Jesse Helms

The far-right senator who refused to compromise

Jesse Helms

1921–2008

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If Ronald Reagan was the bright, optimistic persona of modern conservatism, then Jesse Helms, who has died of vascular dementia at 86, was the movement’s dark, brooding alter ego. Over the course of a 30-year Senate career, the North Carolina Republican resolutely opposed civil rights, homosexuality, affirmative action, tax increases, a woman’s right to choose, foreign aid, and modern art. A self-described “redneck,” Helms was a master obstructionist who relished his nickname, “Senator No.”

Helms, whose father served as both police and fire chief in tiny Monroe, N.C., was a “prize-winning tuba player in high school,” said The Boston Globe. He left Wake Forest College to enlist in the Navy, but “a hearing problem ruled out overseas duty.” After serving as a stateside recruiter, Helms joined WRAL, a Raleigh radio and TV station. As news director and later as a commentator, he became known as a conservative bomb-thrower. Helms called Social Security “nothing more than doles and handouts,” inveighed against Washington’s “pinkos,” and said the 1964 Civil Rights Act was “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.” Egged on by like-minded North Carolinians to pursue a political career, in 1972 he became the state’s first Republican senator in the 20th century. His campaign slogan was “Elect Jesse Helms—He’s One of Us.”

Re-elected four times, Helms “never won with more than 56 percent of the vote,” said the Los Angeles Times. But he used direct-mail marketing techniques to secure conservative funding from across the nation, whipping up support by exploiting hot-button issues. Helms called homosexuals “weak, morally sick wretches” and tried to cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts for supporting “the gay-oriented artwork of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.” During the 1980s, he backed “right-wing authoritarians who ran death squads in El Salvador.” When he pushed for a constitutional amendment to ban abortions, “he likened the procedure to the Holocaust.” Helms voted against Henry Kissinger as secretary of state because he thought Kissinger soft on communism; when Bill Clinton urged that gays be allowed to serve openly in the armed forces, Helms said the president “better have a bodyguard” if he visited North Carolina.

Helms was perhaps most inflammatory on race, said The Washington Post. The only senator to vote against making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday, he argued against King’s “action-oriented Marxism” in a 16-day filibuster. His 1990 campaign featured a notorious TV ad showing a white man’s hand “crumpling a rejection letter as an announcer intoned, ‘You needed that job. And you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority.’” In 1996, the Justice Department admonished Helms’ final campaign for civil-rights violations, “after it mailed 125,000 fliers to heavily African-American precincts warning that voters risked imprisonment if they cast ballots.”

Yet “despite his tough politics, admirers saw a warm side to Helms,” said the Charlotte, N.C., Observer. When, in 1963, he and his wife, Dot, who survives him, read about a 9-year-old cerebral palsy victim named Charles who wanted a mother and father for Christmas, they adopted him. “He frequently interrupted his schedule to see young people, even taking them down to the Senate cafeteria for ice cream.” And in his last years, inspired by Bono of U2, Helms campaigned against AIDS in Africa, backing a $500 million bill to alleviate the continent’s suffering. Following Helms’ death on the Fourth of July, Bono declared, “There are 2 million people alive in Africa today because Jesse Helms did the right thing.” For Helms, though, principles were more important than plaudits. “I didn’t come to Washington to be a ‘yes man’ for any president,” he once said. “I didn’t come to Washington to get along and win any popularity contests.”