*http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gZUL2wcPRkmJWqAtSzZldQm8eSFQD91N51...
Former Republican N.C. Sen. Jesse Helms dies at 86
By WHITNEY WOODWARD and DAVID ESPO – 3 hours ago
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who built a career along the
fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the
occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in Congress, died
on the Fourth of July. He was 86.
"It's just incredible that he would die on July 4, 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, the chairman of The Jesse
Helms Center at Wingate University.
Helms died at 1:15 a.m, the center said. He died in Raleigh of natural
causes, said former chief of staff Jimmy Broughton.
"He was very comfortable," Broughton said.
Funeral arrangements were pending, the Helms center said.
"America lost a great public servant and true patriot today," White House
spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said few senators could
match Helms' reputation.
"Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator
Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes
he believed in," McConnell said in a statement.
Helms, who first became known to North Carolina voters as a newspaper and
television commentator, won election to the Senate in 1972 and decided not
to run for 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 that foretold
his political style.
As he aged, Helms was slowed by a variety of illnesses, including a bone
disorder, prostate cancer and heart problems, and he made his way through
the Capitol on a motorized scooter as his career neared an end. In April
2006, his family announced he had been moved into a convalescent center
after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which repeated minor
strokes damage the brain.
Helms' public appearances had dwindled as his health deteriorated. When his
memoirs were published in August 2005, he appeared at a Raleigh book store
to sign copies, but did not make a speech.
In an e-mail interview with The Associated Press at that time, Helms said he
hoped what future generations learn about him "will be based on the truth
and not the deliberate inaccuracies those who disagreed with me took such
delight in repeating."
"My legacy will be up to others to describe," he added.
Helms served as chairman of the Agriculture Committee and Foreign Relations
Committees over the years at times when the GOP held the Senate majority,
using his posts to protect his state's tobacco growers and other farmers and
place his stamp on foreign policy.
His opposition to Communism defined his foreign policy views. He took a dim
view of many arms control treaties, opposed Fidel Castro at every turn, 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.
Early on, his habit of blocking nominations and legislation won him a
nickname of "Senator No." 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.
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."
After Democrats killed the appointment of U.S. District Judge Terrence
Boyle, a former Helms aide, to a federal appeals court post in 1991, Helms
blocked all of Clinton's judicial nominations from North Carolina for eight
years. Helms occasionally opted for compromise in later years in the Senate,
working with Democrats on legislation to restructure the foreign policy
bureaucracy and pay back debts to the United Nations, an organization be
disdained for most of his career.
And he softened his views on AIDS after years of clashes with gay activists,
advocating greater federal funding to fight the disease in Africa and
elsewhere overseas.
But in his memoirs, Helms made clear that his opinions on other issues had
hardly moderated since he left office. He likened abortion to the Holocaust
and the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
"I will never be silent about the death of those who cannot speak for
themselves," he wrote in "Here's Where I Stand."
Helms never lost a race for the Senate, but he never won one by much,
either, a reflection of his divisive political profile in his native state.
He knew it, too. "Well, there is no joy in Mudville tonight. The mighty
ultraliberal establishment, and the liberal politicians and editors and
commentators and columnists have struck out again," he said in 1990 after
winning his fourth term.
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.
He defeated black former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt in 1990 and 1996 in
racially tinged campaigns. In the first race, a Helms commercial showed a
white fist crumbling up a job application, these words underneath: "You
needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."
"The tension that he creates, the fear he creates in people, is how he's won
campaigns," Gantt said several years later.
Helms also played a role in national GOP politics — supporting Ronald Reagan
in 1976 in a presidential primary challenge to then-President Ford. Reagan's
candidacy was near collapse when it came time for the North Carolina
primary. Helms was in charge of the effort, and Reagan won a startling upset
that resurrected his challenge.
"It's not saying too much to say that had Senator Helms not put his weight
and his political organization behind Ronald Reagan so that he was able to
win North Carolina, there may have never been a Reagan presidency," Cobey
said. "Most people feel like there would have never been a President Reagan
had it not been for Jesse Helms."
During the 1990s, Helms clashed frequently with Clinton, whom he deemed
unqualified to be commander in chief. Even some Republicans cringed when
Helms said Clinton was so unpopular he would need a bodyguard on North
Carolina military bases. Helms said he hadn't meant it as a threat.
Asked to gauge Clinton's performance overall, Helms said in 1995: "He's a
nice guy. He's very pleasant. But ... (as) Ronald Reagan used to say about
another politician, `Deep down, he's shallow.'"
Helms went out of his way to establish good relations with Madeleine
Albright, Clinton's second secretary of state. But that didn't stop him from
single-handedly blocking Clinton's appointment of William Weld — a
Republican — as ambassador to Mexico.
Helms clashed with other Republicans over the years, including fellow Sen.
Richard Lugar of Indiana in 1987, after Democrats had won a Senate majority.
Helms had promised in his 1984 campaign not to take the chairmanship of the
Foreign Relations Committee, but he invoked seniority over Lugar to claim
the seat as the panel's ranking Republican.
He was unafraid of inconveniencing his fellow senators — sometimes all of
them at once. "I did not come to Washington to win a popularity contest," he
once said while holding the Senate in session with a filibuster that delayed
the beginning of a Christmas break. And he once objected to a request by
phoning in his dissent from home, where he was watching Senate proceedings
on television.
Helms was born in Monroe, N.C., on Oct. 18, 1921. He attended Wake Forest
College in 1941 but never graduated and was in the Navy during World War II.
In many ways, Helms' values were forged in the small town where his father
was police chief.
"I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton
wagons, the Fourth of July parades, the New Year's Eve firecrackers. I shall
never forget the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on
the Courthouse Square monument on Confederate Memorial Day," Helms wrote in
a newspaper column in 1956.
He took an active role in North Carolina politics early on, working to elect
a segregationist candidate, Willis Smith, to the Senate in 1950. He worked
as Smith's top staff aide for a time, then returned to Raleigh as executive
director of the state bankers association.
Helms became a member of the Raleigh city council in 1957 and got his first
public platform for espousing his conservative views when he became a
television editorialist for WRAL in Raleigh in 1960. He also wrote a column
that at one time was carried in 200 newspapers. Helms also was city editor
at The Raleigh Times.
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.
*AP Special Writer David Espo contributed to this story from Washington*
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080704/ap_on_re_us/obit_helms_21>
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