THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, November 25, 1994 TAG: 9411250062
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
``Jesse,'' they're saying in North Carolina, ``was just being Jesse.''
Strutting in his new role on the world stage as chairman designate of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms is as full of hubris as a blood-sucking tick in a hound's ear.
Jesse, a sage Carolinian said, ``is acting like somebody who won a Cadillac in the Kiwanis Club lottery.''
Helms told a reporter in Raleigh that President Clinton was so unpopular with the military that if he came to North Carolina, he'd better bring bodyguards. In one sweep he smeared Clinton and the soldiers.
In a muted, understated way, the reaction among Republicans on Capitol Hill was priceless, something to cherish on a gray day.
Their responses were reminiscent of ear-stunned men who, after a huge explosion, can't hear themselves talking and even have some difficulty thinking.
Usually voluble Rep. Newt Gingrich said, soberly, the president would be welcome in Georgia - the first halfway kind word Gingrich has had in days for Clinton.
U.S. Sen. Bob Dole dared more. The president, he said, could go to every one of the 50 states.
That was it. Nothing to scold the chairman-to-be of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Just a word to console the president.
Next day, Helms said he wouldn't make that mistake again - as close as he came to an apology - and then recited again Clinton's disabilities. The exchange, he stressed four times, had been ``informal.''
Dole said Helms phoned him to say that the comment came when Helms and the reporter were ``joshing back and forth.''
Dole said he'd assumed that, but ``it probably shouldn't have been said, even in jest.''
As a former city editor of the Raleigh Times and then a radio commentator, Helms knows that informal or not, joshing or whatever, reporters report.
Virginia has had its Jesses. Lindsay Almond was so bent on becoming governor that he became a segregationist demagogue. Almost too late, he regained his senses.
That Helms heads a committee dedicated to diplomacy is an irony. Some Democrats fret that he may disrupt sensitive negotiations among nations.
Sen. Christopher Dodd touched on a thought in the back of many minds, that Helms' outburst broke in the news Nov. 22 - the date on which all of us can tell where we were when a president was assassinated in 1963.
Maybe Helms will come to his senses. Maybe he will grow up and learn to keep a civil tongue in his head.
If he doesn't, in this era of sulfurous hate when an ill-chosen word may ignite madmen, Helms may draw, some sad day, a heavy burden on his conscience.
And that goes for all the hatemongers among us. by CNB