DarkTimes - 24Hr Global News Blog

WASHINGTON — Jesse Helms, the former U.S. senator from North Carolina who for half a century infuriated liberals with his race-baiting campaign tactics and presidents of both parties with his use of senatorial privilege, died Friday. He was 86.

Helms, who won election to the Senate five times before retiring in 2003, died early Friday at a nursing home in Raleigh, N.C., according to John Dodd, president of The Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, N.C. A cause of death was not given, but his family said in 2006 that he had been diagnosed with vascular dementia.

"Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called 'the Miracle of America.' So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the 4th of July," President George W. Bush said in a statement Friday.

Commentator Patrick Buchanan, speaking Friday on MSNBC, put Helms in the company of the late President Ronald Reagan, calling the former senator "the second most important conservative of the second half of the 20th Century."

A registered Democrat in the years before he ran for the Senate in 1972, Helms was not the only Southerner of his generation to defect to the GOP after his party championed the cause of civil rights and, as he put it, "veered so far to the left nationally." Nor was he, at his death, the only politician defending the traditional values of a rural South that had long since been suburbanized.

But Helms will be remembered as different from his contemporaries in that he was unyielding on issues that were important to him. Unlike other conservatives, such as Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott or former Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich, who fought for their causes but found ways to reach accord with Democrats, Helms—who acquired the nickname Senator No—seldom gave in.

Unlike other symbols of segregation — such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and longtime South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, who recanted their opposition to racial integration — Helms held firm. He rarely reached out to black voters, who in the 2000 census represented nearly 25 percent of North Carolina's population.

The key to Helms' longevity was a political strategy that allowed him to win election without appealing to the mainstream. The use of direct mail to solicit campaign funds nationally was pioneered in the 1960s, but Helms perfected the approach. He sought campaign contributions from conservatives nationally, then used their money to air inflammatory ads that energized his conservative base at home.

Helms never won with more than 56 percent of the vote, but he maintained a devoted core constituency.

Often he was the lone voice of dissent in the Senate. He was the only senator to vote against confirming Henry Kissinger as secretary of state during the Nixon administration. And he was the only senator to vote against making Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a holiday.

And on any number of issues he pushed his conservative agenda in the Senate. He filibustered a bill setting national standards for education to try to force inclusion of a constitutional amendment encouraging prayer in schools. And he pushed for an amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act that would have barred employees with AIDS from handling food at restaurants.

Helms attended Wake Forest University but did not graduate.

One of his first jobs after college was as a sportswriter for the Raleigh News & Observer. There he met Dorothy Coble, the society reporter. They married in 1942. They had two daughters and adopted a 9-year-old boy with cerebral palsy who had said in a newspaper article that he wished for a family.

Los Angeles Times