Watching Washington

Helms' Passage A Hinge Of History

Senate eulogies are models of the Latin maxim de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Speak no ill of the dead.

So it was this week when the Senate returned from its Independence Day recess to remember five-term Sen. Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican. Helms, who retired in failing health in 2003, died last week at 86.

Onetime colleagues who had fought the archconservative during his 30 years in the Senate found ways to salute his conviction, his courage and his kindness to those he held dear. Fierce as he could be in battle, Helms could be as sentimental as a greeting card, mentioning his wife, Dot, in a floor speech and calling her "that girl I met who is now my favorite grandma."

Several of the Senate tributes noted that Helms had been declared dead early on July 4, joining a list of national figures who had died on the nation's birthday (notably Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both in 1826, and James Monroe).

The day of Helms' death was also widely noted in obituaries over the holiday weekend. Admirers of the conservative icon will surely make it part of his patriotic legend.

Looking back, however, the month and day of Helms' passing will seem less important than the year. For Helms has died in 2008, in the summer when the Democratic Party is about to nominate an African American for president.

Historians will find these era brackets irresistible. Helms' passing marks the end of a long line of Southern senators for whom race was an abiding obsession. Barack Obama's nomination represents the improbable culmination of the Democratic Party's century-long transformation. The party of the Old South — of slavery, secession and segregation — is about to anoint its first black leader.

Helms began his political life as a Democrat, as nearly all ambitious young men did in the North Carolina of his youth. In 1950, he helped a segregationist Democrat, Willis Smith, win a close Senate primary. Helms denied involvement in the doctored photos that showed the wife of Smith's opponent dancing with a black man.

In the 1960s, when the civil rights movement was at its peak, Helms was a leader in the resistance. He made his hard-edged opposition heard as a newspaper editor, a radio and TV commentator and a city councilman in Raleigh. And, like his counterpart in South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, he changed his political allegiance to the GOP. The two would soon bring their states and their entire region into the Republican column in 1972, re-electing President Richard Nixon in a landslide and sending Helms himself to the Senate.

Through the rest of his career, whenever Helms had a tough race he turned to the issue he knew best. Facing a stiff challenge by Gov. Jim Hunt in 1984, Helms led the effort to reject the Martin Luther King holiday and railed against the "vote of the blocs." Under the gun again six years later against Harvey Gantt, the African-American former mayor of Charlotte, Helms ran the infamous "white hands" ad attacking affirmative action as "racial quotas" and "reverse discrimination at the hands of ruthless bureaucrats."

Why did Helms rely so heavily on the politics of race?

As a rural-born conservative with a populist touch, he enjoyed strong bonds with his "Jessecrats" that never weakened. Running as he did in the age of Ronald Reagan, Helms never lacked for winning issues. He could find ready audiences for his denunciations of abortion and gay rights, his jeremiads against the United Nations and foreign aid. As a long-standing anti-Communist, he could scarcely have served in a more propitious era than the one that saw the Soviet Union stagger and collapse.

And yet, with all that to work with, he would return again and again to what he knew best, drawing his water from the well of the South's deep and bitter past. Others who had done so, including Thurmond and Alabama's George Wallace, changed their ways in later life. But not Helms, who seemed anything but repentant.

It is not yet clear what the election will bring in North Carolina this fall. But Obama will have an uphill fight in the Tar Heel State. So will the Democrat challenging Helms' successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole. The past will still be present in North Carolina, and the arrival of the future may yet be some ways off.

But the day of Jesse Helms is gone, not to return. And that is a milestone in itself.

7:18 AM ET | 07- 8-2008 | permalink

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