Source

• Born: 18 October 1921
• Birthplace: Monroe, North Carolina
• Died: 4 July 2008
• Best Known As: Conservative senator from North Carolina, 1973-2003

Jesse Helms was a five-term senator from North Carolina and a longtime conservative champion. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he was one of the most powerful men on Capitol Hill, known as a fierce foe of communism, arms control agreements, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Domestically he clashed with liberals over issues ranging from school busing to the National Endowment for the Arts. (He was sometimes called "Senator No" for his implacable opposition to liberal initiatives.) Helms was first elected in 1972, then again in 1978, 1984, 1990, and 1996. He did not run for reelection in 2002 and retired when his term expired in 2003. He was succeeded by Elizabeth Dole.

Helms developed much-publicized friendships with Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State under Bill Clinton) and the rock singer Bono... Helms served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, spending the war as a recruiter in North Carolina... Helms began his career as a newspaper man and was once city editor of the Raleigh Times.

(b. Monroe, North Carolina, 18 Oct. 1921 – 2002) US; US Senator 1972 – The son of a police chief, Jesse Helms was educated at Wingate College and Wake Forest University. After a period in the navy (1942 – 5) he became city editor of the Raleigh Times and a member of the Raleigh City Council (1957 – 61). From 1960 to 1972 Helms was Executive Vice-President of the Tobacco Radio Network. Elected to the Senate in 1972, Helms made a mark as an ideological conservative and as a major fund-raiser where direct mail and tobacco money enabled him to finance not only his own expensive campaigns but also those of like-minded politicians. His conservative crusade pitted him against a range of liberal policies including abortion, affirmative action, civil rights, and high domestic spending. In foreign policy his instinctive opposition to Communist and left-wing regimes made him supportive of dictatorships.

A staunch defender of the tobacco industry, Helms has defended its interest on the Agriculture Nutrition and Forestry Committee. As the senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, Helms became its chair when Republicans recaptured the Senate in 1994. Although Helms has acquired positions of power in Congress he is widely seen as lacking policy and legislative competence and his effect is generally more of an irritant than anything else.

Helms's high-profile conservatism makes him vulnerable in a rapidly changing state. The race against Jim Hunt in 1984 was extremely expensive, as were the 1990 and 1996 races which were also closely fought. Yet Helms survived, a testament to the enduring appeal of his style of conservative politics.

Jesse Helms (born 1921), conservative Senator from North Carolina, is well liked by the religious right for his position on abortion rights, school prayer, and school busing.

Born in Monroe, North Carolina, Jesse Helms studied at Wingate Junior College and Wake Forest University before serving in the navy during World War II. He became active in politics while working as a journalist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and served as an adviser to Willis Smith during his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1950. After Smith's victory in what is regarded as the most virulently racist election in North Carolina history, Helms worked in Washington as an administrative assistant for Smith (1951-1953) and then briefly for Sen. Alton Lennon (1953). Returning to North Carolina in 1953, he worked as a television commentator and as a lobbyist for the banking industry before his election to the Senate as a Republican in 1972. He has been reelected by close margins in 1978, 1984, and 1990. In 1972 and 1984, presidential election years, he ran behind the Republican presidential nominee.

Ideological Purity

Helms has developed a reputation as an ideological purist. His record in the Senate has been consistently anti-United Nations, anti-Communist, anti-government spending, anti-welfare, anti-arms control, anti-foreign aid, and pro-military. His only major political about-face was his 1985 switch from an anti-Israeli position to one that is pro-Israel - one said to have been prompted in part by the narrowness of his 1984 victory over an opponent who received substantial contributions from pro-Israel individuals and groups outside North Carolina.

Support from the Religious Right

Helms is known for his derisive treatment of those he opposes - from Martin Luther King to the Soviet Union to homosexuals - and he has an old-time southern politician's visceral appeal for conservative, mostly rural, white North Carolinians. Said to have an Old Testament sense of good and evil, he has had close ties to the religious right throughout his career, and during his campaigns he has made frequent appearances on the shows of the televangelists Jim Bakker and Pat Robertson. Leaders of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority have spoken on his behalf at political rallies.

Pushing Conservative Causes

Helms has not often been successful in getting his own legislation passed. In 1982 he failed to implement measures that would have stripped the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over cases involving abortion, school prayer, and school busing. He has cast dozens of votes to outlaw or restrict abortion, to eliminate busing for school integration, and to do away with food stamps. In 1989 - after he became enraged over the inclusion of homoerotic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano's photograph of a crucifix in a glass of urine in exhibits funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) - he tried unsuccessfully to convince the Senate to pass a bill that banned the funding of "obscene" art by the NEA or any other federal agency.

Blocking Nominations

Helms has also used his position on the committee to block or hold up nominations regardless of which party controlled the White House. He opposed Republican Gerald Ford's nominations of Nelson Rockefeller for vice president and Donald Rumsfeld for secretary of defense. Many of Democrat Jimmy Carter's nominees faced the same treatment, as did Caspar Weinberger, whom Republican Ronald Reagan nominated for secretary of defense. In 1981 Helms stalled Senate approval of several Reagan appointees as undersecretaries of state, including Lawrence Eagleburger, Chester Crocker, Robert Hormats, and Thomas Enders. In 1985 Helms held up the confirmation of Thomas Pickering as ambassador to Israel at a time of crucial discussions over possible exchanges of western hostages in Beirut for Arabs in Israeli prisons.

Right-Wing Ties

The animosity between Helms and Pickering stemmed from Pickering's service as ambassador to El Salvador, where he was actively trying to work with the Duarte government while Helms had close ties to Duarte's ultraright-wing opponent, Roberto D'Aubuisson. Helms has been closely tied to various right-wing governments, including the regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Beginning in 1986 Helms served as chairman of the editorial advisory board of the International Freedom Foundation, a front organization for the South African Defense Fund, which set up and funded the foundation to conduct political warfare against opponents of apartheid in the United States. Other prominent conservative Republicans connected to the foundation included representatives Dan Burton and Robert Dornan of California and African American political activist Alan Keyes. In 1988 Helms led the fight to pass legislation that required the United States to maintain two embassies in Israel, one in Tel Aviv, the secular capital, and one in Jerusalem, in the contested West Bank region.

The Foreign Relations Committee

Throughout the 1980s Helms was consistently a thorn in the sides of Democratic and Republican administrations as he tried to promote his own ultraconservative foreign-policy agenda. But as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he had the power to do so. His staff included former intelligence personnel who have retained ties within their agencies, and he promoted the hiring of his staffers and aides for key positions in the various national security agencies. After the GOP took control of both houses of Congress, Helms attempted to dismantle U.S. foreign policy. In March of 1995 he introduced a bill to get rid of USAID, the United States Information Agency, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The Democrats filibustered the bill, but to get even Helms shut down the Foreign Relations Committee for four months. Even though foreign aid makes up only one percent of the federal budget, Helms thinks that foreign aid is "the greatest racket of all time" and "the ripoff of the American taxpayers." Informational holds can be placed on projects to temporarily delay funding. The last time the GOP controlled the Senate, there were five holds placed in four years; Helms placed eighty-four holds in 1995. He maintained his presence in the Senate after the 1996 election, defeating former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt with a 52.6% share of the vote.

In March 1996 the Helms-Burton Act was signed into law, sponsored by Helms and Republican Representative Dan Burton of Indiana. The law was designed to pressure Cuba to adopt democratic reforms and was approved a month after Cuban warplanes shot down two civilian aircraft, killing four Cuban-Americans on board. It was bitterly criticized by Canada and the European Union.

On April 18, 1997, Clinton approved a plan to reorganize the State Department, a decision that responded to a long-standing demand by Helms. The plan aimed to consolidate the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the U.S. Information Agency into the State Department by 1999. Helms remained feisty, as in the fall of 1997, he refused to hold a hearing on President Clinton's nomination of moderate Republican William Weld to be ambassador to Mexico, noting that the former Massachusetts governor was soft on drugs. Although he began to face mounting criticism, "Senator No" wasn't budging. Helms won the battle, as Weld asked the White House to withdraw his nomination in mid-September.

His next battle appears to be federal arts funding, as Helms is among politicians who want to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. He stated in a speech to his colleagues, "It is self-evident that many of the beneficiaries of NEA grants are contemptuous of traditional moral standards."

Further Reading

Furgurson, Ernest B., Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms, Norton, 1986.

Mother Jones, May 1995.

New Republic, November 12, 1990.

New York Times, April 18, 1997.

New York Times Magazine, October 28, 1990.

1921–, U.S. senator from North Carolina (1973–2003), b. Monroe, N.C. He served in the navy, chiefly as a recruiter, during World War II. A radio broadcasting executive, Helms gained prominence in the 1960s as a staunchly conservative Raleigh, N.C., radio commentator. Elected (1972) to the U.S. Senate as a Republican from North Carolina, he became known for his outspoken, often unyielding support of right-wing causes in the Senate. He championed a strong military establishment and prayer in the public schools while opposing gun control, abortion, and government support for the arts. Helms chaired the Senate agriculture committee (1981–87) and foreign relations committee (1995–2001).

Bibliography

See his memoir (2005).

Jr.

The career of Senator Jesse Alexander Helms, Jr., is unique in post-World War II U.S. politics. Few legislators have fought as relentlessly, caused as much uproar, or finally had as much influence as the ultraconservative Republican from North Carolina. As a fiery radio editorialist in the 1960s, Helms waged a one-man war on liberalism. His notoriety helped him win a historic 1972 Senate race, a breakthrough in a state that had not elected a Republican in the twentieth century, and three reelections followed. He has emerged not only as a party leader but as an independent legislator with his own tough agenda on social issues and foreign policy.

Born October 18, 1921, in the small segregated town of Monroe, North Carolina, Helms was named for his formidable father. Jesse Helms, Sr., was the town's police and fire chief, and he exacted obedience from Monroe and his two sons alike. "My father was a six-foot, two-hundred pound gorilla," Helms affectionately said. "When he said, ‘Smile,' I smiled." His mother, Ethel Mae Helms, marshaled her family off to the First Baptist Church twice a week. In Helms's childhood, Monroe still romantically celebrated Confederate Memorial Day, and patriotism, regional pride, religion, and racial separation were formative influences on the boy. He showed early promise in writing, by high school already reporting for the local newspaper.

Journalism held such interest for Helms that he quit Wake Forest College in 1939 to work on the Raleigh News and Observer. The twenty-year-old moved up rapidly. By 1941, he was assistant city editor of the Raleigh Times, the city's smaller, more conservative paper. Then Pearl Harbor intervened. Accepted by the Navy for limited duty in recruitment and public speaking, Helms made a crucial discovery: he was good at broadcasting. Starting in 1948, he began a new career as a radio news director at station WRAL in Raleigh. Helms soon moved from the role of political observer to that of political insider. His reporting in the vicious, racially divided 1950 Democratic primary race for the Senate led to accusations that he had doctored a photo of the wife of the loser, Frank Graham, so that she appeared to be dancing with a black man—a fatal blow to the candidate's chances in the segregated state. Helms denied it. The winner, Senator Willis Smith, took him to Washington as his administrative assistant in 1951.

Working in the Senate propelled Helms closer to a political career. From 1953 to 1960, he was a lobbyist and editorialist for the North Carolina Bankers Association. He had an opportunity to exercise his politics in a weekly column and at the same time held his first elective office, on the Raleigh City Council, where, although nominally a Democrat, he opposed virtually all taxes.

The great turning point in Helms's life came in 1960. As the executive vice president of the Capital Broadcasting Company, he began broadcasting fierce radio editorials on radio station WRAL. Here, for the next twelve years, he developed views that would last the rest of his life. These broadcasts were fire and brimstone. In much the same way that radio host Rush Limbaugh criticized liberals in the 1990s, Helms attacked liberal trends in the 1960s. He referred to the 1960s as "this time of the fast buck and the ‘New Morality'—the age of apathy and indifference, the season of disdain for simple virtues and common honesty." What riled him most was the civil rights movement. Carried across the state of North Carolina, Helms's attacks on desegregation were reprinted in newspapers under titles such as "Nation Needs to Know of Red Involvement in Race Agitation!" The liberal media were to blame, Helms reasoned, and if they would stop distorting the truth, then "there would be millions around the world who would change their minds about race relations in the South." Despite his own biases, Helms and WRAL survived repeated complaints to the Federal Communications Commission.

It was only a matter of time before the conservative Helms gave up on the Democratic party. In 1972, he switched parties and ran for the U.S. Senate as a Republican. Helms liked to tell his radio listeners that he had never voted for a Democrat for president, and now, with the decidedly liberal George S. McGovern as the Democratic nominee, he had even more reason to sever his symbolic ties to the party. McGovern stood for everything that Helms detested: support for welfare and abortion, and opposition to the war in Vietnam. To Helms, such views were typical of the way liberalism betrayed traditional values, and why he could not remain a Democrat.

When Helms jumped ship, he took an extreme gamble. North Carolina—indeed, the South as a whole—had been the Democratic party's stronghold for generations. In fact, not since the late nineteenth century had the state elected a Republican senator. Helms changed everything. One key to his beating the favorite, Democrat Nick Galifianakis (by only 120,000 votes) was Helms's use of national politics. The presidential election offered excellent coattails to ride on. Helms allied himself with Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon, linking Galifianakis with the highly unpopular McGovern. Galifianakis saw a much different, and worse, kind of tarring at work. He accused the Helms campaign of using his Greek American ethnicity to imply that he was not a loyal U.S. citizen.

Not surprisingly, Helms's first term in Washington, D.C., established the same hard-line politics of his broadcasting career. He was soon nicknamed Senator No for voting against federal spending—with the exception of support for the military and farmers. He opposed federal aid to education, food stamps for striking workers, government-subsidized abortion, and the creation of the Consumer Protection Agency.

Returning politics to traditional values would be the hallmark of his career, a philosophy outlined in his 1976 book, When Free Men Shall Stand. During his first term in the U.S. Senate, he introduced an amendment designed to circumvent the Supreme Court's decisions banning prayer in public schools. Although the effort failed, it paid personal dividends: Helms came to the attention of conservative organizations and contributors who would be increasingly supportive of him over the next two decades. He saw no conflict with his faith in opposing government aid to the needy. He believed it was the role of the private individual to help others, as he and his wife, Dorothy Helms, had done by adopting a nine-year-old orphan with cerebral palsy. In Congress he voted against federal aid to disabled people and against school lunch programs.

Unlike some social conservatives, Helms had an equal passion for foreign policy. His anti-Communism was a lifelong belief, forming the basis for his opposition to any cooperation between the United States and left-wing governments. He opposed President Nixon's historic opening of ties to China. Supporting right-wing governments—even those associated with abuses of human rights, such as Turkey, or with all-white rule, such as Rhodesia and South Africa—made more sense to him.

Helms gained influence as his career progressed. By the late 1970s, he was already shaping the Republican presidential platform behind the scenes. In Senate votes, he could openly defy the party on nominations and policy decisions. Helms had little fear of the party leadership because he was building a national base of support. He did this with the help of a powerful insider in national politics, Richard A. Viguerie, publisher of the Conservative Digest. Viguerie was an early advocate of using direct-mail techniques, a marketing tool borrowed from business. As campaign manager for Helms in 1978, he blanketed the United States with letters asking for support. It worked, fantastically. Helms raised $6.2 million for his successful 1978 reelection, two-thirds of it from outside of North Carolina. Politicians of all kinds soon followed his lead in using this powerful technology.

In the 1980s, the importance of direct mail to Helms grew in proportion to the rise of conservative Christian politics. Analysts called this emerging constituency the New Right. It favored mandating school prayer, outlawing abortion, and preventing gays and lesbians from acquiring equal rights. Helms tapped its members with dramatic fund-raising letters. By 1982, Helms could count on great support for brash, independent actions in the Senate: filibustering against the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, for example, or attaching a school prayer amendment to the annual extension of the national debt.

The 1980s were a period of great activity for Helms in domestic policy. He railed against the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for funding art that he found offensive, chiefly that of the homosexual photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and of the artist Andres Serrano, whose work Piss Christ depicted a crucifix submerged in urine. The national controversy he engendered continued to divide liberals and conservatives well into the 1990s. He also led a highly publicized attempt to take over CBS, exhorting conservatives to buy up stock in order to end liberal bias in news reporting. He introduced antiabortion legislation that made him the leading enemy of pro-abortion forces, which began demonizing Helms in their own direct-mail campaigns. He was most successful in agriculture policy. Helms won continued backing for tobacco price supports, an issue key to one of his most active advocates, the tobacco industry.

In a combative 1990 reelection campaign, Helms nearly lost to African American Harvey Gantt. The former Democratic mayor of Charlotte was ahead of Helms until the last weeks of the campaign, when Helms' forces mailed 125,000 postcards to voters warning them that they could be prosecuted for fraud if they voted improperly. At least 44,000 cards were sent to black voters, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, which sent observers to the state to ensure fair elections. Helms edged out Gantt by just over 100,000 votes. In 1992, the Justice Department ruled that the Helms campaign had violated federal civil rights and voting laws by intimidating, threatening, and discouraging blacks from voting. Helms's office denied that he was involved in the mailings.

Helms was an outspoken critic of President Bill Clinton. The Republican takeover of Congress in November 1994 gave him chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, a powerful post from which he could authorize money for foreign aid, make recommendations on ambassadors and foreign treaties, and control the budget of the State Department. Almost immediately, he blasted the president as unfit to conduct foreign policy and warned that Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he planned to visit North Carolina military bases. Politicians from both parties denounced the remark, which came on the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Helms called his statement a "mistake" but refused to apologize.

Despite surgery for serious health problems, Helms seemed eager to enter more battles. He was reelected to another term in 1996, again defeating Harvey Gantt.