Jesse Helms (1921-2008)

The Wall Street Journal has the most poignant and magnanimous of the obituaries I have read for the late Jesse Helms.

Jesse Helms

"Since he had to go sometime, Jesse Helms would have liked the idea of dying on July 4. The main cause of his life was defending liberty, especially against Soviet Communism, and so we wouldn't be surprised if he held out to make it to the early hours of our national holiday before dying yesterday at age 86.

Helms was best known as the five-term North Carolina Senator who drove liberals crazy before his retirement in 2002. But his most important role in history arguably took place in 1976, when he and political ally Tom Ellis helped to resurrect Ronald Reagan's fading run for President...

As a Senator, Helms was a forceful anti-Communist, resisting Nixon's detente of the 1970s and promoting U.S. support for dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and freedom fighters in Central America. In one episode in 1985, a 22-year-old Ukrainian sailor in the Soviet merchant marine jumped ship near New Orleans and tried to defect. In a shameful moment, the Reagan Administration returned him to Soviet control days before a U.S.-Soviet summit. Helms took up Miroslav Medvid's cause, and the Ukrainian became a priest after the fall of the Soviet empire. On a visit to the Senator's office 16 years later, Father Medvid credited Helms's public agitation with saving him from KGB retribution...

Helms was a conservative populist, and his campaigns were not above demagoguery. He was a protectionist, reflecting the textile interests in his state. He sometimes abused the Senate's advice and consent power against Presidential nominees – a habit the left has now adopted. His critics have a point that he sometimes exploited racial tensions in the post-1960s South, but Helms himself was no racist and his famous TV spot opposing racial preferences in employment in 1990 barely ran in North Carolina.

Like the political shift across the South and West in the last decades of the 20th century, Helms's political rise was a reaction to the collapse of liberal governance. He sought to reassert traditional American values, and above all to defend U.S. freedom against Soviet tyranny. Like Reagan, he saw more clearly than liberals the moral dimension of the Cold War. Like Reagan, he was a hero of that war."

Wonkette remembers Jesse Helms less generously than I might.

Jesse Helms Finally Dead

"We interrupt your Fourth of July with some Breaking News: Jesse Helms was apparently still alive, and now he’s dead, hooray! He was a sour troll and a bigot, and it’s a testament to every rotten thing about this country that for a quarter century, he was one of the most powerful people in American politics."

Here's the full obituary by Wonkette editor, Ken Layne.

Jesse Helms: American Garbage

And this from the Economist:

Jesse Helms

"JESSE HELMS, the former senator from North Carolina, died today, aged 86. Many will not miss the cantankerous, obstructionist and generally racist Mr Helms. He supported segregationist policies throughout his career, worked against civil rights legislation, filibustered a bill to mark Martin Luther King day as a holiday, was a leading supporter of South Africa's apartheid regime, and ran one of the more racially divisive campaign ads in political history. Yet he claimed not to be racist.

When Bill Clinton nominated an openly homosexual woman as assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1993, Mr Helms recoiled. 'I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that,' he said. 'If you want to call me a bigot, fine.' He was a bigot...

It's a shame Fox News wasn't around in his prime. His opposition to communism was also of the "with us or against us variety" that has defined policy in the war on terror. In 2005, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University opened the Jesse Helms School of Government. There, at least, he will be remembered fondly."

But this?

'It's just incredible that he would die on July 4th, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men,' said former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey."

Whatever.

What I remember most about Jesse Helms, growing up as a young liberal, was that he was a bigot, on matters of race, homosexuality, AIDS, and all things that challenged his generally narrow worldview. He talked a big talk about freedom, but delivered much bitter, petty rhetoric and policy. Hardly the stuff of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Jesse Helms was also a committed anti-Communist, a public U.N. skeptic, and sought some level of absolution from his vile past, I think, with his laudable, later-life efforts to raise money to alleviate the plague of AIDS in Africa.

Jesse and I shared a commitment to freedom, anti-Communism, and American sovereignty.

He also was the public figure in American political life that I most despised for much of my youth. Robert Byrd is a somewhat comparable figure on the left (with more notable ties to the Ku Klux Klan). But I' not sure anyone really matches the dubious stature of Jesse Helms. The idea that a man of Richard Lugar's integrity and thoughtfulness would have to play second-fiddle to someone like Jesse Helms on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has always seemed one of life's crueler ironies to me.

Jesse Helms was also a human being. A deeply flawed, mean-spirited, bigoted, bitter, petty human being. But a human being nonetheless. And someone who made some endeavors to make some amends in the final years of his life. He never said he was sorry. But he did try to make amends.

And, in the meantime, he is a man with friends and family and a man, like every man, who will be missed by those who loved him.

I have to say that the columns I have read that laud Helms' many accomplishments have seriously endeared me to him and his worthy causes, especially his stands for freedom and against Soviet Communism. I remember, as a young liberal, being very heartened and emailing many friends and family when I read that Jesse Helms had written a Washington Post editorial advocating a tripling of the budget to combat AIDS in Africa (a skepticism of which policy I understand better, today, sharing his ultimate compassion for such folks and believing in pragmatic government efforts to deal with a serious health crisis, but also wanting more of that money to come from private sources rather than forever from necessarily limited government coffers).

I was always someone who wanted to like and respect, Jesse Helms, even as I despised him, in my youth. The bigger-hearted reflections on the life and legacy of Jesse Helms have humbled me and my one-time contempt for this bigger-than-life American politician.

Rest in peace, Jesse Helms. You will be missed, all and all. May God and all of us have mercy on your soul.