Jesse Helms:JESSE HELMS, member of the US senate's foreign relations committee for two decades and its chairman from 1995 to 2001, has died at the age of 86.
Helms maintained an old-world courtesy in his personal contacts, but that was only on the surface. He became one of the most powerful and baleful influences on American foreign policy, repeatedly preventing his country paying its UN contributions, voting against virtually all arms-control measures, opposing international aid programmes as "pouring money down foreign rat holes", and avidly supporting military juntas in Latin America and minority white regimes in southern Africa.
In domestic politics 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 irony was that he was often seen as a relative moderate in his home state of North Carolina.
Helms was educated at local schools and had just enrolled for a college course when America entered the second World War. In 1942 he joined the navy, to be given a role which inadvertently established his postwar career. As a recruiting officer he had to make regular patriotic appeals on local radio. They brought him sufficient recognition after the war to abandon his college studies for journalism, initially as news editor of the Raleigh Times and later as director of news and programmes for the principal local radio network.
In 1960 he was given an extraordinary boost when the owner of the main local television station appointed him one of the new medium's first editorial commentators. For 12 years Helms appeared nightly at peak viewing time to denounce the civil rights struggle, trade unions, the UN, Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, hippies, and any other social or political development rejected by the extreme right. His commentaries were repeated by 70 southern radio stations and, as they became increasingly popular, reprinted in 200 newspapers across America.
In a climate well to the right of mainstream politics in Europe, Helms became extraordinarily influential among those Americans Richard Nixon dubbed the silent majority. By the time Nixon moved into the White House in 1969, Helms's political ambitions had been focused. In 1972, in a state that had voted solidly Democratic since the civil war, he stood for the senate as a Republican. In a bitter campaign against a middle-of-the-road opponent, Helms won by 8 per cent. It was a signal of the South's seismic political shift after years of Democratic desegregation. It also made Helms the first North Carolina Republican to sit in the senate for nearly 80 years. The senate's tradition of choosing committee chairman by seniority eventually brought him to head the agriculture committee (1981-87).
Helms's principal skill was obstruction, which he employed ruthlessly once he assumed chairmanship of the foreign relations committee in 1995, having been a member since 1981. The senate's arcane rule book offers virtually uncontrollable power to committee chairmen to determine their own agenda. In a private war with the state department, Helms refused to hold confirmation hearings for 18 new ambassadors, or to debate such key issues for the Clinton administration as the chemical weapons or strategic arms treaties.
In later years Helms suffered from poor health. He contracted prostate cancer and a bone disorder, Paget's disease, which obliged him to travel round the senate on a scooter. He also underwent a quadruple heart bypass.
Helms finally lost his chairmanship of the foreign relations committee when the moderate Vermont Republican, Senator James Jeffords, lost patience with the Bush administration in May 2001. His defection to the Democrats secured their control of the senate and all its legislative committees.
This sudden loss of power, allied to his failing health, at last convinced Helms that it was time to give up. In August that year he announced he would not run again when his term expired in 2002.
Though there was dismay in North Carolina, his decision was greeted with relief by most of the country. The New York Times observed that "few senators in the modern era have done more to resist the tide of progress", and Robert Pastor, whose ambassadorship to Panama was scuppered by Helms in 1995, commented that "nothing Jesse Helms did in his entire career will enhance America's national security more than his retirement". He is survived by his wife Dorothy, two daughters and a son.
Jesse Alexander Helms, born October 18th, 1921; died July 4th, 2008