Senator, Yes
Jesse Helms’s retirement.

By NR Editors
August 29, 2001 1:30 p.m.

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?

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