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Torchbearer Helms Fought Communism, Busing, Gays

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By BART BARNES

The Washington Post

Published: July 5, 2008

Jesse Helms, 86, the North Carolina Republican who served three decades in the U.S. Senate and became a crusader against communism, liberalism, tax increases, abortion, homosexuality, affirmative action and court-ordered busing, died Friday in Raleigh, N.C.

Helms was a shrewd and powerful politician, a superb organizer and a master fundraiser who won election to five terms in the Senate, beginning in 1972.

Sometimes called the patron saint of the New Right, he developed a national following and helped set the nation's conservative social agenda.

He was extraordinarily effective at raising the issues that would provoke the media and raise the passions of his constituents.

He appealed to predominantly white, blue-collar, middle-class Americans who rallied to Helms' championing of what he called traditional family and religious values.

He supported prayer in the public schools, free enterprise in business, a strong military, a balanced budget and "decency, honor and spiritual and moral cleanliness in America."

In 1989, he drew national attention for an attack on the National Endowment for the Arts after it funded works he considered homoerotic and anti-Christian.

"What the perverted homosexual filth is, is not modern-day Michelangelo," Helms told a crowd at the state fairgrounds in Raleigh. "It is modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah."

'Senator No'

To his opponents, Helms was divisive, mean-spirited, race-baiting and manipulative.

He was a pioneer of negative television attack ads, which he used frequently and effectively in his political campaigns.

Among the more effective of his television ads was one that showed the hand of a white man crumpling a job rejection letter while an announcer intoned, "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."

Helms' opposition to social change and what he considered legislative overstepping led to his nickname of "Senator No," a title he came to relish.

In 1977, he angrily denounced a treaty advanced by President Carter to turn over the Panama Canal to the country of Panama.

He blocked nominations for federal office, withheld funding for the United Nations, opposed gun control and threatened to cancel federal support for arts groups and school busing.

A staunch opponent of communism, he sought to isolate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and refused to relent on strict U.S. trade embargoes of Cuba.

As a political fundraiser, Helms had few rivals. At his beck and call was a vast and sophisticated operation known as the National Congressional Club.

Operating out of an office building in downtown Raleigh, the club was essentially a political action committee made up of a nucleus of Helms' longtime friends and supporters.

It included computerized lists of hundreds of thousands of contributors and a state-of-the-art direct-mail fundraising process that raised millions of dollars for Helms and other conservative political candidates.

Nearly 70 percent of its regular contributors were from outside North Carolina.

Out on the hustings, Helms was courtly, Southern and unpretentious.

He had an aw-shucks, folksy personal style that many found engaging, and he had genuine rapport with the rank-and-file voters of his state, many of whom saw him as a classic political outsider, unafraid to take unpopular stands in challenging the political establishment.

Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. was born October 18, 1921, in Monroe, N.C., a small town where his father was police chief.

He attended Wingate Junior College and Wake Forest University, but left before graduating and worked for the Raleigh Times newspaper as a sports writer and city editor.

During World War II, Helms served in the Navy, then returned to his job at the newspaper. In 1948, he joined the staff of radio station WRAL, where he became news and program director. He also helped start the North Carolina News Network, a statewide radio system.

Political Career Began In 1950

His political career began in 1950, when he served as a top campaign aide to Willis Smith, a wealthy and openly segregationist Raleigh lawyer running for the U.S. Senate.

Helms became a household name in North Carolina with his editorials on local news broadcasts.

At 6:25 p.m. each night, Helms broadcast five-minute tirades against the likes of Chapel Hill intellectuals, "the so-called civil rights movement," big government, high taxes, student protests and the Kennedys.

The commentaries were rebroadcast the next morning, and they were carried on 70 radio stations, making Helms' observations staples of daily life in North Carolina. A newspaper column he wrote during those years was carried in 200 papers.

Originally a Democrat, he switched to the Republican party in 1970. Two years later, when he upset Democratic Rep. Nick Galifianakis, Helms became the first Republican elected to the Senate from North Carolina in the 20th century.

In the Senate, Helms rose to become chairman of the Agriculture Committee and invoked seniority to push aside Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar to become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

He was a staunch defender of North Carolina's tobacco industry, and used the Foreign Relations Committee as a platform for his anticommunist views.

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