< Looking Back on Jesse Helms' Life

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Heard on All Things Considered

July 4, 2008 - ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.

Jesse Helms was a fierce conservative all his life. As a U.S. senator from North Carolina, he became known as Senator No for his opposition to legislation and his refusal to compromise. Among his famous causes: opposition to funding for AIDS research and to a holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Jesse Helms died today at the age of 86. Helms retired from the Senate a few years ago after five terms in office.

Senator JESSE HELMS (Republican, North Carolina): I would be 88 if I ran again in 2002 and was elected and lived to finish a sixth term. And this, my family and I have decided, unanimously, that I should not do and, ladies and gentlemen, I shall not.

SIEGEL: The late Jesse Helms. Merle Black is a professor of politics at Emory University in Atlanta. He's a scholar of Southern politics and the author of several books - most recently, "Divided America."

Merle Black, first, how would you assess the political career of Jesse Helms?

Professor MERLE BLACK (Politics, Emory University): Well, Jesse Helms was s real throwback; he was one of the last completely unreconstructed Southerners in the U.S. Senate. And he became the most visible, well-known voice of Southern Republicans in the 1970s, 1980s.

SIEGEL: When he - well, when he was an adult in the 1960s, we identified the South as being the solid Democratic South and the cause of segregation was the cause of the Democratic Party even in the South of that time.

Prof. BLACK: Well, he was part of that shift of conservatives out of the Democratic Party over into the Republican Party. He had been raised a Democrat, he was a Southern Baptist. He'd been raised in a small town south. But he always supported conservative Democrats through his life. And I think in - it was in 1971 just before he ran and won that Senate seat in '72 that he actually switched and began to register as a Republican.

So he represents a lot of what happened to the conservatives in the South where they thought the Democratic Party was becoming much too liberal, it didn't express their views on a variety of topics anymore, and the Republican Party would be far more accessible.

SIEGEL: Did he possess any particular political gifts that accounted for his success for so long as a senator from North Carolina?

Prof. BLACK: Yeah, you know, he was - for a long time - a radio and TV personality in North Carolina. He gave little editorials over a radio network in the 1960s and '70s where he was very straightforward, very direct, everybody knew exactly what he was talking about. No ambiguity there, it was all one way or the other, right or wrong. And he made that connection with voters and I think it really helped him when he began to run for political office.

SIEGEL: In 1990 - in the first of two successful re-election campaigns that he ran against Harvey Gantt, who is an African-American Democrat - Helms had a famous or some would say notorious campaign ad in which a pair of white hands are seen opening a rejection letter. Didn't get the job, you needed that job, the announcer said, but they had to give it to a minority.

Prof. BLACK: Yeah. I think that was the ad that really turned it around. Gantt appeared to be leading in the closing days of the campaign before the Helms' campaign really came across with that ad. That put race in a very visible way as the kind of centerpiece of the campaign. The Helms campaigns almost always involved some kind of racial issue, the use of a lot of negative politics. Helms was doing it in a way that it really gone out of the way in which most politicians campaigned in terms of the biracial electorate.

SIEGEL: In his last years, I gather he softened a little bit on his stance on HIV/AIDS.

Prof. BLACK: Mm-hmm.

SIEGEL: But did he go through this sort of series of apologies that George Wallace went through in his last years?

Prof. BLACK: I don't think so. I don't - you know, when he left office, he was pretty much the same as he was all the way through. And then, he would appear before voters and say, you know, I'm the same guy I was, you know, 30 years ago. Certainly on civil rights issues, he never really did change, he voted against all civil rights legislation. He never tried to really expand the basis of his support that got him elected in the first place in 1972.

And in that regard, he was certainly not a conventional politician. He was much more interested in taking positions on issues and, in effect, representing those hard-line positions on many laws in trying to put legislation together or really move to the center. So he may have changed a little bit on AIDS, but the balance of his voting record, I think, would be pretty consistent all the way through his 30 years in the Senate.

SIEGEL: It's Merle Black of Emory University talking with us about Jesse Helms, the late five-term senator from North Carolina. Merle Black, thank you very much for talking with us.

Prof. BLACK: Thank you, Robert.

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