Former N.C. Sen. Helms dies at 86

As a senator, Helms opposed civil rights and gay rights.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Former Sen. Jesse Helms, an unyielding champion of the conservative movement who spent three combative and sometimes caustic decades in Congress, where he relished his battles against liberals, Communists and occasionally a fellow Republican, died on the Fourth of July. He was 86.

“It’s just incredible that he would die on July 4th, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men,” said former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey.

An iconic figure of the South who let nothing silence the trumpet of his beliefs while in office, Helms had faded from public view as his health declined. He died of natural causes early Friday at the Raleigh convalescent home where he had lived for the past several years.

North Carolina voters first learned of Helms, son of a police chief, through his newspaper and television commentaries. They were a harbinger of what was to come, as he won election to the Senate in 1972 and rose to become a powerful committee chairman before deciding not to seek a sixth term in 2002.

“Compromise, hell! ... If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?” Helms wrote in a 1959 editorial.

Compromise, Helms would not.

His habit of blocking nominations and legislation during his first term led his former employer, The News & Observer of Raleigh, to nickname him “Senator No” — and Helms loved it. He was unafraid of inconveniencing his fellow senators, forcing filibusters before holidays and once objecting to a request by phoning in his dissent from home while watching Senate proceedings on television.

Helms was a polarizing figure, both at home and in Washington. He delighted in forcing roll-call votes that required Democrats to take politically difficult votes on federal funding for art he deemed pornographic, school busing, flag-burning and other cultural issues. Among his first forays into politics was working in 1950 to elect segregationist candidate Willis Smith to the Senate, and he later fought against much of the civil rights movement.

In 1993, when then-President Clinton sought confirmation for an openly homosexual assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms registered his disgust. “I’m not going to put a lesbian in a position like that,” he said in a newspaper interview at the time. “If you want to call me a bigot, fine.”

“When he wrote his book, ‘Here’s Where I Stand,’ I felt no book was needed,” said North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole, who won Helms’ seat after he retired in 2002. “[My husband] Bob would say, ‘You don’t have to look under the table for Jesse. You always knew where Jesse is.’”

But Helms wasn’t entirely inflexible, especially in his later years in the Senate, where he worked with Democrats to restructure the foreign policy bureaucracy and pay back debts to the United Nations, an organization he disdained for most of his career. After years of clashes with gay activists, he softened his views on AIDS and advocated greater federal funding to fight the disease in Africa and elsewhere overseas, and in doing so, struck up an enduring and unlikely friendship with U2 frontman Bono.

“There was trouble in my band for even having the meeting with the senator,” Bono said in a 2008 documentary, recalling the objections of his bandmate, Edge. “And I said, ‘It’s worse than that, Edge. He’s coming to the gig.’ He said, ‘There’s no way Jesse Helms is coming to the U2 show and I said, ‘He is.”’

At the show, Helms marveled at the U2 fans waving their hands like a field of corn blowing in the wind. “He said, ‘I had to turn my hearing aid down, in fact I had to turn it off,’” Bono said.

He took a dim view of many arms-control treaties, and supported the contras in Nicaragua as well as the right-wing government of El Salvador. He opposed the Panama Canal treaties that then-President Carter pushed through a reluctant Senate in 1977.

As Fidel Castro’s fierce critic, Helms helped create legislation in 1996 to strengthen U.S. restrictions against the Caribbean island’s communist government. The Helms-Burton law bars the United States from normalizing relations with Cuba as long as Castro or his brother Raul — who has been president since February — are involved in the island nation’s government.

Helms and his wife, Dorothy, had two daughters and a son. They adopted the boy in 1962 after the child, 9 years old and suffering from cerebral palsy, said in a newspaper article that he wanted parents. That story stood out for Dole and others Friday, as they said that for all of Helms’ political bombast, he should be remembered first as a considerate and compassionate person.

As a politician, Helms never lost a race for the Senate — but never won by much, either. He won the 1972 election after switching parties, and defeated then-Gov. Jim Hunt in an epic battle in 1984 in what was then the costliest Senate race on record. In his last two runs, he defeated black former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt in 1990 and 1996 by running racially tinge campaigns.