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Former N.C. Sen. Jesse Helms dies at 86
AP File Photo
In this June 16, 1983 photo, President Ronald Reagan greets Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. at a dinner honoring Helms in Washington. Helms has died at age 86, the Jesse Helms research center says.
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- Helms: Quotes on Life and Politics
- Jesse Helms' Life
- Continuing Coverage from NBC17.com
- Remembering Jesse Helms
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Published: July 4, 2008
Updated: 07/04/2008 01:02 pm
Jesse Helms, a conservative icon who wielded political power in North Carolina and in Washington across six decades, died today in Raleigh. He was 86.
Helms died at 1:15 a.m., said the Jesse Helms Center at Wingate University. He died of natural causes, said former chief of staff Jimmy Broughton.
Funeral arrangements were pending, the Helms Center said.
Helms rose out of a small, cotton-farming town to become a sharp-tongued commentator and five-term U.S. senator capable of making or breaking presidents. In editorials and on the Senate floor, he railed against civil rights, government spending, abortion, gays and lesbians, pornography and communism.
At times, he would stand alone for causes he believed in, earning nicknames such as "Senator No," a "knight in shining armor" and the "Prince of Darkness."
To his supporters, Helms told it like it was and you always knew where he stood. To his critics, Helms told it like a demagogue and you always wished he'd retire. Both camps counted a lot of members.
"He was not a man to be intimidated," said Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., during a tribute on the Senate floor in October 2002. "He took a stand. He was willing to take a stand alone, without a tremor."
Helms had suffered life-threatening health problems for over a decade, and he survived numerous surgeries even before he retired from the Senate in January 2003. In April 2006, his family announced that he had been moved into a convalescent center after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which repeated minor strokes damage the brain.
The nation became aware of Helms' views during his 30 years in the upper chamber of Congress, but North Carolinians know that he shared them much earlier.
Small Town Roots
Jesse Alexander Helms Jr., the second of three children, was born Oct. 18, 1921 in Monroe, southeast of Charlotte. His father was an officer in — and later the chief of — the combined fire and police departments, and his mother was a homemaker. The family lived modestly, especially with the onset of economic stagnation.
"Our home ties were very strong, and the church the dominant influence in our lives," Helms wrote in When Free Men Shall Stand, his 1976 book of short essays. "Small towns in the South, moreover, have seldom been known as havens of affluence, and the Great Depression hit them with a particular virulence."
Helms fondly remembered the town of 3,000 people as a tight-knit community, a place where people were compassionate, proud, resourceful and self-reliant. He recalled shady streets, quiet Sundays, cotton wagons and the observance of Confederate Memorial Day and the Fourth of July — a place of God and country.
"Papa drove the town's only hook and ladder," Helms wrote, "and it (the Fourth of July) was a time when all the children were allowed — no, encouraged — to climb aboard that magnificent red, shining vehicle for what now, more than four decades later, I remember as a very favorite sentimental journey through town."
In school, he was known as smart, hard-working and not very athletic. His father had a reputation, as a life-long law-enforcement officer, as very strict — something that might have kept the younger Helms from becoming as outgoing as other boys.
"(When he was small) he used to jump up and down because he was so mad he couldn't cut up like the others," said Ray House, the principal at Helms' high school, in the 1986 book Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms, by Earnest Furgurson.
"It was bound to be rough on a little boy," House recalled. "His peers meant more to him than anything else. But he stayed away because he didn't want to embarrass his father."
Power and the Press
Helms attended Wingate Junior College, a Baptist college near Monroe, for one year and then transferred to Wake Forest College, then located in Wake County. He never graduated, choosing instead to focus on outside jobs and military service.
He worked odd jobs, including digging holes for utility polls and proofreading at the Raleigh News & Observer for 50 cents an hour. After he left school, Helms became a sports reporter for the News & Observer, and later he joined the Raleigh Times as an assistant city editor.
But when the United States entered World War II, Helms enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a recruiter and Navy spokesman in Elizabeth City.
He also got married during the war. He had met Dorothy Coble, a society writer, while working for the News & Observer, and they married in 1942.
After the war, he returned to the Raleigh Times as the city editor and he worked for a Roanoke Rapids radio station, WCBT. He had already come a long way for a young reporter, but soon Helms would forge a relationship that would shape much of his future career.
In 1948, A.J. Fletcher, the founder of WRAL in Raleigh was looking for a news director for his small radio station. Fletcher and Helms shared a traditional, conservative philosophy, and Helms got the job.
He reported on the 1950 U.S. Senate race between incumbent Frank Porter Graham and challenger Willis Smith, both Democrats. At times, Helms openly advocated Smith's election, at one point broadcasting on WRAL for supporters to rally at Smith's house and call for a runoff election.
The rally worked, and Smith called for a runoff the next day. It was marked by charges of communist sympathy and race baiting, including doctored photographs of Graham's wife dancing with a black man. Graham, as a former president of the University of North Carolina, was vulnerable to other charges that he wasn't traditional enough.
Helms later denied involvement in the attacks, though when Smith won he appointed Helms his administrative assistant in Washington.
While there, Helms also served as a spokesman for the 1952 presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Richard Russell, a segregationist from Georgia. Russell finished third in balloting at the Democratic convention that year.
Helms returned to work for Smith, but Smith died in 1953 and, after a short time working for Smith's appointed replacement — Sen. Alton Lennon — Helms ended his first experience with Washington politics.
But he didn't stay away from North Carolina politics. He returned to his home state as a spokesman for the N.C. Bankers Association. He edited the association's monthly newsletter, attacking anti-banking policies, school desegregation and other issues.
"What is happening in America is exactly in tune with the forecasts of Karl Marx," Helms said in 1957, regarding the forced integration of schools in Little Rock, Ark. "The cackles you hear have a Russian accent."
A Taste for Politics
In 1957, Helms finally decided to make his first run for public office. He won a seat on the Raleigh City Council, where he stayed for two terms and fought against increases in taxes and spending.
Then, as a new decade brought a dominant new medium, Helms grabbed an opportunity that thrust him into the political spotlight and made his name common in households statewide. Fletcher offered him the vice presidency of WRAL, along with a daily, five-minute editorial on TV known as "Viewpoint."
For the next 12 years, Helms used Viewpoint as a pulpit to preach a conservative vision for the state and country. He scowled at those who disagreed with him on civil rights, feminism, foreign policy, spending on the poor, the university system and other issues.
He gave 2,761 of the editorials, each one at the end of the 6 o'clock news. Often the editorials were also broadcast on statewide radio and reprinted in newspapers.
Helms wasn't the only commentator writing editorials at the time, but his became known as among the most biting, the most pointed.
"Society is beginning to ask the inevitable question: Are civil rights only for Negroes?" Helms said on March 21, 1963. "White women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights.
"The hundreds of others who had their purses snatched last year by Negro hoodlums may understandably insist that their right to walk the street unmolested was violated."
Regarding efforts to help the poor, Helms said on Oct. 2, 1964, "It boils down to the fact that the 'haves' in this country are really those people who are willing to work for a living. The 'have nots,' in an incredible number of cases, are those who are not interested in a job of any sort."
And when it came to people protesting for civil rights, against the Vietnam War or for any other causes, Helms had little sympathy.
"The guy who works for a living has neither the time nor the inclination to march in protest movements," Helms said on June 27, 1966.
And, while many Southerners such as Byrd and Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., would later moderate their positions, at least in public, Helms hung on to the ideas he espoused in Viewpoint.
For example, Helms voted against a bill in 1982 to strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made it more difficult to keep people from voting. He also voted against establishing the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday in 1983.
He stood fast, for better or for worse.
"On the issues, I am precisely where I was 20 or 30 years ago," he told supporters in 1990.
Building a Movement
The editorials gave Helms a wide audience to share his views with, but it also gave him something else — an electorate. He quit broadcasting in 1972 to run for the U.S. Senate, and his name recognition as a commentator made him an instant competitor.
Still, Helms' faced an uphill campaign as a Republican. No member of the party had been elected to the Senate from North Carolina since Jeter Pritchard won a seat in 1897. And, like many conservatives at the time, Helms was new to the GOP, having left the Democratic Party in 1970.
Helms wasn't the first conservative, Southern Democrat to switch parties — Thurmond switched in 1964 — but he was among the first prominent figures to do so in North Carolina.
Helms stuck to his conservative positions and beat the Democrat, U.S. Rep. Nick Galifianakis of Durham, with 54 percent of the vote. Richard Nixon's landslide re-election helped, as did the support of many conservative Democrats and segregationists.
"The leadership hasn't brought this party to where it is now," Sim A. Delapp of Lexington, a former chairman of the N.C. Republican Party, said in 1974, according to The Charlotte Observer.
"I can tell you what's brought it — and any man that knows politics knows. The race question brought it," Delapp said. "The Democratic Party leaned towards the liberals and the dissident elements of the population so much that North Carolinians got tired of it and came over to us."
In his first statewide election, Helms assumed an office that he would use for the next 30 years and that he would use to help launch a conservative movement, as well as a liberal countermovement. He would antagonize presidents of both parties, block the approval of presidential appointees, advance conservative legislation and even antagonize a few countries.
He also quickly went about building a machine to stay in office, in the form of the National Congressional Club.
Tom Ellis, one of Helm's closest friends, founded the club to retire a $350,000 debt from the 1972 campaign. Over the next 20 years, the club's main goal was always to keep Helms in office, but it also helped to elect other conservative candidates and advance conservative ideas.
The club didn't invent any new ideas about politicking, but it did refine several ideas into a daunting political base of fervent conservatives. The base stretched nationwide in the form of mailings to as many as 300,000 regular supporters. Helms and others would send "personalized" letters, and donations would come back. Sometimes they'd be less than $100, but together the donations added up to millions a year.
Such fundraising committees were uncommon in 1972.
"His campaign style and approach to how you run a campaign was largely new — raise a lot of money, hire outside consultants, create your own campaign structure, use attack ads," said Thad Beyle, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "He came out of the media. He obviously knew how those tough ads could get right into the living room."
The Congressional Club — later renamed the Conservative Club — was credited with numerous political victories. The club helped to put John East in the U.S. Senate in 1980, Bill Cobey in the U.S. House in 1984 and Lauch Faircloth in the U.S. Senate in 1992.
The club was also instrumental in Ronald Reagan winning the state's presidential primary in 1976. The victory salvaged Reagan's campaign and propelled him to the nomination in 1980 — but, to the disappointment of Helms supporters, Reagan didn't return the favor by picking Helms as his vice-presidential running mate, choosing the more-moderate George H.W. Bush, instead.
For all of Helms' bluster and electoral success, he had few legislative accomplishments. Other senators rejected most of his ideas, either by voting them down or ignoring them.
Among the issues he championed most were a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, U.S. control of the Panama Canal, the elimination of federal funding for the arts, neutrality in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the elimination of affirmative action and the restoration of prayer in public schools.
All failed, at least during Helms' lifetime.
Helms did succeed in winning continued federal protection of several industries important to North Carolina. He fought improved trade relations with China, and in the mid-1980s, as chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, he reworked the price-support system for tobacco.
'Senator No'
And of course, as an editorial writer with the News & Observer once made famous, Helms succeeded at saying, "No."
He blocked nominees for the federal courts, for ambassadorships and for executive-branch positions, not to mention foreign treaties. He delayed the approval of President Reagan's nominee for ambassador to China in 1985 because he wanted Reagan to cancel money for the U.N. Fund for Population Activities.
And, for many years, he opposed foreign aid, which he saw as undeserved and as contrary to the free market.
"The harsh truth is, there are many countries in the world that are materially very badly off," Helms wrote in When Free Men Shall Stand. "It is our duty to help them. The way to help them is to share with them our political philosophy and our expertise and to encourage private investment there."
The biggest test of Helms' popularity came in 1984 with his campaign for a third term.
Gov. Jim Hunt, a Democrat, had spent an unprecedented eight years as governor, during which he increased money for education and made other reforms that appealed to a broad constituency. At age 47, Hunt was ready for a new challenge, and he eyed Helm's Senate seat. In mid-1983, polls showed him with a double-digit lead that led many observers to declare an early victory for Hunt.
Helms took note, and in fall 1983 he began running television commercials. Some talked about President Reagan's support of Helms; others accused Hunt of waffling on issues such as the Panama Canal and the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. The ads pulled Helms even with the governor by early 1984.
Over the next year, the race dominated headlines and newscasts and drew the attention of national media and political groups. Rival conservative and liberal organizations held voter-registration drives to support Helms and Hunt, and the race became the most expensive Senate race in history to that point — totaling $22 million.
Helms' victory over Hunt was close, but it was still a victory — a phenomenon that was a refrain throughout Helms' Senate career. His largest percentage of the vote was 54.5, in 1978 against John Ingram, a populist who drew little support from the state's business community.
The pattern became more familiar after 1984. Helms would start out a race with 42 percent or 43 percent in the polls, and eventually catch up to where turnout would determine the race in his favor. He would aim for 51 percent, not a landslide.
"It was just who could get the last bit," said Carter Wrenn, the consultant who helped to run Helms' campaigns in 1978, 1984 and 1990, after Helms announced his retirement in 2001.
Each time, the Congressional Club would help turnout with statewide mailings and television commercials designed to inflame voter passion on divisive issues, such as affirmative action.
In 1990, Harvey Gantt, a former Charlotte mayor and a moderate Democrat, challenged Helms. Like Hunt, Gantt held an initial lead on Helms, but the incumbent fought back with ads that have since become famous — or, in some cases, infamous.
"You needed that job and you were the best qualified," said the announcer in one Helms ad, as viewers saw white hands crumpling a rejection letter. "But they gave it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is."
Helms and his campaign stood by the ad, and they won another narrow victory.
"There has never been an election in the history of the world that could not have been turned around by the people who stayed home," Helms said in 1996, on the final day of his re-election campaign.
The Republican landslide of November 1994 gave Helms a new opportunity to wield power against a Democratic president. As a senior member of the new Republican majority in the Senate, Helms became the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He held the position until May 2001, when Democrats took back control. During his six years as chairman, Helms blocked foreign aid, international treaties and dozens of administration appointees by simply declining to hold hearings.
Among his trophies were the Kyoto treaty on global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the treaty creating the International Criminal Court and the treaty banning land mines. Treaties, like nominees, require the approval of the Senate.
Helms refused to hold a hearing on the nomination of Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld to become ambassador to Mexico. Helms said that Weld, a former prosecutor and Republican moderate who advocated abortion rights, wouldn't be tough enough on drug trafficking.
He refused a hearing, too, for former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, D-Ill., whom President wanted to appoint as ambassador to New Zealand. Moseley Braun had been the first black woman to serve in the Senate, but she and Helms often sparred in debate, including over the renewal of a patent for the emblem of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
At one point, when they were both senators, Helms sang "Dixie" while in an elevator with Moseley Braun and had sworn to make her cry. She took it in stride, telling him, "Sen. Helms, your singing would make me cry if you sang 'Rock of Ages.'" They both looked back fondly on the episode.
Helms also single-handedly blocked U.S. dues to the United Nations, keeping hundreds of millions of dollars from the organization. He later relented when the Clinton Administration and the United Nations agreed to structural reforms.
Lasting Influence
"Whether or not we like what he's done, he's the most powerful senator this state has ever had," said Ted Arrington, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, upon Helm's retirement announcement three years ago.
Helms had seen his health suffered in recent years. In 1991, he announced that he had Paget's disease, a bone disorder that causes calcium to build up in the hips. The same year he announced that he had prostate cancer, and the next year he had open-heart surgery to bypass five blocked arteries and replace a leaking heart valve with one from a pig.
Helms also had multiple surgeries on his knees, including one operation on his left knee in 1997. "It's always the left that causes the problem," he said at the time.
He wore hearing aids in both ears, and he has developed peripheral neuropathy, a condition that numbs his feet. During his last few years in the Senate, he rode around the Capitol on a motorized buggy.
Since retiring, Helms largely stayed away from the public spotlight, though he occasionally spoke at Republican events and endorsed candidates in Republican primary elections. He also escorted his granddaughter, Jennifer Knox, when she filed papers in April stating her intention to run for a judgeship in Wake District Court.
"I guess I'm choking up a little bit," Helms said at the time. "Good luck to you, baby. I'm proud of you."
Among the candidates that Helms supported was Bill Cobey, a former congressman and chairman of the N.C. Republican Party, who ran for governor. Helms appeared in a folksy TV commercial with Cobey, and told viewers that Cobey's a dedicated Christian and a principled conservative.
"But the best thing I can say about Bill Cobey, folks — he's a lifelong friend, and I think Bill Cobey would make a great governor," Helms said in the ad, with cheerful music playing in the background.
The ad ended with Cobey telling Helms, in a soft-spoken voice, "I'm a little embarrassed," and Helms responding, in a voice that showed even more embarrassment for embarrassing his friend, "Oh gosh."
The ad was intended to appeal to older voters, who might remember more of Helms' campaigns, but Cobey came in third in the Republican primary. Another candidate that Helms endorsed, Jay Helvey in the 5th Congressional District, finished fourth in his primary.
Statewide, the Republican Party is moving further away from Helms. Elizabeth Dole, widely seen as a more pragmatic politician, replaced him in the Senate.
Helms' lasting influence might be more apparent in Washington, where conservatives in his mold now wield power in all branches of government. The rhetorical style Helms embodied is now more common.
Former Helms aides are keeping his legacy alive. They continue to have influence in state politics, and they have held positions in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Security Council, Republican consulting firms and other powerful institutions.
"We collectively are going to be influencing U.S. policy for decades to come," said Marc Thiessen, a former foreign-policy aide to Helms who was the chief speechwriter for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when Helms retired. "Every one of us was attracted to work for Senator Helms because we believed in the same things he did. We're not clones, but we have the same set of core beliefs."
Journal librarian Julie Harris and The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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