Senator No

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So, has Senator No mellowed to Senator Maybe? "Not once!" Helms thunders as if you've asked him whether he's ever tried on a Union Army uniform. "As Popeye used to say, 'I am what I am.'" Albright's cozying, for the most part, has only got Helms to treat her politely at hearings. The relationship, in fact, has cooled somewhat. Helms bristles when she doesn't respond to his letters promptly or when she calls to "consult" him on an issue she's already decided. Helms also hasn't lost his hard edge, particularly when it comes to civil rights, women's rights and gay rights. Last October, he had Capitol police throw out 10 Congresswomen who barged into his hearing room demanding he allow the committee to vote on a U.N. treaty that urges countries to end discrimination against women. Helms claims the accord would outlaw Mother's Day and legalize prostitution. (It wouldn't.)

Helms votes against legislation that hints at being liberal, but some of his best friends in the Senate have been liberals. He cried when Hubert Humphrey died. One morning he shocked aides by stopping a meeting to phone the office of then Democratic Senator Paul Simon. "I noticed this morning coming in that Paul's left-rear tire is low," he told Simon's secretary. "He better put some air in it, or he won't get home."

"To understand Helms' foreign policy, you have to look at it through a moral prism," explains his spokesman, Marc Thiessen. You also have to accept that the lenses haven't been changed much since the 1920s, when Helms was growing up just west of Wingate in Monroe. It was a sleepy town where cotton wagons circled the courthouse every Saturday, where flowers were put on the Confederate memorial to honor Southern chivalry. Helms, for instance, still thinks the civil rights movement was unnecessary. Foreign affairs for him is defined by the black and white of the cold war. He still speaks fondly of brutal Latin American dictators, like Chile's Augusto Pinochet, because they fought communism.

Clinton may want to build a foreign policy for the 21st century, but Helms is happy to remain its Tyrannosaurus rex. He taps out speeches on a typewriter, avoids diplomatic parties ("They're boring") and spends most nights at home with his wife of 57 years, Dorothy, catching up on paperwork. On TV, the only shows he likes are Touched by an Angel and JAG; he favors C-SPAN. His favorite star on the latter is British Prime Minister Tony Blair when he appears in Parliament to answer questions. "My Conservative friends over there look like they have sat up all night trying to dream up questions to trip you up," Helms once told Blair. "And you stand there looking at this little book you got and blow them out of the water. What in the hell is in that book?"

The betting on Capitol Hill is that Helms won't run again when his fifth term ends in 2002. He suffers from a degenerative bone disorder in his hip and has had surgery for prostate cancer, a quadruple heart bypass and a double knee replacement. And because a neurological disease has numbed his feet, he zips around the halls in a scooter he calls "my Mercedes." But Helms considers these ailments little more than distractions. "I have never felt better," he insists. "I don't have any plans not to run."