John Fund pretty much nails the essence of Jesse Helms in a deft little column:
Two events early in his Senate career showcased Helms’s unflinching nature and his political skills. In 1975, he engineered a visit to the U.S. by Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn over the objections of the State Department, which forbade its own employees from attending a major Solzhenitsyn speech in Washington. State also blocked a proposed visit to the White House, leading Helms to accuse President Gerald Ford of “cowering timidly for fear of offending Communists.”
That incident helped spur Reagan to challenge Ford for the GOP nomination the next year. Reagan lost the first five primaries, and he entered the North Carolina contest broke and under pressure to pull out. But Helms and his chief strategist Tom Ellis refused to give up. They employed Helms’s huge, direct-mail list to build a grass-roots army of volunteers and raise money to air 30-minute speeches by Reagan across the state.
Emphasizing the Panama Canal “giveaway” and smaller government, Reagan won an upset victory and was able to battle Ford all the way to the GOP convention. He showed such strength at the convention that Ford invited him to deliver off-the-cuff remarks to the delegates. Reagan was so inspiring that some of Ford’s own delegates exclaimed, “We just nominated the wrong candidate.” Reagan later acknowledged how Helms’s intervention rescued his political career.
You simply cannot understand modern American politics without reference to these events. Reaganism was reactionary — but not in the sense that critics deploy the term. It was a reaction to profoundly anti-freedom policies at home and abroad, not an attempt to turn back history. Indeed, Reagan and Helms helped to secure a brighter, safer future for the entire world.
Fund also tackles the domestic Helms legacy:
He also stumbled. His anticommunist fervor led him to back authoritarian regimes in Chile and Argentina far more than he should have. His 1983 opposition to a Martin Luther King holiday – he railed against King’s associations with communists – was myopic and a throwback to a discredited past.
The issue of race will always cast a shadow on Helms’s legacy. He could never understand why he was viewed by many as a bigot, having run one of the most integrated TV stations in the South and often hiring blacks on his staff. His criticisms of affirmative action and forced busing were on the mark. But as conservative scholar John Hood notes, “he failed to marry every criticism of government overreaching with calls for the South’s social and moral transformation and clear denunciations of racist business owners.”
Indeed, the mainstream media rarely put Helms’s career in context the way they did, for example, with Sam Ervin, a Democrat who served with Helms in the Senate from North Carolina before retiring in 1975. Ervin was the leading legal strategist against Civil Rights legislation, and he largely crafted the Southern Manifesto against Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ruled school segregation unconstitutional. But Ervin was the man who chaired the Watergate hearings that helped bring down Richard Nixon, and his views on civil rights were almost never mentioned. Both Helms and Ervin were courtly, principled conservatives. Only one became a cartoon media villain.
Solid points all around. But what’s this “scholar” business? Tetrarch Hood will be pleased.
Update: The Uptown paper of record. Sigh. They didn’t have to lionize Helms, just get the facts straight. They didn’t. No mention of Solzhenitsyn or, incredibly, the 30-minute Reagan TV speeches which were a certified mass media event for the state.
I had minimal hopes for the editorial on Helms’ legacy and was still surprised. (It is not online. Wonder why?) The overall tone is one of “good riddance” with some intentional twisting of Helms’ words piled on. For example, Helms made his infamous call to put a fence around UNC-Chapel Hill with reference to the bid to spend public money to build the now broke NC Zoo in Asheboro. In other words, it was a joke — a good and timeless one. Today’s edit dishonestly treats the comment as a call for a gulag in Orange County.
Oh, the stab at hipness made by name-checking Todd Rundgren and Loudon Wainwright also fails. The best song ever written about Helms was Chapel Hill by Sonic Youth.
