WASHINGTON — Jesse Helms, the former U.S. senator from North Carolina who for half a century infuriated liberals with his race-baiting campaign tactics and presidents of both parties with his use of senatorial privilege, died Friday. He was 86.
Helms, who won election to the Senate five times before retiring in 2003, died early Friday at a nursing home in Raleigh, N.C., according to John Dodd, president of the Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, N.C. A cause of death was not given, but his family said in 2006 that he had been diagnosed with vascular dementia.
“Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called ‘the Miracle of America.’ So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July,” President Bush said in a statement Friday.
Commentator Pat Buchanan, speaking Friday on MSNBC, put Helms in the company of the late President Reagan, calling the former senator “the second most important conservative of the second half of the 20th century.”
Helms wouldn’t compromise
A registered Democrat in the years before he ran for the Senate in 1972, Helms was not the only Southerner of his generation to defect to the Republicans after his party championed the cause of civil rights and, as he put it, “veered so far to the left nationally.” Nor was he, at his death, the only politician defending the traditional values of a rural South that had long since been suburbanized.
But Helms will be remembered as different from his contemporaries in that he was unyielding on issues that were important to him. Unlike other conservatives, such as Mississippi’s Sen. Trent Lott or Georgia’s former Rep. Newt Gingrich, who fought for their causes but found ways to reach accord with Democrats, Helms seldom gave in.
“Compromise, hell!” Helms, who acquired the nickname “Senator No,” wrote in 1959.
Unlike other symbols of segregation — such as Alabama’s Gov. George Wallace and South Carolina’s longtime Sen. Strom Thurmond, who recanted their opposition to racial integration — Helms held firm. He rarely reached out to black voters, who in the 2000 census represented nearly 25 percent of North Carolina’s population.
Voice of conservatism
The key to Helms’ longevity was a political strategy that allowed him to win election without appealing to the mainstream.
“He needed the white vote to win,” said Merle Black, a professor of political science at Emory University. “To get that, he had to use explicit racial themes. His was a kind of primitive conservatism.”
Helms never won with more than 56 percent of the vote, but he maintained a devoted core constituency.
“He was a loud and clear voice for muscular, principled conservatism,” said Whit Ayres, a pollster for many Southern candidates. “He was ideologically consistent, and he didn’t bend with the wind.”
He was the only senator to vote against making the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. His lone dissent came only after he conducted a 16-day filibuster against the King holiday, during which Helms took to the Senate floor to decry the assassinated King, a pacifist and civil rights leader, for what Helms deemed his “action-oriented Marxism.”
Stubborn domestic agenda
Helms often prevailed by sheer stubbornness, wearing down opponents. As chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee in the 1980s, he protected tobacco’s federal subsidy against growing pressure from anti-smoking groups. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1990s, he held up U.S. dues to the United Nations — approximately $926 million — until the bureaucratically overgrown agency slimmed down.
And on any number of issues he pushed his conservative agenda in the Senate. Sending colleagues the controversial artwork of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, he asked in 1989 if the government should be funding it — and threatened cuts in the National Endowment for the Arts budget. Introducing a constitutional amendment to ban abortions, he compared the procedure to the murderous rages of the Holocaust.
He filibustered a bill setting national standards for education to try to force inclusion of a constitutional amendment encouraging prayer in the schools. He pushed for an amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act, a bill approved in 1990 with vigorous bipartisan support, that would have barred employees with AIDS from handling food at restaurants.
Helms’ demagoguery was a lightning rod for liberals. He called homosexuals “weak, morally sick wretches.” During debate on a 1988 AIDS bill sponsored by Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Helms said, “There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.”
No quarter given in foreign policy
His obstinacy in foreign policy, where pragmatism often guides policy, was remarkable.
Few administrations escaped his wrath. He condemned President Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to Beijing as “appeasing Red China.” He castigated President Carter, saying he “gave away the Panama Canal.” And after the newly elected President Clinton proposed that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms said Clinton “better have a bodyguard” if he visited North Carolina.
Colored by a passion against communism, Helms never relinquished his animus toward Cuba’s Fidel Castro (he was co-author of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which penalized companies doing business with Cuba), and he backed the Contra rebels in Nicaragua who were seeking to overthrow the Marxist-led regime of Daniel Ortega.
He backed right-wing authoritarians, who ran death squads in El Salvador, and the military in Guatemala.
The making of a conservative champion
Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. was born Oct. 18, 1921, in Monroe, N.C., a small town southeast of Charlotte in the Piedmont region. His father served as police chief of Monroe. Helms attended Wingate Junior College and Wake Forest University but did not graduate.
One of his first jobs after leaving college was as a sports writer for the Raleigh News &Observer. There he met Dorothy Coble, the paper’s society reporter. The couple married in 1942. They had two daughters and adopted a 9-year-old boy with cerebral palsy who had said in a newspaper article that he wished for a family.
During World War II, Helms served stateside in the Navy as a recruiter. After the war, he became city editor of the Raleigh Times and wrote columns reminiscing about his upbringing in the segregated South.
He eventually went into radio and television, which would be a boon to his political career.
From the beginning, Helms was schooled in the political trick of using race to scare white conservatives to the polls. As news director for WRAL radio, Helms supported Willis Smith in his 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina. The campaign theme was that Graham favored interracial marriages. “White people, wake up before it is too late,” said one ad. “Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.”
When Smith won, Helms went to Washington as his administrative assistant.
After Smith’s death in 1953, Helms found his real calling as a nightly television commentator for WRAL in North Carolina, a post he had from 1960 to 1972. He blasted the “pinkos” and “Yankees” in Washington, and criticized King’s inner circle of civil rights leaders for “proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion.” He railed against Social Security, calling it “nothing more than doles and handouts.”
He was persuaded by conservative voters to run for the Senate, a seat he won in 1972.
Perhaps the most infamous Helms race was in 1990, when he ran against Harvey Gantt, a black architect and former mayor of Charlotte. The campaign became notorious among strategists for a television ad showing a white man’s hands crumpling a rejected job application as a voice intoned: “You needed that job. And you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt said it is.”
Gantt lost that election as well as a rematch six years later.
When in 2001 Helms announced his 2003 retirement, Kevin Siers, the cartoonist for the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, depicted the news with a drawing of a Confederate flag at half-staff. Just as striking was the comment from Skip Alston, president of the North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: “Jim Crow Sr. is about to retire after spreading his venom of racism and hate for almost 30 years. Jesse Helms’ only lasting legacy will be one of prejudice and mean-spiritedness.”
Helms is survived by his wife of 65 years, Dorothy, and three children.
Jesse Helms in his own words
“I’m so old-fashioned I believe in horse whipping.” — During a debate in 1991 on an AIDS-related amendment.
“Well, there is no joy in Mudville tonight. The mighty ultraliberal establishment, and the liberal politicians and editors and commentators and columnists, have struck out again.” — Helms after defeating black Democrat Harvey Gantt for Senate in 1990.
“I came up between the two world wars during the Depression. All the people around me emphasized working and savings and personal responsibility. They spelled out in one way or another the uniqueness of America. This has largely been lost. Nobody would have thought of turning to the government to solve all our problems.” — 1984 interview.
“The destruction of this country can be pinpointed in terms of its beginnings to the time that our political leadership turned to socialism. They didn’t call it socialism, of course. It was given deceptive names and adorned with fancy slogans. We heard about New Deals, and Fair Deals and New Frontiers and the Great Society.” — From a Helms editorial at WRAL-TV in Raleigh.
“Compromise, hell! That’s what has happened to us all down the line — and that’s the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?” — Helms writing in 1959 on compromise in politics.
“To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn’t have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.” — Helms responding in 1956 to criticism that a fictional black character in his newspaper column was offensive.
Associated Press
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
