Jesse Helms died on the Fourth of July — a fitting end for a true American patriot.
He was one of the most consequential conservatives of his generation. When North Carolina elected him to the Senate in 1972, for the first of five terms, he was part of a Republican minority. Within even that small band, he was willing to stand alone. His penchant for holding up legislation and casting the only vote against popular bills earned him a nickname that stuck: “Senator No.”
It is easy to rattle off a long list of what Senator No opposed. First and foremost was Communism. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was an aggressive and outspoken critic of the Soviet Union. He refused to overlook the evils of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba. During the 1980s, he led efforts to support Nicaragua’s contra rebels against the Sandinistas and their incipient totalitarianism.
He was against many other things as well: federal funding of obscene art, ineffective aid to foreign governments, and the continual encroachments of Big Government on everyday life. One of the things he was against in the 1960s was, alas, civil rights. His defense of segregation was of course deeply misguided. But is it fair for this error to have been placed in the first sentence of the
New York Times’s obituary of him? Certainly liberals have forgiven the pasts of other segregationists, from Sam Ervin to William Fulbright.
Helms’s real offense was a stubborn and victory-making political incorrectness. In 1990, he was running for reelection against Harvey Gantt, a black former mayor of Charlotte. As with many of Helms’s elections, this one was tight. His campaign ran a television advertisement about Gantt’s support for racial preferences in employment and college admissions. It pointed out that these preferences unfairly cost white applicants jobs. Merely pointing out that they cost whites jobs, let alone unfairly, was too much for liberals, who called the ad, and not the policies it addressed, racially divisive.
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