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Jesse Helms, the conservative US Senator from North Carolina who energized the political right for decades and perpetually angered those on the political left, died July 4 at age 86, leaving a legacy that will far outshine even what most Republicans know about him.
One of four key figures in the rise of American conservatism in the second half of the 20th century (the others being William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan) Helms was a tireless, unrepentant and serially politically-incorrect leader.
He served 30 years in the US Senate from 1972 to 2002. In his life he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Martin Luther King holiday; despised the United Nations and tried to de-fund it; railed against public-funded art that he found repugnant; represented North Carolina tobacco interests unwaveringly; fought for school prayer and against abortion; vocally opposed homosexuality and other sexual license; was fiercely anti-communist; hated liberalism in its every form; and ultimately was the central figure in helping to make Ronald Reagan the 40th President of the United States.
Born in Monroe, NC the son of a sheriff, Helms wanted early on to become a journalist. In his book “Righteous Warrior, Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism”, University of Florida history professor William Link describes Helms’ career in the Navy, then as a radio commentator.
Helms first became active in politics in 1950 in a North Carolina US Senate campaign, and by 1960 had found his niche at television station WRAL in Raleigh where he worked from 1960 to 1972. He was a lifelong Democrat who switched to the Republican Party in 1970.
During his tenure at WRAL, Helms became a controversial figure through 2,732 ‘Viewpoint’ editorials in fire-and-brimstone judgments that reserved particular animus for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a bastion of subversion and socialism.
In 1972 Helms was elected to the US Senate for the first of 5 terms. He never managed a landslide victory, but represented enough of the conservative rural and small-town white voters in North Carolina to launch and sustain one of the most influential careers in American politics. That he was a successful conservative explains why he never has been given a fraction of the media coverage of Ted Kennedy even though he was vastly more influential in shaping the politics of 20th century America without the aid of family wealth and influence, like Kennedy.
Using an organization founded in 1978 called The Congressional Club, Helms insituted the first modern money-raising machine for conservative causes, eliciting funds primarily from small donors. But two years before the founding of the Club, Helms had established his historical measure by convincing Ronald Reagan in 1976 to stay in the presidential primary race after 11 straight losses to Gerald Ford. Helping to engineer a Reagan win in North Carolina, Helms’ prompted Reagan to persevere, leading to several primary wins that year and finally to Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory.
Helms became a master parliamentarian and used his growing status in the US Senate to re-shape the agenda throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. He was strongly Christian, and it is said that he never appeared on Sunday-morning talk shows like Meet the Press only because he was attending church, which he considered infinitely more important than getting ‘face time’ on television.
As a private citizen, Helms’ opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nevertheless, other life-long Senate Democrats who opposed the act like Al Gore Sr., Sam Ervin and J. William Fulbright were exonerated for their stands, while Helms never was.
In the long run, Helms was wrong on civil rights, but ultimately he was prescient on the issue of race. Because while blacks in the 1950s and 1960s were good people who often held bedrock Christian beliefs and maintained strong families, the Civil Rights Act ultimately delivered blacks into the hands of the Democrat party under which three core institutions of black culture – and any viable culture – were destroyed: families, businesses and churches.
Helms maintained a strong position against affirmative action and gained many white votes as a result. In one of the most memorable Senate campaign TV ads ever that helped Helms to defeat the black mayor of Charlotte, NC Harvey Gantt, a pair of white hands was shown crumbling up a rejection letter, explaining in voice-over that the job had been given to an unqualified minority.
Helms defeated Gantt twice, once in 1990 and again in 1996.
During his time in the US Senate, Helms supported authoritarian anti-communist regimes around the world including General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. And again, in the long run, Helms was right in that Pinochet, who seized control in 1973, eventually handed over power to full democracy in 1988, along with the strongest economy in South America. Meanwhile, Castro’s Cuba has remained a dictatorship for 49 years now with no signs of abatement, and an economy so devastated by communism that it won’t recover for decades even if change does ever come.
Helms was unafraid of tackling social issues like homosexuality which he disparaged repeatedly. His famous advocacy of AIDS-infected Kimberly Bergalis, who contracted the virus from an infected gay dentist named David Acer, energized Helms and his followers.
He established a “shadow” State Department to counter the leftward drift of the career bureaucrats at State. He opposed arms control agreements with the Soviet Union knowing that the communists could not be trusted. And ultimately he helped to usher into power a true leader and statesman in Ronald Reagan who ended the Cold War without firing a shot and who affirmed all of Helms’ instincts… and his life.
In 1994, Helms became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sending shockwaves through the liberal political bureaucracy in Washington.
Helms’ passing will be glossed over by the media with the usual charges that he was a “demagogue”, that his followers were “troglydytes”, that Helms “might have had a memory problem”, that he was “extremist”, all terms heard and published the day after he died and that easily could be applied to Kennedy, Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson and others, but never will be by the mainstream media.
The media will attempt to portray Helms as just another marginal right-winger without a cause, the same short shrift that the Fourth Estate dribbles out to all conservatives.
But in fact Jesse Helms was one of the anchor stones of modern-day conservatism. Sometimes bombastic and excessive, his life was a testament to the unapologetic principles of the political “right”. The mold is broken. There will never be another Jesse Helms.
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