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The most disquieting section of Here's Where I Stand is Helms' description of his 30 years in Washington. When he arrived, he writes, the Senate was "a sort of gentlemen's club" of Democrats and moderate Republicans. "They didn't want to make any waves; I wanted to drain the swamp," he writes. Then, for the next 200 pages, the former senator gives us a toned-down rendition of how he drained the swamp: Helms Lite.
Take foreign relations. Helms describes his institutional arch nemesis, the State Department, as a bunch of "do-as-we-please bureaucrats" and mentions that his staff developed "alternative resources for information." This "fact-gathering," as he calls it, uncovered important information, including an alleged secondhand link between an obscure United Nations agency and the North American Man/Boy Love Association. "Our State Department was not aware" of this connection, he writes. "The department claims they were horribly embarrassed by this episode, as they should have been."
Was this really the essence of Helms' foreign relations operation? A few fact-checkers who ferreted out pedophiles with vague quasi-governmental connections? Not exactly. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms ran a "shadow State Department" that sent staffers all over the globe, gathering intelligence from Latin America, southern Africa, Taiwan, South Korea and Western Europe. He built a network of right-wing political and business leaders, along with anti-communist exiles from Cuba and Central America. Conservative organizations at home and abroad funded many of these adventures.
To what end? Demurely, Helms says that he was trying to separate the "good guys" from the "bad guys" and to ferret out communism wherever it lay. (Apparently it lay everywhere: "Communism came over on the Mayflower," he writes, disparaging the Pilgrims' efforts to share the wealth in the Plymouth colony.)
So, who were Helms' "good guys"? This is where Here's Where I Stand again grows silent. The former senator fails to mention that, particularly during the 80s, he built some rather shady alliances. Among his friends:
• The Mozambican National Resistance, or Renamo, a rebel group sponsored by South Africa's apartheid government (another Helms ally). According to the Los Angeles Times, Renamo used to storm into villages, slice children in half with machine-gun fire, and hack villagers to death with bayonets and machetes.
• Roberto D'Aubuisson, the rightist politician in El Salvador most closely associated with the death-squad murders of Archbishop Óscar Romero and thousands of peasants.
• Jonas Savimbi, leader of Angola's UNITA rebels, whose reported torture techniques included burning his enemies at the stake.
• Chile's military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, whose tactics included throwing his political opponents from airplanes.
• Bolivian president General Luis García Meza, a reported cocaine trafficker who came to power in a coup with the help of former Nazi officer Klaus Barbie. The State Department had condemned Meza for "savage violations of human rights," and the former president is now in prison for his crimes. Helms nonetheless courted Meza's friendship, calling the United States' Latin American policy "misguided."
In Here's Where I Stand, Helms prides himself on a foreign-policy agenda based on humanitarianism. "How could -- and why should -- the American people 'write off' the slaughter of countless thousands of innocent people as if it were no more than bad debt?" Helms writes in his book. This is a question the ex-senator must today answer himself. How could he "write off" the brutality of some of his closest allies abroad? His answer: In the hierarchy of evils, communism trumps torture.
"Have we always supported the 'good guys'? Maybe not," Helms concedes. "But this much is sure: It was never a mistake to give our support to the person or group who did not embrace Communism rather than the person or faction who did." Linking communism to "the devaluation of human life," he concludes, "In no case is the ancient rule that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' truer than when the enemy is Communism."
Helms devotes an entire chapter of Here's Where I Stand to what he calls "hot-button issues." He equates abortion with the Holocaust; decries a school-prayer ban that he claims forbids a child from "pray[ing] for comfort for the family of a fellow student dealing with a tragedy"; and explains why conservative talk-radio hosts are more credible than The Washington Post. "The members of the liberal media have made a god of government and devalued Godly wisdom about human conduct," he writes.
One of Helms' hot-button issues is AIDS in Africa. In one of his few self-critical moments, he repeats his 2002 regret that he hasn't done more to solve the international pandemic. "Perhaps, in my eighties, I may be too mindful of my soon meeting Him," the Republican writes, "but I know that, like the Samaritan traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, we cannot turn away when we see our fellow man in need."
