CNN reports on the death of one of the most notorious lawmakers of his generation.
Former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican who became an icon to conservatives, died Friday at the age of 86, a senior congressional source told CNN.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, announced on its Web site that he died at 1:18 a.m. Friday after having been ill in recent years.
The center’s president, Ed Feulner, hailed Helms as “one of the most consequential figures of the 20th century.”
“Along with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, he helped establish the conservative movement and became a powerful voice for free markets and free people,” Feulner wrote.
In all honesty, writing about Helms’ death is challenging. I’m very familiar with his life, record, and worldview, and on practically everything, I found Helms to be an appalling individual. But is it not callous to bash a man just hours after his death?
I think I have an alternative.
The WaPo’s David Broder wrote a column in August 2001, shortly after Helms announced he would not seek re-election. Broder, who would hardly qualify as a reflexive liberal ideologue, did a fine job explaining exactly what made Helms politically significant, and precisely why he’ll be remembered.
What really sets Jesse Helms apart is that he is the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country — a title that one hopes will now be permanently retired. A few editorials and columns came close to saying that. But the squeamishness of much of the press in characterizing Helms for what he is suggests an unwillingness to confront the reality of race in our national life. […]
What is unique about Helms — and from my viewpoint, unforgivable — is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.
Many of the accounts of Helms’s retirement linked him with another prospective retiree, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Both these Senate veterans switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party when the Democrats began pressing for civil rights legislation in the 1960s. But there is a great difference between them. Thurmond, who holds the record for the longest anti-civil rights filibuster, accepted change. For three decades he has treated African Americans and black institutions as respectfully as he treats all his other constituents.
To the best of my knowledge, Helms has never done what the late George Wallace did well before his death — recant and apologize for his use of racial issues. And that use was blatant.
In 1984, when Helms faced his toughest opponent in Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, the late Bill Peterson, one of the most evenhanded reporters I have ever known, summed up what “some said was the meanest Senate campaign in history.”
“Racial epithets and standing in school doors are no longer fashionable,” Peterson wrote, “but 1984 proved that the ugly politics of race are alive and well. Helms is their master.”
A year before the election, when public polls showed Helms trailing by 20 points, he launched a Senate filibuster against the bill making the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. a national holiday. Thurmond and the Senate majority were on the other side, but the next poll showed Helms had halved his deficit.
All year, Peterson reported, “Helms campaign literature sounded a drumbeat of warnings about black voter-registration drives…. On election eve, he accused Hunt of being supported by ‘homosexuals, the labor union bosses and the crooks’ and said he feared a large ‘bloc vote.’ What did he mean? ‘The black vote,’ Helms said.” He won, 52 percent to 48 percent.
In 1990, locked in a tight race with an African American Democrat, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, Helms aired a final-week TV ad that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, while an announcer said, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.” Once again, he pulled through.
That is not a history to be sanitized.
At the risk of sounding heartless, the same is true on the day of Helms’ death.