Goodbye, Senator No
Where are we going to find a principled conservative after Helms is gone?

By Michael Graham
August 23, 2001 8:00 a.m.

hen they leave office at the beginning of 2003, U.S. Senators Strom Thurmond (R., S.C.) and Jesse Helms (R., N.C.) will share a combined 78 years of senatorial service. They will also share a legacy: Converting the "Solid South" to the GOP, protecting Carolina textiles and tobacco, and earning reputations as two of America's most staunch conservatives.

But when Strom Thurmond shuffles off to chase the nurses at Walter Reed hospital, his departure won't send so much as a ripple across the American conservative movement. Jesse Helms's departure — announced Wednesday afternoon — will leave an unfillable vacuum.

You don't have to like Sen. Helms to acknowledge that he has been an effective and uncompromising bulldog for conservative issues in Washington. Indeed, people who loathe Jesse Helms — the Washington and media elites who view him as an unrepentant Neanderthal — acknowledge that he's one tough hombre.

Why, that might have been the exact phrase William Weld used when Helms successfully killed his nomination to become President Clinton's ambassador to Mexico. In 1997, the Massachusetts Republican resigned his governorship to go to Washington to fight for his nomination, which Helms opposed because of Weld's liberal stance on drug policy.

When Weld arrived in Washington to take on a single, septuagenarian senator, newspaper headlines blared: "President Clinton Says He Will Stand By Nominee."

He hasn't been heard from since.

Battles like this, and his overall willingness to fight, have made Helms a conservative icon. When segregation began to wane, Helms's Carolina counterpart, Strom Thurmond, went home to make new friends. But since his election in 1972, Helms has been defining himself by his enemies. He once sang "Dixie" to fellow senator Carol Moseley-Braun — attempting to make her cry, she claims. After winning reelection in 1996, Helms exclaimed "There's going to be six more years of torment for Ted Kennedy."

Kennedy has been one of Helms's favorite foils. During a Senate hearing at which Sen. Kennedy made an impassioned plea to allow foreign AIDS patients to immigrate to the U.S., Helms said: "Let me adjust my hearing aid. It could not accommodate the decibels of the senator from Massachusetts. I can't match him in decibels or Jezebels…"

This willingness to define himself by his opposition to liberalism runs contrary to the current Republican strategy, which is to blur the differences between Left and Right and accept moderated liberal proposals. George W. Bush confronting taxpayer-subsidized photos of homoeroticism as "an abyss of slime to placate people who clearly seek or are willing to destroy the Judaic-Christian foundations of this republic" is unimaginable. Indeed, is there any Republican U.S. senator who would?

Senator Helms came to prominence in North Carolina broadcasting televised editorials on WRAL-TV in Raleigh, editorials that eventually ran on radio and in print across the state. His first media job came, ironically enough, from an FDR program called the National Youth Administration, which got him a position in "sports publicity" at Wake Forest paying $18.75 a month. Eventually, Helms ended up on WRAL-TV in Raleigh, denouncing the big government social programs, liberals, hippies, and civil-rights activists who helped define North Carolina (and America) in the 1960's. Long before Rush Limbaugh, Helms was on the airwaves dismissing the University of North Carolina (UNC) as the "University of Negroes and Communists."

This is one of the disturbing legacies of Jesse Helms. Though you won't see it mentioned in the media coverage of his retirement, Helms was in fact an avowed and unapologetic segregationist. As a campaign worker, he helped elect segregation candidates before his own run in 1972. Unlike neoconservatives who espouse state's rights on principle, despite any unwanted outcomes on racial issues, Helms backed state's rights specifically because he wanted states to have the right to segregate. If Helms's position on 1960's civil-rights legislation has changed since then, he hasn't mentioned it.

Fortunately, good ideas are not destroyed by bad purposes. And Jesse Helms is also the kind of man who, after reading newspaper accounts of a 9-year-old orphan with cerebral palsy, would take the boy into his home and raise him as a son. (The Helms's also have two daughters and seven grandchildren.) Reporters who cover him regularly and those who work with him closely say the imaging of a frowning, dour puritan with an angry scowl is off the mark.

But Helms true political gifts are his consistency and his willingness to fight. He still bristles at the idea that his views have softened in his later years, telling supporters at events in the 1996 campaign "It's the same Jesse." He's always believed in outspending his opponent and running negative, two pillars of modern politics that he pioneered. Soon after his election, Helms was mailing four-five million pieces of political mail a year to conservatives across the country through his National Congressional Club (now the National Conservative Club). No other senator was using direct mail at that level, and Helms used these supporters to raise the millions he needed to defeat well-known Democrat opponents like former NC Gov. Jim Hunt in 1984 and Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt in '90 and '96.

Most of the post-Jesse coverage has focused on a handful of social issues like homosexual policy and public funding for the arts. These are talk-radio-friendly, "pop" issues, but they aren't the foundation of the Helms legacy. "Senator No" really made his mark in foreign policy, promoting anti-Communist regimes (even when they were dictatorships) and supporting freedom fighters in places like El Salvador.

Helms approach to foreign affairs was populist and unabashedly pro-American. This ran counter to the liberal establishment's post-national, global view of world politics, and Helms forced his opponents — Republican and Democrat — to define the American interests in the internationalism they advocated.

As Walter Russell Meade put it in the New York Times earlier this year: "While hating Jesse Helms remains a parlor sport in Georgetown, Cambridge and Manhattan, a longer view of American history would demonstrate that Jesse Helms is a necessary part of the process: If he didn't exist, America would have to invent him."

Meade's point is that principled opposition from conservatives is necessary to build broad support for policies — particularly international policies — advanced by liberals. When Senator "No" finally relents on a missile treaty or U.N. action, the typical man-on-the-street American can believe that his interests have been protected. For nearly 30 years, Helms has served as the conservative's canary in the mineshaft on foreign-policy issues.

It's an interesting idea, one that begs the question: Where are we going to find a principled conservative after Helms is gone?

The curmudgeon wing of the conservative movement will be left to the able hands of Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, but he lacks the passion on social issues to replace Helms. On social issues, people like Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.) and Rick Santorum (Penn.) have shown some willingness to mix it up, but don't look for them to denounce the "extremist, radical, pro-homosexual agenda" any time soon.

Comedy writers may find the retirement of Sen. Thurmond a terrible loss, but for conservatives who believe in unapologetic ideological confrontation, Jesse Helms's departure may be the end of an era. For the moment, perhaps even an entire movement.