Not my favorite senator

One hundred. Easily.

That's how many times I estimate I called Jesse Helms' Senate office over the years, trying to get a comment from him on one outlandish statement or action of his after another.

I telephoned the dude so many times that his office staff and I had our roles down pat: I'd identify myself and a secretary would tell me to hold on. After a minute or two during which she presumably went to fetch him -- although I pictured her polishing her nails, opening mail or making faces at the phone -- she'd return. "The Senator is busy." Click.

When I called at his crib in the Hayes Barton section of Raleigh five years ago, though, a strange thing happened: I talked to him.

I'd already been alerted by my colleague, Rob Christensen, to Helms' one-on-one charm, and sure enough, he personified Southern gentlemanliness. So much so that I had to remind myself that this is a cat who opposed everything this country's government has ever done to improve the lot of people like me. It's no stretch to say that if his spiritual forebears and he had succeeded, I'd be in a field chopping cotton under a broiling sun and singing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."

That -- or wearing a servant's suit on somebody's veranda and going, "Y'all want some mo' mint in dis' heah julep?"

After unflinchingly answering my questions about his lifelong disparagement of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse said the worst thing he could have said to me: "You're my favorite columnist."

Where, oh where, did I go wrong?

Before hanging up, he said "I've got a little lady here who wants to say something to you."

Seconds later, I was on the phone with his wife, "Miss Dorothy," which is what he called her. She repeated his sentiment and, like him, was as warm and Southern as a slice of cracklin' cornbread.

How, I wondered later, could I continue to write bad, albeit truthful, things about him after that?

It wasn't hard.

Jesse's courtliness, if anything, made his gratuitous meanness -- it had to be gratuitous because nobody could be that consistently conservative, could he? -- even more objectionable, because it showed that he knew right from wrong, yet still chose wrong.

His success was based on appealing to people's baser instincts. Later, when facing his own mortality, he softened his stance on AIDS and even supported -- egad! -- efforts to alleviate the disease in Africa.

Was that enough to move the needle from the red of disdain to the black -- figuratively -- of respect?

Not for me, it wasn't.

I tell you about our conversation not to brag, but to illustrate that Jesse knew the importance of newspapers to his success.

The former newspaperman knew that having somebody like me saying bad things about him wouldn't hurt him with his constituents.

Had there been a stock market ticker measuring such things, Jesse's stock probably rose each time I called him on his reflexive, reactionary racism.

Unlike his Alabama kindred spirit George Wallace, Helms never renounced the demagoguery that propelled his political success.

Despite condemnation, Helms was as incapable of admitting he was wrong as a professional wrestler is of admitting he might lose a caged death match.

He was, to the end, a true believer.

That's too bad, because I might've liked him.