Jesse Helms, Conservative Force in the Senate, Dies at 86
By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86.
Mr. Helms’s former chief of staff, James W.C. Broughton, said that the senator died at the Mayview Convalescent Center in Raleigh, where he had lived for the last several years. Mr. Helms had been in “a period of declining health” recently, Mr. Broughton said.
In a 52-year political career that ended with his retirement from the Senate in 2002, Mr. Helms became a beacon for the right wing of American politics, a lightning rod for the left, and, often, a mighty pain for Presidents whatever their political leaning.
Ronald Reagan, a friend who could thank Mr. Helms for critical campaign help, once described him as a “thorn in my side.” Mr. Helms was known for taking on anyone, even leaders of his own party, who strayed from his idea of ideological purity.
“I didn’t come to Washington to be a yes man for any President, Democrat or Republican,” he said in an interview in 1989. “I didn’t come to Washington to get along and win any popularity contests.”
Perhaps his most visible accomplishments in the Senate came two decades apart. One was a 1996 measure that tightened trade sanctions against the Marxist government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. The other, a 1973 amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, prevented American money from going to international family planning organizations that, in his words, “provide or promote” abortion. He also introduced amendments to reduce or eliminate funds for foreign aid, welfare programs and the arts.
David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said recently that Mr. Helms’s contribution to the conservative movement was “incredibly important.”
For one thing, he said, Mr. Helms was alert to technological change, especially the importance of direct mail, and readily signed fund-raising letters that helped conservative organizations get started.
Mr. Helms was also instrumental in keeping Mr. Reagan’s presidential campaign alive in 1976 when it was broke and limping after a series of defeats in the Republican primaries.
And in the Senate, Mr. Keene said, Mr. Helms was a rallying point for conservatives. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he supported Mr. Reagan on issues like aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. “Without Jesse, it would have been hard for Reagan to hold the line,” he said.
Mr. Helms saw himself as a simple man — he even used the word “redneck” to describe himself — protecting simple American values from the onslaught of permissiveness, foreign influence and moral relativism. For 30 years he cut a familiar figure on the Senate floor, typically wearing horn-rimmed glasses, black wing tip shoes and, on the lapels of his gray suits, American flag and Free Masonry pins.
He liked his art uncomplicated.
“The self-proclaimed, self-anointed art experts would scoff and say, ‘Oooh, terrible,’ but I like beautiful things, not modern art,” he told The New York Times in 1989, during a pitched battle over federal subsidies to the arts. “I can’t even figure out that sculpture in the Hart Building.” He was referring to an Alexander Calder mobile.
In the 1980’s he took on the National Endowment for the Arts for subsidizing art that he found offensive, chiefly that of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who explored gay themes in some of his work, and of the artist Andres Serrano, who depicted a crucifix submerged in urine. He later led an ill-fated attempt to take over CBS, exhorting conservatives to buy up stock in order to stop what he saw as a liberal bias in its news reporting...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/us/politics/00helms.html?hp
