Jesse Helms died today. I want to offer his family my condolences.
I know a lot of other bloggers are gloating over this. I don’t plan on doing that.
But not gloating doesn’t mean that we should pretend to honor his legacy. Certainly, Senator Helms will be remembered as one of the most destructive and toxic Senators in the history of the Republic. His retrograde stance on civil rights, his notorious “you lost your job because of a quota” ad, his obstructionist micromanagement of foreign policy in the Clinton years, his abuse of Senatorial privilege, and his attacks on public funding of the arts are only the short list — basically what I remember off the top of my head.
I never met Senator Helms, but I dealt extensively with his staff. I would like to offer three observations regarding his time in office — one good, one bad, and one mixed.
Observation one: Senator Helms was actually quite good on certain human rights questions, particularly those regarding China and Cuba. As Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and other groups can tell you, when it came to those countries, no Senator was a stronger advocate. No Senator spoke out more frequently or more passionately for dissidents and others jailed unfairly. To be clear, he was completely inconsistent, never applying a similar standard to say, Mexico, Zaire, or other U.S. friends. But on China and Cuba, no one was better. To paraphrase Roosevelt, he may have been a bastard, but he was our bastard.
Observation two: it’s hard picking the worst thing Senator Helms ever did, but one that should rank in the top five — one that most people overlook — is his willful destruction of the United States Information Agency. Today, almost everyone recognizes that the United States is woefully unprepared to win over hearts and minds in the Arab world. (For more on the challenges facing U.S. public diplomacy, check out two blogs that do a terrific job of covering it regularly: Abu Aardvark and Mountain Runner). What most people don’t know is that Jesse Helms is one of the main reasons we’re in this mess. In the late 90s, Helms forced the Clinton Administration to dismantle USIA. Actually, he gave Clinton a choice: USIA or USAID, and the Administration chose USIA.
Before USIA was folded into State, USIA personnel had operated separately from State both here in D.C. and abroad. That meant that USIA country directors (known as Public Affairs Officers or PAOs) headed their own offices in foreign capitals (usually called American Centers and housed, unlike embassies, in office buildings in or around the center of the city). They were not completely independent of the Embassy/Ambassador, but they did have a lot of leeway to chart their own course.
In my travels overseas, I always make an effort to meet with PAOs, as I find them, even today, to be fonts of information that second and third secretaries — cloistered behind the walls of the fortress embassy — could almost never match. PAOs often walked freely around the city, taking advantage of incredibly talented local staff who knew all the right people — including dissidents.
All that has changed as a result of the “merger” (and to be fair, the 1998 Nairobi and Dar embassy bombings). I was in the State Department at the time. In fact, I represented my bureau (Democracy, Human Rights and Labor), in a department-wide working group that was responsible for deciding how best to “integrate” USIA personnel into State. What in fact happened was a scramble to acquire the staff and financial resources USIA represented; in the process, the public diplomacy process was largely eviscerated. Public diplomacy personnel in DC were used for whatever was necessary in each the bureau; public diplomacy became an adjunct to other bureau concerns. PAOs came under the thumb of Ambassadors. As a result of the bombings (and 9/11), many former USIA staff were moved into the Embassy compounds, and the U.S. closed many American Centers and Libraries. The director of USIA became Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, which in both the Clinton and Bush Administrations has been a revolving door, usually given as a reward to those too burned out to keep working in the White House (see Evelyn Lieberman and Karen Hughes).
Not all of this can be laid at the feet of Senator Helms. Certainly the cowardice of the Clinton Administration played a role, as did the perception that the United States didn’t “need” public diplomacy after the end of history. The triumph at embassies of security over outreach didn’t help; neither did the fact that the merger was viewed by a resource-starved State Department as little more than an opportunity for plunder.
Today, we’re picking up the pieces. Almost everyone thinks we need to reestablish USIA as a separate agency. That will take millions of dollars and innumerable years. What can’t be recovered is much of the institutional memory. And most of this disaster is the direct result of Senator Helms’ myopic view of foreign policy.
Observation three: Senator Helms may have passed away, but his legacy will live on through the many people who worked for him over the years. Many are in the current Administration. They represent the next generaton of neocons (and paleocons). President Bush’s current chief speechwriter, Marc Thiessen, was for many years Senator Helms’ spokesman (and one of the most powerful staffers on Capitol Hill). Before working for the President, Marc held the same job for Donald Rumsfeld. Roger Noriega, Helms’ Latin Americanist (and the chief architect of the Helms-Burton act), served as U.S. Ambassador to the OAS and as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Mark Lagon is currently a U.S. Ambassador, heading the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. Before that, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organizations.
Over the years, I’ve dealt with all three, and have found them smart, likable and formidable opponents. Marc and Roger were part of the U.S. delegation to the ICC talks in Rome in 1998, and we battled regularly. I’ve found Mark to be one of the more effective officials at State, even when I’ve disagreed with him.
They represent only three examples — I’m sure there are more. But you can bet that they and others will continue to implement the Senator’s vision long after his death. And that doesn’t even take into account those like John Bolton who, while never working directly for the Senator, have assumed his ideological mantle.
So Senator Helms is dead. Long will live his legacy, unfortunately mostly for ill.
Edit: I had no idea how big the photo was — I took it out. It was ridiculous.
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