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 esse
Helms announced that he will retire from the Senate next year, at
the end of his fifth term. He will be missed by the conservative
movement, the country, and millions of now- and once-enslaved people
worldwide.
Helms, a former
radio broadcaster, was first elected in 1972 at the high tide of
Nixonian détente and dirigisme, and began laying the
groundwork for a conservative revival. He was the first conservative
politician to take advantage of the direct-mail techniques of Richard
Viguerie, rallying supporters nationwide. At the same time, he worked
hard on his local base, giving Ronald Reagan a desperately needed
primary victory in 1976. The importance of that win cannot be overstated:
After North Carolina, Reagan fought President Gerald Ford to a near
draw, and positioned himself for 1980. But if Reagan had lost North
Carolina, on top of five previous primary defeats, there would have
been no second run in 1980. Helms saved the Reagan Revolution.
He was a fiery
crusader on social issues, speaking with populist bluntness (he
called the Mapplethorpe exhibit "an abyss of slime").
But the most immediate threats of the end of the 20th century were
foreign, and he made his mark fighting them. Not a nomination nor
an appropriation passed without his scrutiny, and his stubbornness
earned him the epithet "Senator No." Some members of the
foreign-policy establishment acknowledged his usefulness. Walter
Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations,
linked Helms with Arthur Vandenberg and Henry Cabot Lodge as a "broker
between a skeptical public opinion and an insistent internationalist
elite." When the brokers sign off on a deal, as when Helms
finally approved American funding of a reformed U.N. budget, then
the deal is truly made.
But Helms's
contribution went beyond process. He sought for opportunities to
fight Communism, not to buy it off, such as in Central America.
After the fall of the Soviet Union he did not consider its puppet,
Castro, yesterday's news, but insisted that he pay for his continuing
oppression of his people with economic pressure. He resisted every
frittering away of American sovereignty. National Review disagreed
with him on the Panama Canal Treaty, which we saw as hemispheric
noblesse oblige. Yet Helms's focus on American interests became
even more relevant in the post-Communist world, when believers in
the end of history viewed the globe as a theater for bustling armed
social work.
Helms rose
to power as conservatives in the South were battling desegregation.
He battled as hard as any of them (on his radio show he called the
University of North Carolina the University of Negroes and Communists):
a shameful legacy, of which he was never ashamed. In his 1990 race
against black businessman Harvey Gantt, Helms ran an ad showing
white hands crumpling a rejection letter — the job, a voice
explained, had gone to a less-qualified minority — and liberals
cried foul. They were the racists this time, though, doling out
favors on the basis of skin color. Helms was only paying them back
in their own coin.
Ronald Reagan
had the sunny disposition we look for in presidents. But Helms occupied
an equally vital, if lesser, ecological niche, whose requirements
for survival include a willingness to be hated. (Only someone of
his truly affable and courtly nature could be so willing.) Who in
the era of the compassionate junior Bush will take his place?
The
Budget
Be sure to go to NRO Financial for NR's take on Bush's major
headache, "A
Surplus of Spin."
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