Inside The New Right War Machine

There's a war going on and the bad guys are winning. To them, it is a holy war--a latter-day jihad in the heart of the modern democracy. It represents the final metamorphosis of the conservative movement in America into a religio-political attack on personal freedom. Don't worry about George Orwell's 1984; the state as dictator of personal morality is almost here in 1981.

If Senator Jesse Helms and his supporting network of legislators and political hit men outside Congress get their way, you'll soon see Americans once again visiting back-alley butchers or foreign countries for abortions, smuggling Henry Miller's books in from Paris, pushing gays back into the closet (or into the jails), holding women in second-class jobs or in the kitchen, forcing kids to get their sex education off the bath-room walls, returning control of voting rights for blacks to the notoriously capricious local registrars in the South and removing all Federal relief for victims of child abuse and wife beating. The decriminalization of marijuana stands not a whit of a chance under the self-styled new-right thought police.

If you don't believe we're at war, listen to Paul Weyrich. As founder and director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, he is at the very heart of a propaganda-and-political-training network that helped elect a number of the archconservatives who form a near-controlling force in the U. S. Senate today. He is also perhaps the most sanctimonious of the new self-appointed arbiters of American morality.

"It may not be with bullets and it may not be with rockets and missiles," says Weyrich, "but it is a war nonetheless. It is a war of ideology, it's a war of ideas, it's a war about our way of life. And it has to be fought with the same intensity and dedication as you would fight a shooting war."

A war about our--your, my--way of life. Not content simply to live by the tenets of his German/Wisconsin ancestors and the Eastern Rite Catholicism he practices today in Washington, Weyrich wants us all to conform to his standards. An example of what he has in mind is the Family Protection Act, a piece of legislation that would "take us back to the Puritan days," as one defeated Democratic Senator says.

The bill, first introduced by Senator Paul Laxalt but largely written in one of Weyrich's two town-house offices on Capitol Hill, attacks gay rights, undermines the equal rights of women and gives special protection to the "Christian academies" throughout the South--private schools set up to maintain an essentially segregated educational system. Weyrich calls the bill "the most significant battle of the age-old conflict between good and evil, between the forces of God and forces against God." If you favor women in the board room and equal rights for gays, you are a force against God. The holy war is here.

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The most alarming thing is how quickly the forces of this right guard have gained ground. Only a year ago, they were a handful of inside agitators throwing bombs from their bunkers on Capitol Hill. Their political minions were waging bloody, guerrilla-style campaigns in selected states. But in November, they won big. Now they're inside the ramparts, running executive departments and chairing Senatorial committees. They are turning the U. S. Government into a veritable war machine.

"We are radicals," insists Weyrich, "who want to change the existing power structure." The strategy is the gradual corralling of seats in Congress, along with continued control of the Republican Party nominating conventions, leading to take-over of the White House--something they thought they had in Ronald Reagan, who has thus far given them only half a loaf.

"We don't have control of the White House yet," says Howard Phillips, national director of the Conservative Caucus, meeting ground of the religious right with the political right.

The take-over is coming in stages, starting with last year's Republican victories in the Senate. "It is well advertised that the G.O.P. now controls the Senate," explains Wesley McCune, director of Group Research, Inc., which monitors right-wing activities from an office on Capitol Hill. "But it is still not realized that the right wing controls the G.O.P."

The right's immediate goal is to increase its strength in the Congress, where it has already targeted another 20 liberal and moderate Democratic and Republican Senators (Ted Kennedy is at the top of the list) for political extinction in the 1982 elections. Right-wing ideologues are also expected to gain seats in the House of Representatives.

The ultimate purpose of this grand political plan is, of course, to restructure society to suit the dreams of those God-fearing Babbitts. Theirs is a world in which most people of power are white, male and Christian; other people are proles in lesser roles. Phillips has advocated a "return to Biblical law." Civil liberties as we know them today would exist on the sufferance of such men as Jerry Falwell, field chaplain to the right and high prince of religious television, who has denounced all those who served in office over the past 20 years as "godless, spineless leaders who have brought our nation ... to the brink of death."

Tactically, the warriors of the new right have adopted the most effective methods, of international terrorism: wrapping a series of dubious social issues in a brilliant propaganda campaign, they have created a climate of fear--and then used that fear as the weapon to get whatever they want. "The Moral Majority is, in fact, a minority," said Washington Post political columnist Haynes Johnson after traveling all over the country during the 1980 campaigns. "But they have great organization, commitment, desire, hunger and the absolutely unshakable faith that they are correct. And they want to impose it on the majority."

The most obvious example is abortion: although every poll shows that most Americans (from 58 to 83 percent, depending on how the questions are asked), including Catholics, favor the availability of abortion under all or certain circumstances, the conservatives have successfully seized on it as the most attention-getting platform in politics today (even the right knows that sex is still the best drawing card). Since the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing the procedure under medically safe conditions, there has been no abortion issue--until the new right invented one. That minority of the populace that opposed abortion was free to have all the babies it wanted. We didn't know we had a moral identity crisis until they said we did. Yet the majority that wanted freedom to choose its own lifestyle has now been corralled and politically bullied by the sloganeering zealots.

A good part of the far right's success lies in its remarkable skill with words: "Pro-family" and "pro-life" are an image-maker's dream. Not only do they raise the Jesse Helmses and the Phyllis Schlaflys to a kind of sainthood but they make the rest of us seem to be anti-family and, believe it or not, anti-life. "The right-wingers have pre-empted 'family,' " Wesley McCune told the annual convention of the National Abortion Rights Action League early this year. "They stole it and it's theirs and I don't know how you'll ever get it back."

This pervasive threat of moral kneecapping has allowed a handful of Senators, Congressmen, foundation heads and extraparliamentary political activists--all led by Helms, maybe the most powerful politician in America outside the White House--to wield a policymaking power far beyond their numbers.

Consider the Senate Steering Committee, an unofficial political arm of the far right within the U. S. Senate. It was clandestinely organized in 1974 as a conservative antidote to an old-line liberal Republican luncheon group called the Wednesday Club. But it soon went much further than a once-a-week political bull session over food provided by the Senate dining room; it set up a research-and-strategy staff paid for out of the various members' tax-dollar salary allotments. Its offices--tucked away in a shabby Senate annex with no name on the door or the building directory--have since become an efficient clearinghouse that notifies the Senatorial guardians of American virtue when and how they can thwart progressive legislation, use parliamentary procedure for surprise tactics on the Senate floor and take political initiatives that put the moderate center under pressure to accept conservative positions.

After its existence became known, then-Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd attacked the Senate Steering Committee on the floor of the Senate. Because its membership list is still secret, he denounced it as "mysterious" and "shadowy." He objected to its usurpation of the word Senate, though it has no official standing in that body. Despite those barbs, the Steering Committee thrives with Helms as its chairman. It even has division of labor.

"Each guy is supposed to be smart on a certain issue," says the former top aide to one of the most conservative Senators on the committee. And, for the most part, it is so. Helms, the team captain, plays the most positions. As chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, he spends his influence alternately tearing down the food-stamp and school-lunch programs while protecting the North Carolina tobacco industry. Of course, his real interests are in the "moral" issues: abortion, sex education, prayer in the schools, busing, pornography, permissiveness in general. Since 1978, he has also been increasingly involved and even meddlesome in foreign affairs, especially where military dictatorships or white minority regimes are under attack from black or brown people.

James McClure of Idaho is the group's energy watchdog--pro--nuclear power, opposed to such "extremist" restrictions as the Clean Air Act. Like most of the new rightists, he has cosponsored a constitutional amendment to ban abortions. McClure is also the far right's ambassador to the middle: He was successfully pushed by Steering Committee stalwarts into the number-three leadership position of the Republican majority of the Senate, becoming chairman of the Senate Republican Conference. That puts him right behind Majority Leader Howard Baker and Republican Whip Ted Stevens in determining the strategy of the majority party of the U. S. Senate. McClure is the right wing's nice guy; he doesn't act funny or say extreme things, but his politics are hardly any different from Helms's. He played a key role in the vicious Idaho election campaign last year against liberal Frank Church; the man McClure helped elect, former Congressman Steve Symms, has already been dubbed by columnist Jack Anderson as front runner for the title of "worst Senator."

Senator Jake Garn of Utah is officially the banking, housing and urban-affairs man and has ascended with the new Republican majority into the chairmanship of the committee of the same name. He has always fought such Proxmirean measures as the Truth in Lending Act, which forced lending and credit-card companies to tell you how they really had been charging 18 percent interest all along.

But Garn's real specialty, the thing that "makes the eyes in that hawklike face light up," says an arms-control specialist from the Carter Administration, is defense--as in war and missiles. Garn is so violently opposed to détente with the Soviets that he couldn't sleep at night while he was busy holding up ratification of SALT II in 1979; he told The New York Times his wife said he talked about the treaty in his sleep.

Now that the MX missile is getting new life from the Reagan Administration, however, Garn and other hardliners from the mountain states are suddenly screaming bloody murder because those beastly weapons would be planted in their back yards, those wonderful wide-open spaces they love to talk about when attacking the satanic forces of the godless East.

Then there is Orrin Hatch, almost a force unto himself. Like Garn, Hatch is a practicing Mormon from Utah, but he wears it on his sleeve. "We believe the Constitution is divinely inspired and that God created this country," he says without a trace of mirth. Hatch is the stiff-necked fellow who almost single-handedly defeated the Labor Law Reform Act and the Fair Housing Reform Bill in the last Congress. He is now chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, promoting a subminimum wage for teenagers (read: Get the young blacks off the street). He is the Steering Committee's right-to-work hero, anathema to labor.

While Helms has always been the inner group's point man in the anti-abortion cause, it is Laxalt of Nevada who carries the banner on the other social or "pro-family" issues. Laxalt introduced the Draconian Family Protection Act last year, and it never reached the floor of the Senate. Now that he, as Reagan's best friend on Capitol Hill, is a kind of special White House liaison in Congress, Senator Roger Jepsen of Iowa, a creature of the new right's vicious political action arm in 1978, has taken charge of the bill. A new version was to be introduced by summer.

Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming is a polo-playing rancher who fights the battles of the developers who would just as soon pave over the Colorado River and turn a redwood forest into condos. He vigorously championed anti-environmentalist James Watt for Secretary of the Interior. He attacks ecologists by arguing that Federal water-protection standards often "fail to take into consideration ... whether God originally made the stream fishable or swimmable."

Newcomers to the Steering Committee this year are Senators John East of North Carolina and retired Admiral Jeremiah Denton, Jr., a former Vietnam POW from Alabama. Denton is the man who organized the Coalition for Decency in his state and ran on an anti-adultery platform, once invoking the practice of some primitive societies of administering capital punishment for fornication as an example of how the sinews of society must be protected.

Denton is a creature of both Helms and Weyrich, and has come under the wing of Strom Thurmond, new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Thurmond set Denton up as head of something called the Subcommittee on Terrorism and Security, a reincarnation (continued on page 116)New Right War Machine(continued from page 102) of Joseph McCarthy's notorious Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. East is the wheelchair-bound small-college professor from North Carolina who was hand-picked by Helms's formidable political machine, the Congressional Club, to defeat Democratic incumbent Robert Morgan. He appears to be Helms's ideological clone and has told more than one questioner he would "have to check with Senator Helms on that"; such sycophancy has prompted Capitol Hill wags to refer to East as "Helms on wheels."

Because of his freshman status and apparently very limited charisma (his election campaign was conducted by Helms's own operatives almost exclusively on television), East hasn't yet assumed full portfolio on the Steering Committee. But he has become Helms's alter ego on the abortion issue, taking charge of S.158, the statutory end run around the Constitution that Helms has mounted. It would ban abortion by law rather than amendment, thwarting the very spirit of the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling. East assumed that jurisdiction through his chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee's Separation of Powers Subcommittee--especially created for him by Strom Thurmond.

Thurmond himself is a kind of reborn old rightist. Unlike Barry Goldwater, who has shown some hostility to the Young Turks of the new right, Thurmond has allied himself with them and plays a role in their strategy. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he has made it his goal to try to bring back the Federal death penalty--a punishment traditionally meted out more often to blacks than to whites. Thurmond proudly cites his record as a South Carolina circuit-court judge in the Forties, when he sent four men to the electric chair--three of them blacks tried by all-white juries in counties with large black populations that were then excluded from jury service, a practice long ago struck down by the Supreme Court. He also wants to undermine the political potency of blacks in the South by repealing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most significant piece of civil rights legislation since the Emancipation Proclamation.

While Goldwater has fallen into the isolated role of elder statesman, Thurmond, though 78 and a bit slow of mind, is gladly used by the new right. Part of its strategy is to keep someone on the Senate floor at all times to attach irrelevant or outrageous amendments to bills it doesn't like, forcing a floor fight and long delays on issues that finally push Democrats and progressives into damaging compromises. Its master parliamentarian is Helms, who spends more time on the Senate floor than anyone. He is so skilled that in the early days of the 97th Congress, he managed to maneuver liberals, including Senator Kennedy, into voting for a severely reduced foreign-aid bill with the threat that he would otherwise delete $300,000,000 from nutritional programs for school children.

Helms once made a promise to his hundreds of thousands of pen pals at the other end of the computerized, direct-mail fund-raising apparatus "never to leave the floor of the Senate unattended by one of us." The other "one of us" is often Thurmond. Twice when I was in Helms's office for interviews, he was called away by Thurmond. Two other times, Helms took calls from his friend "Jerry"--Falwell, that is.

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This kind of coordination is almost unprecedented in Senate history. There have been brilliant team efforts around specific issues at critical moments--as when Hubert Humphrey managed the floor fights for civil rights legislation in the Sixties. But when their job was done, the progressives, liberals and other Democrats tended to go their own way.

"The right is more highly organized than ever before in its history," says McCune. "It doesn't sit around arguing with itself like the liberals and Democrats do."

What makes the inner coordination of the right-wing Senators go is that it reaches well beyond the front men themselves. The Senators' top aides, often as zealous as the men they serve, constitute a second but key supporting network. And they are given extraordinary freedom of initiative by their bosses. "Among conservatives, the top people are treated practically as deputy Senators," says one deputy Senator.

Until the new Administration took power--when many of those "deputy Senators" were given high posts at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon--the top aides of a dozen of the conservatives met fortnightly for an all-day Saturday seminar-and-strategy session in a suite at Washington's posh Madison Hotel. Organized by the chief gunslinger of Helms's staff, John Carbaugh, this junior version of the Senate Steering Committee became known as the Madison Group. It was organized for the election year 1980, so its role was the ultimate melding of political strategy--both in the Senate and on the hustings.

The success of this marriage was apparent in the election results: four liberal Democrats and one liberal Republican (Jacob Javits of New York) defeated in the Senate; 16 new Republicans elected, including five hard-core new rightists; and Reagan in the White House.

Carbaugh is the prototypal new-right guerrilla warrior. One fellow Madison Grouper described him as "an outside man, ferreting around and launching conspiracies." Carbaugh is a good old boy from South Carolina who joined Thurmond's faltering team in 1972, just in time to help turn around the venerable segregationist's image and political fortunes by telling him to hire two blacks and go for the youth vote (it worked). Carbaugh describes himself as "a fat frog with glasses," a classic of self-deprecating Southern humor. He looks more like an unmade bed--a kind of right-wing Hamilton Jordan--with a beeper on his belt.

Beeeep!

"Damn! That's Helms," Carbaugh says, rising from his bacon and eggs in the elegant dining room of the storied Hay-Adams Hotel just across Lafayette Park from the White House. This is mock irritation, for Carbaugh is a kind of bandit for Helms, the sort of guy who can throw bombs all over Washington while giving his boss the comfortable shield of deniability.

It was Carbaugh (not Helms) who in 1979 leaked the story of the "Soviet brigade" in Cuba, triggering a phony crisis but generally making the Carter Administration look ridiculous and out of control. It was Carbaugh and his immediate boss, James Lucier, Helms's top legislative aide, who flew to Africa, then London, in an attempt to jockey the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe peace talks in favor of the white-minority regime of Ian Smith (the United States had nothing to do with the talks; they were sponsored by the British government). It was Carbaugh who was accused of leaking the cabled report of Senator Charles Percy's talks with Leonid Brezhnev last year about a separate Palestinian state, thus severely undermining Percy's authority as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Carbaugh has convinced some that he did not leak the cable, but many believe he may have at least arranged for someone else to do it.

Whichever is true, the effect is the same. Without so much as opening his mouth, Helms has gained ground on the (continued on page 216)New Right War Machine(continued from page 116) man who is supposed to be chairman of one of his committees. It is through his position on the Foreign Relations Committee that Helms--and, by extension, his, security-cleared aides--has right and access to this kind of classified information. Because of the freewheeling power he grants to his aides--who have lunched or dined with the heads or deputy heads of government in virtually every authoritarian regime in Africa and Latin America--Helms was accused by The Charlotte Observer of operating "a shadow State Department." Senator William Proxmire says of him, "I hate to compare anyone to my predecessor, foe McCarthy, but in that sense, the guy's a force unto himself. Jesse even has his own foreign policy."

It is no accident that both Carbaugh and Lucier are graduates of the Strom Thurmond school of Senate conspiracy. Thurmond helped Helms build a staff of superloyal, hard-core conservatives when he arrived in Washington in 1972.

"Loyally is the most important thing in politics," says Carbaugh when he returns to breakfast from the telephone. "Thurmond likes to have people loyal to him placed all over the Senate."

The loyalty works two ways. Because the right-wingers give their aides so much more leeway than is customary, they must also back them up. One Foreign Relations Committee staffer compared Lucier and Carbaugh to Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, "the Gold Dust Twins of the Fifties" who went all over Europe for McCarthy, looking for Communists. These latter-day gold dusters have yet to be called on the carpet by Helms for even the most extreme behavior. "The great danger when working on the Hill is getting out ahead of your man," says the committee staffer. "Then he has to cut you off at the knees and let you go down the tubes. What Carbaugh and Lucier have, which is very high currency on the Hill, is that in every circumstance, no matter how outrageous, Helms will back them. Either they are his alter ego or he has such an affection for them that he always backs them."

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Next we come to a critical cog in the entire new-right network--the unelected, ex-officio, paraparliamentary quartet of Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, Terry Dolan and Paul Weyrich.

The new-right network is so small that its chief publication, Viguerie's Conservative Digest, is the house organ of the movement, ballyhooing birthday parties (for Conservative Caucus chairman Phillips) and housewarmings (for Weyrich's new town houses) in full-page photo spreads in its back pages. Viguerie, a disillusioned far-right Goldwaterite who (legally) made off with the Senator's conservative mailing list in 1965, is the original new rightist. He catapulted a 12,500-name list into a multimillion-dollar empire that today owns lists containing 20,000,000 names and 4,500,000 contributors--which he expects to double by the 1984 elections. Viguerie is the progenitor of the hate-filled letter of one-line paragraphs that keeps all far-right politicians financially afloat with its fund-raising mailings.

Phillips is the burly former wrecking ball of the Nixon Administration whose chief contribution to political history was his attempt to put the Office of Economic Opportunity--Lyndon Johnson's poverty program--out of business. He felt he was double-crossed by White House soft-liners, and so he became a real right-winger.

"I went from being a careerist to being a conservative," he says. He passed with mixed success through various political incarnations (once declaring himself a Democrat and losing abysmally in the Massachusetts Senatorial primary) and came out the other end as a part-time worker in Helms's Senatorial office, from which base he created the grassroots political-action agency he called The Conservative Caucus.

Phillips also somehow survived the metamorphosis from Jew to religious fundamentalist. "I read the Bible every day," he says. He is also the creator of the predominantly Protestant Religious Roundtable, a critical vehicle in bringing the television evangelists into politics for the 1980 elections.

Dolan, mustachioed, handsome and young, is the fast gun of the movement. With the help of Helms, Dolan founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC, or "nicpac"), located in Roslyn, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Georgetown. That is the outfit that targeted and helped defeat Senators George McGovern, Birch Bayh, Frank Church and John Culver--four staunch progressives--in last year's elections. Dolan glories in negative campaigning and believes the only services the Government should provide are national defense and mail delivery. He gladly admits to using subliminal advertising techniques so "there will be people voting against the [liberal candidate] without remembering why.... The negatives will stick, although [the voters] may not remember why they are so upset."

Dolan's shameless sabotaging of the American political process virtually knows no bounds. He had no objection when a former NCPAC member released an anti-McGovern poster showing the South Dakota Senator at the center of a shooting target, the bull's-eye directly over his heart. "McGovern in the gun sight; I don't see anything wrong with that," he says disingenuously. "It was not intended to mean you ought to shoot McGovern." The poster was later withdrawn because of public outcry.

This extrapolitical network works like this: Dolan creates the "hit lists" and raises tons of money ($7,600,000 in 1980) with Viguerie's mailing lists, throwing the funds into the critical elections more to knock off liberals than to replace them with conservative heavyweights.

Phillips then creates chapters of The Conservative Caucus in every state and in most Congressional districts. The Caucus coughs up the potential candidates to run for the posts then occupied by liberals. For example, Phillips chose an unreconstructed if relocated Georgian, Meldrim Thomson, to run for the governorship of New Hampshire. Thomson won. And so did Gordon Humphrey, a lightweight but good-looking airline pilot who showed up at one meeting and was chosen to run for the Senate from New Hampshire.

Weyrich is the new-right network's great coordinator, manipulator and trainer. He calls himself a "political mechanic." Under his aegis, for instance, some 100 conservative single-interest groups meet weekly in one of three gatherings that hear reports, share information and plan a unified strategy. The nine-year-old Kingston Group has more than 50 participants, always including a representative from Helms's office, and meets on Fridays to discuss economic and institutional issues. The Library Court group meets on alternate Thursdays under the direction of Weyrich's right-hand woman on the pro-family issues, Connie Marshner. The Stanton Group, chaired personally by Weyrich, meets on the other Thursdays to deal with defense issues (Helms sends two representatives to that meeting).

Finally, there is a luncheon every other Monday at the Key Bridge Marriott Hotel--just outside the godless capital but only a short walk from Terry Dolan's office. The purpose of the get-together is to have a kind of "candidates' gang bang," as one participant puts it--the planning of election strategy. That meeting is run by Morton Blackwell, whose real job offers chilling proof of just how influential the new-right network has become: Blackwell is a special assistant in Reagan's White House.

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But on the far right, all roads lead back to Jesse Helms. "Helms was directly or indirectly responsible for the founding of half the conservative groups in America," admits Dolan.

He ought to know: It was Helms who, in 1975, gave Dolan his first blessing and the initial scare-propaganda fund-raising letter that made NCPAC possible. Carbaugh claims to have invented both NCPAC and The Conservative Caucus in Helms's office, not to mention six other nonprofit foundations he and other Helms henchmen have founded around Washington for "educational" purposes. They are actually heavily involved in political education; one of the foundations exists to pay for Helms's junkets to such authoritarian countries as Chile, Uruguay and Taiwan; he refuses to travel with the Foreign Relations Committee, then brags about not spending taxpayers' money.

But Helms's most powerful creation is the least known: The Congressional Club. Originally founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, to retire Helms's 1972 campaign debt, The Congressional Club has become the first national political machine in America. It identifies voters, raises funds, chooses candidates, runs campaigns and aids other conservatives. It is to national politics what the Daley machine was to Chicago and Tammany Hall was to New York City. It rests on the conservative charisma of one man: Jesse Helms. Last spring, it opened an office in Washington.

For all the club's anonymity, the 1980 Federal Elections Commission report showed that with $7,870,000 raised, it was the largest political-action committee in the country--larger than NCPAC, larger than big labor's COPE (the original PAC), larger than big oil and big chemicals and big anything else. One of its spin-offs single-handedly raised a remarkable $4,600,000 for the election of Reagan. Helms personally campaigned for Reagan and other conservative candidates in 22 states, often carrying in his inside coat pocket a check from The Congressional Club. "He came and spoke for me in Idaho," remembers freshman Senator Steve Symms. "Then he handed me a $1000 check and said he had to fly home that night so he could teach Sunday school the next morning."

The guiding genius behind The Congressional Club and the Helms political phenomenon is Thomas F. Ellis, an attorney who cheerfully puffs a pipe in his Raleigh office beneath the lithographed gaze of Robert E. Lee ("the man I admire most in history"). Several tiny Confederate battle flags stand in the office window. Ellis was once exposed as a director of the Pioneer Fund, created to conduct research into the genetic inferiority of blacks. It was he who talked Helms into running for the Senate in 1972 and managed a campaign that was a study in subtle negativism, successfully identifying the Democratic opponent with McGovern and reminding xenophobic Southern voters of his Greek immigrant origins. It was Ellis who saved Reagan's political life after he suffered two bad primary losses in 1976; Ellis put together a hard-hitting 30-minute television show, turned the Panama Canal treaties into the chief boogeyman of Reagan's campaign and pulled off an upset in the North Carolina primary. Reagan stayed in politics.

It was also Ellis who invited direct-mail wizard Viguerie into North Carolina in 1978, where they raised $7,200,000 for Helms's re-election--to this day. the most ever spent on a Senate race in U. S. history. It was Ellis, as chairman of the club, who decided to pirate Viguerie's techniques, set up his own computers and letter printers and go national.

Today The Congressional Club has a bank of more than 2,000,000 names and a stunning list of 300,000 reliable contributors, most from outside North Carolina. It was with that arsenal that Ellis was then able to take an unknown small-college professor named John East and turn him into a U. S. Senator last year.

Ellis is the ultimate television maven. He sees no need for any further contact between the candidate and the people. "I would have told Reagan to take that $29,000,000 [in Federal election funds], spend $28,000,000 on television and go out to the ranch for a rest," he says. "No need to run around the country letting the press take shots at him." Of complaints that East's campaign was conducted so exclusively on television that few North Carolinians knew the candidate was in a wheelchair, Ellis said, "You go out and run around shopping centers and you wear yourself out."

Ellis believes not only in television but in negative campaigning as well. The East commercials told virtually nothing about East except that he was a "good, decent Christian"; they concentrated instead on attacking the incumbent Democrat, Robert Morgan, for his votes on the Panama Canal and aid to Nicaragua, positions Morgan claims were grossly distorted. "If any election was ever bought," he says, "it was mine."

"It was straight out of Mein Kampf," says a retired North Carolina journalist who had plenty of time to watch television last year. "You tell a big lie often enough and loud enough, and people will believe it." The East campaign spent nearly $2,000,000, most of it on television. "He was on everywhere," says the journalist.

What makes all this important and frightening is that it is the wave of the right-wing future. Helms and Ellis have been calling more and more of the shots within the movement. Most observers' view of history is so short that they conceive of Dolan--whose first success was in 1976--as the original negative-campaigning dirty trickster. Ellis and Helms were successful at it in a 1950 campaign widely regarded as the dirtiest in modern North Carolina history. The Congressional Club will be all over the political landscape in 1982; more so in 1984, when, among others, Helms will be up for re-election. By then, he may have become such an entrenched national figure that even so attractive a Democrat as North Carolina governor James Hunt, who won re-election last year with 62 percent of the vote, will be unable to unseat him.

What Helms and his men have effectively done is to organize a third party--the Conservative Party--despite disclaimers to the contrary. They have introduced into American politics the parliamentary style of Europe, where party cohesion is the governing principle. The Conservative Party functions as a team, not a debating society. But when you share the boogeyman approach to national life, you never have to be specific about the details, and therefore you never have much to quibble about.

Conservatism has become a kind of substitute religion in this country, and in that there is a close resemblance between the fanatical far rightist and the convinced Communist. Each believes in party discipline. Each believes that his way--not to mention his method--is ordained by God or natural law. And each believes that he will prevail.

"To an extent, we are like Communists in this," allows Weyrich. "The new right feels victory is inevitable."

"Helms once made a promise 'never to leave the floor of the Senate unattended by one of us....' "