Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms
Furgurson, Ernest B.
Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms is another fusillade fired in the ongoing battle between North Carolina's senior senator and the liberal press, two camps that practically define themselves in...
...He's against everything, always complaining, an obstruction to the important business of the Senate, the charge goes...
...their mark, however...
...Furgurson's entitled to his opinion...
...Furgurson opines that "Most international problems in our time demand a reasoned international strategy...
...The policy questions are dealt with only obliquely...
...Let's have no nonsense about rising tides that lift all boats...
...With all the "morning in America" syrup that has attended the "Reagan Revolution," it is easy to forget the hard work of reaction against bad ideas and bad policies that conservatism calls for...
...Furgurson reveals the economic illiteracy of most journalists in the remarkable sentence: " . . . Reagan, facing a sure economic recession, bowed to his advisers and reluctantly threw his weight behind . . . one of history's biggest tax increases...
...What of U.S.-Soviet relations...
...Polemics disguised as biography, and like tactics, are to be expected in these circles...
...Furgurson begins the book with a meditation on the question of how he and Helms could have experienced similar upbringings, yet turned out so differently...
...He casts Helms as a pawn in class warfare, a shill for big business, on whose behalf he "persuaded working people that their needs were the same as men whose economic desires were in fact wholly opposite...
...F urgurson really doesn't have a clue about Helms or how to go after him...
...Helms's animosity toward Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, can be traced, Furgurson speculates, to the time when Helms, as a Raleigh city councilman, warned city officials that King's appearance in the city might stir violence...
...But that should be to his credit with real conservatives...
...It THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 43...
...Senator Helms emerges without a scratch from this unauthorized biography, an extraordinarily vapid and uninformed book...
...He emerges from this hatchet job as a principled and charitable man with access to far more intellectual candlepower and political acumen than one ever suspected...
...King came and went without incident, and Helms was deeply embarrassed, the blame for which King apparently has been made to bear...
...Though this notion would be a commonplace to the Constitution's drafters, to Furgurson it reveals thinking that "will chill anyone who subscribes to the Bill of Rights and realizes that some day Helms could take part in a convention to amend the U.S...
...That's all fair enough...
...he "nobody here but us liberals" viewpoint is never put aside...
...Helms has staked out the right-most position in the U.S...
...He "has never supported a civil rights bill for those already born...
...Since Helms's positions are without merit on their face, there remains only the business of discovering what defects make this demagogue tick...
...The answer is that somewhere along the line Jesse Helms learned to think for himself...
...That fact is hard to understand—and inconvenient—for Helms, whose journalism and politics were intermixed throughout his broadcast career...
...It is part of Furgurson's purpose to do dime-store psychoanalysis on his subject, and his efforts here are quite beyond ludicrous...
...The only real-life incidence of alleged discrimination that Grove City addressed concerned how much money colleges apportioned to women athletes...
...Furgurson appears to be utterly unconversant with conservative arguments on any issue, and so he falls back on the old liberal conventional wisdom that conservatism is merely personality defect...
...And what about tax policy, the argument over whether supply-side incentives to the private sector or government redistribution will elicit greater economic vitality...
...Constitution...
...Undoubtedly, much of the liberal community will give vigorous assent to the whole smear, but the book certainly will do nothing to damage Helms's standing among his admirers...
...Silliest of all is Furgurson's explanation for why Helms isn't too keen on the media...
...But since the bill attempting to undo Grove City, which Helms opposes, classifies itself under "civil rights," Furgurson had no compunction about borrowing it from the feminists to use in labeling Helms a racist...
...And the liberal media Helms worries about...
...By then Helms has been compared unfavorably with George Wallace ("a warmer, more understandable human being" than Helms's aloof polyester patrician) and Joe McCarthy (a red-baiting yahoo, but no ideologue with a blueprint for America's future like the Constitution-threatening Helms...
...In opposing sanctions against South Africa, he obviously supports "apartheid—a system devised to keep sassy black people in their place...
...Anyone naive enough to expect the book really to be an even-handed treatment, or contain even a straw of sympathy for Helms, should be disabused of the notion after twelve pages...
...This book will do him no harm...
...Furgurson goes to great lengths to flesh out an indictment of racism...
...The New Right social agenda—abortion, school prayer, pornography, and crime...
...Furgurson probes deep into the Helms psyche, and discerns that the gift may have been motivated by the Senator's gratification at having his presence acknowledged and being asked to offer a benediction...
...It's because the young Helms, an aspiring journalist, did not finish college and take all the requisite journalism and liberal arts courses...
...Though author Ernest B. Furgurson is chief of the Baltimore Sun's Washington bureau, it is his conceit that he stands outside the fray between Helms and his media antagonists...
...Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms is another fusillade fired in the ongoing battle between North Carolina's senior senator and the liberal press, two camps that practically define themselves in opposition to each other...
...He postulates that certain values, such as the inherent worth of the individual, the primacy of strong family life and property rights, are properly seen as antecedent to civil liberties...
...No such animal...
...Let's not have any inordinate fear of Communism...
...And that is that...
...Had he done so, "he would have been grounded in the ethics of the business, exposed to the historical and cultural traditions on which Americans make political judgments...
...Then there's the chapter titled "Coattails II," in which it is suggested that Helms owes his '84 election to Ronald Reagan...
...He would have gotten used to the questioning of common assumptions and established authority that is the very fundament of higher education...
...Furgurson doesn't seem to have heard of the debate...
...He would have it that he is an unbiased observer, something of a scientist, as it were, who confesses that since boyhood, "politicians, especially demagogues, especially southern demagogues, have fascinated me . . " As Furgurson pursues his curiosities he discovers to his horror that this species that has amused him so, embodied perfectly in Helms, threatens the nation's constitutional underpinnings...
...These latest rounds have missed Gordon Jackson, a graduate of Duke University, has written for the Wall Street Journal and the St...
...The book is nearly 300 pages of inadequate analysis and distorted facts...
...W. Norton/$18.95 Gordon Jackson SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB, CHANNEL 3, CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE KTVN, CHANNEL 2, RENO, NEVADA WTTS, 92.3 FM, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WGTC, 1370 AM BLOOMINGTON INDIANA WAJI 951 FM FORT VVAYNE INDIANA CORPORATE OFFICE BOX 62 BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA 47402 TELEPHONE 812 332 7251 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 begin to see the error of his ways...
...Here Helms is found guilty of committing political philosophy...
...Where does Helms stand on civil rights legislation...
...The President no doubt helped, but the fact that Helms, supposedly anathema to blacks, received nearly five percent more of the black vote than did Reagan is rather inconvenient to the coattails theory.is undoubtedly a bid by Furgurson, originally a Virginian, to join another species of Southerner as curious as the demagogue—the journalist who moves east, "grows" into liberal enlightenment, and is rewarded with celebrity status, ?/ la Tom Wicker, Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, and Sam Donaldson...
...One of the counts is that Helms supports the Grove City Supreme Court decision...
...Helms is in the trenches doing that hard work, and he takes a lot of the heat off of Reagan and others...
...Then there was the matter of Helms's $50 donation to a church collection plate...
...Someone should tell him that the recession was nearly over at the time the tax bill was passed in mid-1982, and that it would be a dizzying revelation for any economist to discover evidence that a tax increase combats recession...
...Furgurson takes after the current fashion in denigrating Helms as representative of a negative conservatism...
...He wants to call him both a fervent, unbending ideologue and a Machiavellian, self-aggrandizing manipulator...
...Perhaps the Senator can enroll in a few night courses at George Washington University and HARD RIGHT: THE RISE OF JESSE HELMS Ernest B. Furgurson/W...
...But . . . that is hard to achieve as long as national leaders exaggerate foreign threats and thus feed popular fears...
...Louis Globe-Democrat, as well as The American Spectator...
...Senate and those who disagree with him undoubtedly have cause for concern that he will prosper...
...But there's little point in producing a. polemic that demonstrates no substantive knowledge whatever of the policy issues with which Helms deals...
...lino more instances merit recounting...
...Journalists, in Furgurson's experience, are only idealistic folk, a little more sensitive than the average Joe to "civil rights, civil liberties and the poor...
Vol. 20 • February 1987 • No. 2
