Jesse Helms Passes Away On July 4
Jul 5, 2008 19:41:21 GMT -5
Post by majorbludd on Jul 5, 2008 19:41:21 GMT -5
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican who became an icon to conservatives, died Friday at age 86, the Jesse Helms Center said.
Helms once said his job was to derail the freight train of liberalism.
Conservatives admired him for his opposition to abortion and what he called "indecent art," while liberals accused him of using race as a wedge issue to defeat black opponents.
Helms opposed civil rights and a holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was one of a small number of senators who opposed extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982, eventually giving up a filibuster when then-Majority Leader Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, said the Senate would not take up any other business until it acted on the extension.
But Helms wrote in his 2005 memoir "Here's Where I Stand" that he was "not the least bit racist," the New York Times wrote in a review of the book.
The Jesse Helms Center, a private foundation in Wingate, North Carolina, announced on its Web site that Helms died at 1:15 a.m. Friday in Raleigh.
The cause of death has not been announced. Helms had been ill in recent years.
President Bush called Helms "a kind, decent, and humble man."
"Throughout his long public career, Sen. Jesse Helms was a tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina, a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty," Bush said in a written statement.
"Under his leadership, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a powerful force for freedom. And today, from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember -- in the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side," he said.
Helms retired in 2003 after serving five terms in the Senate.
At the time, President Bush said the Senate was "losing an institution."
Helms' hometown newspaper, The (Raleigh) News & Observer, lionized him in 2001 as one of the creators of the modern Republican Party.
"Helms helped broaden the party to include religious conservatives and people who drank not just Chablis but sweet tea, and who drove not just BMWs but pickup trucks," the paper wrote when he announced he was going to retire.
When the GOP was the majority party in the Senate, Helms was chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, consistently moving U.S. policy toward the right, especially regarding the United Nations and Cuba.
Helms was such a polarizing figure in American politics that the left and the right invoked his name in fund-raising appeals.
"The business of political causes and issues is a lot like professional wrestling -- there is good and there is evil. And Jesse Helms, to those of us on the left, is evil," Roger Craver, a leading direct-mail fund-raiser for the left, told CNN in 2001 when Helms announced his retirement.
Helms was instrumental in blocking the payment of U.S. dues to the United Nations in an effort to force changes in the world organization. The United States withheld up to $1 billion under a law that came to be known as the Helms-Biden Act. The law demanded reforms of U.N. bureaucracy and a reduction in Washington's contributions to the U.N. peacekeeping budget and general budget.
He also helped prevent the Senate from ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty despite appeals from President Clinton.
He worked to prevent the National Endowment for the Arts from funding work he disapproved of.
"If people want to go into a men's room and write dirty words on the wall, let them furnish their own crayons," he once said. "Let them furnish their own wall. Don't ask the taxpayers to support it."
He also held seats on the Agriculture Committee, looking out for North Carolina's extensive tobacco industry, and on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. Watch how Helms had an impact in politics ยป
Helms was known as "Senator No" for his staunch opposition to an array of liberal causes, including affirmative action, arts funding and gay rights.
"The destruction of this country can be pinpointed in terms of its beginnings to the time that our political leadership turned to socialism," Helms said in an editorial he wrote at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, according to The Associated Press.
"They didn't call it socialism, of course. It was given deceptive names and adorned with fancy slogans. We heard about New Deals, and Fair Deals and New Frontiers and the Great Society."
Helms was accused of race-baiting throughout his career.
"To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing," he wrote in 1956, according to the AP.
Civil rights activists on Friday offered mixed reactions to his passing.
"He was a talented man. A man of considerable power. But he used his powers to maintain the order of the Old South. It was divisive," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Friday.
"We offer condolences to his bereaved family, but the senator had a chance to move toward a more perfect union and he chose the Confederacy."
Helms faced challenges to his Senate seat from Democrat Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1990 and 1996.
In the first election, Helms ran a television commercial that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a pink slip as the 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. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is. Gantt supports Ted Kennedy's racial quota law that makes the color of your skin more important than your qualifications."
In later years, Helms worked with Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and U2 singer Bono to fight AIDS in Africa.
At 80, Helms had an operation to replace a faulty prosthetic heart valve put in place a decade earlier when he had quadruple-bypass surgery.
Helms once said his job was to derail the freight train of liberalism.
Conservatives admired him for his opposition to abortion and what he called "indecent art," while liberals accused him of using race as a wedge issue to defeat black opponents.
Helms opposed civil rights and a holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was one of a small number of senators who opposed extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982, eventually giving up a filibuster when then-Majority Leader Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, said the Senate would not take up any other business until it acted on the extension.
But Helms wrote in his 2005 memoir "Here's Where I Stand" that he was "not the least bit racist," the New York Times wrote in a review of the book.
The Jesse Helms Center, a private foundation in Wingate, North Carolina, announced on its Web site that Helms died at 1:15 a.m. Friday in Raleigh.
The cause of death has not been announced. Helms had been ill in recent years.
President Bush called Helms "a kind, decent, and humble man."
"Throughout his long public career, Sen. Jesse Helms was a tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina, a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty," Bush said in a written statement.
"Under his leadership, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a powerful force for freedom. And today, from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember -- in the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side," he said.
Helms retired in 2003 after serving five terms in the Senate.
At the time, President Bush said the Senate was "losing an institution."
Helms' hometown newspaper, The (Raleigh) News & Observer, lionized him in 2001 as one of the creators of the modern Republican Party.
"Helms helped broaden the party to include religious conservatives and people who drank not just Chablis but sweet tea, and who drove not just BMWs but pickup trucks," the paper wrote when he announced he was going to retire.
When the GOP was the majority party in the Senate, Helms was chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, consistently moving U.S. policy toward the right, especially regarding the United Nations and Cuba.
Helms was such a polarizing figure in American politics that the left and the right invoked his name in fund-raising appeals.
"The business of political causes and issues is a lot like professional wrestling -- there is good and there is evil. And Jesse Helms, to those of us on the left, is evil," Roger Craver, a leading direct-mail fund-raiser for the left, told CNN in 2001 when Helms announced his retirement.
Helms was instrumental in blocking the payment of U.S. dues to the United Nations in an effort to force changes in the world organization. The United States withheld up to $1 billion under a law that came to be known as the Helms-Biden Act. The law demanded reforms of U.N. bureaucracy and a reduction in Washington's contributions to the U.N. peacekeeping budget and general budget.
He also helped prevent the Senate from ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty despite appeals from President Clinton.
He worked to prevent the National Endowment for the Arts from funding work he disapproved of.
"If people want to go into a men's room and write dirty words on the wall, let them furnish their own crayons," he once said. "Let them furnish their own wall. Don't ask the taxpayers to support it."
He also held seats on the Agriculture Committee, looking out for North Carolina's extensive tobacco industry, and on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. Watch how Helms had an impact in politics ยป
Helms was known as "Senator No" for his staunch opposition to an array of liberal causes, including affirmative action, arts funding and gay rights.
"The destruction of this country can be pinpointed in terms of its beginnings to the time that our political leadership turned to socialism," Helms said in an editorial he wrote at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, according to The Associated Press.
"They didn't call it socialism, of course. It was given deceptive names and adorned with fancy slogans. We heard about New Deals, and Fair Deals and New Frontiers and the Great Society."
Helms was accused of race-baiting throughout his career.
"To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing," he wrote in 1956, according to the AP.
Civil rights activists on Friday offered mixed reactions to his passing.
"He was a talented man. A man of considerable power. But he used his powers to maintain the order of the Old South. It was divisive," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Friday.
"We offer condolences to his bereaved family, but the senator had a chance to move toward a more perfect union and he chose the Confederacy."
Helms faced challenges to his Senate seat from Democrat Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1990 and 1996.
In the first election, Helms ran a television commercial that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a pink slip as the 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. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is. Gantt supports Ted Kennedy's racial quota law that makes the color of your skin more important than your qualifications."
In later years, Helms worked with Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and U2 singer Bono to fight AIDS in Africa.
At 80, Helms had an operation to replace a faulty prosthetic heart valve put in place a decade earlier when he had quadruple-bypass surgery.