Jesse Helms

His admirers will see in his death, early this morning, the sort of providential dispensation earlier generations saw in the July 4th passings of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Whether Jesse Helms knew he'd made it to his 86th Fourth early press accounts do not say. In the last few years he had good days and less good ones as a series of minor strokes took their toll. He'd have been pleased in any event. There was never any question about Jesse Helms' patriotism.

Senator Helms was one of the friendliest people I ever met. Courtly, in an old-fashioned way. Avuncular. Good at telling stories. When he and his wife read an newspaper article about a boy with cerebral palsy who wanted a family, they adopted him. He treasured the values of Monroe, North Carolina, where he grew up. "I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton wagons, the Fourth of July parades, the New Year's Eve firecrackers. I shall never forget the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on the Courthouse Square monument on Confederate Memorial Day," he wrote in a 1956 column.

From newspapers Helms branched out into radio and television, and one of the fixtures of my childhood was his daily commentaries on The Tobacco Radio Network.

Times changed, and their passing annoyed Helms. He found no shortage of scapegoats in his fifty-year public life. Black people and Communists fed his anger for decades; when they lost their currency, feminists and gay people were ready to hand. When president Clinton nominated a woman who was both to a sub-cabinet post, Helms' reaction was, "I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that. If you want to call me a bigot, fine."

“Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, “and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.”

He held that homosexuality is "degenerate," and homosexuals are "weak, morally sick wretches." Best-selling gay author Armistead Maupin chuckles when he looks back on his first job out of college, writing those fire-breathing commentaries for Helms.

''Jesse Helms thought I was the hope of the future,'' Maupin is fond of saying. ''And he was right.''

Senator Helms spent thirty years representing the State of North Carolina. He was renowned for constituent service, which helped him eke out his never-large re-election margins. His ornery streak delighted a lot of people, amused that so many of the rich and powerful around the land worked so hard to defeat him and never did.

On the other hand, his legislative accomplishments were meager, and at his death Congress was looking to undo one of the larger ones, his ban on HIV-positive visitors to the United States. It's the only medical condition written into law as a bar to entry, and a law we share with only Armenia, Brunei, Iraq, Libya, Moldova, Oman, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Sudan.

Having fallen under the sway of the pop star Bono in his last year in the Senate, Helms decided to support AIDS measures in Africa, where heterosexual transmission of the disease is most common. But he never relented on the travel ban, which is why, among other effects, the biggest conference in the world devoted to curing the disease cannot meet in the United States.

Helms protected tobacco subsidies while railing against government spending. He opposed arms control agreements. He opposed the Martin Luther King Jr holiday. He opposed the Panama Canal Treaty. He railed against an unusually broad swath of art as pornography, tried to strip the federal courts of their ability to hear abortion cases, tried to ban flag burning and school busing. His Congressional Club, established with fund-raising guru Richard Viguerie, turned into a cash machine with apocalyptic warnings from Helms that ""Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior."

He blocked presidential appointments over and over- once, in a fit of pique over the Senate's refusal to confirm his choice for a judgeship- he blocked any appointments to North Carolina federal court vacancies for the next eight years. "In domestic politics," The Guardian reported, "he denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as 'the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress", voted against a supreme court justice because she was "likely to uphold the homosexual agenda', acted for years as spokesman for the large tobacco companies, was reprimanded by the justice department and the federal election commission for electoral malpractice, and compiled a dismal personal record as a slum landlord."

The cornerstone of Helms' career was race. For him, The University of North Carolina was 'the University of Negroes and Communists.' Black civil rights activists were "Communists and sex perverts."

He could wave the bloody shirt with the best of them, and did. One of the Republican Party's leading media experts, Alex Castellanos, got his start working for Helms. Castellanos wrote the 1990 ad that showed a white fist crumbling up a job application, these words underneath: "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority," in the first of his two races against black Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt:

When Illinois Senator Carol Mosely Braun- an African-American- entered a Senate elevator, Helms cheerfully began singing "Dixie." I"m going to make her cry," he said. "I'm going to keep singing 'Dixie' till she cries."

Jesse Helms' great tragedy was that he shared with Ronald Reagan the vision of America as a shining white city on a hill, never perfect but always striving towards perfection, but saw the blessings of liberty as a scarcity, too often thoughtlessly doled out to the wrong sorts of people.

For him, though, it truly was a white city.

Helms leaves behind a loving family and a mini-presidential library and museum, the Jesse Helms Center, at Wingate University outside Monroe, "at which American and foreign dignitaries could pay homage. Those unable to attend in person could demonstrate their goodwill in cash: Taiwan donated $225,000, Kuwait $100,000, and various tobacco companies more than $1m.

"Former president Jimmy Carter, secretary of state Madeleine Albright, Dr Henry Kissinger, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and other key public figures all turned up. Eventually even the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, heeded the call: in the aftermath of his visit, the foreign relations committee suddenly released America's long-outstanding payments to the UN."

"My legacy will be up to others to describe," he wrote in 2005.

Indeed it will.