Former Sen. Jesse Helms dies at 86

updated 8:13 p.m. ET July 4, 2008

RALEIGH, North Carolina - 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.

Helms died at 1:15 a.m., said the Jesse Helms Center at Wingate University in North Carolina. 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.

Slowed by variety of illnesses
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 that he had been moved into a convalescent center after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which repeated minor strokes damage the brain.

Video   1990: Jesse Helms runs for re-election Oct. 30, 1990: NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports on Sen. Jesse Helms's run for re-election against Harvey Gantt. Nightly News

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 President Carter pushed through a reluctant Senate in 1977.

'Senator No'
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.”

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