can't get legislation through."

In his long career as a foreign policy gadfly, Helms has tended to lose more than he wins. "He will pitch a fit and make a stink about a lot of things," says a former Republican staff member on the committee. "But on the big things, he rarely prevails." Where he is likely to affect policy is at the margins, on treaties that must be approved -- there are few on the docket -- and appointments. State Department officials believe Helms will manage to kill George Bush's cherished Chemical Weapons Convention banning the production of such arms because the Senator believes the Russians are still cheating. He is likely to make it tougher for the U.S. to deploy troops to the Golan Heights as part of an Israeli-Syrian peace deal, though the Senate will probably approve the idea over his objections.

His obstructionist approach to nominations is nothing new; for years he has placed "holds" on ambassadorial choices he disliked, angering Republicans and Democrats alike. Even before he was chairman, he held close to a veto over any diplomatic nominations, keeping some in limbo for months, even years. At other times Helms prefers just to make trouble. When Clinton forwarded to the Senate last year Geraldine Ferraro's nomination to be Ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Huamn Rights, Helms sent the State Department as part of the process more than 100 questions that he wanted answered in 24 hours. Sample: "How many countries in the world have official languages?"